I finished Mass Effect a while back. I most definitely enjoyed the game. I was a fan of the story and the methods in which it was told. It was because I enjoyed the storytelling that one specific example of “bleugh” jumped out at me.

I landed on some planet somewhere (like you do) and began driving around, firing my guns to pass the time, and hoping to stumble upon some points of interest. I found a structure that, when approached, turned out to be the ruin of an ancient race. I interacted with it and was treated to a few pages of text explaining that this device had “shared” a memory with me: a prehistoric earthling coming into contact with the ancient race responsible for building this ruin.

This was all spelled out to me in text. It was kind of shocking given the amount of cut scenes I’d already seen in this game. It wasn’t poorly written or anything, it just didn’t “fit.” Because it’s what I do, I imagined the circumstances that led to the inclusion of this content: random designer is tasked with putting in some lore for this ancient race. This designer checks the source for lore, notes that they visited earth long ago, and decides they’ll combine that with the “transference of memories” technology that they’re famous for and make a ruin where you receive this memory. Designer, not wanting to “bother” anyone (like a few artists to make a caveman, and a member of this ancient race, and a prehistoric earth, and a sound person to make the sounds for this planet, and another designer to “set the scene,” etc.) decides that instead of making a cut scene, they will convey their idea in text. Simple, right? Sure, but weird.

It felt like it had been crammed in at the last minute, like they had run out of time to do another cut scene and just wrote this in instead. Had this been a codex entry (an in game repository for wodges of text) it would’ve felt much more at home, but, the codex isn’t the place where your player writes down tales about what memories he or she was given while out in the world.

None of the above is meant to suggest that cut scenes are the way to tell a story in a game. While I haven’t played it, one of the most mentioned items in any Metal Gear Solid 4 review is the length of the cut scenes. People suggest they spend more time watching them than playing the actual game. While working at SOE, one thing a lot of designers (myself included) were psyched about was getting tools implemented to make the creation of cut scenes something that could easily be done (we could hack it in by using a non-cancellable bind-sight spell, but it wouldn’t really be polished). However, if we had put cut scenes in, a lot of designers would have put on their director hats and started making uselessly long cut scenes for anything they thought important. Cut scenes are great, but I don’t think they’re the “correct” answer to “telling story in a game” any more than pages of text are.

Games are an interactive medium, so the real way, we (game designers) believe, to convey story, is to get the player to do something. Have the player kill off a bunch of invaders, tend to wounded, rescue stolen supplies, and repair the battlements, and they’re definitely going to get a sense of the setting.
I created numerous newbie experiences for EverQuest II and I don’t think I ever got story right. Why? I was always very focused on progression, and stuff like “story” ended up being “written in” to “fit.” Nothing had been planned from the beginning, so I kind of hashed it together (sometimes I did good, sometimes I did bad). Given that I’ve done it wrong myself, I don’t feel bad saying I’ve also seen others do it wrong.

Recently I took my low level alliance shaman in World of Warcraft to Dustwallow Marsh. When I landed in Theramore, the first quest I got (and, thus, the first quest I did) involved a gnome trying to re-light a lighthouse. The story of this quest line went as such:

Initial Quest Exclamation Point: A gnome wants to re-light the lighthouse, go help her!
Me: Ok!
Gnome: It’s old, but it will work if we get it oil!
Me: Ok!
Gnome: Great! You got the oil. While I was digging around in the lighthouse, I found this highly laughable book about sea monsters! How silly is that? Here, you have it. I’m going to get to work on finishing the repairs.
Me: Ok! (Thinking: Sea monsters are laughable? We have dragons… mages… a portal into a world of islands floating in space… but sea monsters are laughable?)
Sailor: Those tales are totally true! One sea monster even lives here in Dustwallow Marsh! If you want confirmation, go talk to Fisherman!
Me: Ok!
Fisherman: Ok, I’ll tell you about the one who lives here but only if you go get attacked by a mob because I have a thinly veiled reason for you to do so.
Me: Ok!
Fisherman: Great job doing that thing I told you to do. Now, about this sea monster. He is attracted to bright lights, that’s why they turned off the light house.
Me: Ok, I will go warn them! (Thinking: Ah, so whether or not I actually came out here and did your pointless task, if all were right in the world the monster would’ve spawned anyway, right?)
Sailor: Really?! We turned off the lighthouse and forgot why?! Omgz! PREPARE FOR BATTLE!
Me: Ok!

What I imagine was meant to be an epic tale about a sea monster came off as quite less than epic. I did all of these quests one right after another, and the whole thing, if you discount travel time, took about 15 minutes. Any sense of awe for this ancient monster that some claimed didn’t exist was a bit ruined because of how quickly I could progress from start to finish of the quest line. These were the first things I did in this zone, so AFTER coming into the zone and helping take down an ancient sea monster, I went on to less exciting tasks, like handing out pamphlets to guards.

Armchair design? Yes, let’s!

