Category: Ramblings

I am not the type of person to have new year resolutions. The idea of making life-changing decisions because it is that time of year seems a just a bit inane. However, this year the stars were aligned… or more precisely, the dates were aligned. I decided to make a life-changing move, and it just happened to be at the beginning of a year and a decade. Thus, I will call it, for lack of better name, a new years resolution.

Resolved: I will make a conscious decision to be happy from now on. Whenever negative thoughts move in for an attack, I will fight them off with laughter and positive thoughts, and force them to retreat back to the slimy cave in which they dwell. Actually, they dwell in my head which is not slimy, unless you get brain on you, but the imagery seemed good, so I used it.

I know, it seems like an odd resolution. Of course I would strive to be happy. Making a resolution to be happy is about as pointless as making a resolution to breathe a couple times a minute. However, happiness has been an illusive friend these past several years. I am not unhappy with anything in particular, I just feel like the world has seen me and jumped up on a chair screaming, and is now chasing me around the kitchen trying to crush me with a broom. I’ve sat down and tried to determine what makes me happy, and have failed utterly. This seemed odd, so I tried to define what happiness is, and was unsuccessful. So out came the books.

In his book Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, describes happiness as consisting of “positive emotions” and “positive activities”. He further categorizes emotions related to the past, present and future. Positive emotions relating to the past include satisfaction, contentment, pride and serenity. Positive emotions relating to the future include optimism, hope and trust. Positive emotions about the present are divided into two categories: pleasure and gratifications. The bodily and higher pleasures are “pleasures of the moment” and usually involve some external stimulus. Gratifications consist of those activities in which you lose track of time and yourself.

Very academic, but does it help? He says that if I loose track of time, I am happy. However, I have had some jobs where I have deliberately blocked out the passage of time to stave off boredom. I was not happy. Furthermore, gratifications block out all felt emotion and eliminate self-consciousness. If all emotions are blocked out, how can I be happy, since happiness is an emotion? STOP: This is not a critique of Seligman, and I certainly do not presume to know more than he does. However, this definition of happiness does not immediately fit my situation.

Thus, with the lack of a target, I will close my eyes and shoot. I do know what lack of happiness is: depression, a feeling of helplessness, self-depreciation. Perhaps I cannot aim for a particular feeling, but I know what to avoid. When I sense these feelings coming on, I will crush them like little bugs; perhaps with a broom.

Reading over what I have said, I sense that I am not all here. Thus, I am stopping for the evening so the various schisms in my brain can regroup and work together. The point of this post was to say that I am making conscious effort to be happy, whatever that means.

Note to self: in the future, don’t quote as it then becomes an academic paper, and requires more thought than random babbling deserves.

Yesterday, I completed college. Again. I now have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. This should be a cause for celebration, but with the bleak job market and the number of experienced programmers competing for the same jobs I am applying for, I must admit that my spirits are not soaring. In the first case, looking for work is about the worst job to have. When you add in that the average person is taking six months to find a job, the future looks pretty bleak. Nothing really to celebrate.

However, this could provide excellent opportunities to go private. Although I will need to spend a significant amount of time and effort attempting to find a “real” job, the rest of my time can be spent improving my coding skills, and doing a bit of writing. Who knows, I might actually make a bit of money on the side.

Since I am writing this journal, I suppose it could be looked at as a documentary of an unemployed individual. I will continue to make updates on my job search as well as my side projects. I can only hope that it is a short journal.

Here I am, another presence on the Internet. A flake of knowledge floating on the breeze of information. Well, a flake, anyway. And what am I doing here? Blathering like an idiot. Spewing out a litany of irrelevancies that no one but my closest friends and the occasional innocent mentally deranged bystander will ever read. Chaining together a succession of words to form an image of life with a complete lack of meaning. Making a pitiful attempt to keep my head above the turbulent waters of our times, while swimming frantically towards no particular destination.

And what does this say about you, my poor companion? You, who are not being drug along in my dusty wake, kicking and screaming the entire time, but who are voluntarily traveling by my side and graciously sharing the thoughts I have thunk. Do you hope to garner some secret wisdom from my diatribe? Are you seeking a chaos of ideas to help you assign order to the muddled world in which we live? Do you have nothing better to do?

For you, my sole cohort, I can make only one promise: but I won’t.