Sep 07 2014
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Don’t Worry! Be Happy!

smileyI’m about to embark on another learning journey. Surprised? Me too. But if you have been following me for some time you’ll know that, not too long ago I attended Harvard where I completed a course that explored the rather esoteric concept of justice. Ok, to be fair, I didn’t actually attend Harvard. I took that course online with maybe a hundred thousand or so other people, give or take a few. But I passed and now my Harvard certificate is proudly displayed in a most prominent spot on my office wall. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t been reading this blog carefully enough. Shallow people know there’s no shame in exploitation when no one gets hurt. And honestly, is there any harm in people expecting you to be just a little smarter than you really are? Or happier? Because you see, for my next foray into the world of academe I will become immersed in the exploration of the “science of happiness”. You heard me right. I’m going to learn how to be happy.

The funny thing is most of the time I am happy. Which doesn’t mean I’m never grumpy or sad or temperamental or just plain ornery. There are times when I am all of those things. Like when I’m driving, minding my own business and some lunatic decides the speed limit is slightly more than double what I am doing. And passes me. On the inside. Or squirrels eat my car, which, if I can be so bold to say, hasn’t happened since we have managed to successfully evict them from the garage. Which has actually made me quite happy. Unless they come back. Which will make me all of the above. Or my hair goes curly in the rain. Yeah, that’s probably the proverbial straw. Yet all of these aside, I’m usually pretty happy. So you may be wondering why exactly I would devote the better part of the next three months learning about happiness.

First things first. I’m taking the course from Berkeley and, besides Harvard, who doesn’t want to go to Berkeley? Let’s face it. Anyone who grew up in the 60s, and I know quite a few people who did, feels a little tinge of nostalgia at the mention of the name. I mean Berkeley. Man, that’s where it was at. Berkeley. The epicenter of  the cultural revolution. Who doesn’t want to groove to that beat? And what better place to go to learn how to be happy? Although, if this were the sixties, I suspect that you wouldn’t have to take a course to figure out how to get happy at Berkeley.

And I gotta say, after seeing the course syllabus I’m pretty excited about what’s to come. Because not only is this course about learning how to be happy, it’s also about discovering how to live a meaningful life. Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it would have been better to have taken this in the sixties but since there’s no age limit on enrollment I’m guessing it’s not too late. Besides, there are readings and lectures, quizzes and practice exercises so surely something’s going to stick. But to be totally honest, my excitement for what’s to come is coupled with just a little bit of skepticism as I consider the implications of taking a course that talks about “measuring happiness” and provides a list (and you know what I think about lists) of “eight essentials when forgiving”. Do we really need to take a course that instructs us on how to forgive? I’m starting to wonder if the course about being happy could already be making me a little sad.

But despite my reservations I do think this course will be worth my time. As you know, every once in a while I have some trouble coming up with ideas for this blog. The truth of it is, I have an inkling that, if nothing else, I won’t find myself with that problem over the next few months. And you know what? That’s making me happier already!

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Aug 14 2014
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Let me count the ways

bread listI’ve written about them before and apparently I’m going to write about them again. It seems to me that people like lists. I haven’t actually done the research so can’t say it’s an empirical fact or anything like that, but I do have some evidence to support my hypothesis. Take my last post. My last post had a list and people liked it. And, let’s face it. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Letterman’s entire career has been built around a list. Each and every night for the past 30 odd years he’s shared with us a “top 10” and it seems to me that nothing could last that long if people didn’t like it. As a matter of fact, it’s entirely possible that he could single handedly be responsible for the ever increasing popularity of the list. Although you won’t want to quote me on that.

The fact is, people make a lot of lists. They make lists when they go shopping to make sure they buy all the right stuff when they get to the store. Even if that store happens to be right around the corner from where they live. And yet, my best guess is, that when they leave the store there are as many things in their basket that weren’t on the list, than were. And some that were on the list but not in the basket. Most people make lists at work of all the things they need to do. I’ve been told this is a good thing, not so much because it reminds you of what you need do, but more so because you get such a good feeling when you cross each one of those things off until eventually you don’t have a list. Which begs the question “do people really like making lists or is it the getting rid of them that tickles their fancy?”

