Tag happiness (9)
rumsfeld flashbacks
Mood: okay
Music: "Star Trek" soundtrack
Posted on 2009-05-18 10:41:00
Tags: happiness politics links
Words: 575
Apparently the President's Worldwide Intelligence Updates (prepared by the Pentagon) often had verses from the Bible on the cover, which makes me a little queasy. I agree that, if you're religious, there's nothing wrong with looking to your religion/God for faith and guidance, but this seems more like "Hey, the Bible says this whole war thing is A-OK, carry on!" The accompanying article is full of new information about Rumsfeld, including The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”
“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”
The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”
Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”
Another excellent article I read this weekend was What Makes Us Happy? in The Atlantic. (a magazine I consistently enjoy) It looks at a study that started following Harvard students in the 1930s and kept up with them until now, trying to determine what factors were most important to living a happy life. What they found was
Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.(bolding mine) The "mature adaptations" they mention consist of
altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship)(bolding mine)
A week of happy recap, and ismydatasignificant.com
Mood: okay
Posted on 2008-12-19 10:50:00
Tags: health math projects happiness
Words: 307
So I started the week of happy a week or so ago, and I'm pretty...happy with the results. It turned out to be kind of a tough week, what with the root canal and the painful aftermath, but focusing on the little things that make you happy during the day is good. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that big changes in lifestyle (new bigger house, etc.) don't generally affect one's happiness level in the long run, but little things can if you focus on them. Or something like that.
Dentistry - I gave in and called this morning to make sure it was normal for the pain to last all week. The person I talked to told me to come in, and they took an X-ray and thank goodness everything looks fine. (if I had had to have like another root canal or something I would have been seriously sad) She said the pain can last a while, and as long as it's getting better (it is!) it's OK, and she gave me another prescription for Zipac(sp?) to take in case there's a lingering infection or something. (and she told me to switch to Advil instead of Tylenol for the inflammation) So, yayish!
Last night when I got home quijax was watching Mythbusters, which I don't get to see much but I like! One of the myths they were busting was that buttered toast tends to land buttered side down, and long story short they ended up dropping toast off of a building and observing. Anyway, the results were slightly more in favor of the toast landing buttered side up, and Jamie had a physics explanation (when you butter toast it gets indented) but their numbers weren't convincing. Long story short, I created ismydatasignificant.com for an easy chi-squared test for significance. If only I understood more statistics...
A week of happy
Mood: happy
Posted on 2008-12-18 11:05:00
Tags: health happiness
Words: 260
Yesterday kinda sucked. My tooth still hurt a lot and my stomach was starting to hurt, possibly from taking too much Tylenol (I estimate something like 20 pills over the last few days). Buuut I was happy after work - djedi cooked a nice dinner, then I relaxed some on the couch, then we finally put up the Christmas lights and decorations. It's kind of exciting this is our first Christmas in a house, so putting up the outdoor lights seemed like a rite of passage of sorts :-)
While we were putting decorations up inside we had a new episode of "Chuck" on. I love "Chuck" - it's mildly serialized, funny/cute but with a reasonable amount of action. And the characters are very relatable - I feel like I can understand their motivations and why they do what they do, which is not always true on shows like "Fringe". Also, Adam Baldwin is awesome!
Anyway, that was nice, and then after it was over there was another new "Chuck" that we watched on the couch while cuddling. It was a good night!
Today I'm happy because (despite waking up in the middle of the night with stomach issues) my tooth definitely hurts less! This morning I did eventually take some aspirin (yeah, bad on the stomach but maybe it's bad in a different way than Tylenol? I dunno) but I waited until I got in to work, as opposed to downing pills as soon as I got up because it hurt so much. This is more exciting than I can put into words!
A week of happy...ish
Mood: okay
Posted on 2008-12-16 19:14:00
Tags: health happiness
Words: 76
Today I guess I'm happy because Tylenol exists, since it's holding my tooth pain at bay. I've been spacing my doses a little further apart so hopefully that means it's getting better. Not feeling particularly happy today, although I'm not really unhappy either. Just kinda...being.
Anyone else planning to go to the Texas Bowl (Rice v. Western Michigan) from Austin?
Oh yeah, I'm also happy work went well for the first time in like a week.
A week of happy
Mood: okay
Posted on 2008-12-15 15:44:00
Tags: health happiness
Words: 135
I'm happy my root canal is done and it was successful. I'm also happy I'm at a job where I can take off easily for dentist and doctor's appointments.
I took my last dose of antibiotics yesterday and by last night the tooth was starting to ache again. So when I went in and they did the stuff to numb the tooth it hurt like hell. After that everything was pretty fine, modulo keeping my mouth open for a ridiculously long time (the appointment lasted 1:45, and my mouth was open for most of it...now my jaw is sore). And it smelled terrible, what with doing unspeakable things to my tooth. And now my tooth is sore. But it's over with, and I took some Advil, so hopefully by tomorrow all will be relatively well.
A week of happy
Mood: happy
Posted on 2008-12-14 22:11:00
Tags: happiness
Words: 30
Today I'm happy we were able to be sociable this weekend, despite playing WoW a lot. Also happy we managed to beat around 3/4ths of Naxxramas on the first try!
A week of happy
Mood: okay
Posted on 2008-12-13 16:01:00
Tags: happiness
Words: 73
Today I'm happy because last night I was at a red light waiting to turn left and the guy turned on his reverse light and sped up and backed right into me, but I got out and only my license plate was messed up and eventually the other guy got out and was very apologetic and was happy that there was no real damage.
(I'm also happy I can write in run-on sentences!)
A week of happy
Mood: happy
Posted on 2008-12-11 15:41:00
Tags: meme happiness
Words: 91
From copperwolf - what a great idea!
1. Post about something that made you happy today even if it's just a small thing.
2. Do this every day for a week without fail.
3. Tag 8 of your friends to do the same.
Today's happy thing: my tooth is only aching mildly, as opposed to the pain Tuesday night. Absence of pain is something that's hard to appreciate, but it's pretty clear in this case since the pain was so recent.
Hmm...I'll tag djedi, wonderjess, wildrice13, llemma, onefishclappin. Don't feel obligated, though :-)
Happiness (two kinds of ice cream!)
Mood: busy
Posted on 2007-12-07 15:28:00
Tags: essay happiness
Words: 229
A common trap to fall in is to assume that you will be happier and your life significantly better after event X happens. ("If I could just get that promotion...", "If I only had a puppy..", etc.) I've always tried to not do this because it leads to not trying to either make things better or be happy with where you are in life. There's always one more goal over the horizon that will finally make you happier. I've been reading The Happiness Project for a while and in a post today she linked to an article that articulated this point nicely.
At the same time, the truth is that sometimes big events do make you happier. I'm, say, 50% happier now than when we were living in Maryland, both for job and people reasons. I guess the difference is that it was a really big change, and that I didn't just give up on "being happy" while we were up there.
I guess I've been thinking about this some because of our discussions about getting a PlayStation 3. (mostly for Rock Band) Money aside, I was pretty reluctant for a little while because it has a very rich-kid or yuppie vibe around it. (to me anyway) But honestly, it's just a stupid video game system, it's not a reflection of my life or anything similarly out of proportion.
This backup was done by LJBackup.