The Treatment Program of Absurdity: 1

The Ridiculous Seminars

Once every three months, there would be a parent’s workshop, where our parents would come in for a family therapy session, followed by a seminar. During the one after Xmas, I had passed out in my chair while Dr. Mathems was talking, in which my grandfather had to wake him up. My granddad admitted to all of the parents that even though he did not condone his grandson falling asleep, he sympathized with me, since Dr. Johnson also found the seminar boring. Dr. Johnson - who had a Ph.D. in psychology, and had gotten books published that had been on the bestseller list of The New York Times - had decided to meet with Dr. Linkins about improving the seminars, but Dr. Linkins completely shunned him.
The parents lost interest in the seminars, but the seminars continued, and became mandatory for students every Tuesday afternoon. I would go into the bathroom at that time to play video games or watch the news, in which I would still get credit for attendance. Often times, I would just bail out on them and take a zero; money didn’t mean as much to me, since I always went on shopping sprees while I was home.
On January 7, 2010, there was a seminar about reasoning with people. Scenarios included a student refusing to cancel a doctor’s appointment, in which their parents would get billed. The student had to pretend to be the staff member, while the staff member had to pretend to be the student. I told the staff pretending to be the student that they needed to get off their lazy ass and cancel the appointment this instance, in which I was reprimanded for being disrespectful towards the student, claiming that I had to be calm and reasonable. I watched the scenario being observed, and thought it was ridiculous that someone would be expected to reason with a student acting in that manner.
On January 14th, there was a seminar about training horses, in order to understand how to relate to people. I sent a text message to my cousin, telling him to call me. My ring tone was “Me So Horny” by the 2 Live Crew, and from the moment that the ringtone went off, Tory got up so she could escort me out of the group-room, meaning I was free. John Butler knew I had intentionally done something to get his phone go off in order to get kicked out, so he had decided to make me watch the video again in therapy, but never went through with the plan.
The seminars were nothing but a joke, since they were so simple and lacked critical thinking. The Stanford Marshmallow experiment was a psychological experiment that was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960’s, where he would give children a marshmallow, and told them that they would get another marshmallow if they waited ten minutes before eating the marshmallow; the experiment was conducted on January 21st, but all that happened was that Adam and I rebelled by immediately eating the marshmallow.
The seminars never got any better; they continued to be ridiculous and pointless. What made them interesting was when George would cause constant interruptions. The best seminar was yet to come, but it will take a term that George and I called the seminars, and make it literal.