Mmm . . . Sandwich

I decided it could be interesting and slightly profitable to volunteer as a subject for a couple of psychology studies on campus. Today I spent my lunch break rating on an arbitrary scale of my own devision the degree to which I liked and disliked imaginary sensations. (The smell of dirty laundry; the feeling of a warm bed in winter; the taste of your favorite chocolate; the feeling of rough sandpaper.) A grad student seated next to me read the list of possibilities and I typed my numeric responses into a slightly outdated computer.

I sure hope that this study is about the meta-level pattern of responses, since my subjective answers were objectively all over the map.

The interesting question was at the end, when the grad student asked me to identify the best and worst possible sensations I could imagine. These are difficult questions when you're put on the spot!

After some hedging and stalling, mostly to make sure I didn't think of anything sexual, I identified the Best Possible Sensation as lying on a warm beach in summer, surrounded by a symphony orchestra in performance. (I hope, additionally, that the grad student is controlling for her being a female grad student, since a male grad student would have heard a much less frou-frou answer.) I did not specify that the orchestra would be playing a work something like a Prokofiev ballet, except one that I'd somehow managed to compose myself, though I was thinking this.

The Worst Possible Sensation was easier to identify as being hit very badly by a bus, which I guess is a self-centered and obvious choice, but I really didn't want to think through all the terrifying possibilities of life right then and there.

With $20 in hand and walking back to the office, on a warm and sunny day, I wondered more about the orchestra performance on the beach, and whether I could actually make this happen someday, and whether this actually secretly meant something sexual anyway, and so on. And then, since it was lunchtime and I hadn't eaten yet, I started thinking about the roast beef sandwich waiting for me in the office fridge, and man! it was going to feel good to eat that sandwich. I was pretty hungry by then! I really started salivating over this sandwich.

And it occurred to me that immediately beforehand I'd tried to imagine the Best Possible Sensation ever, and it turned out to be not as exciting as imagining a Roast Beef Sandwich.

There's a moral to this story someplace, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

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I can tell you another moral, though, after a week of solid gym attendance and increasingly healthy cooking: the key to good behavior is procrastinating from a separate and even more daunting task, such as unpacking your life's possessions from the boxes in the new apartment you just moved into.