Naming of the community has proven significant in maintaining Romance's most visible business, a small branch post office of the United States Postal Service. The local post office is one of several within the USPS system that gain attention because of "love-themed" names, but received special focus in 1990 as the first location to issue that year's stamp in the USPS Love Stamp series. Romance's post office is among those popular around the United States for postmarks of cards for Valentine's Day, as well as for wedding invitations. A side venture of sorts has developed in recent years, with a small number of weddings performed on the grounds of the post office, though the practice is not affiliated with the USPS.
Now they all really did lose it. Even the grandmother was openly howling with laughter. Which was fine, right? As has already been established, I am always perfectly willing to be mocked in a foreign country for somebody else’s entertainment. But in this case, I must confess, all the hilarity was a bit unsettling on account of the fact that I really did not get the joke. All I could understand was that these Hmong ladies and I were clearly speaking an entirely different language here (I mean, above and beyond the fact that we were literally speaking an entirely different language here). But what was so specifically absurd to them about my questions?
There are no huge secrets when it comes to ways to feel happy. It’s all about taking care of your body and mind, focusing on the needs of others and looking to role models who have already walked in your shoes. When you put these five principles into place, you will experience more fulfillment in every part of your life and have meaningful experiences on a regular basis.
The two main characters are very likeable, but the game doesn't focus too much on dialogue, which is bad for the side characters as they don't get much screentime (although they're interesting nonetheless). This is also a good thing though since it allows you to focus more on the gameplay/programming, so you're learning something, Very YourMileageMayVary!
On average, men were happier if they received confessions of love before a relationship turned sexual, while women were happier if first declarations of love came after sexual intimacy in the relationship. It seems that, consciously or unconsciously, guys take a pre-sex "I love you" to mean "I'm ready to sleep with you," while women worry it's a move to get them into bed.
I used to be such a starry-eyed believer of love. I thought that love conquered all – and that as long as you shared that feeling with someone, it meant that the relationship would last, In the theory of fairytales and movies, this may be the case, but in North American reality – not quite. Instead, love is only one of the many ingredients needed for a long-lasting partnership. But the concerning issue is – people put so much weight on the feeling of love, a feeling that inevitably changes, takes different forms and can get blinded easily.
For forty-five days, give up control instead of trying to control the world in your accustomed ways. Don’t quit your day job to beg with a rice bowl and think that will be a way to feel good. Just stop checking the weather report, buying lottery tickets, and expecting the world to work according to your rules. Choose one habit you have for feeling in control, and do without it. If you can’t give up your control ritual completely, commit to giving it up for a certain time each day. You will learn how to feel happy and safe in the world despite your inability to control it.
Fix anything that’s broken. Another way to feel happier is to take a good, long look at your life and to change whatever you can change to make yourself feel happier. Though you may not be able to make dramatic changes, like changing your career all of a sudden, there are small things you can do that can make a big difference. If something’s not working for you, then fixing it will definitely make you happier.
Moore's buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. "I get their user ID, email address, age, plus their full name. Neither their full name nor their email is ever supposed to be revealed," he says.
If you think you can’t spare ten minutes a day, consider the time you already spend dreaming of what you’d rather be doing. You can use that time to research the necessary steps. You will get a dopamine feeling each day as those steps come into view. You will start to expect that dopamine feeling and look forward to it. You will learn to feel that it’s possible to transform a dream into reality with steady effort. When your ten minutes is over, go back to living in the present, which is another hack for how to feel good and happy. Do not make a habit of focusing constantly on the future.
