Month: July 2012

It Isn’t Always Easy

| rachelhamm

It was not easy to be happy today.

I woke up at 7:00, as usual, and as usual, I checked my email first thing.  I don’t know why I feel the need to check my email as soon as I wake up, but I do.  I had an email from a man I’d been on 3 dates with saying that he didn’t feel a “spark” and that we shouldn’t continue seeing each other.  I was utterly baffled, because it had been less than 36 hours ago that we were making out like teenagers on my couch.  I’m not sure what happened to the spark, but apparently, it’s gone.

I tried my damndest to be cautious about my feelings for this guy, because I didn’t want to get hurt when it inevitably ended, but our second date was amazing and our rapport seemed so spot on, that I let myself become hopeful.  We had just enough in common to keep us talking and just enough not-in-common to keep it interesting.  And he was nice.  And funny.  And shared my devotion to the Oxford comma.  And he kissed me first, dammit!

I can’t figure out what went wrong.  I don’t think I did anything crazy or desperate or clingy.  In fact, I was super careful not to, while still being my amazingly awesome and quirky self.  I understand that dates are for “trying people on,” but after that third date, I felt pretty confident that he’d chosen to wear me out of the store.  After we watched a movie on my couch, he literally said, “I can’t take this anymore,” and kissed me!  He’d been working up the nerve to make a move throughout the ENTIRE movie, then comes back with “There’s no spark.”  WTF.

So, yeah, it wasn’t easy to be happy today.  I repeated one of the commandments to myself, “Fake it til you make it,” but it didn’t do me much good.  All of my co-workers could tell I wasn’t having a good day.  I tried to remember, “Laugh more, cry less,” but only succeeded in keeping the tears at bay until 6:00 PM, when I arrived home.

I finally decided to force myself to do something that would make me happy, so I started a new blog.  I’m not dropping this one; the new one is under a pseudonym and with a different hosting site and is basically going to be an outlet for my misadventures in dating, love, and (lack-of) sex.  I think it’s going to make me very happy.  Especially if I can get some readers.  Writing the first post made me feel a little better.  And writing this makes me feel a little better.  Tomorrow I may work on doing some actual writing on my novel.  Because that will make me very happy.

Update on My Happiness Project

| rachelhamm

I finished The Happiness Project and I’ve been trying really hard to follow my 12 Commandments.  I find myself using “Pause. Breathe.” and “Think Friends Before Finances” the most often.  I tell myself to “Do it Now” a lot, but I haven’t been great about actually following through on that one yet.  So I’m going to try and focus on less frittering and procrastination and more productivity over the next week.

To increase my happiness, in addition to the 12 Commandments, I’ve also decided to focus on being thankful.  I wrote a few thank you notes to friends, which I never would have done before, and I made a “Happiness Calendar.”  Gretchen talked about doing a one-sentence journal to record things that happened every day, and I loved that idea.  I saw on pinterest a calendar in a box with an index card for every day; you use the same cards for several years, writing down a sentence or two about something that happened that day, until your cards are filled up and you have 5-10 years worth of memories.  I made my calendar with the plan to use it to record moments that made me happy that day, not just any random thing that happened.  Hopefully it will make me more aware of things that make me happy throughout the day.