I may have linked to this MSN article before, but I think it’s really interesting.  To an extent, you can choose to be happy.  That’s something that I feel like I know instinctively, but I didn’t know it when I was younger–especially when I was a depressive teenager.  I think it’s something that everyone has to learn.

The steps to getting to happiness are: 1) nurture your relationships; 2) exercise; 3) be more extroverted; 4) nurture your spiritual side.  Also,

happiness is associated with characteristics like autonomy, competence, close relationships, and high self-esteem.

One part of the article in particular warns against buying things to be happy.

“The route to sustained happiness is not to change the static circumstances of your life, but rather to change the activities that you’re involved in,” says Sheldon. “This could mean committing to a new vocational plan, pursuing a new set of goals, or joining a new organization.”

One more interesting quote:

One way to steer your life toward happiness is simply to count your blessings, and perhaps even create and make regular entries in your own “gratitude journal.” Myers points to research showing that people who pause each day to reflect on the positive aspects of their lives (for example, their health, friends, family, education, freedom) are more likely to experience heightened well-being.

I think that this journal is something like that for me.  I write about my triumphs and feelings of happiness.  I write about bad things, too, and I think I need to work on being more positive here.  But it’s a start.

The last paragraph of the article is great.  Check it out.  (I was going to include it here, but I’ve quoted enough already…)

I really felt as I was reading this article that my opinions on happiness were reaffirmed.  I have thought for awhile now that the happiest people are those who are working towards a goal.  It’s not enough to just have a goal.  You have to know that you are doing something every day that will help you reach it.  Working towards a goal makes you feel good about yourself because you are accomplishing something.  In other words, you like yourself more, and liking yourself is absolutely necessary for true happiness.

But you can’t be single-mindedly devoted to a goal and be happy.  You have to have relationships, friends.  My husband is a pretty happy person in general.  He spends a lot of time on his computer, but he has really good friends there.  He takes care of those friends, and they take care of him, and seeing them and working with them each day is very important to him.  Sean’s goals aren’t to start a business or land a high-paying job or what have you.  He seems to know instinctively that working towards something, whatever it is, is the road to fun and happiness.  The things he works towards are for him and for the online communities he is a part of.  It’s a different, rather social kind of achievement.

(Sean is the only “gamer” I really know well, so I’m wondering if this is true for other people who play video games.  When playing a game, you’re working towards a goal, and when playing online or a multi-player game on a server, you have to work cooperatively.  It gets the social aspect and it gets the working towards a goal in one fell swoop.  And I do think that, in general, gamers are happy people.  I’ve never met a gamer like the ones you see portrayed in the news.)

For me, the times when I’ve felt the most unhappy are when I’m powerless to change something that I’m willing to work my ass off to change.  And lately, now that I’m doing workouts and things and taking better care of myself, I’ve felt better–I’m working towards the goal of a healthy me.  Soon I’d like to start working on the goal of getting proficient in Japanese.  I have lots of study materials.  I want to start saving up to buy those Pimsleur tapes, because hearing it and practicing it is important, but in the meantime I’ve got books and plenty of online resources.  It’s been nagging at me that I haven’t done anything, and I think I will be even happier if I start up some self-study.

In a nutshell, it’s productive people who are happy.  If you just fall into the status quo, get complacent, and sit around all day doing passive activities like watching TV, then you’re not bettering yourself, and you’ll start to lose respect for yourself.  But if you work to improve yourself and do the things that you like with people you like, you’re on the road to happiness (and possibly other successes, depending on what your goals are).

At times like these, I feel so optimistic :)  I just want to go out and make my mark on the world.

I spoke with a good friend last night, someone about whom I care very deeply.  I left the conversation feeling, well, upset.

