I seem to have a lot in common with Gretchen Rubin. Writing. Living in an urban setting. A tendency to be irritable. Would usually rather read than do almost anything else. A sense of wasting my life, letting small details of getting through the day override the greater aims I have. But I really knew I would like her book The Happiness Project when she started talking about Benjamin Franklin.

Ever since I first read Franklin’s Autobiography in undergraduate school, I have thought about his habit of tracking his habits as a tool toward self improvement. I remember the other students and the professor in my American Literature class mocking Franklin for keeping track of his “errata,” but thinking how much it reminded me of something I might do. But it never occurred me to actually try this method until Rubin’s book.

I have created a chart on a piece of paper that has the days of the week in columns, and the elements of my life I would like to make sure I accomplish down the side of the page. Eating breakfast, flossing, walking, reading poetry are all there. I also have some specific goals in terms of writing, socialization and business development listed. I quickly saw how this was a great tool for helping me focus my time, and make sure that I actually make time for the things I consider important but have been actually doing in a haphazard fashion.

Gretchen Rubin is also a great motivator because she details her own weaknesses, her failings, her perfectionism. Similar types of books have been off-putting to me in the past because they seem so high-minded. Here is someone showing her own imperfections while nudging us to improve our own.

Rubin also focuses on what she calls “Being Gretchen,” and is essentially a great place for all of us to start: focus on the things you like to do, are good at, and in work with your natural inclinations. Diets, exercise programs, and other setups to change habits frequently ask us to take on some imposed structure that goes against our natural inclinations. For writers, I think this is an important meditation in terms of how we write. there are so many books and websites out there about how to develop a writing discipline, how to write a book/novel/poem/how to blog/how to journal/etc. and, really, when you study the great writers in all of those genres, they each have their own idiosyncratic way of approaching the task.

Rubin also is very good at combining factual research with her own personal experience, creating a balance between expertise and real life. Nobody really likes a know-it-all who seems to have all the answers; we relate better to someone who eats junk food, snaps at her family,and wishes to change but doesn’t really want to be different person.

Gretchen Rubin’s blog is : http://www.happiness-project.com

I’ve learned so much about food and cooking from watching cooking shows on television. As a teenager I would watch and long to be able to make the kinds of recipes being shown; dreamed of having a fancy kitchen, a professional mixer or food processor. Kathleen Collins has made a very detailed study of how those shows have changed over the decades of television history, and how those shows have influenced those of us who like to cook and eat.

The history of television cooking shows is much longer and richer than I could have imagined. Some of the earliest shows sound like some of the crazy Food Network shows on now. And it is interesting that throughout the entire history of cooking on television, here has been a voyeuristic quality and also a  vicarious quality. In other words, we love watching others cook thins we know we will never cook ourselves. And yet I think a regular viewer of these shows learns about cooking and technique, much like watching someone cook in a kitchen , but because television cooking shows are such controlled and “chopped up” presentations, they do not teach how to plan a meal, how to cook a whole meal or party so all the food is ready at the same time. They never teach you about cleaning up, or planning your shopping and menus so you don’t have a lot of waste.

Food is entertaining becuase it is part of all of our lives, and have used the cooking shows to help live  out and shape our fantasies of the ideal life. Collins does a great job of showing how these shows have excelled at that and captured the moving target of the American Dream over the last fifty years.

This book was a great find, especially great for winter reading during the recent snow storm. The book combines a discussion of plants that grow in the city with city history. But the book is not nearly as dry as that makes it sound. The book is filled with descriptions of pastoral scenes, descriptions of varieties of plants, of famous gardens of the past, of eccentric gardeners. White’s style is especially effective in conveying a sense of connection among people who have gardened and loved gardening in Philadelphia over the last few centuries. She achieves this way of making history come alive by anchoring in her own life experiences. The book reads like a sort of formalized journal that wanders off into the lives of other people. Woven expertly into these contemporary explorations are the stories and exploits of people of the past.

When White writes, toward the beginning of the book, “The more I live in my corner of Philadelphia, the more it seems that the city is an extensive garden, a bit wild in parts” (p.4). For someone living in Center City, that is a great eye-opener; beauty and nature are all around us, even in what seems to be the most urban settings. All we have to do is open our eyes and see it, whether it is plants growing in a hidden spot, or a sense of the past and what has come before.