You may however, be wondering why a shallow person like myself would be spending so much time thinking and writing about lists all the while eschewing the temptation to make them. Certainly I have made public my disdain for those pesky resolution lists so often made at the first of each year and there is still nothing in that bucket of mine. It’s just that everywhere I look these days there’s someone, I’m sure with the best of intentions, trying to tell me what 10 things I should or shouldn’t buy at my local big box store or what foods I should or shouldn’t eat if I want to live to be 100. Which I suppose in my family isn’t out of the question and, now that I’m thinking about it, I should probably ask my Mother to make a list.. Bottom line? While I don’t like making lists I have no problem reading and sharing them with you. So here are some of my favourites:

1) The 10 best and 10 worst places to live. Not that I am but it’s always nice to know where one should move should one be thinking of moving. You can also find out the 10 most expensive and the 10 least expensive places to live. Although perhaps unintentional, there is a strong correlation between these lists.

2) The 10 best colleges and universities in the country.  As a matter of fact, you’re going to find lots of lists that rank institutions of higher education. Unfortunately they’re all going to be different so you’ll just end up confused. Might I suggest you just use that “best place to live” list for this decision.

3) The 10 most influential people who never really lived. I can completely understand the inclusion of Santa Claus, Barbie and even Robin Hood, but I had to question the list’s reliability when it came to “The little engine that could”. In what universe can a train engine, even one that talks, be classified as a person?

4) 10 reasons why old people are awesome. Ten? At my age I would have been happy with one.

5) 7 new robots designed to do human jobs. I’d be ok with this as long as it didn’t dress better than me.

6) 13 scientific terms you might be using wrong. Fortunately I’m not using any of these wrong. Actually, I’m not using any of them at all.

7) Forbes 500 List. This is a long one so not sure anyone is really going to take the time to read it. Even so, one thing I can tell you for sure. I’m not on it.

8) 30 under 30 and 40 under 40 lists. These are always interesting because you get to see the rising stars in your community. One day I’m hoping to make the top 70 under 70.

9) 10 cool ways to reuse a pizza box. I eat a lot of pizza. Normally I throw out the box. I could have made chairs. Who knew this list would come in so handy.

10) Almost everyone does 10. I’m not doing 10.

Well what do you know! Looks like I just made a list of lists. Hope you liked it.

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Jul 31 2014
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Thank Goodness for Facebook!

thumbs upI learn a lot from Facebook. For starters, I now know where each and every one of my friends go for fun and entertainment, even when they are having all of that fun without me. I know where they go to eat and what they ate when they got there, saving me not only time and money but often ensuring that I have an even more satisfactory culinary experience than they did. I’ll be the first to admit that I learn from the mistakes of others. And it’s now exponentially easier for me to learn about my friend’s political views, who they support and don’t support, what issues are important to them and what they like and don’t like. Afterall, it’s not the way it was in the “old days”. I mean back then if you wanted to protest something you had to march down to city hall and join a crowd of possibly thousands of like minded people carrying placards, singing protest songs and chanting some catchy phrase like “Hell no! We won’t go!” (“we” weren’t really in any danger of “going” anywhere, but that was beside the point) and there were so many people that no one even knew you were there.  But now all you have to do is post a video of Rob Ford or some activist pontificating about the plight of women or men or the need to spay and neuter (the latter being primarily with regard to animals, btw) and we all pretty much know where you stand.

One of my favourite things is having the opportunity to live vicariously through all of my friends’ adventures as they post pictures of the wonderful and exotic places they visit. Places I am unlikely to ever frequent due to my rather narrow tolerance of heat, with regard to both temperature and food. It’s true, I’m a bit of a diva when it comes to vacays which, as a result, means that touring Africa or Asia through the eyes of others is likely as close as I will ever get. So I learn a lot about travel, albeit mostly other peoples.

But perhaps even more importantly, I learn a lot about myself. You see, I’ve been on Facebook since 2007 and during that time have had the opportunity to partake in a vast array of quizzes that have led me to know and understand myself just so much better. All I can say is thank goodness for Facebook as otherwise I’m not sure I would have ever reached the level of introspection which I now profess to have. Because, as a shallow person, I am sometimes wont to neglect this type of self-reflective activity and I am therefore deeply indebted, if not grateful, that as a member of Facebook I am guided thus to do so. So let me share a smattering of what I’ve learned about me with you.

1) My left brain is pretty much non-existent which probably doesn’t surprise most people but could be of some concern to my boss

2) I should be living in New York. I’d be ok with that if I did, but I don’t.