I don’t mind if she sees what I think about it, because apparently I haven’t been able to present my thoughts coherently in person, but in order to protect her privacy and the privacy of other parties, I won’t use her name.  (This secrecy stuff is really annoying…)

My friend’s best friend, her closest companion, is a guy who broke her heart.  For months she pined for him.  She still says he is the epitome of attraction, a great guy, that she is so similar to him and that she can understand him so well, that he has taught her so much about herself and how to love herself…so that even while she’s joking that he’s trying to find her a boyfriend, you get that sense of unresolved feelings.  She will deny this; she says they are best friends.  Back when she made her decision to stop wanting him as a lover, she insisted that she was not going to stop seeing him or being friends with him, because he was too important to her, too big a part of her life.

So, in other words, she consciously chose not to move on at all.  She chose to stay in limbo, to pound her feelings down, to relegate herself to second place in order to be near the guy who won’t have her.  It’s like saying, “I’d rather have him this way than not at all.”

And subconsciously, it’s like saying, “Maybe someday he’ll see what I’m worth and change his mind.”

I won’t pretend to understand his side of all this.  He dated her, he broke up with her, he continued to have sex with her after the fact because it was convenient and fun.  And from what I hear, he does care about her.  She seems to think that I think he is evil, but I don’t.  I’ve said numerous times that I think he is human.

The reason I don’t think she should spend time with him is not because I think he is a bad person.  I have no data on whether or not he is a bad person.  And, frankly, I don’t care whether or not he is a bad person.  What I know is that it is horribly emotionally damaging to cling to someone the way she’s doing, to absolve him of all guilt (which she does, even though she claims not to, simply by allowing him the pleasure of her company), to pretend that her strong, overwhelming feelings of a few months ago have suddenly turned off like a light switch.

She’s subconsciously leading herself on.  She may have even subconsciously decided that as long as she can be with him this way, she doesn’t need more from him–and that she doesn’t need any romantic relationship.

She is letting him abuse her by staying near him.  It doesn’t matter whether he means to abuse her or not.  That is the end result.  She loves him, she wants him, he won’t have her, she lets him have her friendship anyway even after all that happened.  He will never know from this the depths of her feelings.  He will probably assume that she is fine, that they are friends, and everything is hunky-dory.  So he will treat her the way he’s always treated her, the way that made her love him in the first place.

They’re together, and yet not, by his choice.  Every day is a torture chamber for my friend…one that she jumps into eagerly, because he’s there.  It may be beautiful outside, a wonderful world where she can grow and learn and find love, but that doesn’t matter because he is down in the torture chamber.  She’ll stunt her own growth–and she is stunting her own growth–simply in order to keep him near.

It’s not like no one has told her this, either.  But she denies it, vehemently.

Last night she said she felt bad because he felt out of place during a recent get-together with “the group”.  I was extraordinarily annoyed by this, though I held myself in check.  I calmly explained that anyone who isn’t part of a group will feel left out.  But it seems to me that she wants him to become part of the group, or something.  I’ve already told her that if he’s there spending time with us regularly, then I will have to opt out of those meetings.  I refuse to watch her destroy herself.  She can do that on her own time.

What right does she have to expect us to accept him?  I don’t care what kind of person he is, or if I would have liked him in another circumstance, or whether or not he chose to hurt my friend the way he did.  What happened happened.  To me, he isn’t a person.  He is a part of my friend’s life that she needs to walk away from.  He will never be a person to me.  He will certainly never be my friend.

Worked a full 8 hours, no break today.  It feels like I work more now that I have “fewer” hours…

Tomorrow’s the last day before my vacation.  I don’t think I have enough time to get done what I need to before I leave.  I read an article on MSN awhile back about people who have horrible, stressful vacations because they try to do too much beforehand and then spend the whole time worrying about what didn’t get done.  I could see that happening to me :P  I even (in a fit of irrationality that I now regret) offered to telecommute while I’m in Kentucky…:P

So, I’m just trying to unwind now.  Ate a late lunch, checked websites, looked for Sailor Moon 40 (not yet…grr…), and now I’m just trying to decide what I want to do with myself for the rest of the day.  Bwah.  A nice nap sounds wonderful, but I don’t know if I want to do that.  The possibility of biking also exists…we’ll have to see about that.

Speaking of which, I meant to go to a bike shop today, but it totally slipped my mind, what with all the MIND NUMBING STRESS…

One lap, no weights; 5 minutes on stair climber; same routine as Tuesday.

