I will spend 20 minutes to half an hour each day working on my creative writing. I find that when I free write, I am able to better access what I am feeling subconsciously. This helps me to express myself, and I’m usually surprised at the quality of work I usually end up with. It’s been a goal of mine to have something I’ve written published. I have already started doing this activity sporadically, but starting tomorrow I will set aside time every day after dinner to practice writing.

The problem that I am going to brainstorm is dealing with my car and the winter conditions. Up until this point in my life, I have always had the luxury of having a garage. This meant protection from ice. It never got cold enough for me to worry about any part of my car freezing, or needing to run my car for five to ten minutes before using it. I would to provide protection for my car against the winter elements. As far as solving my problem, until now I have been stuck on the thought that I need some sort of winter weather cover for my car.

Branching out and brainstorming, maybe there is a local garage near my house that I can rent space to park for the winter. After a bit of research, maybe I can make my own car cover for the winter. Perhaps I can find a better deal on car covers from eBay or other websites. Maybe I can run a power cable out the car and have a heating blanket running. My only experience with winter weather so far is from Chicago and Germany, both of which are much more severe than Virginia. Maybe I should ‘rough it’ through this winter and make a better educated decision for next year.

I think that what I am going to do is a combination of the looking at discount websites, and waiting to make a more informed decision for next winter. Sometimes no action is the best action, and making an informed decision is always better than one that is made uninformed.

Relationships

The exercises on relationships were a little difficult for me; I don’t like to admit that a relationship I have is in need of work, and the fact that the exercises called me to label someone a “problem person” made it hard to do. Yet, after I got past this, I had an eye-opening heart to heart with my fiancée. I have been wanting more power, recognition, and freedom. I told my fiancée what I really wanted during the take aim exercises on page 180.

We had a long discussion that started with Halloween. This upcoming Halloween will be the first one that I have been in the United States for in the past 4 years. This is also the first Halloween that I will have trick-or-treaters on my own doorstep. I want to relax, decorate the house a little, and see the costumes. I asked what Myrna wanted to do for Halloween, and she wanted to see the trick-or-treeters, and also go to a Halloween Party and meet some new people. We realized that although we wanted different things, we can do both.

I had to explain the exercise to Myrna, and hand her the IPOH book, turned to the list of needs (page 8). It was interesting to hear her go through the needs and examples, and talk about what she feels is going on in our relationship. I was surprised to hear some of what she said, and I made a few realizations about why we had a few of our previous arguments.

IPOH Chapter 5

This chapter was rough for me. I think that fact is made obvious by my putting off writing this blog to the last conceivable minute. I think the problem is that at my current state, I don’t have a lot of contact with people on a close personal level. Having just moved, and not yet being employed, my friends and people that I talk to are limited to my Fiancée. My mother and brother are close, so it’s not like I’m a hermit, but I’m not exactly in a position where the idea of letting go of relationships is comfortable.

This brings me to my action indexes. I would say that as far as people are concerned, I need to work harder to maintain the worthwhile friendships and regain contact with some of the friends I’ve lost contact with. As far as activities, I know that I can kick gaming to the curb. I’ve already started this by working on better time management, and I’ve found that the less time I spend on computer games the less I want to. I could spend more time being involved in a group and meeting new people by not gaming.

In order to increase the amount of power and freedom I have in my life I am going to begin writing creatively again. I used to love to write, but lack of an audience slowly turned me away from this. I’m going to start by following through on my long-time desire of writing a theatre script.

Balancing

As I started to read chapter 4, I was fairly complacent. The chapter’s subject was on balance, and I considered myself decent at juggling several things. It didn’t take too long for the E. Perry Good to wake me from my misconception, and give me reason to sit down and think about what was being said.

After my first misconception of the chapter I developed a fairly negative view on how this exercise was going to turn out. I expected that I would discover that I am completely out of balance. Luckily my results on the exercise didn’t turn out as bad as I had expected.

I analyzed 5 people and 4 activities. The relationships category was filled by my fiancée, brother, mother, father, and friends. I only have a few close friends, and they all fit best within the same group. My activities were: school work, house work, exercise, and gaming.

The quadrants of my circle turned out as follows:

Love:
Fiancée
Brother
Mother
Father
Friends
Exercise
Gaming

Power:
Fiancée
Mother
Father
Friends
Schoolwork
Housework
Exercise

Fun:
Fiancée
Brother
Mother
Friends
Schoolwork
Exercise
Gaming

Freedom:
Brother-
Mother-
Friends-
Exercise-

The only quadrant that is not on par with the others is Freedom. I didn’t realize that some people, such as my mother, met as many needs as they did. This exercise also helped me to identify ways I might be not meeting other people’s needs. For instance, I need to think of ways to work on my relationship with my fiancée so that we can meet each other’s need for freedom.