How about you still turn on the lighthouse as your first quest in the zone. And after that, you don’t get a follow up about sea monsters that are apparently “laughable.” Instead, you start doing your quests as normal. Occasionally, though, you receive quests to investigate missing patrols, late ships, and other mishaps that involve the docks in one way or another. Your investigations turn up “little,” other than pieces of wood from ships that has been clawed to shreds, and no survivors. Eventually you find one dying survivor and he mentions the name Tethyr. From there you start to learn about the lore. And then, instead of doing a completely pointless task for someone, you go on a quest to talk to the one sailor who claimed to have survived an attack by Tethyr years ago. From him you learn Tethyr’s weakness, and also how to lure him (crank the lighthouse up to 11). THEN you summon and kill Tethyr, but not before he does something amazingly destructive to showcase his power, like destroy a ship in front of you while the quest NPC yells at his archers to stand their ground, instead of rushing out to attempt to save a ship that’s obviously lost anyway. Maybe one archer knows his wife is on that ship and runs ahead anyway, only to get devoured by Tethyr. It takes more work (and definitely more than just designer work), but even if you left out some of the stuff at the end I think it could’ve been presented better.

This was the same shaman who ran through the Draenei newbie experience and enjoyed it immensely. That newbie experience definitely built up to something that was then completed BY you, the player. The only “downside” that I recall from that one was that the final “build up,” (meaning: “oh no, we have to act now or else…!”) came on rather suddenly, and in the middle of me doing a bunch of other completely pointless (in comparison) quests. I’ll spare you any armchair designing for that quest line, however.

“Injecting” a story into a world has so many potential pitfalls. I just spoke of “pointless” quests, however, I’m probably one of the biggest fans of pointless quests. One thing that has often been stressed among my peers is the need for presenting players on a “Hero’s Journey.” Everyone seems to believe that if the player isn’t doing heroic deeds and changing the world (which they never do anyway), then they will become disinterested and feel bored. While I definitely agree that heroics are great and should be employed, I’ve seen this “Hero’s Journey” claim used to incorrectly—in my opinion—deride simple quests, such as, “go harvest some corn for me.”

“I entered this new zone and I’m harvesting corn, this doesn’t feel very heroic.” The need for heroics is quite definitely real, in my opinion, but I also believe there is a need for exactly the opposite (provided it’s logical). If the world is constantly beset by enemies with whom you must repeat the same cycle—kill their agents, destroy their war machines, infiltrate their base and steal their plans, kill their spies, then finally kill the boss—then the world is going to get stale VERY quickly. Things, I guess, get un-fun when someone is looking for a specific kind of content and can not find it: “I’d like to be carving my sword through hordes of enemies, but all I can find are harvest quests,” or, “I’d like to be helping these farmers, because I find harvesting more fun after work than killing, but I only have quests to kill bandits,” or “I’d like to go searching for the rare fish this guy is talking about, but apparently he won’t spawn unless I’ve completed all this guy’s OTHER quests… ugh.”

In my opinion, quests have become a crutch when it comes to story telling. They provide an easy way to “force” story onto players, and they distract from the “grind,” but they carry with them gobs of baggage.

• What happens when a quest is something your character wouldn’t do, but there is no alternative?
• What happens when the dialog your character is speaking is not something your character would say?
• What happens when quests, which are meant to “offset” the grind, become the new grind, as you go through them with your 2nd or 3rd character? Grinding isn’t necessarily preferable over quests, but it lends itself to “passive play” much better than questing does. “I just want to sit and grind while watching TV, I don’t feel like running back and forth. Besides, I’ve done the quests in this zone with 4 alts already.”
• What happens when quests are crammed in because there are supposed to be enough quests to get someone from level X to Y and they become obviously illogical or stupid? “Bring me 10 bear ears, BUT ONLY PRISTINE BEAR EARS? REGULAR ONES WON’T DO!” What happens when it’s obvious the quest designer is making fun of themselves?
• How do you convey an “epic” feel to a quest line that is completed in one night by most, and one hour by those who are powering through it?
• What happens when your players just want to group with their friends, but can’t do it “efficiently” because their friends are “behind them” in quest progression?

If you get a chance, I highly recommend running through the Death Knight “newbie” experience in WoW’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion. It’s quite a step forward in “storytelling” as far as MMOs are concerned, but it “cheats.” You watch the world around you change based on your actions and you definitely get the same sense of progression that you would get in a single player game. All the instancing make the world feel real, and then… you’re kicked out into the regular world to deal with all the crappy “vanilla” quests :P

Is it a great, great experience? Yes!

Will it dull with time if you do it more than once? Yes.

Does it “fix” storytelling in MMOs? No, it just happens to do a really good job at sidestepping some of the more common problems.

Quests are a crutch for both storytelling and content, but right now they’re the best we’ve got. Who wants to make them better?

It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment.

One day, she went to see a doctor because she wasn’t feeling well, and learned that she had contracted H.I.V. from a contaminated needle. She had to leave her job. She lost visiting rights with her children. And she developed complications from the H.I.V., including shingles, which caused painful, blistering sores across her scalp and forehead. With treatment, though, her H.I.V. was brought under control. At thirty-six, she entered rehab, dropped the boyfriend, and kicked the drugs. She had two good, quiet years in which she began rebuilding her life. Then she got the itch.

It was right after a shingles episode. The blisters and the pain responded, as they usually did, to acyclovir, an antiviral medication. But this time the area of the scalp that was involved became numb, and the pain was replaced by a constant, relentless itch. She felt it mainly on the right side of her head. It crawled along her scalp, and no matter how much she scratched it would not go away. “I felt like my inner self, like my brain itself, was itching,” she says. And it took over her life just as she was starting to get it back.

