List: '13 Tips for Dealing with a Really Lousy Day'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. I’m a grumpy old man [1]. Though I aspire to be grumpless, some things still irk me. Push my buttons. Yank my chain. A big one’s people wishing me: ‘Have a nice day’. As if that’ll make any difference to my day. As if some days I set out to have a not nice day. Fact is, despite what anyone tells me, and despite what I do and/or say, some days are horrid. Awful. Really lousy. (Though usually not literally infested with lice.) In other words, really lousy days happen despite intentions, wishes and efforts to the contrary. And if they happen, then what? Gretchen Rubin (pictured) [2], a best-selling writer whose new book, The Happiness Project, is an account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier [3], has a blog to help her readers create their own happiness projects. On her blog, also called The Happiness Project [4], each Wednesday is ‘Tip Day – or List Day, or Quiz day’. On Wednesday 3 November she posted ‘13 Tips for Dealing with a Really Lousy Day’ [5]. It’s actually 19 tips – because number 13 expands to seven others [6]. No-one’s life comes devoid of failures, disappointments, losses, and rejections. When they inevitably happen, today’s list gives us ways to deal with them. Doing so may not result in happiness. But it should reduce unhappiness.
P.S. h/t [7] darling Emily for alerting me to Rubin’s blog and its Wednesday lists.

GOM, SAD and Solar

It’s no coincidence I called myself a grumpy old man [GOM] in June [1], and I wrote of seasonal affective disorder [2] in July [3] and August [4]. For here in Tasmania the three winter months – June, July and August – are cold, dark and wet. Though feeding hay’s mandatory as is chainsawing a wattle that felled a fence last week, farm chores in winter are no fun. So it’s the perfect time to light the woodheater and curl up with a book. Last week I read Solar [5], the newest novel by acclaimed English writer Ian McEwan (pictured) [6]. I couldn’t wait to read a book marrying McEwan’s undoubted writing skills with the theme of global warming/climate change. But, sadly, my disappointment matched my expectancy. My major gripe was that the main character, Nobel Prize winning scientist Michael Beard, wasn’t likeable. And neither were the lesser characters. Also McEwan’s writing quality’s uneven; and big text chunks are irrelevant to the storyline. It needed, but didn’t get, a good edit. I doubt it’d have been published if penned by an obscure writer. I’ve whinged about mediocre books by other fantastic writers – John le Carré and Philip Roth [7, 8]. Solar joins this list. Whether it’s the halo effect, or because these writers are so famous and powerful that no publisher dares edit their work, it’s the readers who suffer. Or was it only that I read Solar in winter when I’m a GOM due to SAD? Ho hum.

P.S. Today’s the winter solstice. So from tomorrow, daylight hours will be longer.

farmdoc's blog post number 55

Grumpy Old Men is the title of a 1993 film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Grumpy I was as a boy and then as a man. Now I am a grumpy old man. As a GOM I am irritated by mindless jargon, e.g. all about, totally and frankly. But my all-time favourite is no-brainer (which Wikipedia calls a thought-terminating cliché). In my 27 May 2008 blog post I wrote about two items of agricultural wisdom I had read in Tasmanian Country. In last week’s issue another appeared. Titled ‘Grass is good’, it quotes a British research finding that cows grazing on grass and clover produce more antioxidants and vitamins in their milk, than cows feeding on silage and cereals. And the widest difference is between organic and non-organic milk. (Though separate from this research, it is also known that the meat of cattle grazed on pasture is substantially lower in fat than the meat of grain-fed cattle.) Well big bloody whoopy do! Even children know that cattle – and sheep and goats too – are designed to digest grass, which is why they have multiple stomach chambers and chew their cud. So if you eat meat and drink milk from grain-fed feedlot cattle, you deserve what you (don't) get. I would call that a no-brainer – that is, if I wasn’t a GOM. Ruminate on it.