Gary Smalley was one of the country's best-known authors and speakers on family relationships. He was the award-winning, best-selling author or coauthor of sixteen books, as well as several popular films and videos. The Blessing and The Two Sides of Love have won Gold Medallions, The Language of Love won the Angel Award as the best contribution to family life, and his other titles have received Si ...more
18Of course the clinch image is, much like the narrative it so strikingly represents, a generic type. Each individual execution of the type is slightly different but essentially – typically – the same. This typicality functions as the basis of the public’s interpretation of the clinch image. That is, the public perceives the type of image and interprets this image as signaling a stereotypical kind of romance genre identity ; this interpretation is based on the widespread cultural codes that regulate the semiotic functioning of cover iconography, which hold that a clinch image equals the generic identity “romance”. In this interpretative act, the public overlooks the individual execution of this type – an execution that, for all its typicality, still has individual traits. These traits are, however, precisely the focal point of the romance reader’s semiotic decoding of the image and suggest to her a somewhat different interpretation of the text’s identity. They do not simply individuate the image, but do so according to a set of (generic) codes shared by the novel’s producers and its target audience of romance readers. On the basis of these codes, the romance reader is able to learn more about the novel’s specific characteristics.
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The American Meteorological Society 13 published research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 13.9°C, so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.
There are no huge secrets when it comes to ways to feel happy. It’s all about taking care of your body and mind, focusing on the needs of others and looking to role models who have already walked in your shoes. When you put these five principles into place, you will experience more fulfillment in every part of your life and have meaningful experiences on a regular basis.
There are two kinds of optimizers: those who write programs, and those who hack what other people have written. Kevin Burton is a perfect example of the latter. With his all-American look, Burton seems to have just stepped out of a Gap ad. But that doesn't mean he can meet women on his own. For that, he relies on a sneaky little program he invented called the AIM Sniffer.
One day last summer, I missed the bus to the train station, and when I asked a cyclist for directions, he offered to carry me to the station. How nice! How many examples of happy things in your life can you list, that you did or someone did for you? Take ten minutes: the first five to think of something nice to do, and the last five to do it. Life has nothing to offer if not optimism, and if you honestly think about it, you realize there are a lot of happy things people do for each other. You don't need to be optimistic about life, it is better to realize that life is optimistic, whether you are or not.
The key of Pure Romance is to improve the lives of women. By talking to thousands of women every year, Patty recognized that women need for more education, awareness about women's sexual health, research, nd something that's essential to every woman's wellbeing. To cater for that need, Patty set up the Patty Brisben Foundation for Women's Sexual Health. This nonprofit organization funds clinical study and educate for women's sexual health, committing to arouse awareness about these sensitive subjects when working with others everywhere.
Whatever aesthetic intention may come into play as well, the main issue of the paratext is not to “look nice” around the text but rather to ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose. To this end, the paratext provides a kind of canal lock between the ideal and relatively immutable identity of the text and the empirical (sociohistorical) reality of the text’s public…the lock permitting the two to remain “level”. (407-408)
When you wake up in the morning and your brain is everywhere and you feel distracted or pulled in a hundred different directions and you’re not really sure how to think about God or the day. Notice what David does here. He takes his soul in his hands and he talks to himself. Kind of scary. He’s not just listening to how he feels. He talks to himself and he says, (verse 1)
Slow movement is an essential variation on this theme. Tai chi and Qi Gong are so slow that you may think they’re not real exercise. But super-slow movement is more of a workout than it seems. It forces you to use muscles evenly, activating the weaker muscles instead of letting the dominant ones take over. Both are great exercise methods for how to feel good in your body and mind. Commit to doing something that doesn’t look like “real exercise” for forty-five days, and you will feel the difference.
So of course the Hmong fall in love. Of course they feel preference for one person over another person, or miss a beloved one who has died, or find that they inexplicably adore somebody’s particular smell, or laugh. But perhaps they don’t believe that any of that romantic love business has very much to do with the actual reasons for marriage. Perhaps they do not assume that those two distinct entities (love and marriage) must necessarily intersect—either at the beginning of the relationship or maybe ever at all. Perhaps they believe that marriage is about something else altogether.
