not unhappy

Somehow I have trained Quicksilver that a quick search for my blogging software of choice, ecto, should result in the bookmark for Octodog. Invariably when I just want to write a quick entry here, I end up pondering octopus-shaped hot dogs.

And then I lose my train of thought. I mean, who wouldn’t? It’s an octopus AND a hot dog.

Thursday evening was the big summer party for work, and it was quite the party. I planned on going right at 16:30, staying an hour, then heading to the gym before the SFlickr gathering. Not exactly. A group of us closed the place down at 21:30 and then went to a bar in the Marina for another few hours. I met some new people, and I got to know a couple of them over the course of one excellent evening. We had fun. I had fun.

I’m having a lot of fun these days. Sometimes I am taken aback by how not-unhappy I am anymore. I had achieved a comfort level in being unhappy; I perceived myself as an unhappy person, and I lived accordingly. Of course, this is not to say that everyone who is unhappy has a choice to be so or not, but I do think that more of us have more of a choice than we realize.

Having a choice means potentially making a mistake. But the alternative — indefinite stagnation in the name of fear — is unbearable.

I’m trying to make good choices in the following areas, because they directly impact my happiness level:

• health: getting enough sleep, joining a new gym, drinking more water, eating better
• environment: improving my home space, taking an inventory of my books and music so I know what to sell and what to keep, purging and consolidating my wardrobe, paying my bills on time
• career: improving my quality of living, pursuing my interest in the Web professionally, studying advanced concepts in preparation for a more technical track later
• social life: setting a schedule and sticking to it, not overcommitting my time and/or energy, spending more time offline than on

I feel like once I’m in a good space with most of these areas, I can actually do something with the pages and pages of mediocre writing I’m cranking out. Until then, I find it difficult to wrangle them into any sort of shape. But at least they exist. That’s another thing that prevents me from being unhappy: I’m writing again.

About Halsted M. Bernard

Halsted, a/k/a cygnoir, does stuff with words. Her favourite things to do with words are keeping this diary, writing stories, and organising information. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two cats, a few gadgets, several fountain pens, and many books.

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