3) If I was a cheese (and that’s a big “if”) I would be Gouda and belong in a “cheese museum of perfection”. Sounded good until I read the “people will want to eat you until you were gone” part.

4) Talk show host? I’m Seth Myers and “the smartest person in the room with plenty of important thoughts to get across to the world”. I knew there was a reason I’ve been writing this blog!

5) If I took high school Chemistry now I would get a D. Not bad since I actually never took Chemistry when I was in high school.

6) Apparently I would be Taystee in “Orange is the New Black”. I’ve never seen it so will have to take their word for it.

7) My aura is yellow. I’m “optimistic and intelligent, with a friendly, creative presence”. I  was pretty confident that was absolutely right on the money until I realized I had already taken the quiz a few months back. At that time my aura was red which meant I had an “insatiable urge to win”. Seems just a little contradictory to me and since it’s pretty hard to verify, I gotta say it’s all a tad confusing.

8) You know I love a good Rom Com so no way I could pass up finding out which Queen I would be if I was one. Looks like me and Sandra B. share the same love of checklists. Wait a minute. Isn’t that a left brain thing?

9) Have to admit I was a little disappointed to learn that in the world of Shrek I’d be wearing Lord Farquaad’s garb. Donkey, Gingerbread Man or Puss in Boots, those are characters I can get my head around. I suppose though that being a “born villain” can’t be all bad.

I could go on but I think you can see how important Facebook has been in contributing to my understanding of myself. Of late I’ve been tempted to complete a quiz that measures how shallow I am, but I think both you and I already know the answer to that.

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Jul 15 2014
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Informative, Instructive

Things I don’t need to know (TIDNTK)

stopSo I’m sitting on our fav patio having my usual grande non-fat, no foam latte, (the specifics of which you should know in case you ever want to “treat”) pretty much minding my own business, when the woman sitting at the next table strikes up a conversation. It wasn’t one of those really interesting conversations that people sometimes have over a cuppa. To be honest, I can’t really remember what triggered the chit chat but I’m pretty sure it was along the lines of “Wonderful day! Nice that the weather has finally warmed up. Afterall, it is July.”  a commonly expressed sentiment in my part of the world. Or perhaps she commented on someone walking by dressed, to be polite, unusually, confident that my opinion would mesh with hers. And although our encounter was short it was clear that in some way, if only in her mind, she and I had grown close, by whatever metric one can measure closeness between two, until that moment, strangers.

I know this must be the case because a short while later, and after we had both comfortably returned our attentions back to our regular coffee partners, she got up and walked toward the door of the cafe, stopping just long enough to look me straight in the eye and proclaim, in the most matter of fact way that “coffee goes right through me.”  Just like that. She stopped to tell me she had to go to the bathroom and pretty much what she was going to do there. This person who I had, in the broadest sense of the word “known” for just short of ten minutes, shared with me what I would consider to be one of the most private of bodily functions. Now I know that some people would shrug this sort of thing off with the oft, perhaps even overused saying we have come to know as TMI (too much information) but not I. For me, this open and rather uninhibited disclosure was simply a thing I did not need to know (TIDNTK) at all. Because I don’t. I don’t need to know anything about anyone else’s bodily functions. I mean it’s enough that I have to deal with my own which, if you don’t mind my saying, can be problematic in of themselves.

As I reflected on this encounter I realized that there are other TIDNTK. Like secrets. Now I love a good secret as much as the next person but here’s the problem. As you may recall (and if you don’t, as always you can read about it here) I don’t have the very best memory. So when you tell me a secret one of two things is going to happen. There’s a very distinct possibility that I’m going to forget what you told me which is probably the least of two evils, but nonetheless makes the whole exercise rather pointless. The more problematic outcome is that I’m going to remember what you told me but forget that “don’t tell anyone but…” part of the conversation, rendering the aforementioned “secret” less so. Which is never a good thing.

