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What makes you happy?

10/6/2014

Today I’ve finished the 100 Happy Day Challenge! The idea is to take a photo of something that made you happy that day, every day for one hundred days and to share your photos online.

It was a really lovely thing to do and a friend commented that she will miss my photos when I've finished so she has inspired me to continue doing it. I’m not sure I’ll do it every day but my goal is to post 1000 Happy Photos!

Here’s a collage of the photos I took…

And this is what I wrote for today’s 100th photo…

It’s interesting to look back on them all and to realise just what makes me happy – there were lots of photos of either sending or receiving Letterbox Joy (of course!), many taken at the beach or of trees or the moon or random naturey things, many involving food and champagne and friends (one of my favourite combination of happies!), quotes and words (some written on eggs) but not many involving ‘stuff’ at all which is really lovely and very fitting for The Year of More.

No photos of dresses or shopping… most of it was about connection or experiences that brought happiness into my life – even if it was something small like watching the bush turkeys playing in the yard at the school I work at.

Or hand feeding a goat

Or the timing of having a key to open the bike shed so a young boy’s bike didn’t have to spend a long cold night locked up all by itself

Or picking up friends from the airport who had flown up to help celebrate my birthday with me

Or playing with a new Dymo machine a friend and I are co-parenting as we’re both creative nerds!

Or when the lady behind the counter in Officeworks pointed to my Audrey Hepburn pendant and said ‘Is that you?’ (Yes, she was wearing glasses but it was still The Best Compliment Ever!)

Or my weird nerdy little habit of writing messages on eggs

Or having time off work approved so I can go to New York next year - Super Exciting Stuff!!!

Or the excitement of discovering an envelope in my Letterbox

Or preparing to send something super special to other Letterboxes around the world

Or the smell of freshly cut grass outside my office

Or The Utter Joy of Words and Books

Or that I simply had a day in which I didn’t have to drive anywhere

Or some foot photos to add to my collection

Or pulling over to chat to the cows

Or immense Celebration Joy

And last, but definitely not least, is my passionate love affair with the theatre...

I currently have three theatre tickets on my fridge – one is for a play in a couple of weeks called ‘Love Letters’ (thereby combining two of my great loves, Letterbox Joy and Theatre Joy!), 'Wicked' tickets for my trip to Melbourne at the end of June and a ticket to see the stage adaptation of the book ‘1984’ (where Big Brother originated for those who don’t know that piece of trivia) which was quite confronting for my sixteen year old self when I first read it in Year 10 English Literature class, way back in 1984.

What joy-filled plans do you have coming up?

Joyful hugs,

K xo

‘Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.’ Marcus Aurelius

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Do women really need dresses?

2/6/2014

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I own 46 dresses.

Forty-six.

That’s an awful lot of dresses for one woman to own.

I’m not even sure a woman actually ever ‘needs’ one dress – surely any article of clothing would suffice if the need were simply to cover one’s body? Even if the purpose extends to warming the body or celebrating a special occasion, we don’t actually need a dress in order to do that. Society has dictated (in my culture at least) - and we have willingly followed along for centuries - that women should be covered head to foot in a white dress as a requisite to entering into marriage.

But surely a pair of pants and a shirt would suffice? Or a bikini? Or a tastefully placed scarf? A rather large tastefully placed scarf perhaps.

I only have a very teeny tiny amount of Bride DNA so I’ve often been left flabbergasted during conversations about the cost of weddings and in particular, how much money women spend on wedding dresses. The rather large amount of Travel DNA I have happily residing in my body takes over and automatically calculates where in the world that amount would take me. A $1,000 dress has me washing elephants in Thailand, a $2,000 dress and I’m off to the theatre on Broadway, a $3,000 dress and I’m happily sipping margaritas in a Mexican hammock. And anything above that is an Around the World Ticket, which I am yet to experience purchasing.

Despite the fact we can (and some women do) get married wearing anything we please, most women wouldn’t dream of getting married in anything other than a dress. I certainly didn’t. It honestly didn’t even cross my mind not to wear a dress. And if that can happen to me, a woman of the Low Bride DNA variety, surely it can happen to anyone.

I was talking to a woman on the weekend about wedding dresses and how Outrageously Expensive They Are. Let’s call this woman Sally to protect her right to not have her level of Bride DNA shared across the internet without her prior knowledge or permission.

Sally, was telling me that she fell in love with a dress that cost $2,700 (which is almost the price I paid for my first car) and that at 47 years of age, she couldn’t see the value in spending That Much Money On a Dress, which let’s face it, you wear for about 10-12 hours if you’re lucky (unless you party in it until 4am like I did! But more about my wedding dress in a moment.) Anyway, she didn’t buy the dress when she first tried it on but after her niece had a rather disastrous experience with the dressmaker Sally was planning to use, she ended up back at the same bridal boutique. She told herself it was to look at cheaper dresses. Which is of course, like going to the bar your ex frequents after you’ve broken up. It’s never going to be a wise decision.

As retail fate would have it, Sally's dress was on sale.

For $1,500.

And any woman reading this, who has ever fallen in love with an item of clothing but didn’t initially buy it because she couldn’t justify the price, and has then seen that item on sale, will understand what happens next.

I’m not sure of the scientific term but our brain does something a little bit kooky and it completely forgets all about the Cost to Value argument it completely understood and believed in earlier. And we go ahead and justify spending the sale amount. Even if it’s still outrageously expensive and more than the budget we had originally set ourselves. (Kooky Brain Activity trivia: house buying also brings on a similar brain kookiness, which can be witnessed at auctions across the world on any given weekend.)

And this is exactly what Sally’s brain did. Her budget was $900 but she still bought the dress for $1,500.