People seem to have a pretty good understanding of what love feels like, and we do a good job respecting love as an important feeling. But our culture sends a pretty contradictory message about what commitment is. We say marriage requires love and commitment, and yet somehow “love is all you need” prevails as a logical sentiment. Our collective divorce rate speaks for our confusion.
27This brings me to what I call the preview scene, the third and final example of the double semiotic codification of the category romance’s materiality. The preview scene is a scene (or more often part of a scene) printed on the first page of the category romance novel. It is a brief piece of text (usually about five to ten lines) that is placed before the title page, colophon, foreword or any other kind of introductory page. Following immediately on the book’s front cover, the preview scene is usually the first page of the book the reader encounters. It consists of a partial scene that is extracted from the main narrative and that functions somewhat like a trailer for a film. Although the scene is presented without any explicit framing, its strategic placement at the beginning of the book sets up a metonymic interpretation of the scene as representative of the narrative from which it is extracted. The scene then functions to provide a first, very brief but supposedly representative taste of the narrative that follows a few pages later in the same volume.
You may think that there’s nothing you can do to feel a little bit happier. In reality, being happier is completely within your control, no matter what situation you’re in. If you want to be happier, then you have to be willing to change your perspective to be more accepting of whatever life may throw at you, while also trying to change the things that aren’t working. If you want to feel happier in no time at all, just follow these steps. But sometimes you just have to do what you think you might need to do or make happen.
In the cover story from the 19th issue of Girls’ Love on the right, two sisters fight to win the affections of an attractive man, with the man ultimately going for the quieter, less disruptive girl who doesn’t chase after him (“Stand-In For Love”). On the left is a panel from a story in the first issue of First Romance, where Cathy (the sweet, docile feminine protagonist) is compared to Chloe (a cowgirl who is rowdy and aggressive and deemed an undesirable woman and wife) (“Love Taught Me a Lesson”).
He redeems us. He lifts us up and crowns us! But the other thing that word “crowned” can mean is sometimes translated “to encircle,” kind of like a crown, but “to surround,” which also makes sense in the context because if he’s exalting us from the pit, surrounding us, encircling us. Then he mentions two different Hebrew words for love, both a kind of love.
The first one is “hesed,” which is God’s covenantal, loyal love. You could you could describe that as commitment love, committed love. He crowns us, he surrounds us. He exalts us to a place of living in his committed, loyal, durable, enduring, steadfast love. The kind of love that does not fluctuate with feelings. The kind of love that does not change whether you have a good day or a bad day or you wake up feeling like a Christian or a pagan. It’s a steadfast, loyal love. He surrounds us with that loyal love.
I had the Young Romance idea coming out of the service. I saw all these adults reading comic books and said, “Jeez, they’re all reading Disney and Donald Duck.” I got together a few pages of True Romance Confession and I thought the girls, the housewives that were reading comics, the housekeepers, the housemaids, everybody who was reading comics would really like to read some adult comics. I showed it to Jack and he loved it.
He committed to be sacrificed. He was rejected and despised while He was alive, and then He willingly died a torturous and agonizing death so that we might experience a relationship with the God of the universe. He did not commit to winning a popularity contest. He did not come to get accolades from men. He knew that this committed love would lead to His death.
It’s all quite simple, the grandmother explained patiently. Before a traditional Hmong wedding, it is required that the groom’s family come and visit the bride’s house, so the families work out a deal, a date, a plan. A chicken is always killed at this time in order to make the families’ ghosts happy. Once the wedding date arrives, a good many pigs are killed. A feast is prepared and relatives come from every village to celebrate. Both the families chip in to cover expenses. There is a procession to the wedding table, and a relative of the groom will always carry an umbrella.
Commitment is what holds a couple together through the ups and downs of life, but it does not necessarily signify love. Love is what makes a person want to keep their commitment no matter what happens, and this may fade in and out during the span of a relationship. Commitment and love combined make a great relationship, but each can form the basis of a working relationship on its own.
