Happiness Lifehack

i love it when things just flow together, and I haven't had that happen in a while. I feel like I slogging through a mire of cellophane wrappers (real cellophane, not that cheap petroleum based polypropylene stuff). So I was doing one of my random "that seems interesting; I think I'll google it and see what it means" searches that comes out of editing pages from weird books, I found out about the Happiness Manifesto lifehack (the BBC has a whole lifestyle section on this, including an easy-to take test to discover happiness levels. And there's recipes, too. Because recipes make people happy). There's even a group following it informally on 43 things, and my new obsession is 43 things

And writing of 43 things, I love the idea of setting up self-imposed punishments for not meeting my publicly-declared challenge. I heard on NPR (I think) about a group of people who swore they were medically incapable of losing weight, but when threatened with having pictures of themselves posted naked on the internet (taken with their permission, and the study was started with their permission to post if they didn't lose weight - always read the fine print, people), these same study victims managed to drop some poundage. Crazy that. Although I did get chastised for suggesting that I might really want to eat a worm if I don't get the worm bin up and running. I don't really want to eat a worm, even with the recipes in the back of my worm book. I ate snails in Paris. I discovered they're just carriers for butter and garlic, and I much prefer bread or mushrooms for that. In fact, mushrooms have pretty much the same texture and consistency of snails without the creepy knowledge that they once had eye stalks. Eye stalks kind of freak me out.

yeah.

Random Random Random Senseless Practice

(The second week of February is Random Act of Kindness week. I hate that bumper sticker, but really love it when people mutate it into other messages.)
One of the things I do that doesn't actually bring in any viable income but is still fun because of the randomness of it all, is proofreading OCRed documents for a company that contracts with major publishers for online document search retrieval. I'll edit a Christian marriage counseling page, a page from a children's book, and then a page of soft-core erotica, then a math book page. Great for keeping the brain non-linear, and I get to play with my weird ability to immediately spot the typo in written text. (I inherited this ability from my super-human mom, and until recently, just used this ability to constantly criticize myself. So this is a slightly lucrative use of a power for good, and not evil.)

For the most part, I don't get involved in the content, but I sometimes I'll proof a page that compels me to read the rest of the book. Rarely does the publisher omit the author or the title of the book from the layout of the individual page, but it does happen, and I'm left fumbling with half-finished novels in my head that will never be completed. So far there's a fictional biography of an icelandic punk band, a sci-fi series that I think I can track down, and an autobiography of a person who did a tibetan monk thing in England somewhere and has a funny writing style that I adore.

So yesterday afternoon I had a conversation with my fabulous neighbor about our ability to convince ourselves that we're worthless by listening to others trying to beat us down and turn us into something they think we should be, and not who we really are (a common enough occurrence in our media-inspired culture, I suppose). She went back to the gym and I sat back down in front of the computer and immediately ran into a great (para)quote in that tibetan monk book I happened to get to proof a few pages: I choose my own direction. And however much I may wobble in reaction to others, I keep my direction steady.