I had to drag myself kicking and screaming out of bed this morning.  I just did not want to get up at all.  But now that my workout and shower are over, I’m feeling better.

Going to have to have another confrontation today, or at least a laying out once again of my limits.  I knew it wouldn’t last.  (Hell, it never even really started, did it?)

Just wanted to post that I’ve had a nice day :)  Had a lovely time with Sean right when he got home from work, and after that Brooke came over and we made curry.  Then we ate it and watched live action Sailor Moon!  We also had ice cream.

We made it through five episodes, enough to see the introduction of Moon, Mercury, and Mars, and some trials and tribulations for those three.  Much to my delight, Brooke really enjoyed it!  She wants to watch more :)  I’m glad I have someone to watch it with :)

I’m hoping to finagle my way over to Mari and Kelly’s tomorrow to see what their house looks like with all their stuff in it.  We’ll see.

Work went well today.  I made a training document and worked through it step by step with Wanda, and that really helped.  Today was much calmer, and she seemed to really be grasping what was going on.  I was so relieved.  Yesterday was just evil.

Looking forward to Saturday :)  Flying out of AGS straight to LEX.  That will be so nice :D  Although I think the reality of the distance involved may be cut down with the drive omitted.  (Small price to pay!)

You just can’t make this shit up.  (Well, I guess somebody did…but it certainly wasn’t me.  Where I come from, we don’t add syllables during the course of normal conversation.)

My back hurts this morning, so I’m not going to do my workout.  The back pain isn’t really the real reason I don’t want to do it, though; I had a bad dream, and it’s made me feel a little shaky.

I’d like to recount the dream here, because it had such a profound effect on me, but it involved people I know, and I don’t want them to see this and get offended.  This is the hairy part of having an online journal; how much can you say?  If I was the only one I had to worry about, I’d say everything.  But unfortunately I have to take other people’s feelings into account.  ;>

In any case, I’m going to write about the dream and not use names.  There are two characters besides myself in the dream, a man and a woman, so I’m going to refer to them as “the man” and “the woman”.

I’m not sure what I was doing in the dream, but at some point I decided to leave the room in the middle of a conversation with the man because I was unhappy with whatever he was saying.  The man then hurled something over the wall of the room.  I didn’t see it exactly, but I heard it smash to the floor and break, and I heard the sound of wooden things scattering across the room, and I knew instinctively that it was my ceramic kitchen utensil holder, which for some reason had all my wooden spoons and things in it (in real life, it has the plastic and metal stuff in it.  I haven’t had the wooden spoons in it for a long time).

This really pissed me off, but I was also scared, so I didn’t run back in there to confront him.  Instead, I stormed out of the room I was in and into the hallway, where I found the woman.  She had heard the sound and was pacing back and forth frantically, wringing her hands and mumbling to herself in a high-pitched, frightened voice.

I pulled her into a hug and tried to soothe her.  “It’s okay.  Don’t worry about it.  It’s okay.”  I think she calmed down, but not much.  (It’s obvious where this part of the dream comes from.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time worrying about this person recently, but I haven’t been able to do anything to help her.)  By this time I was determined that I had to do something, to make it obvious to the man that his behavior was unacceptable.  I apparently explained the situation off-camera, because AJ showed up with some long socks that said “ALAN” on the toes, and said, “Make him wear these.  His feet will stink for a week!”

This was not the solution, of course.  I wasn’t sure what was, but I headed back to confront the man.  When I got back to the room, though, I discovered he wasn’t there.  Asking around, I discovered that he’d left completely.

That was pretty much it.  I think the part about him leaving at the end is important because I tend to lose my nerve in situations like that.  If he’d been there, I might have been able to say what I wanted to say, but postponing the confrontation would only make me less able to pull it off.

The man in my dream has never been violent towards me in real life.  He is bigger than I am, though.  One time he was mad and slammed his hand onto a desk.  It made me flinch.