Her internist didn’t know what to make of the problem. Itching is an extraordinarily common symptom. All kinds of dermatological conditions can cause it: allergic reactions, bacterial or fungal infections, skin cancer, psoriasis, dandruff, scabies, lice, poison ivy, sun damage, or just dry skin. Creams and makeup can cause itch, too. But M. used ordinary shampoo and soap, no creams. And when the doctor examined M.’s scalp she discovered nothing abnormal—no rash, no redness, no scaling, no thickening, no fungus, no parasites. All she saw was scratch marks.

The internist prescribed a medicated cream, but it didn’t help. The urge to scratch was unceasing and irresistible. “I would try to control it during the day, when I was aware of the itch, but it was really hard,” M. said. “At night, it was the worst. I guess I would scratch when I was asleep, because in the morning there would be blood on my pillowcase.” She began to lose her hair over the itchy area. She returned to her internist again and again. “I just kept haunting her and calling her,” M. said. But nothing the internist tried worked, and she began to suspect that the itch had nothing to do with M.’s skin.

Plenty of non-skin conditions can cause itching. Dr. Jeffrey Bernhard, a dermatologist with the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is among the few doctors to study itching systematically (he published the definitive textbook on the subject), and he told me of cases caused by hyperthyroidism, iron deficiency, liver disease, and cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Sometimes the syndrome is very specific. Persistent outer-arm itching that worsens in sunlight is known as brachioradial pruritus, and it’s caused by a crimped nerve in the neck. Aquagenic pruritus is recurrent, intense, diffuse itching upon getting out of a bath or shower, and although no one knows the mechanism, it’s a symptom of polycythemia vera, a rare condition in which the body produces too many red blood cells.

But M.’s itch was confined to the right side of her scalp. Her viral count showed that the H.I.V. was quiescent. Additional blood tests and X-rays were normal. So the internist concluded that M.’s problem was probably psychiatric. All sorts of psychiatric conditions can cause itching. Patients with psychosis can have cutaneous delusions—a belief that their skin is infested with, say, parasites, or crawling ants, or laced with tiny bits of fibreglass. Severe stress and other emotional experiences can also give rise to a physical symptom like itching—whether from the body’s release of endorphins (natural opioids, which, like morphine, can cause itching), increased skin temperature, nervous scratching, or increased sweating. In M.’s case, the internist suspected tricho-tillomania, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which patients have an irresistible urge to pull out their hair.

M. was willing to consider such possibilities. Her life had been a mess, after all. But the antidepressant medications often prescribed for O.C.D. made no difference. And she didn’t actually feel a compulsion to pull out her hair. She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”:

The way their nails scraped down upon the
scabs
Was like a knife scraping off scales from
carp. . . .
“O you there tearing at your mail of
scabs
And even turning your fingers into
pincers,”
My guide began addressing one of them,

“Tell us are there Italians among the
souls
Down in this hole and I’ll pray that your
nails
Will last you in this task eternally.”

Though scratching can provide momentary relief, it often makes the itching worse. Dermatologists call this the itch-scratch cycle. Scientists believe that itch, and the accompanying scratch reflex, evolved in order to protect us from insects and clinging plant toxins—from such dangers as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, transmitted by mosquitoes; from tularemia, river blindness, and sleeping sickness, transmitted by flies; from typhus-bearing lice, plague-bearing fleas, and poisonous spiders. The theory goes a long way toward explaining why itch is so exquisitely tuned. You can spend all day without noticing the feel of your shirt collar on your neck, and yet a single stray thread poking out, or a louse’s fine legs brushing by, can set you scratching furiously.

But how, exactly, itch works has been a puzzle. For most of medical history, scientists thought that itching was merely a weak form of pain. Then, in 1987, the German researcher H. O. Handwerker and his colleagues used mild electric pulses to drive histamine, an itch-producing substance that the body releases during allergic reactions, into the skin of volunteers. As the researchers increased the dose of histamine, they found that they were able to increase the intensity of itch the volunteers reported, from the barely appreciable to the “maximum imaginable.” Yet the volunteers never felt an increase in pain. The scientists concluded that itch and pain are entirely separate sensations, transmitted along different pathways.

Despite centuries spent mapping the body’s nervous circuitry, scientists had never noticed a nerve specific for itch. But now the hunt was on, and a group of Swedish and German researchers embarked upon a series of tricky experiments. They inserted ultra-thin metal electrodes into the skin of paid volunteers, and wiggled them around until they picked up electrical signals from a single nerve fibre. Computers subtracted the noise from other nerve fibres crossing through the region. The researchers would then spend hours—as long as the volunteer could tolerate it—testing different stimuli on the skin in the area (a heated probe, for example, or a fine paintbrush) to see what would get the nerve to fire, and what the person experienced when it did.

They worked their way through fifty-three volunteers. Mostly, they encountered well-known types of nerve fibres that respond to temperature or light touch or mechanical pressure. “That feels warm,” a volunteer might say, or “That feels soft,” or “Ouch! Hey!” Several times, the scientists came across a nerve fibre that didn’t respond to any of these stimuli. When they introduced a tiny dose of histamine into the skin, however, they observed a sharp electrical response in some of these nerve fibres, and the volunteer would experience an itch. They announced their discovery in a 1997 paper: they’d found a type of nerve that was specific for itch.

Unlike, say, the nerve fibres for pain, each of which covers a millimetre-size territory, a single itch fibre can pick up an itchy sensation more than three inches away. The fibres also turned out to have extraordinarily low conduction speeds, which explained why itchiness is so slow to build and so slow to subside.

