From the Happiness Project on Slate.com

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you've find very helpful?
I tell myself that happiness is not about making good choices or having success; it's about being resilient when we mess up.

Hina Matsuri

Hina Matsuri aka Girl's day aka the Japanese Doll Festival is celebrated every year on March 3rd. Usually, this entails displaying dolls representing royalty on pedestals in your home. According to one of my friends, if you don't remove the dolls by a certain point your daughter will not get married. Thank god there's no such rule about Christmas trees!
I decided to make Hina dolls in my ceramics class. However, my dolls are a bit different. They are beetles. I was inspired by a book of Japanese ceramics that my teacher showed me, in particular a sculpture of a beetle resting on a mushroom.
The other women in my class told me they are 'so original,' which at first worried me because originality isn't exactly a value in Japanese society. I felt better when they took pictures of my dolls on their cellphones. They wouldn't take pictures of them if they were really odd, right?
Also, here are a couple of cups I made in class.

Interesting Article

I've heard of Temple Grandin, but don't know much about Meg Daley Olmert. For me, this article sums up the difficulty I had when I was researching my thesis. A lot of the research being done about our relationship with animals is level-headed and scientific, as I have found Grandin's to be. But there's a great deal of work out there that's romantic, whimsical - whatever you want to call it - and not really useful if you want to make a good argument.

My latest addiction

It is now strawberry season in Japan (actually, it seems strawberries might be on their way out and cherries on their way in, if my assessment of candy flavor trends is accurate), and that means that confronting me every time I enter the grocery store is a huge display full of strawberries. I think that strawberries here are too expensive, so I don't buy them. I am, however, enticed by what's sold next to the strawberries - little tubes of sweetened condensed milk. I can't really remember why I first bought one, but at 158 yen, they're difficult to resist (that's about $1.50). There's something unbelievably comforting about sitting in front of the TV, eating this stuff with a spoon. After I came home one day and ate a whole tube, I decided to find out just how bad for me it was. And look what I turned up!