Sick Days / Perils of Praise

I was pretty sick this weekend, and there were two things that made it worse. First, it was absolutely gorgeous outside. Being stuck inside when your sick on a beautiful day is almost worse than being stuck at work. I don't know why- maybe because you know you won't magically get better at 5:00? I don't know. The second thing was that my frickin' frackin' internet was out again, pretty much from Saturday through last night. If there was a day that I needed the interwebs, that was it. So I caught up on the TiVo and watched a whole bunch of The Office on DVD. I can say with authority that it is the best comedy, if not the best show, on TV right now (it passed Scrubs a few seasons ago).

I felt better but still crappy on Monday, so I called in sick to work- marking my second sick day in my four and a half years with Navair. I always feel so guilty about it, like "I could soldier it out if I had to." But then I think "Why? I have sick days, and nothing that can't wait until tomorrow." Plus, since the cable guy never came on Friday (to figure out why my internet isn't working) like he was supposed to, I could just sit and wait for him all day. They said he would show up between 11:00 and 4:00, so take a guess when the doorbell rang. That's right, 4:30! He still beats out the guy who came to hook up the cable at my old apartment- in that instance I was given the very specific window of 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, and the dude showed up at 6:30 pm. But that's neither here nor there.

The internet support guy's conclusion was that the wiring in my house was so cheap that it couldn't support the internet frequency, saying "Yeah, this is all crappy Wal-Mart cable and connectors in your walls." He said that the way my house is set up, I couldn't expect to get internet service unless I rewired the whole thing, which I really don't want to do. This explanation was all well and good, except that the internet worked in my house for about 2 years before totally crapping the bed. So, he changed a bunch of connectors, and it's working for the time being.

The real reason I wanted to post today was to present this great article I happened by with my temporarily functioning internet service. It really appeals to my psychology side:

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids

The gist of the article is that when kids are praised for being hard workers, their performance improves because they learn that they can control their effort, and therefore success. When you tell a kid that they're smart, their performance decreases for several reasons: First, they figure they can coast on brains alone, so they put forth little effort. If they don't get something right away, they don't even try because they figure "Well, I'm not smart enough for this, so game over." Also, they don't like to try new things because they might fail and look dumb- and being smart is all they have.

I like this because I've seen so many examples of this (in myself and others) in real life. They make a lot of other good points as well, so check it out.