Jeff Winger?! What Are YOU Doing Here?

I was reading someone's Facebook status today, and it read something like, "We choose our own happiness" and so on. This gave me pause.In my patriarchal blessing, it says that I have a naturally cheerful disposition. this is a statement with which I have struggled because sometimesI'm just sad. It's completely overwhelming, it's out of my control, and it just happens. So this is what I think:

I think that to some degree, because of our agency, we can decide upon happiness. This is not a blanket statement- depression and sadness and anger are a pat of being human. We should not deny our emotions, negative or otherwise. I believe that when all is said and done, we can look back on our day or our year or our life and then we can decide whether we will be happy, whether we are proud of the decisions we've made and whether we can move forward with hope and optimism.

I have chosen to pursue happiness, which well may be

the same thing.

Maybe wanting to be happy coupled with righteous desires and a pure bit of faith is all we need.

Maybe it's more like a habit, a skill developed in trying times.

Maybe it's even less definable than that.

Maybe, and I think this is true, we have glimpses of happiness here and won't really know it until the eternities.

I think I got off track. Choosing happiness is a selective thing, as it were. That's all I had to say on the matter.

Change of tack!

But I do want to talk about the utter ridiculousness of my school, before I forget again.

Sometimes, not for the quality of the education but for the administrative process, I feel like I attend Greendale Community College, Joel McHale-style.

This feeling was affirmed by the first week of school run-around, the presence of the Human Being,

and the millions of fliers the school printed out to announce its impending paperlessness (see Community Season 1, episode 10: "Environmental Science"). Also, I seem to be the only person in my Math 950 class who didn't flunk out of the third grade.

I never know how to end these things.

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Recorded 8/26/10