If you’re happy and you know it… make a list?

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~Tuesday~ Recently, my friend Casey posted a blog entry entitled, “If you’re happy and you know it… make a list?.” Take a moment to read it, if you want to. I’ll wait.

I liked the idea so much when I read it that I promised to make my own list soon, and today’s blog entry is delivering on that promise.

These are the top things that come to mind when answering the question, “What makes you happy?”

Note: There is rhetorical reason why this is a bulleted list and not an ordered list.

  • Writing (in a variety of forms, some of which make me happier than others—creative writing makes me the happiest)
  • Repartee (the quicker, the sharper, the better)
  • Hanging out with my friends (most of whom fall into the next category)
  • Being in the company of positive, thoughtful people
  • Laughing
  • Making people laugh
  • Being affirmed
  • Affirming others
  • Being helped
  • Helping others
  • Intellectual inquiry
  • Line-dancing and two-stepping
  • Being in the presence of loved dogs
  • Getting exercise (but only after I do it, unfortunately)
  • Sending and receiving U.S. mail
  • Coming out of surgery to a loved one’s face
  • Being financially healthy
  • Writing in cursive
  • Checked-off to-do list items (Which I can now do to the one that says, “Write a blog entry about the things that make you happy” )

Of course, my first inclination is to do something with this data, such as to use it as a rubric to see if I’m really spending time doing the things that make me happy.

So, as a starting point, I thought I’d create a pie chart with each item having equal weight:


The next step, which was to adjust the weights to the actual amount of time I spend doing those things, surfaced a few problems quickly:

  1. Rhetorically, the list does not have parallel construction
  2. Several of the items overlap
  3. The math was gonna get messy, and I’m committed to not using algebra today.

So, I’m just going to leave this as it is, and put an entry on my Google calendar to look back at it in six months—or if I’m ever feeling “not happy”—to see if I’m doing the things on this list, or perhaps need to update the list.

What makes you happy?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

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