New Style.

I am borderline obsessed with this website called Thought Catalog. I'm sure I've mentioned it before. Today I read a post that I felt compelled to put on here, mainly because it explains a lot of my absence from writing lately.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/why-its-harder-to-write-when-youre-happy/

It couldn't be more on the money. But it also got me thinking, along with a few other things going on, about being happy and sharing that happiness. I think that people find it easy to bond over the sad things in life. Even the comical things in life are, generally speaking, sad things that we make light of. Look at any stand-up comedian and examine their material: it's usually poking fun at some odd and embarrassing parent, string of bad dates, or complaints about their spouse or boss. Why is it easier for us to talk about our negative life experiences than our positive ones?

I read a lot of blogs every day, and I'm finding- in retrospect- that most of the ones I seek out are inspiring to me on some level. One has pointers on how to navigate through tough times, one girl has my dream closet, another "Tumbls" about outdoorsy adventures that she goes on. I guess it would make sense to say that most of what I seek out is something legitimately uplifting. I'm not sure, then, why I feel so uninspired to write when my life is going well. Shouldn't I have so many positive things to discuss? I feel like all of my posts when I've felt somewhat inspiring have come out of pains that I was working through at the time, so I guess when those pains are passed over I feel like I land in new territory as far as inspirational material. Perhaps this can be a new starting point for my blog... not only finding inspiration from positivism but transcribing that inspiration into words that people want to read. Lets face it- no one wants to read about how much I adore my boyfriend or friends. There's a fine line between sharing and bragging, and I don't want to cross it.

It says in the Thought Catalog entry that people who are happy are more inspired to "do," rather than "react." I totally agree. This is why people become suspicious of the validity of a person's happiness when they over share information to assure people just how "well things are going." There should be a lot of "do" entries in my blog if things are going well. There's a lot of fun things that I have been lucky enough to get to be involved in as of late, and it may be fun to share them as well as give recommendation on how other people can check them out. I guess I should just stop being vague and start writing, no?

It's almost the end of October, which is CRAZY to me. I mean, legitimately crazy. Summer went way too far into the Fall (as expected thanks to living in Southern California), and I'm really excited for it to finally start to cool down. I wrote an article for NiteGuide with a laundry list of activities for Halloween. The best of which, in my opinion, was to hit up Universal Studios Halloween Haunt. If you live in SoCal, this is what you need to do for Halloween. I've gone every year for the past 5 or so years and it is absolutely the most fun thing you can do in the area. Universal Studios is an actual movie studio lot, which means that their make up artists are the ones creating these monsters for the big screen. Needless to say, their costumes are the gnarliest ones out there. They pull out all the stops with their haunt and their mazes and I'd be lying if I said I haven't hidden behind groups of sketched-out tourists in hopes that they would get chased instead of me! The way to do it is to get a VIP Pass, which is about $30 more per ticket but totally worth it. You don't wait in any lines for more than 15 minutes and every year that I've done it I have gotten to go through every maze/on every ride instead of only having time for like 5 things since I'm in each line for 2 hours (please don't check my math on that... I am not there for 10 hour spans of time). Costumes are not allowed, so don't worry about that. And if you need to liquid courage yourself up before the night starts, there's a restaurant in front of the entrance with some awesome drinks (and food, if you're into that sort of thing). Don't miss the Bill and Ted Adventure show because it's hilarious and totally rips on every pop culture thing from the past year... and as positive as I'm trying to be- few things are better than seeing a woman dressed as Britney Spears with a shaved head and carrying her baby by one foot while dancing. I'm just sayin'.

Hopefully you can check this out and if you do, let me know what you thought of it here in a comment! More fun posts to follow. And be patient with me, writing about stuff other than "feelings" is a newbie for me and I'm trying to make it fun without sounding like they're all sponsored posts. In the mean time, check out this video I've had on repeat for like two weeks: