My Happy Place

For me, the phrase "happy place" has never been about an actual place. I don't have one particular place that I want to be in order to cheer up unless you count my room, but at least half of that has to do with wanting to be alone. (I realize being alone may sound strange to some when they think about happy places, but I've always been the epitome of an introvert.)

What's far more important to me when it comes to a happy place is that I have a book or my computer with me. Mostly for the same reasons, believe it or not. I want to read. That's my happy place. Sometimes writing, but while that makes me happy, if I'm in major need of cheering up, anything I try to write will turn out darker. It ends up making me wallow instead of actually making me happy most times. Books make me take on whatever emotion is in them, so as long as I have a happy book, I'm good.

The biggest reason why I say my computer is that reading fanfiction is a big happy place for me. Sometimes I prefer it over books when I'm sad because I know who the characters are already and I have a good idea what to expect. Plus, it's pretty easy to tell the fluff from the angst when it comes to fanfiction, so I know for sure what I'm getting myself into ahead of time. Sometimes that's particularly nice when I'm upset.

Tumblr and Twitter and whatnot can also help cheer me up at times. Especially Tumblr or Twitter on good days, but the mood of those depends on what I'm seeing in my timeline/dashboard. If I start seeing negative stuff, then cheering up isn't going to happen, and it's back to reading for me. For that reason, I tend to start off there but migrate to reading when I seriously need to cheer up.

What about you guys? What is/are your happy place(s)?

More On Resolutions

I talked about my list of future resolutions earlier this month. In that post I mentioned that, while the list wasn't entirely languages, it mostly was. I had a few other things down that I wanted to learn, but it wasn't much by any means when you took in the sheer number of languages I had written down.

Well, I've been adding a lot more things that aren't languages recently. It's almost funny how many things I've thought to add over the last couple of weeks. I don't know what it is, but my brain just seems to have exploded with things I want to learn. These are, of course, things that tend to take a while to get the hang of. Hence the idea of learning them as resolutions.

As I said in my past resolution post, it will definitely take me a while to get to all of these things. Because if I try to tackle them all at once, I won't make any sort of progress. Knowing me, I'll keep adding things faster than I can learn them, so the list will never actually end.

I'm starting to wonder if I should double up instead of going at it one at a time though. Now that less of the list is languages, I've started thinking about doing one language and one other thing at a time. I'm not sure, since that would still take up quite a bit of time. Unsurprisingly, learning a new language takes up plenty of time all on its own.

I guess we'll see. As it stands now, I'm still working on Japanese, and I think I'm going to start working on Spanish in the next month or so. Since I was taking Spanish classes that are now over, I really want to start working on it on my own before I lose everything I learned. I think I can handle working on two languages at once. (Honestly, I'll have to keep adding to the languages anyway because there will never be a time where I don't have to practice with every language that I've been learning in order to keep my skills at the same level.)

For now, I'm just going to focus on the two languages, but I'm considering the other aspects of the list and what I should be doing with them. We'll see I suppose.

Book Review: A Bone to Pick by Mark Bittman

ISBN: 0804186545
Published: May 5th, 2015
Publisher: Pam Krauss Books
Read from May 22nd to 24th, 2015
Synopsis from publisher:

Since his New York Times op-ed column debuted in 2011, Mark Bittman has emerged as one of our most impassioned and opinionated observers of the food landscape. The Times’ only dedicated opinion columnist covering the food beat, Bittman routinely makes readers think twice about how the food we eat is produced, distributed, and cooked, and shines a bright light on the profound impact that diet—both good and bad—can have on our health and that of the planet.
In A Bone to Pick, Mark’s most memorable and thought-provoking columns are compiled into a single volume for the first time. As abundant and safe as the American food supply appears to be, the state of our health reveals the presence of staggering deficiencies in both the system that produces food and the forces that regulate it. Bittman leaves no issue unexamined; agricultural practices, government legislation, fad diets, and corporate greed all come under scrutiny and show that the issues governing what ends up in our market basket and on our tables are both complex and often deliberately confusing. Unabashedly opinionated and invariably thought provoking, Bittman’s columns have helped readers decipher arcane policy, unpack scientific studies, and deflate affronts to common sense when it comes to determining what “eating well” truly means. As urgent as the situation is, Mark contends that we can be optimistic about the future of our food and its impact on our health, as slow-food movements, better school-lunch programs, and even “healthy fast food” become part of the norm.
At once inspiring, enraging, and enlightening, A Bone to Pick is an essential resource for every reader eager to understand not only the complexities inherent in the American food system, but also the many opportunities that exist to improve it.