Other researchers traced these fibres to the spinal cord and all the way to the brain. Examining functional PET-scan studies in healthy human subjects who had been given mosquito-bite-like histamine injections, they found a distinct signature of itch activity. Several specific areas of the brain light up: the part of the cortex that tells you where on your body the sensation occurs; the region that governs your emotional responses, reflecting the disagreeable nature of itch; and the limbic and motor areas that process irresistible urges (such as the urge to use drugs, among the addicted, or to overeat, among the obese), reflecting the ferocious impulse to scratch.

Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s legs, even before it bites). The itch-scratch reflex activates higher levels of your brain than the spinal-cord-level reflex that makes you pull your hand away from a flame. Brain scans also show that scratching diminishes activity in brain areas associated with unpleasant sensations.

But some basic features of itch remained unexplained—features that make itch a uniquely revealing case study. On the one hand, our bodies are studded with receptors for itch, as they are with receptors for touch, pain, and other sensations; this provides an alarm system for harm and allows us to safely navigate the world. But why does a feather brushed across the skin sometimes itch and at other times tickle? (Tickling has a social component: you can make yourself itch, but only another person can tickle you.) And, even more puzzling, how is it that you can make yourself itchy just by thinking about it?

Contemplating what it’s like to hold your finger in a flame won’t make your finger hurt. But simply writing about a tick crawling up the nape of one’s neck is enough to start my neck itching. Then my scalp. And then this one little spot along my flank where I’m beginning to wonder whether I should check to see if there might be something there. In one study, a German professor of psychosomatics gave a lecture that included, in the first half, a series of what might be called itchy slides, showing fleas, lice, people scratching, and the like, and, in the second half, more benign slides, with pictures of soft down, baby skin, bathers. Video cameras recorded the audience. Sure enough, the frequency of scratching among people in the audience increased markedly during the first half and decreased during the second. Thoughts made them itch.

We now have the nerve map for itching, as we do for other sensations. But a deeper puzzle remains: how much of our sensations and experiences do nerves really explain?

In the operating room, a neurosurgeon washed out and debrided M.’s wound, which had become infected. Later, a plastic surgeon covered it with a graft of skin from her thigh. Though her head was wrapped in layers of gauze and she did all she could to resist the still furious itchiness, she awoke one morning to find that she had rubbed the graft away. The doctors returned her to the operating room for a second skin graft, and this time they wrapped her hands as well. She rubbed it away again anyway.

“They kept telling me I had O.C.D.,” M. said. A psychiatric team was sent in to see her each day, and the resident would ask her, “As a child, when you walked down the street did you count the lines? Did you do anything repetitive? Did you have to count everything you saw?” She kept telling him no, but he seemed skeptical. He tracked down her family and asked them, but they said no, too. Psychology tests likewise ruled out obsessive-compulsive disorder. They showed depression, though, and, of course, there was the history of addiction. So the doctors still thought her scratching was from a psychiatric disorder. They gave her drugs that made her feel logy and sleep a lot. But the itching was as bad as ever, and she still woke up scratching at that terrible wound.

One morning, she found, as she put it, “this very bright and happy-looking woman standing by my bed. She said, ‘I’m Dr. Oaklander,’ ” M. recalled. “I thought, Oh great. Here we go again. But she explained that she was a neurologist, and she said, ‘The first thing I want to say to you is that I don’t think you’re crazy. I don’t think you have O.C.D.’ At that moment, I really saw her grow wings and a halo,” M. told me. “I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Yes. I have heard of this before.’ ”

Anne Louise Oaklander was about the same age as M. Her mother is a prominent neurologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, and she’d followed her into the field. Oaklander had specialized in disorders of peripheral nerve sensation—disorders like shingles. Although pain is the most common symptom of shingles, Oaklander had noticed during her training that some patients also had itching, occasionally severe, and seeing M. reminded her of one of her shingles patients. “I remember standing in a hallway talking to her, and what she complained about—her major concern—was that she was tormented by this terrible itch over the eye where she had had shingles,” she told me. When Oaklander looked at her, she thought that something wasn’t right. It took a moment to realize why. “The itch was so severe, she had scratched off her eyebrow.”

Oaklander tested the skin near M.’s wound. It was numb to temperature, touch, and pinprick. Nonetheless, it was itchy, and when it was scratched or rubbed M. felt the itchiness temporarily subside. Oaklander injected a few drops of local anesthetic into the skin. To M.’s surprise, the itching stopped—instantly and almost entirely. This was the first real relief she’d had in more than a year.

It was an imperfect treatment, though. The itch came back when the anesthetic wore off, and, although Oaklander tried having M. wear an anesthetic patch over the wound, the effect diminished over time. Oaklander did not have an explanation for any of this. When she took a biopsy of the itchy skin, it showed that ninety-six per cent of the nerve fibres were gone. So why was the itch so intense?

Oaklander came up with two theories. The first was that those few remaining nerve fibres were itch fibres and, with no other fibres around to offer competing signals, they had become constantly active. The second theory was the opposite. The nerves were dead, but perhaps the itch system in M.’s brain had gone haywire, running on a loop all its own.

The second theory seemed less likely. If the nerves to her scalp were dead, how would you explain the relief she got from scratching, or from the local anesthetic? Indeed, how could you explain the itch in the first place? An itch without nerve endings didn’t make sense. The neurosurgeons stuck with the first theory; they offered to cut the main sensory nerve to the front of M.’s scalp and abolish the itching permanently. Oaklander, however, thought that the second theory was the right one—that this was a brain problem, not a nerve problem—and that cutting the nerve would do more harm than good. She argued with the neurosurgeons, and she advised M. not to let them do any cutting.

