Rice Reunion: 10 years

I just got back from my 10 year Rice Reunion, and have a couple of observations:

1) I'm pretty pleased with myself and life right now -- which is a wonderful thing to discover. How could I tell? I wasn't nervous about this at all. For instance, my 10 year high school reunion involved a new clothing purchases and drinking copious amounts of wine once I got there. For this, I was throwing clothing into a suitcase 10 minutes before we left, hoping I would cover the vagaries of Houston weather, and drank moderate amounts of wine.

2) Geeks lacking social skills in college are *still* lacking social skills 10 years later. I like to think I've improved on that account (maybe I'm deluding myself), but I was surprised how often I had to just chalk it up to personality, and how less tolerant of it I am now. Turns out the self assured ones are the worst -- they have less perceived incentive for fixing their flaws. (Or don't realize they have them.) The ones that were just shy/awkward are (somewhat) easier to talk to now.

3) Rediscovering my freshman year roommates was the highlight of the weekend. We were best friends for first semester, and could hardly speak to each other second semester (putting 5 freshman in a suite built for 4 is one of the worst ideas Rice has ever had -- and our numbers show it, since only 3 of us stuck around Rice long enough to graduate).

4) Ben and I are "successful" -- both in that we are happy (see #1) and in that when we compare ourselves to our Rice peers, we don't find much jealousy. The only people I was even a little jealous of were 2 CS friends who have/are starting companies -- but I also feel that if I want it enough I can make that happen, too (maybe on a later or slower schedule, but that's OK, too). And, it turns out, many of our peers who aren't software/CS people were jealous of Ben and my projects -- if you are a chemical engineer or you work in oil, side projects are a lot harder to do. (The CS friends didn't even manage to get to our projects; see #2)

All in all a good experience. I'm glad we went.

Family & Happiness

Two thought provoking tidbits from Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project blog:

• Pierre Reverdy observed, “There is no love, there are only proofs of love.” Keeping these journals to be a link between himself and his children is an active proof of love. We think we act because of the way we feel, but in fact, the way we act shapes the way we feel – so performing loving actions boosts loving feelings.

I'm taking this as a reminder to do, not just to contemplate, especially in my family affairs.

• Studies show that one way to boost happiness is to keep happy memories fresh. Happy people don’t have more pleasant experiences than unhappy people, but they remember them better. Keeping a journal (which for most people skews toward the happy experiences) will help keep good times memorable.

One of the smartest things I've done for keeping memories alive is to order an extra copy of Josie's yearly photo alblums (I use MyPublisher's Bookmaker) and keep it under the coffee table with Josie's other books. We pull her first year out regularly to look at it -- unfortunately the second year one isn't done yet.

On Marriage

"Marriage typically meets our sharply felt needs for security and predictability, [psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell] argues, but in those relationships that last well, people take the leap of believing that they actually don't know exactly who the other person is or what he or she is capable of -- the absolute knowingness is a fantasy anyway -- and that there is new terrain to be discovered."

"Adam Phillips, a Longon psychoanalyst, muses in his 1996 book, "Monogamy": "What if our strongest wish was to be praised...What would our relationships be like?... We might find ourselves saying things like: The cruelest thing one can do to one's parner is to be good at fidelity but bad at celebration... Or it's not difficult to sustain a relationship but it's impossible to keep a celebration going. The long applause becomes baffling."

-- both from "Can This Marriage Be Saved?", Laurie Abraham, New York Times Magazine 8/12/2007

What I found provoking about these is that they tie in nicely to the current popular science on Happiness. That to be happy you have to have "flow" -- work that engages you in an almost transcendental way, and gratitude -- which I see tying in to celebration in a marriage -- to take time to appreciate what we've accomplished and what we have.