Happiness Is A Choice

If one only wished to be happy,
this could be easily accomplished;
but we wish to be happier that other people,
and this is always difficult,
for we believe others to be happier than they are

Happiness is not an absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them. - H. Jackson Brown

Regarding to my last entry about happiness, I coincidently watched a very interesting documentary about happiness tonight. The documentary tried to compare the way of life and happiness between the Hongkers and Italians. It shows that most of the time the Italians seem to be happy and enjoying themselves with fiestas, eating ice creams, making delicious foods or sunbathing. They have really relaxing life. On the other hand, Hongkers are more into working and searching for money. The documentary showed that Hongkers having more hectic life, however the enjoyed their life at night with entertainment, going to pub or karaoke.

So, looking at both different races from different regions, most of us might say that Italians are happier than Hongkers. But how true it is when we are saying one race is happier than the other?. It is really subjective in defining their happiness with the way of life they choose or they have to choose. Happiness is something that can be chosen; either we accept whatever we have and try be happy with it or we are just looking at others and thinking they have more than us and that is the reason why they are happy and we are not.

The documentary concluded that to compare happiness between these two races were just like comparing between butterflies which are freely fly from one flower's stigma to another stigma and ants that are working and searching foods. Both are two different creatures and they are happy in their own ways.

Moral of story : Happiness cannot be compared between a person to another person or from one race to another race. Happiness is a choice that we must make. We choose how to be happy with what we have and live with it.

Women are less happy

I took this from Greg Mankiw's Blog a professor in Harvard;

According to new research from Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson:

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Don't you think happiness is very subjective?!

Pasar Malam & The Unwashed Eggs

I'm not a big fan of pasar malam or pasar Ramadhan. Not, after my friend who is a lecturer in Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management did a research on E Coli Bacteria in contaminated food.The foods in pasar malam usually are exposed to dust, human dirty hands and other unhygienic handling. When she told me about her research findings, it makes me think twice to go to pasar malam. But, recently I was craving for Murtabak and went to Pasar Malam near my house. After searching and walking from stall to stall to find murtabak, I couldn't find any that went according to my specification- the eggs used must be washed. All of the Murtabak sellers in this pasar malam didn't wash their eggs. They just took the eggs from the eggs rack and used it straight away. I'm not exaggerating this. I watched one of the murtabak sellers bought a rack of eggs from the eggs seller and then he flipped the murtabak dough and used the eggs he bought without even washed it first.

The next day I went to my sister's house and we went to Taman Melawati's Pasar Malam and again out of the murtabak sellers there is only a seller who washed their eggs. My sister asked him whether he washed the eggs before using it as we saw the eggs were in the basket and not in eggs rack. He nodded and we bought his murtabak. If he lied to us it was between he and Allah. There was also a murtabak seller who was angry with my sister and said" orang lain buat macam ni jugak ( do not wash the eggs)" when she asked about it.

Some of you may think it is just a simple issue and I put too much concern on it. To be frank, I'm not against any pasar malam because sometimes I will go there too to find the food I'm craving for. What I'm trying to say here, it is not just about the unwashed egg shell serves as a good carrier to bacterial contamination but it is also about the not suci food that we consume without realizing it or sometimes we realize but we just ignore it. Just imagine foods that you look so yummy but not so hygienic and suci go into your throat and tummy. Yuck!

Sigh?

When I hear somebody sigh,"life is hard,". I am always tempted to ask, compared to what?"

Sydney J. Harris

I know I did a lot of sighs since I started my study and I should do no more when I found this quote. Well..... this interesting quote was found in my ECONOMICS book.