Eudaimonia

I enjoy reading random articles (that is, any headline that grabs me from the msn homepage). Yes, I have that kind of time. One I stumbled on was “Five Things Happy People Do” (http://lifestyle.msn.com/mindbodyandsoul/personalgrowth/articleoprah.aspx?cp-documentid=6556551).

As usual, it seemed to center on the idea of spending more time doing things you love with people you love. What a shock. One hardly needs an article to tell them that. However, it did mention the concept of “eudaimonia” which I’d never heard before. The article claims it was a Greek concept that basically meant to strive “toward excellence based on one's unique talents and potential.” This seems a simplistic explanation of the concept, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Wikipedia explains the concept more as living in balance and virtue. Which explanation is more accurate? I have no idea, and I lost interest in further researching the subject (Greek philosophy is really not all that fascinating to me). But anyway…

The point being that the article claimed that one tenet of happiness is to spend time doing that which utilizes your talents. This seems to reconcile with what I intuitively understood, that I would be happier with a job that utilizes more of my talents (like being organized, self-motivated, consistent and having a good attention span for tedious tasks) and moves away from my weaknesses (namely, dealing with people… like obnoxious clients). I may have other talents and abilities, and I should spend time exercising those, but I don’t really need a drastic career change to be happier. Just one that lends itself better to those talents I have that actually apply to accounting.

There’s something GREEN in my food!

Steve and I signed up for “Community Supported Agriculture” this week. Basically, we get a box of fresh veggies each week which Steve picks up close to campus.

In our first box this week, in addition to the chard, leeks, squash, carrots, artichokes and radishes, we received two veggies we’d never heard of: spigariello greens and agretti. Sensitive to the plight of those ignorant of heirloom Italian vegetables, the box came with suggested recipes for the included veggies and a little information about the aforementioned foreign greens.

Spigariello greens are related to broccoli and we are planning to eat them in a salad tomorrow with the radishes and carrots we got. The agretti is apparently is a close cousin to the tumbleweed (sounds yummy, doesn’t it?). We sautéed them and added them to white rice and strips of Korean barbeque beef to make the beautiful plate you see below.

Of course, the “we” used here is the royal we… I had nothing to do with it. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true… I think I was there on the shopping trip to CostCo where we bought the beef.

More weird vegetables to come. I know you’re all on the edge of your seats… stay tuned!

A New Thread

Commenting on my previous post The Dream or the Dough, Lee (who is one of my five brothers-in-law, for anyone who doesn’t know) asked what “the dream” is for me.

I think my previous post was more of a philosophical wondering. I have very few requirements in life. I’ve already acquired a family of rabbits who I enjoy and I have Steve who is, well, awesome. I am very much enjoying married life. I feel I’ve achieved what I want in my personal life at this point. Someday I’d love to have a house, but I recognize that the time isn’t now and I don’t think it weighs much on my overall happiness.

From my career… I fully understand that it’s highly unlikely that I will find a job that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning, but I would settle for a lack of dread. I think the thing I most dread is any kind of stress. There’s a laid-back, aloha spirited person down deep inside and I just hate stress of any kind. I don’t like deadlines or dealing with obnoxious clients/customers. I don’t care much for workplace responsibility. I love routine and the familiar. All that being said, I would probably be a great general ledger accountant somewhere or something along those lines. Unfortunately, if you don’t want responsibility and, essentially, don’t want to think, you can’t make the big bucks. I guess the dream for me would be to somehow figure out how to be able to afford to work as a part-time low-level accountant somewhere. I think being a part-time bum would agree with me because the more I think about it, the more I realize that I will most likely have better luck finding intellectual and creative fulfillment outside the workplace than in it.

The Dream or the Dough

You may have noticed the decreasing frequency of my blog posts of late. I’ve been having a bit of writer’s block, which I attribute primarily to tax season. Nothing saps your creativity like filling out IRS forms all day.

I think at my core I really am a creative person who enjoys being challenged intellectually. That is likely at the heart of my lack of satisfaction with my accounting career choice. I can’t argue with the financial benefits of my path. Had I chosen to be some variety of starving artist, Steve and I would not be making such encouraging progress on paying off his student loans. However, accounting is not terribly challenging, at least not in an interesting way… trying to figure out tax code, while challenging, is decidedly not interesting.

I’ve heard two schools of thought on satisfaction in the workplace:

1) Do what you love and the money will follow (which just seems overly optimistic and like it was coined by rich people)

2) Work is work, just try to tolerate it and do your real living after 5 pm and over the weekend (which is a little depressing when you’re facing at least 40 more years in the workplace before retirement)

Are you satisfied with your career choice? What would you tell someone who’s early on in their working life… follow the dream or follow the dough?

When the days blend together…

… I find myself watching cooking shows even though my complete lack of patience and attitude that spending time preparing food is futile since soon it’s gone and you just have to eat again in a few hours makes me possibly one of the worst cooks on planet Earth.

My favorite cooking show is Good Eats on the Food Network. Perhaps it’s my appreciation of nerds (as the show’s host Alton Brown is unabashedly nerdy) or the fact that the shows explains how ingredients behave and not just how much of which kind to throw together. Thus, it’s still interesting even though I’m fairly certain I will never attempt any of his recipes…. or anybody else’s for that matter.