I’m not sure why I had this dream now, but I think it speaks to some sort of issue I must have.  I’ve always had a problem with strong people hurting weak people.  I can’t stand to watch scenes like that in movies (as you’ll recall).  I sort of wonder if something happened to me when I was a kid (this is the convenient, Hollywood psychology solution), or if there is some other sort of reason why I’m like this.  I can’t really think of a single reason, though I can say that I was frightened of abuse as a child.  Maybe that’s all it takes, even if no physical abuse actually occurs.

I feel really uncomfortable right now.  I wish I could just go back to bed.

I stayed a little late at work (as usual), meaning I got off at 3:40–Robert was out of town today so I had to work a full shift.  Things were very, very hectic.  Things kept going wrong; it just wasn’t good.

It could be due to the stress, then, that I got home, started the laundry, laid down to read Getting Things Done, and fell promptly asleep.

I love sleeping.

I woke up at 10:30, thinking blearily that I should at least change my clothes.  As I was automatically preparing my clothes for tomorrow, the fog lifted enough for me to remember the laundry.  So here I am, waiting on it, and eating Crunch Berries.

I had to force myself out of bed this morning.  I stayed up too late watching America’s Funniest Sitcom Families or Something Like That on ABC.  It was really amusing.  I especially liked the off-the-cuff remarks by the late John Ritter.  The man was a genius.

 

Anyway, it just kept going on and on and before I knew it it was 10:30, so I hopped into bed finally.  Too late, really.

 

I was supposed to have gotten off work at 11, but as is the norm these days I stayed late, until around 1.  It was fine, though…I had stuff to get done, and I managed quite a bit of it.  Today Robert is out of town, and I will be working on training Wanda to do the stuff I won’t be able to do while I’m out of town :>  So today will be a full workday.  Fortunately, yesterday I went grocery shopping, so that’s out of the way.  I even know what I’m making for dinner tonight :)  (Last night, we ordered in from T.G.I. Friday’s…)

 

Since I got up a little later than usual, and was moving kind of slowly, I made a circuit around the complex and then skipped the stairclimber.  I don’t know if we’re biking today or not, but my legs may thank me for the reprieve.  I then did my usual routine, same as last time.

 

I don’t think I’m going to make Sean’s lunch this morning.  I really need to get in the habit of doing that the night before :P  My time in the morning is priceless.

I wish someone competent was subbing Touch.  There are two groups, “Crossfade” and “Genbu & Meisei”, and neither of them is particularly good.

 

There was one really embarrassing moment in the Genbu/Meisei sub of episode 16–embarrassing for me, watching, because it’s such a stupid mistake on the part of the fansubbers.  Minami has caught a cold/flu, so Tatsuya brings her some lemons (apparently lemons make you well?  I don’t know).  Minami says, 　「レモンじゃない！」　(“remon ja nai!“) .  Genbu/Meisei translated it as, “These aren’t lemons!”

 

Now, technically, that is what she said.  “ja nai” is a way of saying “is not”.  But this structure is common in feminine speech (slang, if you will) for adding emphasis to a statement without being direct.  It’s akin to saying, “Aren’t those lemons?” or “Those are lemons, aren’t they!”  In other words, it’s a rhetorical question whose answer is patently obvious.  (Men use this structure too, but they tend to say “jan” instead of “ja nai“, from what I’ve noticed.  For example, when someone impresses him in tennis, Ryoma might say, “yaru jan“.  I think we can assume here that the “yaru” means “to play [a game/sport]”; most of the time Anime-Otakus [who I highly respect as fansubbers] translate it as “not bad”.)

 

Given that the phrase can technically mean (with different intonation) “These aren’t lemons,” the phrase Tatsuya says next, which Genbu/Meisei translated as “What, do they look like pumpkins to you?” makes sense…but Minami’s line doesn’t, because they are obviously lemons.  Meanwhile, Crossfade, which had Minami say, “Lemons!”, didn’t bother translating Tatsuya’s line at all.  It looks like rather than taking the time to do it right, both fansub groups conveniently omitted things that made the conversation complicated.

