Criteria

I am a researcher. It is in my job title. It has been for quite awhile. I've been a research assistant and a research associate. I work in an office with "Research" in the title. I'm actively (some days) engaged in my own scholarly research as an PhD candidate. And, now that you mention it, my research is actually on the behaviors of other researchers. Yikes. I even have a preferred (and, as I've been told, proper) way of pronouncing the word. It's re-SEARCH, not REEEE-search. Just FYI.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about how we measure things. About definitions and goals and outcomes and objectives and criteria. I think about how we operationalize things. I think about common themes. I think about how it all fits together. And this little blog is no exception.

As I mentioned in the kick-off post, I didn't want this blog to turn in to some hodge-podge list of stuff. I don't want it to be a collage of things clipped from magazines and decoupaged onto construction paper. I want it to be MORE than that. Whatever MORE is.

And that's where my brilliant-beyond-brilliant husband came into the picture. Holy crap can that man brainstorm. Wow, is he amazing at generating ideas and making sense of them all. Before I could even imagine writing a paragraph, let alone a sentence, he encouraged me to generate a huge list of all the things that came to mind when I thought of writing a blog like this. And then as we poured over the list, he kept asking me "why this? why that?"...and from all of that hemming and hawing, we came up with a list of 6 criteria.

Ultimately, no matter what we're talking about in life, my rationale for loving/valuing/celebrating most things can be sifted and winnowed down to approximately 6 things. These are the things that will be the criteria for my blog posts. If I take the time to talk about something, it's going to fall in to one (more likely, many) of these categories:

• I love things that are rife with pure, unabashed glee.
• I appreciate in others, and strive for personally, optimism and enthusiasm about one's place in the world.
• When things contribute to the public good, my heart sings.
• Maybe it's being an oldest child, or spending too much time in school, but true wisdom and intelligence really humble me.
• There is virtually nothing in life that can't be laughed at. Humor, especially smart humor, makes my world go 'round
• Above almost all, I value sincerity. The starting-to-turn-yellow pages of my Random House thesaurus (with the GRE words highlighted in pink) also refer to it as "free from pretense." Or unaffected. Or real, honest, natural, genuine, authentic, ingenuous, earnest. Yes. Yes to all of them.

And there you have it. Now we can finally get started!