“But I was desperate,” M. told me. She let them operate on her, slicing the supraorbital nerve above the right eye. When she woke up, a whole section of her forehead was numb—and the itching was gone. A few weeks later, however, it came back, in an even wider expanse than before. The doctors tried pain medications, more psychiatric medications, more local anesthetic. But the only thing that kept M. from tearing her skin and skull open again, the doctors found, was to put a foam football helmet on her head and bind her wrists to the bedrails at night.

She spent the next two years committed to a locked medical ward in a rehabilitation hospital—because, although she was not mentally ill, she was considered a danger to herself. Eventually, the staff worked out a solution that did not require binding her to the bedrails. Along with the football helmet, she had to wear white mitts that were secured around her wrists by surgical tape. “Every bedtime, it looked like they were dressing me up for Halloween—me and the guy next to me,” she told me.

“The guy next to you?” I asked. He had had shingles on his neck, she explained, and also developed a persistent itch. “Every night, they would wrap up his hands and wrap up mine.” She spoke more softly now. “But I heard he ended up dying from it, because he scratched into his carotid artery.”

I met M. seven years after she’d been discharged from the rehabilitation hospital. She is forty-eight now. She lives in a three-room apartment, with a crucifix and a bust of Jesus on the wall and the low yellow light of table lamps strung with beads over their shades. Stacked in a wicker basket next to her coffee table were Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” People, and the latest issue of Neurology Now, a magazine for patients. Together, they summed up her struggles, for she is still fighting the meaninglessness, the isolation, and the physiology of her predicament.

She met me at the door in a wheelchair; the injury to her brain had left her partially paralyzed on the left side of her body. She remains estranged from her children. She has not, however, relapsed into drinking or drugs. Her H.I.V. remains under control. Although the itch on her scalp and forehead persists, she has gradually learned to protect herself. She trims her nails short. She finds ways to distract herself. If she must scratch, she tries to rub gently instead. And, if that isn’t enough, she uses a soft toothbrush or a rolled-up terry cloth. “I don’t use anything sharp,” she said. The two years that she spent bound up in the hospital seemed to have broken the nighttime scratching. At home, she found that she didn’t need to wear the helmet and gloves anymore.

Still, the itching remains a daily torment. “I don’t normally tell people this,” she said, “but I have a fantasy of shaving off my eyebrow and taking a metal-wire grill brush and scratching away.”

Some of her doctors have not been willing to let go of the idea that this has been a nerve problem all along. A local neurosurgeon told her that the original operation to cut the sensory nerve to her scalp must not have gone deep enough. “He wants to go in again,” she told me.

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

In a 1710 “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” the Irish philosopher George Berkeley objected to this view. We do not know the world of objects, he argued; we know only our mental ideas of objects. “Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and figures—in a word, the things we see and feel—what are they but so many sensations, notions, ideas?” Indeed, he concluded, the objects of the world are likely just inventions of the mind, put in there by God. To which Samuel Johnson famously responded by kicking a large stone and declaring, “I refute it thus!”

Still, Berkeley had recognized some serious flaws in the direct-perception theory—in the notion that when we see, hear, or feel we are just taking in the sights, sounds, and textures of the world. For one thing, it cannot explain how we experience things that seem physically real but aren’t: sensations of itching that arise from nothing more than itchy thoughts; dreams that can seem indistinguishable from reality; phantom sensations that amputees have in their missing limbs. And, the more we examine the actual nerve transmissions we receive from the world outside, the more inadequate they seem.

Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished. Suppose someone is viewing a tree in a clearing. Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye, one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark—attributes that we perceive instantly.

Or consider what neuroscientists call “the binding problem.” Tracking a dog as it runs behind a picket fence, all that your eyes receive is separated vertical images of the dog, with large slices missing. Yet somehow you perceive the mutt to be whole, an intact entity travelling through space. Put two dogs together behind the fence and you don’t think they’ve morphed into one. Your mind now configures the slices as two independent creatures.

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals. When Oaklander theorized that M.’s itch was endogenous, rather than generated by peripheral nerve signals, she was onto something important.

The fallacy of reducing perception to reception is especially clear when it comes to phantom limbs. Doctors have often explained such sensations as a matter of inflamed or frayed nerve endings in the stump sending aberrant signals to the brain. But this explanation should long ago have been suspect. Efforts by surgeons to cut back on the nerve typically produce the same results that M. had when they cut the sensory nerve to her forehead: a brief period of relief followed by a return of the sensation.

Moreover, the feelings people experience in their phantom limbs are far too varied and rich to be explained by the random firings of a bruised nerve. People report not just pain but also sensations of sweatiness, heat, texture, and movement in a missing limb. There is no experience people have with real limbs that they do not experience with phantom limbs. They feel their phantom leg swinging, water trickling down a phantom arm, a phantom ring becoming too tight for a phantom digit. Children have used phantom fingers to count and solve arithmetic problems. V. S. Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has written up the case of a woman who was born with only stumps at her shoulders, and yet, as far back as she could remember, felt herself to have arms and hands; she even feels herself gesticulating when she speaks. And phantoms do not occur just in limbs. Around half of women who have undergone a mastectomy experience a phantom breast, with the nipple being the most vivid part. You’ve likely had an experience of phantom sensation yourself. When the dentist gives you a local anesthetic, and your lip goes numb, the nerves go dead. Yet you don’t feel your lip disappear. Quite the opposite: it feels larger and plumper than normal, even though you can see in a mirror that the size hasn’t changed.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.

