A few weeks back, I was able to share a short poem I had written this year that didn’t fare well in a local poetry competition, with anticipation of seeing the finalists and/or winning entries so I can “self-study” them as one more of many attempts to “get” modern poetry. Well, I got them and have shared them below, along with some self-study notes.
Writing
Pursuing Contentment Instead of Happiness
Over the past handful of years, I have been talking and reveling a lot about the science of happiness, and my happiness from having learned that science through courses at Yale and Berkeley online. I do this enough that there’s even a header menu choice for “happiness” on my blog, even though there’s not a huge number of posts under it. That’s how much I value trying to catch people’s attention with it to share it with them! For all of its value and my intent, though, I find that talking about the science and pursuit of happiness in life occasionally rubs people the wrong way, or lead them to think I’m really misguided since I’d never be happy if I’m always chasing something I can’t get, right? Yes, except that I’m really working to maintain as much of something as I can, though that wasn’t quite right, either. I am not trying to be ecstatic or even perky sort of happy throughout most of my days, which is not what the courses taught, either. I am just pursuing a general feeling of bliss throughout as much for as many of my days as possible, and minimizing stresses and/or things that get me down, stressful or not. But how to properly explain that? Well, recently, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley which had taught me the Science of Happiness course came to the rescue. Contentment, was the word I was seeking and meaning to use, not happiness, and it makes a huge world of difference!
A Global Defining Moment with Getting the COVID-19 Vaccination
Where were you when…? That’s the question often asked about defining moments of a generation, country, demographic, or some other group could commonly relate to. These questions, and the moments they reference, tend to each be about an event that happened not to the group, but to something that impacted the group. On the contrary, with receipt of the COVID-19 vaccine, what we have is a defining moment more definitive, and more globally relatable, and more personally impacting to us all, than any of those other defining moments. For that, the question will be a little different. It won’t be where were you when…? But rather, where and when did you… get your vaccine? And quite possibly as a follow up, how was it?
Prompted
Nothing cohesive today except the source of the writings, which were six writing prompts from my weekly Creative Writing for Newcomers class, and the twist I tried to make from each instead of going where the prompts were pointing me. I didn’t do it with the first prompt, only looking to fill it with something more interesting than what someone might have thought in response to the prompt. However, once I found it, I made it a point to not only find an interesting response for the following prompts, but to intentionally sideswipe or blindside the direction in which those prompts first led me. We only had two minutes with each prompt, but I generally liked what I got out of it.
The Most Judgmental Person I Know
She’s the most judgmental person I know. On its own, that’s not so bad. That’s just being opinionated, even if the opinions came with condemnation. With the reasonably “correct” opinion, I would even agree the judgment, even if I might not care to judge. Alas, not with this person. What’s bad about her is that she was the least qualified person to be judgmental about a lot of what she was judgmental about, at least least qualified to be that judgmental! More unfortunately, whether the fact she was so pushy with her judgments, or so unqualified to render them, being the more annoying part of her was what made her the most annoying person I knew.
Digital Citizen 