A few days ago I was with some friends while a TV was on in the background.  Midway through some Christian telling me how Howard Zinn couldn’t possibly be a Christian (I assume due to his anti-war, anti-poverty, and anti-slavery positions), I was given the opportunity to completely tune the guy out (allowing him, the Christian, to play hacky-sack) when this AWESOME news clip came on SBS — The Hula Hooping Hallabeoji!

It took me quite a bit of work (and some Korean friends) to get this video.  I also re-edited the clips and put it to some Girls Generation. So, here it is… as I said before, it is AWESOME.

I think my favorite part is when he spins the hoop and proceeds to do a Liza-esque fake-tap dance routine… actually, the whole thing is my favorite part.

This one goes out to Cousin Emily, who also likes to rock it Hula Style…

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Cousin Emily suggested I read Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project ($15 @ Barnes & Noble).  It is a book about the author’s one year project to make herself happier.

As GRETCHEN! says (she’s so high-strung I can only think of her in ALLCAPS and exclamation points), sometimes we aren’t happy doing the things that will make us happy in the long term.  That’s the way I feel about this book.  I did not enjoy reading it, but I learned some things and am happier in the end.  Seriously.

This is an issue I am slightly obsessed with having been quite unhappy for most of my twenties.  When I came to Korea I eventually came to realize that I was very happy, so I’ve been trying to identify why I am happy now.

Here are some things I learned about my own happiness from the book and from my endless ruminations on the subject:

#1 Clutter — She starts the book by focusing on clearing the clutter in her house.  This is an issue I wholeheartedly agree with.  When I sold everything I owned before moving to Korea, I expected to be sad… but I wasn’t.  And after everything was gone, I felt a sense of liberation I had never felt before.  Now I am ruthless.

#2 You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy – This is the sort of thing I would have scoffed at before.  It’s so new-agey and hokey, but it works.  I don’t think I fully realized it though until moving to Korea.  It took me a long time living here before I realized that I was actually kind of happy.  Then, I started telling people I was happy (something I’ve never done)… then,  I became more happy by just saying I was happy… and an added benefit is that by acting so happy, all the Koreans around became happier too because they were happy that I was happy in their country (which GRETCHEN! discusses in the book too).

#3 Being happy is hard work — I was very unhappy in Connecticut, but I never really worked at being happy, I just expected it to happen.  When I moved to Korea, I was so afraid of being unhappy and depressed that I worked hard to make sure that didn’t happen.  And it worked.  The downside to this is that I’ve become more intolerant of unhappy people because I feel like they are not working hard enough.

#4 Growth — Growth is very important to me, but I’ve never thought about it as a facet to my own happiness.  Seeing this written out was very helpful for me because it allowed me to think on it in different ways.  Now, when I think about doing my Korean homework I realize that it’s not a chore… it’s part of my growth and it will make me happy.  I realize this is a bit of mental gymnastic re-framing of the issue… but it’s also true.  Because of this, I’ve been much more conscious of setting aside time to do these projects.  Now, I enjoy the projects more and I even look forward to them.

#5 Being present for the different stages of events – GRETCHEN! makes a really good point that events (like birthday parties) are actually pretty short in the whole scheme of things and that we should pay more attention to the before/after of the event and recognize the happiness we gain from them.  So, instead of dreading the endless hours involved in her daughter’s cake selection, GRETCHEN! got into it and made a bigger deal of it because she knew her daughter would most likely remember the pre-party cake selection process much more than the actual eating of the cake.  GRETCHEN! also validated my obsession with photo-documenting everything I do by saying that we need to take photos so we can remember these events and draw happiness from them endlessly.

There are many, many more great things, and there are a lot of things I didn’t like about the book…but GRETCHEN! says it’s bad to constantly criticize (which she probably wrote so that people like me would feel guilty about saying negative things).  I will say that the project seemed to work wonders for her because from Chapter 1 to Chapter 12, she became FAR less annoying. FAR LESS.

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For my entire life, I’ve longed to be the most popular kid in school.  It’s a position I have coveted since age 3.

At first I took the academic track to popularity.  Unfortunately, around the age of 18 I realized that making good grades does not make one popular.

But today, I made it!

Cousin Emily mailed me a care package with marshmallows and Rice Krispies…  Evidently all you need is a 16 oz bag of marshmallows and crowds will automatically form while you hold court.

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My new favorite thing in life are bedazzled ties.  I see them everywhere.  In fact, it took some a bit of searching for me to find a tie that was not bedazzled.

Of course, I think I only love them because I know I could never wear them (they don’t go with plaid).

Here’s the video:

And, a post on bedazzling wouldn’t be complete without a shout out to my cousin Emily.  I still remember showing up to her house to go to a party and her saying, “We can’t leave until I put some color on my hair and bedazzle my jacket!”  And for Christmas this year, what did she get?  Her new husband (as in like 2-days-old new) got her bedazzled jeans from the master of all bedazzlers: Manuel…

I think maybe Nashville and Korea aren’t that different after all…

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