A lot about this phenomenon remains murky, but here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.

The new theory may also explain what was going on with M.’s itch. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in her scalp. And, for whatever reason, her brain surmised from what little input it had that something horribly itchy was going on—that perhaps a whole army of ants were crawling back and forth over just that patch of skin. There wasn’t any such thing, of course. But M.’s brain has received no contrary signals that would shift its assumptions. So she itches.

Not long ago, I met a man who made me wonder whether such phantom sensations are more common than we realize. H. was forty-eight, in good health, an officer at a Boston financial-services company living with his wife in a western suburb, when he made passing mention of an odd pain to his internist. For at least twenty years, he said, he’d had a mild tingling running along his left arm and down the left side of his body, and, if he tilted his neck forward at a particular angle, it became a pronounced, electrical jolt. The internist recognized this as Lhermitte’s sign, a classic symptom that can indicate multiple sclerosis, Vitamin B12 deficiency, or spinal-cord compression from a tumor or a herniated disk. An MRI revealed a cavernous hemangioma, a pea-size mass of dilated blood vessels, pressing into the spinal cord in his neck. A week later, while the doctors were still contemplating what to do, it ruptured.

“I was raking leaves out in the yard and, all of a sudden, there was an explosion of pain and my left arm wasn’t responding to my brain,” H. said when I visited him at home. Once the swelling subsided, a neurosurgeon performed a tricky operation to remove the tumor from the spinal cord. The operation was successful, but afterward H. began experiencing a constellation of strange sensations. His left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve.

H. has not accepted that these sensations are here to stay—the prospect is too depressing—but they’ve persisted for eleven years now. Although the burning is often tolerable during the day, the slightest thing can trigger an excruciating flareup—a cool breeze across the skin, the brush of a shirtsleeve or a bedsheet. “Sometimes I feel that my skin has been flayed and my flesh is exposed, and any touch is just very painful,” he told me. “Sometimes I feel that there’s an ice pick or a wasp sting. Sometimes I feel that I’ve been splattered with hot cooking oil.”

For all that, the itch has been harder to endure. H. has developed calluses from the incessant scratching. “I find I am choosing itch relief over the pain that I am provoking by satisfying the itch,” he said.

He has tried all sorts of treatments—medications, acupuncture, herbal remedies, lidocaine injections, electrical-stimulation therapy. But nothing really worked, and the condition forced him to retire in 2001. He now avoids leaving the house. He gives himself projects. Last year, he built a three-foot stone wall around his yard, slowly placing the stones by hand. But he spends much of his day, after his wife has left for work, alone in the house with their three cats, his shirt off and the heat turned up, trying to prevent a flareup.

His neurologist introduced him to me, with his permission, as an example of someone with severe itching from a central rather than a peripheral cause. So one morning we sat in his living room trying to puzzle out what was going on. The sun streamed in through a big bay window. One of his cats, a scraggly brown tabby, curled up beside me on the couch. H. sat in an armchair in a baggy purple T-shirt he’d put on for my visit. He told me that he thought his problem was basically a “bad switch” in his neck where the tumor had been, a kind of loose wire sending false signals to his brain. But I told him about the increasing evidence that our sensory experiences are not sent to the brain but originate in it. When I got to the example of phantom-limb sensations, he perked up. The experiences of phantom-limb patients sounded familiar to him. When I mentioned that he might want to try the mirror-box treatment, he agreed. “I have a mirror upstairs,” he said.

He brought a cheval glass down to the living room, and I had him stand with his chest against the side of it, so that his troublesome left arm was behind it and his normal right arm was in front. He tipped his head so that when he looked into the mirror the image of his right arm seemed to occupy the same position as his left arm. Then I had him wave his arms, his actual arms, as if he were conducting an orchestra.

The first thing he expressed was disappointment. “It isn’t quite like looking at my left hand,” he said. But then suddenly it was.

“Wow!” he said. “Now, this is odd.”

After a moment or two, I noticed that he had stopped moving his left arm. Yet he reported that he still felt as if it were moving. What’s more, the sensations in it had changed dramatically. For the first time in eleven years, he felt his left hand “snap” back to normal size. He felt the burning pain in his arm diminish. And the itch, too, was dulled.

“This is positively bizarre,” he said.

He still felt the pain and the itch in his neck and shoulder, where the image in the mirror cut off. And, when he came away from the mirror, the aberrant sensations in his left arm returned. He began using the mirror a few times a day, for fifteen minutes or so at a stretch, and I checked in with him periodically.

“What’s most dramatic is the change in the size of my hand,” he says. After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long.

The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain that sporadically seize him. Where once he could do nothing but sit and wait for the torment to subside—it sometimes took an hour or more—he now just pulls out the mirror. “I’ve never had anything like this before,” he said. “It’s my magic mirror.”

There have been other, isolated successes with mirror treatment. In Bath, England, several patients suffering from what is called complex regional pain syndrome—severe, disabling limb sensations of unknown cause—were reported to have experienced complete resolution after six weeks of mirror therapy. In California, mirror therapy helped stroke patients recover from a condition known as hemineglect, which produces something like the opposite of a phantom limb—these patients have a part of the body they no longer realize is theirs.

Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.

So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem. We prescribe tranquillizers, antidepressants, escalating doses of narcotics. And the drugs often do make it easier for people to ignore the sensors, even if they are wired right into the brain. The mirror treatment, by contrast, targets the deranged sensor system itself. It essentially takes a misfiring sensor—a warning system functioning under an illusion that something is terribly wrong out in the world it monitors—and feeds it an alternate set of signals that calm it down. The new signals may even reset the sensor.

This may help explain, for example, the success of the advice that back specialists now commonly give. Work through the pain, they tell many of their patients, and, surprisingly often, the pain goes away. It had been a mystifying phenomenon. But the picture now seems clearer. Most chronic back pain starts as an acute back pain—say, after a fall. Usually, the pain subsides as the injury heals. But in some cases the pain sensors continue to light up long after the tissue damage is gone. In such instances, working through the pain may offer the brain contradictory feedback—a signal that ordinary activity does not, in fact, cause physical harm. And so the sensor resets.

This understanding of sensation points to an entire new array of potential treatments—based not on drugs or surgery but, instead, on the careful manipulation of our perceptions. Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.

I called Ramachandran to ask him about M.’s terrible itch. The sensation may be a phantom, but it’s on her scalp, not in a limb, so it seemed unlikely that his mirror approach could do anything for her. He told me about an experiment in which he put ice-cold water in people’s ears. This confuses the brain’s position sensors, tricking subjects into thinking that their heads are moving, and in certain phantom-limb and stroke patients the illusion corrected their misperceptions, at least temporarily. Maybe this would help M., he said. He had another idea. If you take two mirrors and put them at right angles to each other, you will get a non-reversed mirror image. Looking in, the right half of your face appears on the left and the left half appears on the right. But unless you move, he said, your brain may not realize that the image is flipped.

“Now, suppose she looks in this mirror and scratches the left side of her head. No, wait—I’m thinking out loud here—suppose she looks and you have someone else touch the left side of her head. It’ll look—maybe it’ll feel—like you’re touching the right side of her head.” He let out an impish giggle. “Maybe this would make her itchy right scalp feel more normal.” Maybe it would encourage her brain to make a different perceptual inference; maybe it would press reset. “Who knows?” he said.

It seemed worth a try.

Then hours in writing

Still more days in waiting.

And finally I had created

That which I needed

To prove your shortcomings.

And as I reread it

To affirm and to edit

I found my own failures

staring back at me.

In Vista this means that when I was searching my music folder for something I ended up getting 0 results for something I knew I owned. I clicked advanced search and saw that by default I wasn’t searching anything that wasn’t indexed. Indexing was a system hog in XP so I had turned it off in Vista. “Ok,” I told myself, “I give, I’ll try turning on indexing.” And so I tried. But when I try to turn it on I just get an error for every single file that it’s trying to index, stating “access denied.” When I hit “cancel,” Windows then hilariously thinks indexing is turned on.

So far the one thing Vista has done that has impressed me is make it so then I hit F2 to rename a file, it doesn’t include the extension by default. That’s it. That’s the only thing.

Since then, I’ve had an opportunity to call myself an asshole for doing just that.

When it comes to PvP, I thought of myself as a “nice guy.” I don’t attack other players unprovoked. I thought this meant my philosophy was, “don’t be a dick.” But that explanation didn’t quite cover my actions. You see, while I am definitely not a dick “because I can,” I most certainly AM a dick to people who choose to be a dick to me first. If you kill me for no reason, I absolutely will retaliate. If you kill me while I’m doing an escort quest or fighting mobs or weakened for some reason, I will retaliate three three fold. I happen to be a class that is especially suited for world PvP retaliation, and I happen to be a HUGE dick when I think people deserve it.

I was participating in a “Fishing Contest” that takes place in the game world. Winning the contest nets you a neat fishing pole (which I already have) or a neat trinket (which I don’t need). I wasn’t there to win. I was there because I wanted one of the rare fish you could only catch during the contest. I happen to know that this contest is generally ruthless, so I tried to fish off the beaten path. It didn’t work. A particularly well-geared shaman found me and started attacking me. I attacked back. I came to realize he had pretty nearly infinite mana, and my mediocre dps and inability to interrupt his heals sufficiently meant that I wasn’t going to be able to kill him. That’s fine, I told myself, as I swam to my escape. As I swam back to that area, however, I found him standing by the fishing pool but not fishing. He was “spotting” for his friend, who came up a bit later. His friend was trying to win the contest, and he aimed to help his friend win by attacking any other person fishing they came across. Well, that didn’t sit right with me, so I decided to do something about it. I decided that this guy would not successfully help his friend win the fishing contest. How did I do that? By casting a stun spell on his friend (which interrupted his fishing) and then swimming away (preventing them from following and killing me). I did this over and over for the next 20 minutes until someone else won the contest and these two left.

They messed with the wrong druid, ya know?

I’m a self righteous dick. I decide that you won’t win the fishing contest and then make it so; not because I am skilled enough to take on two people who outgear me, but because my class just happens to have the skills that make it possible for me to pull it off.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit recently and I can’t justify it as anything other than that “asshole philosophy” I mentioned earlier. No, I don’t apply the philosophy to people who don’t “deserve it” in my opinion (well… unless they’re friends with someone who does deserve it I guess), but I sure take advantage of such a philosophy whenever I get the chance. It’s sort of the basic reason I have fun on a PvP server, I like the feeling of power that comes along with punishing someone who I think is a jerk. It’s probably very similar to the feeling of power those jerks get when killing someone who is low on life fighting 3 mobs.

