Day 83: Hilarious adventures in singing/acting

What went well? 

1. Had the most hilarious rehearsal for Opera Scenes. We were trying out different "story lines" for our characters, and one of the scenarios was me being super intense and obsessive and my lover being kinda creeped out by it. Her [she's singing the role of a guy] expression at one point cracked me up and everyone just started laughing so much. It was the funniest thing ever and I was literally in tears of laughter.
2. Buddhism lecture, interesting, awesome and provocative as usual.
3. Professor Duckworth gave some extremely insightful advice in her positive psychology lecture today, that has actually changed the way I think about writing papers. It was profound. Basically, based on a paper (David, M. S. (1971). That's interesting!: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 309-344), there is a formula for writing an interesting article/essay. Interesting findings or theories contradict accepted facts, beliefs, or opinions. Interest lies in novelty. So the basic structure for an interesting piece of writing would follow a format like this:
• It has long been thought that…
• But this is false because…
• Here is the evidence that this is false…
• The practical implications of this discovery are…

What did I learn? 

• Like any religion, Buddhism can, and has, resulted in violence. Attachment to any views does that.
• You know, the WWW exercise really does work. When I started writing this blog post I was in a really, really bad mood because I actually had quite a mindless day, so I lost my key to my room (so will have to get a lock change). But reflecting on the good and the laughter from the day made me laugh again, and bring some perspective and affective balance back. Overcoming the negativity bias requires active work, but it's kinda more rational - a lot of good stuff did happen today, after all, and that shouldn't be outweighed by a mishap. So, I just changed the title of this post from "Ugh" to "Hilarious adventures in singing/acting".