Studying Psychology

You get a message from Vishal - “Yo, want to work on psych?”

You didn’t have anything planned for the moment, so why not? You head over to the library, and pick your way through the bookstacks, eventually finding the little room that he has reserved.

“Can you believe it? We did Freud in a week, and now we’re doing the Neo-Freudians in the next. Look at this shit,” Vishal says, pointing to a stack of six books. “How the hell are we supposed to get through all of this?”

“Sparknotes?” you ask, hoping that the old trick from high school will still work.

“Nope. Checked it already, and the other summary sites too, so don’t get your hopes up,” Vishal says. “God, who are these authors? What kind of a name even is ‘Erik Erikson’? Like couldn’t his parents think of something more creative? No wonder this guy came up with the phrase ‘identity crisis’ - he must have been having a heck of one himself.”

“Ah, this is the guy who talked about all those stages in life that people have to go through?” you ask.

“Yep,” Vishal says, tossing you a thick book titled Childhood and Society. “So we’re clearly not getting through this unless we’re dividing up the books. How about this? We take the next two hours to each skim a book. Then, you fill me in on what I missed, and I do the same for you, and that’s a third of this pile dealt with.”

“Sounds like a plan,” you say. “Should we rope a third person in? That way, we’d only have to read two books each instead of three…”

“Do you know anyone?”

“Sarah?” you venture, thinking back to the cute girl - the only girl - in your psych class.

“Hah, good luck with that one bro,” Vishal snorts. He’s already flipping through a book - Feminine Psychology by Karen Horney.

“Yeah, guess she’d need to know my name first,” you say, and Vishal nods emphatically.

“You think?”

With that, you both dive into your respective books, turning pages like madmen.

Forty-five minutes later, you look up, and see that you’re about 100 pages into the book. Good progress, you think to yourself, until you flip to the back and realise that this thing is about 500 pages long.

“Shit, I’m going to have to go much faster,” you say.

“Dude, I’m halfway through my book. You gotta hold up your end of the deal,” Vishal says.

“Yeah, but how long is yours? It looks like a skimpy little thing,” you say.

“269 pages,” Vishal says, thumbing to the back. “But I’m at page 150. You look like you’ve hardly gotten past the intro!”

“See, mine’s 440 pages long. And, I bet, harder to read, because Germans can’t write for shit,” you say.

“Horney was German too,” Vishal retorts. “Come on, next book I’ll take the longer one. Fair deal?”

“Fine, fine,” you say, and you return to the page you were on, reading about the childhood experience in two different Native American tribes.

After another forty-five minutes, Vishal throws his book down on the desk. “Finally done with this piece of crap. You going to be done by the time I get back from the loo?”

“Sorry, translate to American, could you?” you ask.

“Sorry that I’m too posh for you,” Vishal says, playing up his faint British accent for the moment. “I’m just going to use the potty for a moment.”

You turn back to the book, where you’ve just gotten to about page 350. Your eyes are growing heavy, and you’re not sure how much of the content you’re really absorbing - you’re mostly skimming topic sentences and skipping the details of the examples given - but you **** yourself to push on.

When Vishal comes back, he quietly works on something on his computer, while you make the final push to finish off the book. Eventually, the job is done, and you too throw the book onto the table, where it makes a satisfying thud.

“Done!”

Your cry of satisfaction gets Vishal’s attention.

“So, who shares first?” he asks.

It takes the two of you a minute to argue over it, and then another half an hour to actually explain the books to one another, but by the end of it, you have a halfway decent idea of why women might be objectified, and why that might impede their process of self-actualization. In fact, you find yourself actually persuaded by the argument!

But at no point do you reconsider trying to fuck fifteen different girls before the end of Burn Week. That would require you to apply your newfound learning to the real world, and everyone knows that what you learn in school is rubbish anyways.

All of a sudden, your phone buzzes. It’s a text from Dani!

Vishal +10