20 Minutes

I've spent all week researching psychological background for a new story and had a heck of a time getting anywhere. Yesterday I finally got my hands on a book that looks like it will be invaluable but it still hasn't answered the vast majority of the questions I have and no single book is going to be able to tell me if my overall concept is viable from a reality stand-point. After everything, I still had a list of 5 critical questions that I could neither find the answers for nor have any idea where else to look.

The Shrink graciously let me bounce the questions off of him though and in a mere 20 minutes I got all of them answered, brainstormed solutions to a few other issues, solidified motives and thought patterns that I had been guessing at and got all excited about the project (more so than I already was)!

So I got to thinking about how he was able to answer everything I threw at him in 20 minutes. And I know that this is his area of specialty and he does have years of years of experience on these matters but I got to wondering how much of this knowledge he was able to just learn.

Oh, how I want to know these things! I want to understand how people think and why and what can be done to encourage or discourage these things. I want to be able to look at a situation and have an idea of what motives are behind them, what kind of thoughts and rationales. I wanna know all this stuff!

So how can I learn about it? Oh, what I would give to have a trained mentor in this stuff to talk about things and bounce ideas and learn from... Wonder if I can buy a my-friend-the-shrink at Walmart? :P

Seriously, though... how does one make friends with people who share the same interests - in the real world? Outside of cyber-space, I don't know anyone (that I don't have to pay by the hour) who shares any of my interests. Baby-Mommy kinda a few of them a little, but guess where I met her??? Cyber-space. :-(