 

On the whole, I guess I would trust Genbu/Meisei over Crossfade, though.  From the easy stuff Crossfade’s  getting wrong–“ice milk” as “ice cream”?  “Straight” as “strike”?–I have to wonder how much of the story I’m missing.  I may as well be watching it raw.  Don’t even get me started on how the umpire is somehow the “crossbreeder”(!).  Unfortunately, Genbu/Meisei seem to have stopped at 16, while Crossfade is up to episode 22.

 

The story is one of those wacky love triangles–this time involving two twin brothers and their next-door neighbor–but it’s serious, too.  I really enjoy it, despite the horrid subbing.  I doubt it will ever be licensed, because it, like other quality shows–Miyuki, Yawara–is pretty old.  The animation is outdated and not flashy enough for today’s core anime crowd.  Plus, there are no giant robots, and the T&A is pretty tame (gee, a girl in a leotard–and her body is actually human proportions, too).  Good story isn’t enough to get something released in the US…yet.

 

And so that’s why I want someone else to fansub it.  Or for Genbu/Meisei to catch up–because at least they use a nice big font that I can actually read.  I was trying to screencap some of the latest Crossfade release to demonstrate how terrible it is, but unfortunately I can’t seem to do so.  Just believe me when I say that they picked the most swirly, serif font they possibly could, and then made it about three pixels high ;P

This is the thirty-sixth day of my new lifestyle.  I consider last week, during which I didn’t work out at all, to be a part of it, because in order to be healthy one has to take breaks when necessary.  These breaks aren’t setbacks.  They’re part of the path towards wellness.  My back was hurting, and it was not feasible to work it out last week.  Since resting and using a heating pad Mari gave me, my back is feeling much better, and I was able to do my workout routine this morning at almost the same level I was at before the break.

 

This was my schedule this morning:

 

5:00-5:15: Wake up, get dressed, stretch.

 

5:15-5:45: Work out:

1 lap around complex (no weights)

3 minutes stairclimber

50 crunches

20 knees-to-elbows

30 each side obliques

30 each side lats

50 back raises

20 wuss pushups

30 each side outside inner thigh lifts

30 each side inside inner thigh lifts

30 each side side leg lifts (these were especially hard this time, don’t know why)

20 scissor kicks

30 (+10) each side glutes

30 (+10) calf raises

 

5:45-6:00: Make Sean’s lunch (turkey and swiss, ramen)

 

6:00-6:15: Shower

 

And since 6:15, I’ve been getting dressed and typing this post.  Whee!

 

I’d like to be able to devote a full hour to my morning workout, but I get up quite early enough as it is, thank you.  If I worked out until 6:15, I’d have barely enough time to shower and get dressed before leaving for work.  That’s not ideal…the morning, for me, is time to wake up and get ready for the day, not time to freak out and rush out the door.

 

I’m so particular about things…I don’t like stressing out, and I try to avoid things that are boring.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m just weird.  It seems like other people accept stressing out and boredom as part of everyday life.  I tend to refuse to accept either one–in fact, they make me rather grouchy.  I guess I figure…we only have this life.  Why spend so much of it doing things we don’t want to?  I do wonder if this view is unrealistic, though.

 

Ah, I feel great :)  I’m glad to be back on my regular routine again.  Last week I got up at 6 am instead of 5 every morning, and I went to work already wishing I could come home.  Today I feel fine.  (Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that I’m only working a half day today ;>)

I don’t believe that the Republicans are fuming over gay marriage now in an effort to “distract” people from the war, because I don’t believe Republicans think people are so stupid that they can’t concentrate on more than one thing at a time.  I think the issue came up because gay people started getting married.  It would have come up when that happened regardless of the timing.

 

The Republicans are wrong, though.

 

I just thought this was cute, and wanted to share.

I’ve hit the limit for title length!!  But there’s lot of good news, and I didn’t want to focus on just one thing :>

 

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write about it, because I’ve been dilly-dallying and now I need to run off with Brooke to see Mari bellydance…then we’re having sushi…and then we’re helping Mari pack/move stuff to her new house!!!!  Joygasm!!!!

Thank goodness.

 

And uh…whoa, what did Blogger do to its admin?  I likes it!