Finally, and this is by no means a comprehensive list, I never need to know how much you paid for anything. Now this may surprise some of you who know a little bit about my background since, my Mother at the ripe old age of almost 99 (maybe that’s something you didn’t need to know) can, at a moments notice, rhyme off the price she paid for each of the 6 steaks she served for dinner on July 8, 1963. So if I did want to know prices I would have come by it honestly. But the thing is I don’t. You see, if I bought the same item and paid more for it than you did, I’m just going to feel bad. And if you paid more for it than I did, well what good is that going to do you? If we paid the same then I suppose I knew all along what you paid, so what did I gain by your telling me? And then there is always the chance that you tell me how much you paid for something just to let me know that you could. Silly, because that will likely result in my being judgmental and thinking about how stupid you were to pay so much and not wait for whatever it was to go on sale. Because everything always does.  And that’s what I would do if only to avoid the aforementioned “feeling bad” thing. So, as you can see none of this is good, ergo best not to know in the first place.

I’m sure there are many more TIDNTK but they’ll have to wait ‘cause I gotta run. Must have been something I ate.

 

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Jun 30 2014
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Why Not?

www worldMore than anything, I want this blog to go viral. Ok, not more than winning the lottery, but more than most anything else. Perhaps this level of desire in a shallow person confuses you as up until now you may have had the impression that not too much moves me one way or the other most of the time. Honestly, except for the blog, not much does. Other than my family of course which, even if they didn’t I would be obligated to mention at this juncture since some of them actually read this. But they do. None of the aforementioned withstanding, I imagine the question that is running through your mind at this very moment is “Why?” “Why on earth does she want her blog that she doesn’t even write once a week, to go viral?” to which the only reasonable response would have to be “Why not?”.

Let’s face it. People these days appear to be obsessed with sharing stuff. And most of them are of much lesser quality and frequency for that matter, than this blog, if you don’t mind my saying so myself.  And I can say this with some authority because each and every time I log into Facebook I am bombarded with a plethora of videos, ranging from the inane to the absurd, that someone, somewhere decided to share with someone somewhere and somehow without even a modicom of effort on my part, I end up right smack in the middle of all the sharing. Sometimes I click on one or two of those links but invariably, by the time I get there, over one million others have too, which makes me feel just a little less special but does get me wondering. I mean, who was the first person, the first guy or gal to share that particular link because, as we all know, in the beginning there was one. One single person made whatever it is that me and a million or so others are looking at, go viral. But even with all that traffic and attention, it’s not all good.

Take all the “cute kids dancing”, “cute kids talking to each other”,  “cute kids destroying the house”, and lest I forget to mention the “cute kids being scared out of their minds by their idiotic parents who just want to post on YouTube”  videos. It’s not that filming kids is anything new. In my day your Father filmed you for hours and hours swinging on a swing, going up and down, up and down. Then he had to send all that film to the lab to get developed subsequently spending hours at his little editing and splicing machines putting it all together to ensure there was no break in the action.  On Friday night everyone was invited to the house to celebrate the Sabbath and watch the hours and hours of footage of me swinging on a swing looking very, at least to my parents, cute. Ok, maybe that was just my house but, suffice to say, when we woke our guests up at the end of the night it was pretty clear that no one was really interested in watching cute kids do stuff that cute kids do unless they were their own cute kids. Today however, a million people not only watch but see fit to share these “kids that no one other than their parents and a few neighbors really know” with another million people and before you can say Jack Robinson you’ve got yourself a truckload of viral kids.

Don’t even get me started on the cats. Let’s face it. Anyone who has ever shared their abode with a feline friend, as I have for the past thirty years, (well not the same one for all of them) knows that if you happen to come upon a grumpy one, it’s no picnic. Just about everything in your house is transformed into a scratching post and as if that’s not bad enough, you’ll soon discover there’s no need for that enviro alarm clock with the ocean surf and babbling brook sound options. Nope. You’ll be awoken well before dawn to Mr. Grump’s yowling as he makes his way through each room of your house in a way that lets you know he pretty much owns them all. So what may I ask would possess over 15 million people to not only watch a little critter’s videos but to succumb to wearing “Keep Calm and Stay Grumpy” t-shirts, an adaptation of the popular saying that I’m not even sure makes any sense. And just to add a little insult to the injury, “Tardar Sauce” (yes, that’s his real name) is not even grumpy. Yet, somewhat inexplicably, he is viral.

Here’s my take on it. It seems to me that this whole viral thing is somewhat random and, in better than a few cases, more hype than substance. So while this blog is neither cute nor grumpy (well on occasion perhaps it is that) what’s to stop it from going viral? I mean, why not? So please know, If any of you want to be “the one” you have my blessing to make it happen. And now that I’m thinking about it, “Keep Calm and Stay Shallow” could work.

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