Any woman in this situation leaves the store happily uttering these words…

I remember saying the exact same thing to Mum after I bought my wedding dress. It was on sale and cost me $500 (it was 1994 and this was on the cheapish side of wedding dresses even back then – the girls at work were spending in the thousands, and we were all secretaries who weren’t exactly earning a lot of money). That’s when I first suspected I Wasn’t Like Other Women when it came to weddings. Although you’d think I would have figured that out when I refused to spend more money on an engagement ring than we’d spent on a fridge.

After I got over the brief excitement of telling Mum I’d found My Dress, I then stood there in shock and said ‘I’ve just spent $500 on a dress I’m Only Going To Wear Once!’ It seemed absolutely absurd to me that even I was capable of being swept up into the Wedding Vortex. I made up for this perceived wedding madness by not having a bridal party and not seeing my flowers or cake until The Big Day. Which was actually quite easy as we were getting married on an island so I simply ordered everything by fax and blindly trusted that the people at the other end knew what they were doing.

I’d like to pause here to acknowledge that those of you with really high levels of Bride DNA may be finding this quite difficult to read right now. My apologies. It might help if you think about baby's breath and a string of matching satin gowns for a minute before you keep reading.

Here’s a link if you need a bit of extra support… http://www.vogue.com.au/brides/

Those with an excessively high amount of Bride DNA, may need to venture here… http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/a-bride-actually-tied-her-newborn-baby-to-her-wedding-dress?bffbnews&s=mobile

This is a link to a story about a woman who tied her four-week old baby to her wedding train.

I kid you not. Seriously, I couldn’t possibly make up something like that!

I bought my wedding dress (Long, White and An Airfare to Perth) on Christmas Eve after my work Christmas lunch (first sign of a Bride DNA anomaly). So I was a little inebriated during said purchase (second sign…). I was also sans Mother of the Bride and any girlfriends (third sign…) as I was on my way to the train to go home. I bought the first dress I tried on (fourth sign…). I know many women buy the first dress they try on but they usually then try on others after that to make sure they’re making the right decision.

A High Bride DNA day indeedy

Not me. I tried it on, liked it, and put a deposit on it right away. Why try on others when I knew this dress was The One? Besides, I had a train to catch remember (Bridal Vogue… Bridal Vogue…). The lady in the store was fascinated by me; perhaps she’d only ever read about Low Bride DNA women in Scientific Bridal Journals and seeing one in real life was endlessly intriguing to her. She said I was the only person she’d ever known who had bought a wedding dress on Christmas Eve, as though I should take that particular piece of information on board for future reference. She also kept asking annoying High Bride DNA-related questions:

Are you sure you don’t want to try on 15 more dresses?

Are you absolutely positive you don’t want to wear a veil??

Are you sure you don’t want to bring your Mum and bridesmaids back in with you???

Don’t you want me to take a Polaroid of you in the dress so you can at least show them???? (I finally let her take a photo which had her giddy with tulle-flavoured excitement).

Are you sure you don’t want a dress with a train she asked eagerly after I’d succumbed to the photo-shoot????? (She didn’t laugh when I said I would be on one in a few minutes time).

Did I love wearing the dress? Yes.

Did I regret paying $500 for it? Absolutely not.

Do I know where the dress is right this very minute? Not a clue.

Would I pay the equivalent of that amount if I were to get married again? Not in a million years.

Surely, with inflation, that amount would at least get me a week in Hawaii??

So, like my wedding dress, these 46 delightfully colourful and textured items currently hanging in my wardrobe were all most definitely ‘wants’ rather than needs. At some point, I bought them, one lovely dress at a time, because I really liked them, and perhaps with a few, I genuinely thought it was love.

But I only actually remember buying a few of them: A black and green dress I had made in Thailand for a friend’s wedding, the beautiful flowered dress I bought to wear to Mum’s funeral and the Little Black Dress I bought in New York, which sadly is now better known as the Too Little To Be Worn Black Dress.

Mostly I have no recollection whatsoever of where I was when I bought most of these dresses. Some things just aren’t significant enough to remember. What I do remember however is where I’ve worn them.

I’ve celebrated and laughed in them at friend’s parties, I’ve cried and hugged in them at funerals, I’ve danced in them at weddings, I’ve excitedly sat down in them at the theatre, I’ve felt nervous and self-conscious in them on dates, I’ve tenderly folded them to take travelling, I’ve volunteered in them at events, I’ve worn them to the beach, to lunch, to the movies, to work.

What I’ve discovered is it’s not the dress that’s important. It’s what you do wearing the dress that brings you joy. I could have been wearing the same dress on all of these occasions – or I could have been wearing jeans and a t-shirt - and the delight, love and pleasure I experienced each and every time, would not have been lessened by what I was wearing or not wearing.

And I know that not buying Dress No. 47 for another year will not in any way diminish my happiness, joy or contentment.

And I know with Dress No. 47, it will most definitely be love.

Joyful hugs,

K xo

‘Joy is not in things, it is in us’. Richard Wagner

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This is me

Hi, I’m Karen Young and I live on the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Australia. I'm a passionate, nerdy, loud, quirky introvert who loves words, elephants, people, the beach, champagne, chocolate, sunsets, trees, travel, books, Joy of every kind but especially Letterbox Joy, Writing Joy and Theatre Joy. I adore being inspired to Live More, Love More and Be More. I love fiercely and hurt deeply. I make mistakes, lots and lots of lots of mistakes! And I learn from most of them although some lessons seem to take me a lifetime to learn so Life is most definitely a constant Work In Progress xo

What makes you happy?

Do women really need dresses?

This is me

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