Don’t feel too bad for Steve, though. It helps you to stay fit if everything your wife cooks is unfit for human (or bunny, for that matter) consumption.

Pirates!

Steve and I spent our Sunday watching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies back-to-back-to-back. We started somewhere around 3 in the afternoon and wrapped up just after 11 pm.

Before you ask, no, we did not have anything better to do.

We’ve heard a lot of criticism of the second and third movies (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End) saying that they didn’t match the tone of the first movie (Curse of the Black Pearl) and that they were confusing and nonsensical. Steve and I never agreed with these criticisms and watching the movies again really cemented our stance that the plot was carefully thought out, foreshadowed a great deal in the first movie and all makes sense once you’ve seen it enough times to catch all the nuances.

I admit that I am biased in that these movies are favorites of mine (closely following the original Star Wars Trilogy and Indiana Jones #1 & #3). But I urge anyone who has a long attention span and absolutely nothing to do to watch these movies as a marathon. It was a lot of fun and we noticed things we hadn’t caught the other times we watched… which is impressive being that I’ve practically got them memorized.

Happy Birthday!

Of course we don’t know the exact date, but sometime around this time in 2003, our first rabbit Buster was born. He’s not our oldest rabbit (that’s SweetPea, who will be 7 this summer) but he was the first rabbit we brought into our home and I naturally spoil him quite a bit.

In 2003 when we got him, we didn’t have a camera, but we had a cheap little webcam. We took this grainy picture in the garage here when we first brought Buster home.

He’s grown up quite a bit…


Happy 5th birthday, Buster! I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a 5-year-old.

Bye Bye Kitty

It’s no secret that shortly after getting a cat, I realized that I’m not a cat person. We lived with Mischief the tuxedo cat for a little over two years before we found a suitable home for her. A friend of mine in Santa Cruz who has had cats all her life and loves them took Mischief into her home tonight.


It already feels a little odd that she’s not around. Not really sad, since she always annoyed me and has gone to a better home, but just… strange.

Family Rings

When Steve and I got engaged a little more than two years ago, we had… well… negative money. We had student loan debt and were making very little money. Thankfully the latter has changed, which has allowed us to make progress on the former. But at the time, two months of Steve’s salary for my engagement ring would have resulted in me getting a very nice piece of string to tie on my finger. I still would have said yes, but it’s always fun to get some bling.

My ring once belonged to my great-grandmother. It was passed to my mother, but she already had her engagement and wedding rings, so it sat in a safety deposit box. She gave it to me as a hint to Steve probably around six months before he proposed.

Steve recently acquired a new ring. The day after he proposed, we went out and bought him an engagement ring. I felt it was a bit one-sided for just the woman to wear an engagement ring. I guess it was warm that day, and his hands were swollen or something, because the ring has never fit since. He had been wearing on his middle finger. When his mother commented about it, we explained, and she wandered off and returned with this ring.

It belonged to Steve’s dad and was worn for 35 years until it just didn’t fit right anymore. They were kind enough to allow Steve to wear it, and it fits perfectly.

I feel fortunate to have so much family history in the palms of our hands.

The Horror

Speaking on behalf of the editorial board is Johnny.

I am a bit skittish, even by bunny standards, I realize this. But finally there is photographic evidence of what these people do to me.

The red-headed one grabs me from my condo and flips me over on my back. She then proceeds to take scary-looking clippers and deprive me of my best means of defense, my ultra-sharp Freddy Krueger nails.

Then the other human takes a small plastic device that shines a bright light in my eyes when I’m most vulnerable.

I am definitely not amused.

For the Bible Tells me So

Steve and I watched a documentary last night named for that line in a famed Christian children’s song. The main point of the documentary was that some literalist (those who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true) Christians use the Bible as a basis to discriminate against and encourage intolerance toward homosexuals. I don’t want to go into that issue because I feel that the debate can begin and end for Christians (being that Jesus Christ is supposed to be the center of their faith) with Matthew 22:37-39: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

But anyway…

There was something interesting brought up briefly in a discussion by one of the theological scholars they interviewed for the movie. He mentioned the “fear of the feminine.” That is, that men have a fear of appearing feminine and of others who appear feminine. I don’t know how much I subscribe to this idea, but he made an interesting point, mentioning that when you want to insult a sports team, for instance, you call them a bunch of sissies or girls. What’s so insulting about being like a girl? Is it equally insulting for a girl or woman to be like a man? It would seem so, given the distaste many people seem to have for powerful/assertive women (for instance, Hilary Clinton). And does this gender separation serve a purpose in the modern world?

Done! For now, at least...

My posting has been sporadic of late because I have been completely obsessed with my attic project. I warned Steve to act impressed upon arriving home whether he was or not. And he’s either an excellent actor or was genuinely awed because he claimed that my work was pretty incredible.

I went through every single box and bag in our little garage and sorted through all of our belongings. I organized and re-arranged and catalogued (we now have a spreadsheet listing our entire book collection… don’t say it, I know I’m an accountant to the core).

There’s this tremendous weight that seems to have been lifted from my shoulders. It’s no longer “I should clean the attic someday”… it’s been done. Although, I suppose next I have to go through my shoes… yikes…