“Committed to Love” is a deeply personal one. It details the many issues and experiences I had to confront and deal with in my twenty-five-year marriage to a bisexual man who succumbed to AIDS. The twenty-four chapters in this book range from his diagnosis on June 19, 1992, with AIDS related pneumonia to his death on August 17, 1994. Every aspect of my relationship with Dr. Jeffrey A. Mintz, both as my best friend of thirty-seven years and my husband of twenty-five is explored in explicit detail. The challenge of a marriage under these circumstances was to say the least, both chaotic yet most rewarding. My thoughts about love evoked images of champagne, roses, and chocolates. Yes, I had a lot of all of them in my marriage, but the reality and truth about my life with him was that the word love for me had always meant commitment, unconditional acceptance, and facing every problem with a solution even if I didn’t know what the solution would be.
Exercise regularly. Regular exercise has been proven to make people feel happier and even just 30 minutes of exercise a day can have a significant impact on how happy you feel. You may not want to hit up the gym or go for a quick run when you’re feeling down in the dumps, but that’s precisely what will get you up. If exercising alone is too boring for you, then take a group yoga, dance, or barre class or join a team sport.[6]
5. Look for meaning. Re-frame an event to see the positive along with the negative. Maybe getting fired will give you the push you need to move to the city where you’ve always wanted to live. Maybe your illness has strengthened your relationships with your family. You don’t need to be thankful that something bad has happened, but you can try to find positive consequences even in a catastrophic event.
The cofounder of an Internet startup, Burton spends his days coding in Wi-Fi-enabled cafés and using his AIM Sniffer to keep an eye on all the data traveling over the cafés' networks. Between marathon Java-thrashing sessions, he often finds he wants to introduce himself to "a cute girl with a laptop" but is too shy to make an approach. That's where the Sniffer comes in handy. If a hottie fires up her AOL Instant Messenger client, Burton sees her login name and can send her an IM. "I've gotten several first dates that way," he says. "Women think it's cute when I can make a message pop on their machine as if by magic. Now that so many women are online, it's our chance as geeks to start getting more dates."
Commitment is about being with another person in a relationship, but love is not always necessary. A person may want to be with someone else because they have affection for them, or it may just be a feeling of comfort that motivates them. Being at ease with another person is part of a relationship, and this may suffice for someone to remain with their partner. If formal vows have been taken by the couple, a person may feel responsible for staying together. This does not necessarily signify love or caring, but it does form the basis of their commitment.
So what overarching ideas can we garner from these patterns? Generally speaking, as I said before, the comics came out of a post-war and Cold War culture that prized stability over all else and saw marriage as the foundation of the country’s stability. It makes sense, therefore, that the romance comics—geared toward an audience of young women—would engage in so much implicit finger-wagging, repeatedly pushing messages through their stories that women should mold themselves into a particular breed to appeal to men and desire the life of a happy housewife above all other pursuits.
We Americans often say that marriage is “hard work.” I’m not sure the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work—I’m quite certain they would agree with those statements—but how does marriage become hard work? Here’s how: Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband—more than anything else—is a man who will “inspire” them, which is, by any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on qualities such as “decency,” or “honesty,” or his ability to provide for a family. But that’s not enough anymore. Now we want to be inspired by our spouses! Daily! Step to it, honey!
“Father, I am so thankful that Jesus was totally committed to loving us. I am so thankful for the salvation it brought me. I struggle with being committed like that with others. I confess I do more love ‘contributions’ than I commit to loving others. Change my heart for others that I might learn to commit to loving them. I can only do that through your Holy Spirit in me. Amen.”
By committed, I mean someone who is faithful. Reliable. They’re there for you. The have your best interests in mind. Loyal love can, at times, not feel warm and fuzzy, but it is faithful and committed. Or compassionate love, where there’s a warmth, a feeling. There’s no question that they love you because you can feel their love. But it can be a little more come-and-go in expression.
