Introducing 100 Days of Squee

Originally published at my site. You can comment here or there.

Yes, I know things have been awfully quiet around here lately. I go and get my eyes fixed and all of a sudden, what, I don’t feel like writing anything anymore? What’s with me anyway, huh?

Well, I’ll admit I’ve been more than a bit depressed lately. I don’t want to get into all the whys of it here, but between being down in de dumps and being in one of my very inward-facing phases, I haven’t written a damn thing lately. The problem there is that one of the best ways for me to combat depression is to write my through it. So consider this the start of that.

(It always helps when I’m depressed to put things in some sense of perspective. Even with all of the crap we’ve had going on, I’m still so incredibly, incredibly fortunate and blessed compared to at least ninety percent of the world, and I do know that. I’m physically healthy, my family’s healthy, my kids are happy, I’m not especially wanting for anything material, I’m not being persecuted, and I’m not, so far as I’m aware, in danger of being displaced or executed as part of an ethnic cleansing. Things could be so much worse.)

One of the best ways for me to beat off depression is to focus on all the wonderful bits of my life, all of the things big and small which make me truly happy. To that end I’m enacting 100 Days of Squee, during which I’ll attempt to touch on many of the things, people, events, places and whatnot which bring me some amount of joy. These things might be tiny details or big pictures, important or frivolous, tangible or ethereal. I’m going to try to be as specific as possible with most of the squees because the entire point of the project is for me to look back over the list later when I’m down and remind myself of the things that make me happy so I can beat the down away.

Also, I’m saying this right up front just to take some of the pressure off of me with this project: it’s entirely possible I won’t actually finish all one hundred days. I’m notoriously short of focus with this kind of thing, so if I feel like I’m done and feeling better after, say, fifteen or twenty days, then that’s cool. But I’m certainly going into this with one hundred as the goal.

So that’s that. The project will kick off on Tuesday and I’ll try to update it most weekdays for the next four months or so. Squee ho!

100 Days of Squee: Day One

Originally published at my site. You can comment here or there.

I really feel like I should start off this whole 100 Days of Squee thing in by talking about just how amazing my wife is and how happy she makes me. But that’s not what I’m gonna do. Oh, don’t you worry, I’m sure I’ll be talking about her plenty over the course of these hundred happy-making things; I’m sure I could do an entire 100 Days project just on those bits of her which enrich my life. But today I want to start the project off with the little thing that made me so quietly happy yesterday that I had the idea to keep track of these squeeful things in the first place.

Soup.

(Clearly this would be a good place to mention what’s probably pretty obvious: these 100 things aren’t in any sort of order whatsoever. If there’s indeed any such list which would feature “soup” before “my wife,” this ain’t it. These bits of squee will be coming out in the order I feel like writing about ‘em, that’s it. Also, remember how I said I might be touching on the trivial? Um, yeah, that.)

Yes, soup. I do love me some soup, and the soup I had for lunch yesterday — the French onion soup from Panera, filled with yummy melted Asiago — made both my taste buds and my stomach glow with warm happiness. And having lunch with said amazing wife surely didn’t hurt, either. (Hey, lookitme, I managed to make it just a little bit about Terry after all!)

French onion’s certainly one of my favorite soups (and I mean real French onion; as much as I liked the soup from Panera, even that’s a poor/cheap/quick imitation of the real thing), but I don’t get to have it very often since Terry developed a rather intense distaste for it sometime during her younger years. Luckily for me, I have plenty of other soup lurve to satisfy me, notably tomato soup, broccoli-n-cheese soup, potato soup (soooo bad for me, and soooo yummy), egg drop soup, even chicken noodle. McGuire’s Irish Pub, easily the most famous restaurant in my hometown, sells their Senate bean soup for 18 cents a bowl — and I’d gladly pay twenty times that much for it.

Good soup seems to make me feel better spiritually, if indeed it’s possible for a warm-to-hot liquid optionally containing other foodstuffs to do so. The act of eating soup enhappies[1] me, the feeling of the warm-to-hot liquid sliding down my throat into my belly enhappies me, the fact that I don’t have to eat very much to be full enhappies me. So there you have it: soup == squee.

(One day down. Bear with me — I promise these will get better.)

[1] Yes, “enhappies” is so a word. Shut up.

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Originally published at my site. You can comment here or there.

It’s not often that a mainstream radio station will give me as jarring a shift between songs as the ones I routinely get from my iPod, but wow did whatever station I was listening to pull a doozy on my drive home tonight: they followed Outkast’s “Hey Ya” with “East Bound and Down” (a.k.a. “Love Theme from Smokey and the Bandit“) by Jerry Reed.  I’m going to have to keep this station tuned in just to see what else they come up with.