On Happiness~

"THE ONLY TRUE HAPPINESS COMES FROM SQUANDERING OURSELVES FOR A PURPOSE." ~ William Cowper


Got this from Gretchen Rubin's daily e-mail this morning & thought I'd share.

The Month of Love

An afternoon sun is unsuccessful in curtailing my chill that continues. This is so unlike me~  **sigh**   Supposedly it has reached 35 outside. Maybe that's my problem... I'm inside.

I've had a vacation day from the office, reading a book as well as ruminating about the chatter the past couple days of the Claudia Rankine/Tony Hoagland matter.  The latter has my head spinning. 


It's the month of LOVE and if you haven't seen it already there's a series of PDF print and Cut Valentines here  courtesy of the American Academy of Poets.

I've been getting Gretchen Rubin's daily "Happiness Project E-mails" for a while now and the other day I got this one that I just love:

"One of the best and fastest ways of acquiring knowledge is to insist on remaining ignorant about things that aren't worth knowing."

— Sydney Harris

And another thing I picked up from her site was the SIX WORD MEMOIR.   Another version of this - Six Words on Happiness.  A few that were on her site that I liked...

• Reading the last page of "Mockingbird."
• paying toll for the person behind me
• with my six I declare love

Birthday Book

 Arriving in the mail today.... Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box - Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments. I've been interested in this book for some time. It's a collection of previously unpublished works of Elizabeth Bishop. I've never read a lot of Bishop but I was interested in this when it first came out. Elizabeth Bishop had a reputation for being a real stickler about her work. Many have theorized that she would not have been happy to see this material in print, but I'm a sucker for things about poets that shed more insight into who they are and what impacts their work. Hence I've taken an interest in to books like Plath's Letters Home, Plath's Journals, Ted Hughes's letters, Anne Sexton's letters, to name a few. Anyway, this was a birthday present that arrived today and I'm anxious to start reading it.


On another note, tonight I saw Gretchen Rubin at the Plaza Library where she talked about The Happiness Project. An overflow crowd. Fascinating woman and story. More on this in the near future.


The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun