I tend to walk around with a pretty stern look on my face. I’d say it was because of my taciturn New English upbringing, but I grew up in Wisconsin, which is not exactly Vermont. On a recent visit, though, I found that I was the only person greeting strangers with a “Good morning” or “Good afternoon,” and in many cases I got no response. So I’d like to think my taciturn, guarded nature is a product of my raising, although I spent almost as much time in Missouri as Wisconsin in those formative years (hence saying “product of my raising”).<\/p>\n
“Are you smiling?” my beautiful wife asked. She has a much easier smile than I do. If I try to put on a smile, it’s a bit crooked and put me into a better mood like the Internet pop psychologist say it should.<\/p>\n
So I’m going to try to start mentally marking one thing a day that makes me smile, and to think of that all day so I can say, “Good day,” with a genuine smile instead of a rictus grin.<\/p>\n
So, yesterday. Wait: Let me go back a bit. On Tuesday night, I rented a couple of films: Parker<\/em> and Riddick<\/em> because apparently, I’m inspired by bald action heroes. Although, to be honest, so many of us are bald these days. Am I including myself in the list of bald action heroes? You bet I am.<\/p>\n So I said on Facebook:<\/p>\n My fitness goal: To life enough weights that people think I look like Jason Statham instead of Paul Bettany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, yesterday, I hit the gym for my first workout in two weeks? Three weeks? And there’s this guy there with the five o’clock shadow on his head and face at 9:00am (is there a name for the haircut which is the five o’clock shadow on the head?). He’s holding a twenty-five pound bar bell weight in front of him with both hands, arms extended, and he’s turning it like a steering wheel.<\/p>\n I thought maybe it as The Transporter<\/em> workout.<\/p>\n You see, because Jason Statham was in that film, and he drove a car, and one should work those muscles in case the power steering goes out, and….<\/p>\n Well, all right, it’s less funny when I explain it, but it made me smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I tend to walk around with a pretty stern look on my face. I’d say it was because of my taciturn New English upbringing, but I grew up in Wisconsin, which is not exactly Vermont. On a recent visit, though, I found that I was the only person greeting strangers with a “Good morning” or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-made-me-smile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16637,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16636\/revisions\/16637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}