The Happy List

Trying to write more on the Happy List. Check it out! Ladies, let's get back to posting more often, everything you add makes me smile too.

Always helps put things in perspective. If you want to get in on the catharsis and be added as a contributor, let me know!

What I'm Reading

Adding various things to my Google reader today, and came across a bunch of great sites and blogs that I'm looking forward to reading more of.

Although this Incomplete Manifesto is from a design company called Bruce Mau Design, I think many of the points are so applicable to lots of processes, creative or otherwise. Particular favorites include:

• Don't Clean Your Desk: You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
• Take Field Trips: The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
• Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it
• Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child): Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Other sites I'm intrigued by:

• White Hot Truth
• Daily Poetics
  
• The Happiness Project: especially because we've been trying to update The Happy List more often. Figuring out what makes you happy helps you to remember to do it.
• Wanting to read more of Bob Sutton's workplace blog too. So many conversations I've had lately about jobs and the future have circled back to wanting to work in a good environment, for a good boss, as a good employee, and what all of that means.

(One more set of interesting rules from Daily Poetics: Immaculate Heart College Art Department)

What are you reading? Any good suggestions? Also recently launched, if you're looking for a good way to get into reading print materials and not just blogs: The Twitter Book Club! Check out the first book announcement and get involved!

Being in the Now

Quick post (a paper for school beckons):

One of my favorite things in the entire world is being surrounded by the people I love. We packed 30 people into a living room to watch the Steelers/Cardinals Super Bowl. I'm from Pittsburgh, and so I'm clearly a Stillers fan. But the best part was the atmosphere. The older we get, and the more settled down/in relationships/scattered around the country my group gets, the more rare big group settings are. Being curled up in close quarters, laughing at mostly nothing, and just enjoying being together: sure, it's very Jewish mother-hen of me, but there's really nothing that's much higher on my list in life. I spend a lot of time thinking about the future lately, but sometimes, I just love the present.

Not falling apart

My happy list post today just proves to me that a lot of what stresses me out is just in my head. Even with a week as stressful as the last one or two have been, there's so many little (and big) things that should keep me from blowing up.

The weekend with the London ladies was exactly what I needed: some of my favorite people, in my favorite city, and all we had to have to make a good time was each other! We ate and drank and shopped and napped and caught up and LAUGHED! Emily's parents treated us to Maroon 5 tickets out in Mansfield, which was an unexpectedly wonderful night--Adam Levine is gorgeous, and I'd forgotten how much I love their music.

This week is all about trying to take a deep breath and not overinvest myself. I stepped down as the chair of a committee for Generation Progress, a PAC/networking organization launched by a friend. I'll remain involved, but wised up and took a leadership load off. I'm almost at the end of all the summer orientation fairs for freshmen, and onto some of the final preparations for the student groups I run. I'm also freelancing right now, and am quite a bit behind on my hours, but I'll hopefully get around to it this week and the next.

Starting/continuing to ponder jobs. This internship has been a minor-league disaster. Jobs and bosses and work always make me think about how I'd do it better as either an employee or a boss in another instance. I really want to own my own company eventually--not sure what the mission would be, but I've been talking about creating the ultimate work environment obsessively lately. Grad school's also in the back of my mind. My poor buzzing mind.

I booked tickets home for two weeks from now, and tickets to Tampa to see my grandmother right before classes start in September. Classes start?! Eek. Still trying to figure out what my 4th class is going to be: options I've found range from journalism on the web to psychobiology to Islam. We'll see what I pick.

Taking.
Deep.
Breaths.

I think that's the top priority on my long to-do list. That, and remembering to focus on the happy things.