My Top Ten

My friend and I are currently working on a project we are calling the Happy Book. It will be a collection of things that make us happy, so that when we find ourselves in a rut--in one of those places where everything seems to go wrong and you just can't find the joy in life--we can open the book and hopefully find something that will bring us back to a happier mindset.

As part of my happy book, I'm trying to come up with my top ten list. No specific topic. Just a compilation of the ten things that make me really happy right now. I think it is probably a good thing for everyone to try to do at some point. So here it goes...

...Oh, and just a warning, some of these will probably get extremely mushy and sentimental...

10. A really good inside joke--If you've ever had one, you know what I'm talking about. It's the kind of joke that only takes a few words or the right look on someone's face to send you into hysterics. It's enough to turn around any bad day.

9. Surprises (the good kind)--Outwardly, I have always hated surprises, mostly because my fiance purposely tortures me every time he is trying to surprise me. But secretly, I love the excitement that comes from even the smallest surprises.

8. Reading a book that makes the world disappear--For me it is a very indulgent kind of escapism because it is so hard to find the time to get that into a book.

7. The way my dog greets me when I get home--She gets so excited every time I walk through the door. If she doesn't make it to the door by the time I get through it, she's waiting on the back of the couch, which she knows I'll have to walk past to get to my room. It is great to have someone get so excited to see you.

6. Finding something that makes me cry (in a good way, of course)--Movies, stories, songs, Hallmark commercials. I love anything that can touch me enough to make me cry. I spend so much of my day trying to function that I love being able to just feel for a bit instead.

5. Lou Malnati's deep dish pizza--It is my all time, hands down, favorite food. When they started shipping frozen pizzas around the country, my mom would send them to me at school for my birthday.

4. Those rare occasions when I can sit around in my pajamas and do nothing all day and not feel guilty--Life has become so stressful that even when I have the opportunity to just relax, I feel guilty about not doing anything productive. But very rarely, I can sit around and do nothing and feel absolutely no guilt whatsoever. Recently my friends and I had a celebration of these very same moments. We all ditched work on a Friday, met up at one girl's apartment, and did absolutely nothing productive. It was AWESOME!

3. Knowing people who bring out my favorite self--I don't believe that anyone has a "true self" that once they find it, they can be their true self with anyone they are around. I believe that a person has many selves (all of them just as true as the next), and that these selves are naturally affected by the people around them. I have several friends that bring out my favorite self--the one that is unguarded, laughs a lot, and has so much to look forward to.

2. A really really good conversation--I'm not exactly sure how to describe what a good conversation is for me. All I know is that once I've had one, I feel like I've really accomplished something, no matter how trivial the topic.

1. Knowing what love is--And I'm not talking about that Hollywood romance crap. I've felt that type of "love." It never lasted and it always left me feeling completely empty. The kind of love I'm talking about takes work, but it is so worth working for. It fills you up rather than takes away. This kind of love is more of an experience than a feeling. It's definitely not as glamorous, but I'm eternally grateful that this is the type of love that I have found.

I can't get on your change-train when you keep trying to throw me off the caboose!

Today at work, everyone received a full-color, elaborately (and terribly) laid-out magazine to advertise the companies new "Customer Focus." I'm assuming this is related to our VP's new mission statement and his call for us to jump on the "change-train" of this new company culture they have been pushing. There have been many changes since I started working here and NONE of them make me want to get behind the success of the company.

For example, we were recently notified that, because of growing concerns that our customers will be badly effected by the economy, the company will be trying to be conservative in their spending and will be reducing our 3% maximum merit raises to 1%. Now I know that there are many people who are not getting raises at all, taking pay cuts, or losing their jobs altogether, but how can I believe that the company is concerned about their spending when I am receiving full color laminated posters with the mission statement to replace the full color poster that I already received, a new color name plate to go under my existing name plate outside my cube, very large full color posters internally advertising the launch of our new web platform that we are all working our butts off to prepare (it's not like we don't know it's coming), and now this wonderful internal magazine that they recommend we show to friends and relatives. They have never given us anything like this before in the year and 3 months I've been working here. Does this seem like a conservative spending move?

Of course they won't have to be worrying about paying us for long since they have been planning for over a year now to move our department somewhere they can pay someone half as much as us for the same work (first it was Malaysia, now Arkansas). Yet we are constantly criticized for not getting behind the company goals.

If only this company could realized that they need to stop being entirely hypocitical and stop treating us all like children, they wouldn't be alienating so much of the talent that they desperately need right now.