Confidential Information.

I have a date in ten minutes with a tall and handsome foreigner.

Don't tell my husband.

pseudo-intellectual

I got really excited at work a while back because I happened to notice something interesting about decimals, so I sent an email to a fellow nerd about it. Fellow Nerd laughed at me--in a nice way--because I get so excited about the smallest things. That made me smile, because when lizardek made icons for all her friends a while back, she said that mine (the one I'm using currently) reminded her of someone who takes pleasure in small things, so I guess she hit me pretty well there.

I just don't understand people who don't get excited about the little things. The way I see it is that I can either be happy when I type decimals because I am doing something that I discovered that will make my life easier, or I can continue to use this finding without experiencing any particular emotional response. I just don't happen to think that pleasure is a limited-capacity commodity, so why would I purposefully not take happiness where I find it? So what if figuring out this teeny tiny decimal trick doesn't win me the lottery and allow me to quit my job and eat bon-bons all day? Every single time I use it (incidentally, very very rarely) I remember that it was fun the first time, and that makes it residual fun again. A day full of residual fun is a day that generally doesn't go too badly. I don't get it.

I guess the obvious answer is that people just don't see this as a conscious decision.. they don't notice that decimals are exciting. Frankly, most people wouldn't find this particular thing even the least bit interesting. (Although two people I work with read this journal, and they're probably trying their darnedest to figure out what I'm talking about right now, so they might be vaguely interested... and will be terribly disappointed if they bother to ask me about it sometime.) But.. I think most people just don't look for joy in unexpected places, which I think is extremely, extremely sad--because if you don't look for happiness in the small things, how can you find it in the big things? Happiness is a skill, not a state of being. You can lose it if you don't use it.

A bitter heart will not reveal the spring that love remembers...
(Crossing Muddy Waters, originally by John Hiatt, currently in my playlist by Adam Duritz & David Immergluck)