The Happiness Project

I'm a major skeptic of feel-good movies and self-help books, though I'll admit some are better than others. But after a number of people recommended Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, I decided to give it a go.

I read it really quickly and not too closely (it was the last week of classes in my last semester of graduate school, after all), so I'm not going to give a thorough review or anything like that. Some parts were better than others, and I'm not going to start a regulated happiness project of my own (though Gretchen's blog suggests her readers do just that).

I did make a list, as Gretchen suggests, of the things that make me happy, and the activities I genuinely enjoy doing. This seems totally corny as I write about it now, but it's also a fitting time to think about it since I'm on the verge of making some changes in my life. Between experiencing a death in the family and selling all my free time to graduate school the past two years, I've had a lot of ups and downs and often, trouble deciding what I really like to do anymore. One thing I do still like doing is writing and blogging. Thanks to my information architecture class this past semester, I also know I (oddly) like coding and messing around with html, so I'm excited to make some improvements to the blog.

This month, I graduate, move to a new apartment, and start a new job. I'll be closer to my boyfriend and living near Chicago. I don't like making posts about my goals or what I'm going to do, because those kinds of things never actually pan out as planned, and I don't really know what I'm getting into yet. But I WILL be decorating a new apartment, and I have a Groupon to a fabric store. I also hear that I'll have to learn to preserve food, thanks to my newly-purchased CSA share. Simply Step Back will continue, though it might be different- so stay tuned.