Keeping a blog makes me very happy, for many reasons. One reason is that it’s a source of challenge and novelty, which, studies demonstrate, are critical to happiness.
Unfortuantely, along with challenge and novelty come frustration and feeling stupid.
A very kind reader—I’ll call her CB—emailed me to say that when she read my blog in her RSS feed, symbols like “curly quotes” showed up as ???. To help me, she thoughtfully included instructions on two separate ways to fix this problem.
I was so overwhelmed by trying to fix this glitch that I just…did nothing. I didn’t try to fix the problem. I didn’t respond to her email. I just left her message in my in-box, where I’d read it from time to time, and feel guilty and defeated. I didn’t even write her back! Which was so, so rude. This was in early AUGUST!
Yesterday, another reader wrote about the same problem. Okay, I decided, now I really need to get a grip on this.
I went back to CB’s email and tried to see if I could follow her directions. There was something I didn’t understand, about using Wordpad. Remembering one of my Secrets of Adulthood, I told myself, “It’s okay to ask for help.”
So I wrote CB back, apologized for my rudeness, and asked for more help. She answered, just as nice as before. I followed her directions.
So, here goes. If you’re reading this in an RSS feed, does the post look better? Does it look worse? Have I fixed anything?
I hope that CB’s good deed makes HER feel happy – that’s the “Do good, feel good” principle.
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I’m finding Gimundo dangerously addictive — I started reading this post about the importance of scent to happiness, and then clicked from one story to the next for about half an hour. And I’m supposed to be fixing my formatting problem!
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