Review:

A Bone to Pick is a collection of articles that Bittman has written for the New York Times over the years about all of the different things wrong with the food system in America. It covers a wide range of issues within the food system from the idea of the level of "foodness" of processed foods to the amount of meat Americans consume on average. It talks both about the diets of the average American and the current state of agriculture. It feels like very little is left out over the course of the book.

I greatly enjoyed A Bone to Pick. The various issues addressed in the book are issues that I've increasingly paid attention to over the years, and I consider them very important things to discuss. The role big business plays in influencing the government produced nutrition guidelines is one such issue that I see as extremely important for people to think about, and I often feel like those nutrition guidelines are wrongly viewed as unbiased even by Americans who stop to consider lobbying's influence when it comes to other issues.

The one nit-picky thing I have to say about the book is that it feels repetitive at times. This books is, after all, a collection of articles that were published over a number of years. Because of that, each article stands on its own and wasn't originally written to be read in book form with many of the other articles. This was particularly obvious because I read the book in a span of just a few days. Certain information began to feel very repetitive as I had to read more or less the same thing over and over. On one hand, it served to drill certain points into my head, and the ones that were repeatedly mentioned were typically what I would label the most important ones. On the other hand, it could get a bit tiring at times.

I don't think that one thing is necessarily a bad side. It makes the book a great option for reading slowly and piece by piece. While I didn't read it that way, that is probably how I would recommend others handle it. That is also a good idea because it gives you time to digest what is in each article, and considering the amount of information in the book, that time could be very valuable.

This is one of those books that I would like to recommend to everyone, although I know that, in reality, only certain people are likely to pick it up and actually read it. It has some really great information that is good for everyone to know considering, as the book points out several times, everyone in the world has a relationship with food.

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.

Life Post: A Weekend Spent With Books

This weekend has felt strange for a reason that I can't really pinpoint. I think it's that I spent so much of it reading. I managed to read two books from start to finish from Friday until earlier today. I can't remember the last time I did that. It was awesome, but it's left me feeling kind of out of it. It's like I was disconnected from everything, especially today, and now I have to get back into it. It's like the first day back at school or something like that.

I've managed to get myself up to only four books behind on my reading challenge. Considering I've been reading quite a bit lately, it's kind of amazing to me that I'm still behind at all, but hopefully I'll catch up completely soon.

I also took a break from writing this weekend, but my mind is definitely on the two one-shots I have sitting on my computer. They're both almost completely finished. The only editing left is really going through one last time to try to pick up on any grammar mistakes or typos that I can find. I really want to get to that this weekend. Both of them are between 15,000 and 20,000 words each (if I'm remembering correctly), so I highly doubt I'll get both of them up this week. I think at least one of them being posted is reasonable though.

So, that will probably be a lot of my week as well as writing a few other smaller things that I want to do. And also reading in order to continue trying to catch up to everything. Oh, I also need to finish up the scrapbook page for Summer. It would be finished if I wasn't having trouble getting pictures printed, but I should be able to sort that out this week too. Let's hope at least.

Taking Pictures

I always want to be one of those people who is really into photography and is taking pictures of everything. I love the idea of having pictures of stuff, but then, when I'm in the moment, taking pictures feels like such a hassle that I never do it. Sometimes I film stuff, but my shyness prevents that a lot. And sometimes filming really makes me feel like I'm missing out on something just to film it, which is probably a big reason the pictures never happen either.

But I look at absolutely gorgeous photos other people take, and I really want to do that. To be fair, I look at paintings and drawing and stuff and want to be able to do all of that too. I think I just assume photography would be easier. Not easier to be excellent as, obviously, but easier to at least make terrible attempts at.

I really want to practice drawing more in the future. I should really try to take more pictures too. That doesn't mean buying an expensive camera (at least not in the foreseeable future), but I have a digital camera that I could at least start messing around with. When I bought it, I bought it mainly for filming, but since my last camera had been video only, I told myself that now I would for sure take pictures too. That hasn't happened, and I want to change that. I could do with having at least a few more things documented because I have almost no pictures of my own as it is. I know I'm in friends' and family's pictures sometimes, but it would be nice to actually have pictures of my own. For a variety of reasons.