Jason Schwartzman and Kirsten Dunst

Are way chiller than people give them credit for. Jason was the drummer for phantom planet (of OC fame) and his brother is the lead singer for Rooney. Now he is Coconut Records, his solo project. I had the album Nightiming burned for me and a lot of the songs aren't that great, but the fact that Jason is talented enought just to make record by himself where he plays all the instruments and sings (in key) is pretty impressive and I'm not going to complain if I usually skip a couple of songs on the album. Three of the songs are actually really good and for the past two days I've pretty much been listening to those constantly.
One of the chillest things about the album is that Kirsten Dunst provides some guest vocals on two of the songs. Neither the songs or her singing are particularly good, but its still chill that Jason invited her to sing on his album. According to wikipedia, Jason and Kirsten met at Sofia Coppola's wedding (Jason's cousin) to Spike Jonze and danced on top of speakers together. Kirsten is also way cuter than I realized. When I saw the spiderman movies I never really thought she was anything special but then I saw Marie Antoinette a few weeks ago I realized that she is bomb. And then I saw Eternal Sunshine again and she is bomb in that too. She's also going out with the lead singer of Razorlight, who I had never heard of until these British guys told me that they are all the rage over in England. My friend Beard bought their cd and I wasn't that impressed, but once again that doesn't really matter.

Look how chill she is, she reads Carl Sagan and wears flannel and white sunglasses. And she's all skinny and pale but still flaunts it in people magazine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schwartzman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsten_Dunst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Coppola
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Jonze
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weezer
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mTzEp4CeWT8
http://www.myspace.com/coconutrecords

In Your Head

I don't really know anything about psychology, but whenever I learn anything about it I find it incredibly fascinating and always end up playing games in my mind, which makes everyday thinking a little more fun. I think that it would be a really cool major if you got into the right stuff, but the one psychology class I took (psy 201 mind and brain) didn't impress me much so I gave up on that pretty quickly. However, before I took the class (and part of the reason why I took the class) my dad sent me a really interesting psychology book calle The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the University of Virginia.
The title sounds like a Dr. Phil self help book, but deals with pretty in depth psychology studies and the like. Basically its all about studying from a scientific standpoint what makes people happy. Its pretty much what you expect: family, friends, things you enjoy doing, not being stressed. But the best part of the book for me is all of the studies that it describes. One passage that I find particularly interesting:

"Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you towards thinking the thing is good. So when a man namesd Dennis is considering a career, he ponders the possibilities: 'Lawyer, docter, banker, dentist...dentist...something about dentist just feels right.' And in fact, people named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia. The own-name preference even shows up in marriage records: People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial. When Pelham presented his findings to my academic department, I was shocked to realize that most of the married people in the room illustrated his claim: Jerry and Judy, Brian and Bethany, and the winners were me, Jon, and my wife, Jayne."

Most of the studies support the general hypothesis that we have very little control over our thoughts and actions because the concious mind is so heavily influenced by the subconcious. We conciously decide to eat because chemicals are telling us that we are hungry and that getting food is probably a good idea. Haidt compares the concious mind to a rider on an elephant, which represents the unconcious. The rider can direct the elephant, but can never really control it. I shouldn't even try to explain this in a couple paragraphs, you should get the book.

some links to check out:
http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-Ancient/dp/0465028012

really cool experiment, also check out the stanford prison experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

test yourself here, do the research studies they are way bettter.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/