My Happiness Project: Part 2

You may remember my previous recent post about my “happiness project” happiness rules—the ones that I use at school. (If you don’t remember, it was THIS POST.)

As a quick recap…

I love Gretchen Rubin, and I’ve loved her work since high school. The first book of hers that I came across was The Happiness Project, probably when I was a freshman in high school. In The Happiness Project, she does research on happiness, and then makes 3-4 resolutions per month for a year that she thinks will make her happier, and analyzes whether the resolutions do make her happier, and in what ways they improve her life. That book made a big impact on me!

With the amount of impact that the book had made, when I was rereading it, I was thinking about how surprising it was that I had never done a happiness project of my own. But then I realized that I have done a happiness project. I have done many happiness projects. They just look different from Gretchen’s—different enough that I didn’t recognize them as such.

Because I am a Questioner in the Four Tendencies framework, I often rebel against outside expectations or frameworks, especially if they don’t make sense, or I don’t see the reason, or I don’t think it’ll work. I realized that what had happened was I had filed Gretchen’s happiness project format under Things That Won’t Work. So, what I was doing instead was assessing my life every so often and then making tiny resolutions when I saw somewhere that I thought I could be happier, and putting that resolution (only, I mentally call it a ‘rule’) into play. 

So, today, instead of talking about the rules I’ve already put in place at school, as I’ve already done, I wanted to tell you about new “happiness rules” I tried this summer! You’ll notice that these resolutions are a bit more temporally oriented than the others—mostly because the rules that I follow at school are more integrated into my daily schedule, whereas these are part of what are making up my new daily schedule at home.

 

Memorize something every week
I’d been thinking about how much I love having things memorized and right at the tips of my fingers, and I realized that the only way to get things memorized is to intentionally memorize them. (Duh, Samantha.) So, I decided to choose something each week to memorize. So far, I have memorized Psalm 131, the countries of the world (at least well enough to get 100% of the JetPunk countries of the world quiz and impress my siblings), “Love is Not All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, (who is one of my new obsessions), "The River Knows Its Time" from Thick As Thieves, St. Augustine's Prayer at Night, and "Time Does Not Bring Relief", also E St. V M. I’m enjoying it, and I think my brain is already getting faster at memorizing. (Or else St. Vincent Millay is easier to memorize than the psalms, which may also be true.)

Do Latin every day
Speaking of memorizing and knowing things, I really don’t want to lose my Latin skills—in fact, I really want to get better at Latin, perhaps to the point where I can read things other than just the New Testament. (I know it’s not “just the New Testament”, but the New Testament is not hard Latin. I’d like to be able to read Caesar.) So, I’ve been working my way through the Henle 1 workbook, one lesson (or half a lesson) per day. I’m really enjoying it—I’m finding translating from English into Latin much easier than it ever was in high school, and translating from Latin into English is starting to feel more and more fluent, which is an excellent sign. I’m hoping to keep doing this during the school year, but we’ll see if that actually happens.

Work in the garden every day
Our garden has been a bit neglected this year, due to everyone having so much on their plates, and I’m hoping to get it back on track! I’ve been trying to get out to water and weed for at least a little while either in the cool of the morning or of the evening, and it does make me happy! There’s the satisfaction of clearing a bed of weeds, there’s the fun of seeing seeds come up, and there’s the joy of being outside. Also, apparently when one gets dirt under one’s fingernails (which I do, because I hate wearing gardening gloves), there are microbes that send a signal to your brain to release serotonin, so that probably contributes to my happiness, too.

Text a friend every day
This one is related to the resolution that I talked about in my last happiness project post of “Go to Night Office”. It’s hard to keep in touch with my friends while I’m living 2000+ miles away, but texting is one way that I can do that. I can often be scared to text people—nervous about saying the right thing or having the right tone or them not texting back fast enough—but I’m actually getting over that quite nicely by giving myself the goal of texting at least one of my friends every day, and I feel like so far I am still in touch with at least most of the people I want to be in touch with. Which makes me happy.

Wear dresses more often
I like wearing dresses (they make me feel pulled-together and feminine), and I have quite a few, some of which can even be worn on a daily basis (and I have done this!). But I hadn't been wearing them, often because I worry that I won’t be comfortable in them. So, over the summer, I’m tried to wear a dress at least two days a week (Sunday and one other day). Because I helped with wedding coordination at our church, often it ended up just being a dress for the wedding on Saturday, and then a dress for Mass on Sunday, but it’s still more dresses! (Though sometimes I cheated and counted wearing a skirt...) And hopefully that is also helping train my brain to know that they can be comfortable.