Sure I consider myself better than them, but we run on the same juice. Philosophically I’d say my original “don’t be a dick” philosophy still stands, it just has the rather “Punisher-esque” caveat that if someone is a dick to me or my friends, then I will turn their philosophy against them. I’m like a gentle giant who turns into a douche when you are mean :D

I have always taken issue with people who adhered to the tenets of Nietzsche*, or proposed a ‘might makes right’ attitude. The adopted brother (I believe) in “The Brother’s Karamazov” argued that if there was a God, then it was God who was responsible for his [the brother's] evil actions, and if there was not a God then there was thus no afterlife in which he was judged for his evil actions, and as such the evil actions were perfectly acceptable. Now, that isn’t the exact argument, no doubt, and it may even be the wrong book or character (indeed, I never read the book, I am recalling only a single scene I saw in some English class many years ago). The point is, I’ve always seen that “sort” of philosophy as inherently flawed. The “Ring of Gyges” type of philosophy.

*[I’ve never read Nietzsche, only briefly studied]

I had always internally characterized this sort of philosophy as an “asshole philosophy.” That is to say, this is the philosophy adopted by an asshole who wishes to rationalize their behavior. This fatalist (a term which I will self apply often enough) attitude that equates to: “I can, and you would, so I do.” Whenever I heard people speak like this I would judge them internally as assholes, and consider their path to philosophy not one born from questions and curiosity, but instead one born from a need to defend their actions, to defend actions which they felt guilty for.

It worked. I could think of people who took this path as assholes, but I had never put any thought into why one would have such a need to take this path in the first place. That is to say, I didn’t take this path, and as such I never thought deeply on it. And, only recently I sheepishly realized how flawed my own philosophical path was. I didn’t necessarily think at length about the questions of life and come to whatever conclusions I have come to, not by a long shot. Instead I merely looked at my own life–which of course includes the horrible things I see in the news or otherwise–and from that evidence (empiricism, yay) made my conclusions.

Is having an “asshole philosophy” a weakness? It obviously betrays a lack of trust in humanity, but is that something that can be seen as a weakness in the person who comes to such a conclusion? My life has been exceptionally good. Because of this, my general philosophy has been a positive one: don’t fuck with other people. But what of people whose lives have not been good. What reason would they have to believe that, “don’t fuck with other people,” is even remotely applicable? They know all too well that such a philosophy is obviously not going to work because invariably others will fuck with them.

How is it possible for me to judge people when it comes to something as uncertain as philosophy? Yet I cannot shake the notion that people who do feel that might makes right are somehow inferior to me. Force is a trump card. In things large and small it is inarguably a way to get what you want. Granted, it can have consequences, but what of them? If the consequence is that you are then killed or harmed, well that just proves the rule further. If the consequence is that you are suddenly unloved or distrusted, does that necessarily disprove the rule?

What if it does? What if might does not make right simply because you cannot control the thoughts of others, and thus cannot determine how others judge you. That is, perhaps, the ultimate failing point of such a philosophy: you can use it to take physical things, or to inflict pain, but you cannot use it to force someone to believe something you wish them to believe. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to write in that previous sentence, and in the end it turned out I couldn’t think of a “good” “failing point” of such a philosophy that doesn’t apply to every other philosophy out there: there is nothing you can do, physical or otherwise, that will force someone to believe what you wish them to believe. You can mislead, lie, bribe, threaten, torture, but you cannot change another person’s mind, truly.

And no philosophy is “best” at convincing others. While one man may be turned off at the demonstration of physical force, another may be impressed. While one scoffs at an attempt at reasoning, another may be intrigued.

When I read “A Song of Ice and Fire” I am often upset at how easily some characters are swayed by others, at how quickly lies can turn someone. And though I do still consider myself a pessimist, I temper that with a general attitude of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ That is to say I will approach most new people with the assumption that they are ‘good’ until they prove otherwise. So I am curious: is my philosophy working for me? Were I to exist in the seedy world of Ice and Fire, would I be a pawn in someone else’s game because of my philosophy, or do my wits pick out the flaws in others quick enough that I could avoid such traps. And, indeed, I am rare to open up, but when I sense innocence I tend to display my feelings, and yet feigned innocence is no doubt easy to achieve.

Where do I sit? Am I but a weak minded fool put to use by others, yet driven by my belief that most people are good? Or am I the distrusting curmudgeon who lives a long and unfulfilled life?

What philosophy avoids the pit traps in a world where Nietzsche exists? Must one always be on their guard? Such a dismal place, this. And yet, that is where the excitement of life lies: the pain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&eurl=http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes/timeline/Internet_Memes/embed_tl?fs=1#

Give it a watch if you’ve the time and inkling.

For now, I’ve picked up He’s Scared She’s Scared. My fear, going into this book, is that it will be informative and fun but I won’t really feel like I’ve gleaned anything from it. I was also afraid I wouldn’t be able to connect with it. However, in the first bulleted list I found an example that applied to me, and then I came across this sentence:

Years of conducting interviews have convinced us that people with commitment problems gravitate toward each other.

That spoke to me, and I liked it. All right, Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, I’m in! I look forward to getting deeper into this book.