In order to continue the freedom I feel from exercise, I will begin to plan it into my schedule.
In order to continue the all around good relationship I have with my mother, I will make sure to talk to her at least once a week.
In order to continue having fun with my fiancée, we will go exploring our new home city twice a week.

In Pursuit of Wants

The second chapter of IPOH was much more difficult for me than the first chapter was. One of the things I had to continuously remind myself of was written in big bold letters across the 57th page. “Remember: We meet our needs through activities we do with ourselves and other people, not through products.” Most of my wants seemed to be different things. I realized that time seemed to be a major component of most of my wants. I’m going to stop myself here; before I jump too far into what I took from this chapter.

I will start with the first exercise from this chapter; identifying what I have that makes my life happier.

From Myself:
- I have a nice townhome in Virginia that I share with Myrna, my fiancée.
- I am a student. It feels amazing to study full time again after being in the Army.
- Both Myrna and I have been learning to cook better.

From Others:
- Myrna loves me. Just that thought makes me happy.
- I have a very supportive family.
- I have some life-long friends that I left the Army with. We support each other with the troubles of trying to start a life outside of the military.
- The Veterans Administration, which has been providing me with health coverage as well as money for education.

I feel I made the right decision when I was 18 years old, and enlisted in the Army. It was obviously a rough, painful few years, but I don’t think I would be the person I am today without it. On top of the personal growth brought on from service, the benefits and rewards provided to service members has been invaluable.

This decision showed that I had a willingness to sacrifice my immediate college-bound, relatively safe future for service to the nation that provided that security. Although I didn’t have everything thought out that well at the time.

After reading through more of IPOH I wrote out a list of all of my wants that come to mind. This is where I began to notice the theme of time across my wants. I placed time within the Freedom need, although it does fit into Power too.
Using the abbreviations: L- Love, P- Power, F- Fun, FR- Freedom
FR- A car for Myrna, with infinite gas mileage
FR- A dishwasher
FR- A closer VA hospital (it takes about an hour to get there and back.
P,FR- A part time, first shift job.

With the exception of the job, everything falls back to the desire for more time. However, the desire for a job will take up even more time. I’m fairly sure that I’m not stretching myself too thin. Instead, I’ve realized that what I actually need is better time management. If I paid closer attention to how I was spending time, I wouldn’t be having due dates sneak up on me, and last minute, household emergencies wouldn’t be able to cause as much problems as they do. By managing my time better I would be able to fulfill my need for freedom, power, as well as open more time for fun.

The Intro to Happiness

“If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.” This quote from W. B. Wolfe on the second page of the book sums up what I took from the introduction quite nicely.

The introduction served as a good reminder that happiness is created out of the sum of what is happening within my life. Equally important, a lack of happiness can often be traced back to a set of choices that I am making poorly, or not making at all.

After reading both the introduction and the first chapter I decided to put what I had read into practice. I had been having some nagging frustrations over the past few days that have been negatively affecting my happiness. It only took me a few moments to pinpoint what was bothering me. I had been lethargic about cleaning up the last few days, and the house was starting to show it, and my fiancée and I had been grating on each other over the past few days. After some consideration, I concluded that the issue between us was that we were both so busy the last few days that she was lacking her physical need for sleep, and we were both missing out on fun and freedom.

I decided that I was going to let her take a nap, and I would surprise her with a clean house when she woke up. Because cleaning was going to be a surprise for her, it became fun for me. And to put an end to a long story, I feel much happier now than earlier today.

I’m also noticing that the author’s initial words, about how uncouth it is to talk about happiness, have been ringing true. Reading over this post I feel like I sound like an advertisement.

I wasn’t quite sure whether we were to be reading the introduction, and the first chapter, or just the introduction. I chose to read, and write, on both in order to be on the safe side.

First Post on my New Blog

*taps on blog* "Test, test, one, two, three."

Well then,
This is both my first and my second blog. As it turns out two of my classes this semester are exploring Blogs, making me one busy blogger. And yes, I do laugh at my own jokes.

However, here it is. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of the options and controls, but I expect I'll have it all down soon. I'm actually quite picky about visual style, and looking around this page I can easily tell there will be some drastic changes before I'm done here.