feeling s-t-r-e-s-s-e-d?

I just started sorting through the course materials for my final GE class (hooray! hooray! hooray!), HESC 342: Stress Management.

For the record, I did not wake up stressed this morning. I actually woke up pretty relaxed, considering that I went to sleep at 8:30 in a Benadryl-induced semi-coma (somebody please explain to me the benefit of an anti-allergy drug that apparently does nothing except knock you out; why not just take a sleeping pill? incidentally, though, watching parts of the Olympic closing ceremony while drifting in and out of consciousness was fun; it makes more sense that way).

Then I logged into my Stress Management course and took two stress tests: one for my overall life and one for my job.

The overall life one said that I had a moderately high stress level which put me in the "mid-life crisis" category.

Nice. I'm stressed, having an identity crisis, and I'm slated to die at 50.

The job one seems to have been written specifically for lawyers. It had a series of true/false questions like "Does your job affect the lives of other people?" "Do you have to make decisions that affect other people's well-being?" "Are there high levels of substance abuse or marital problems for people in your profession?" "Do you deal with problems day-to-day that do not have easy, common-sense answers?"

Heh.

I think that the only question I answered "false" was "do you have trouble sleeping?" If only it was fill-in-the-blank, I could've said something like "No, thanks to Benadryl."

I guess they have to convince us all that we're stressed during this first week, so that we have a sense of impetus for learning to manage the problem over the next 15.

It seems to be working.