For live critiquing:

credits
Images: don’t know; didn’t ask
Nonsensical captions: me

Don’t get me wrong: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is delicious–nobody’s saying it isn’t. It’s also ridiculously unhealthy and will kill you if you eat enough of it, but I’m sure that when Mssrs. Cohen and Greenfield started their ice cream shop up, killing people was the furthest thing from their minds. I even believe that the company is, or at least has been, a beacon of responsible corporate citizenship–honestly I haven’t looked at it in great detail since the Unilever takeover a decade or so ago, so I’m not sure whether that’s still the plan or if it’s just the brand strategy.

But notwithstanding delicious ice cream and the good will of the founders, I have always hated the slogan Ben & Jerry’s uses sometimes: “If It’s Not Fun, Why Do It?”

Here’s why:

• Because the kids need to eat
• Because long-term happiness is more important than short-term pleasure
• Because you’ll be glad you did, even though it was difficult at the time
• Because you have a cavity
• Because tequila isn’t good for dogs
• Because it will clear the air
• Because you promised
• Because if you do it enough, it will really pay off
• Because it will help you do fun stuff in the future
• Because they can use your help
• Because the cat box isn’t going to clean itself
• Because integrity is more important (and more satisfying) than fun

I could go on like this all day, but they’re telling me it’s time for my meds. Let me just mention, though, that I’m very much in favor of making things you’ve decided to do fun–it’s practically essential. I’m just not in favor of deciding what’s worth doing based on whether or not it seems easy and pleasant. There’s more to life, right?

A blogger at the Tiny Buddha blog offered a post called “8 Ways to Make Meditation Easy and Fun” at http://tinybuddha.com/blog/8-ways-to-make-meditation-easy-and-fun the other day, and while part of me is still saying “I reserve the right to disapprove of excessive comfiness in meditation,” all in all this post gives me several guidelines I can use, not to mention a little commiseration on the “think the world of meditating but don’t do it as often as I might like” situation (which I’m sure is unique to the blogger and myself).

Recommendations include a hybrid nap-meditation, a 100-breaths meditation, a micro-meditation, and others. I’m always interested in good meditation resources, since I’m really not particularly expert at it (and yet I get a lot out of it even fumbling through as I do). If anyone has other good resources on the subject to suggest, please comment!

This has little to do with willpower or with writing, but it’s worthwhile regardless. Here’s something I read on the site XKCD.com the other day:

"Misconceptions," from the Web comic XKCD.com

Reading it, I was of course intrigued and went straight to the Wikipedia article on “Common Misconceptions,” mainly to see if there could possibly be anything there I didn’t know. Which, uh, there was. A couple of highlights:

• Napoleon wasn’t particularly short
• Pilgrims didn’t wear buckles on their shoes and hats
• Scientists do in fact understand how a bumblebee can fly
• Different flavors are not detected solely on separate areas of the tongue

A couple of these were things I only learned recently (like the lemmings thing, though I had suspected that was made-up for a long time. There’s a gruesome fact in there about Disney, though). One (“People do not use only ten percent of their brains”) is something I’ve blogged about on this site. Highly recommended reading!

On a related subject, in case you don’t already know about it, I’d like to recommend Snopes.com for any time you question an urban legend or get an e-mail that you think might be a hoax. Snopes.com is the one site that I can think of that is so useful that I am willing to go there even though it features a lot of annoying pop-up ads.