Learn to do a bit of makeup
Along with wearing more dresses, to help me feel more comfortable in my femininity, I wanted to be able to do a bit of makeup on myself. I don’t need to be able to do a lot, I just would like to know how to wear makeup, should I want to. Getting my makeup done for the Formal dance at Newman was a good impetus, because I bought my own mascara and eyeliner, although one of my friends did my makeup. So, a goal for over the summer was to figure out how to use those, and the eye shadow palette that Legolas has.
One of my proud (and funny) moments so far this summer was the night that my parents, Legolas, Father DD, and I went to Les Miserables. Number one, I wore a dress that I hadn’t worn in a really long time, and I liked it. Number two, I did my own mascara and lip gloss, and felt very classy. But I came downstairs, and Eomer was hanging out in the kitchen with Gimli and Pippin, who were there to babysit the youngers, and Eomer was like “WHAT did you do to your EYELASHES” and Pippin was like “no, no, no, that’s not what you say. You say ‘yas, queen!’.” And Eomer was like “oh, okay. Yas, queen.” 
Legolas and Galadriel and I also spent a really happy evening experimenting putting makeup on ourselves and each other, which cumulated with Galadriel using my mascara to draw herself a beard and moustache. XD
I still haven’t figured out the liquid eyeliner (my last attempt covered my entire eyelid in eyeliner, which was quite the look), but either we’ll get there, or I’ll decide that I don’t want to use it anyway. I'm kind of leaning towards the latter. But if anyone has makeup tips, feel free to throw them my way!

Learn to do my hair
Another thing that I want to have the ability to do for myself is my hair. It is so lovely to have a mom and a sister who are happy to do your hair, and are good at doing it, but it also means that you grow up not knowing how to do your own hair. For the first, oh, year and a half of being at college, I put my hair up in a ponytail. Every day. (Except for special occasions, when I found one of my female friends to do it. Finally, this spring I decided that I needed to learn to do my own hair and started doing one new hairdo per week. This summer, I’ve tried out a few styles, at first courtesy of Cute Girls Hairstyles—a braid, a looped and tucked ponytail, milkmaid braids—but I also learned how to do French Twists, and took off from there, to the point that I've been making up my own new hairdos and have been wearing updos at least three times a week, on average, if not every day! Ultimately, I’d like to be able to French braid my own hair. We’ll see--but for now, I'm quite happy with how I'm doing with this! 

Put on lip balm and lotion
I’m kind of mediocre at taking care of myself, as you may have guessed by the fact that I didn’t know how to do my own hair or makeup. One of the things that I haven’t ever gotten in the habit of doing consistently is putting on lip balm (because my lips dry out really easily) or lotion (because my hands dry out really easily). So, I’ve been trying to get into the habit of lip balm in the morning, lotion in the evening, and I can definitely tell the difference!

Reread things
As you probably know from my post on rereading, I want to do more rereading! I’ve been trying to add rereads to my reading list, reread things when the mood strikes me, and overall reread more. And it seems to be working pretty well—I’d estimate that around 1/4 to 1/3 of the books I read in July were rereads! I also reread the Queen’s Thief series in June. :) Hopefully I can keep this up when I go back to school, as well.

Sketch something every week
As a landscape architect, while working on projects this past year, I ended up feeling quite self-conscious about my sketching skills. They’re not as bad as those of some of the other people in my year (because landscape architecture is becoming more of an online profession, some people just don’t learn how to draw), but they’re not the best. So, I’m trying to do more (read: any) extracurricular sketching over the summer so that I can both keep in practice and (hopefully) improve. Some weeks are better than others, but I have sketched nearly every week, so I feel good about that. I still am no good at drawing people, but hey, I don’t need to draw people nearly as much as a landscape architect, anyway.

Make time to read
Reading is important to me (obviously!), but for some reason especially at home, it often gets pushed out by other activities. I’ve been trying to make an effort to spend at least a bit of time each day just sitting and reading. Not eating and reading, not walking and reading, no multitasking. Just reading. And it’s always really refreshing, so I think that’s something I’ll be carrying forward.

Put down the fork
I tend to eat really fast, which ends up being to the detriment of both my enjoyment and my digestion. One thing I started implementing about halfway through the semester that I’m still trying to implement is putting down my fork (or spoon) in between bites. It’s what my mom tried to make me do when I was little when I would eat too fast (only, I wouldn’t actually do it, because I was a child, and you know how we are), and it’s actually remarkably effective. My food tastes better, and I feel full faster, and am able to realize when I feel full and stop eating. Turns out, moms are pretty smart.

So, those are the “happiness rules” I tried out this summer—and I ended up feeling pretty happy with all of them! 😊

At the end of another long post about myself…how about you? Do you have different “happiness rules” for yourself for the summer? Do you have resources you’d recommend for learning to do my own hair and makeup? What’s the most recent thing you’ve memorized?