JONATHAN TERRANOVA

That’s right. Facebook is Rick Rolling the masses for April Fools Day. If you have the application “Friends For Sale!” then you will see “April 1st, 2008. Today’s Bonus: $10,000.” Click on it and you’ll see this…

Kudos to Facebook. I did not see that coming.

I happened to stumble upon Kevin Sites series, “In the Hot Zone.” While watching some of his clips on Yahoo NEWS I began to get a feel of what he is trying to do, that so many media outlets are not - report the news without any partisan agenda. So a big Thank You to Kevin Sites and Yahoo NEWS for reporting and posting the facts.

One video that stuck out in his series was “From the Marines to Al Jazeera.” It is an interview with Josh Rushing, who quit his 14 year position in the Marines to become a reporter for Al Jazeera. It was a great video and I felt that I needed to post it on here. Please, watch it for yourself because you definitely won’t hear anything said in this video on Fox News. You may also want to view the rest of videos from the series. Each week they add a new chapter. As of today, they are on Chapter 13, so I have quite a bit to catch up on.

I happened to see on T.V a few weeks ago this person discussing happiness and our obsession with it. It was perceived as generally American. The show I watched also discussed the historical Christian belief that happiness was achieved through death. Only God can grant you true happiness, in heaven, and it was something to strive towards in your mortal life. Our obsession with being happy is displayed in our dialogue. How many times have we heard “just be happy about it” or “don’t worry, be happy?” This may seem trivial, but I started to really think about what happiness is and how Americans perceive it.

Now, maybe I became more subconsciously aware or it was just coincidental, but the idea of being happy has come up in conversation a lot lately. Various people I know, who don’t know each other, have spoken to me about it. So, I decided to write this.

I believe that every person, regardless of their nationality or heritage, wants to be happy. As Americans though, we have been force fed this idea that if you are not happy then you should be. This endless pursuit leads to depression. Mind you, these are my opinions, but it seems that in our culture, not being happy means being depressed. We strive to be happy, always. Some of us even take medications for it. Our pursuit of happiness is making us unhappy. As if we cannot be content with our lives. It seems like nobody is content anymore and if you are, then you will most likely here, “why are you not happy?” or “you should be happy.”

If I was happy all day, every day, then what would I feel when something great happens; Amazing? I thought that true happiness was an ultimate feeling. It could possibly be our over usage of the word. Maybe it was the “extreme” marketing blitz by advertisers a few years ago. Everything became so “extreme.” Our sports, drinks, chips, whatever had to have an extra kick to it, as if to say, “bigger is better”. Or I could be over thinking this part.

The pursuit of happiness is what is depressing us as a nation. We may be content, but since we are not happy we relegate our feelings. We believe we should be happy, always. Being content won’t do, so we become depressed about it. We start to believe things are worse then what they really are. We start to resent our job, apartment, significant other, whoever or whatever we can blame for not being “happy.” We take things for granted all the time. Maybe we are beginning to take ourselves for granted. If you have your health, you should consider yourself lucky. Most people forget that there are 45 million Americans without health insurance. If you are an American, there is always someone, somewhere who has it worse than you.

I am not sure when being content was “not good enough?” Somewhere along the line, happiness became a right. Don’t get me wrong, people should have happiness in their lives. Most people do, but they minimize it because that feeling is not always there, like they think it should be.

The more I think of it, the more I realize we do the same thing, but in the opposite direction. Although it may not be as much, we have seemed to forget about sadness. Sadness has become depression for the most part. We have simplified our feelings to either being happy or depressed.

I don’t really have any conclusion to this. It’s just a thought of mine that helped me to understand my perception of happiness. It has enabled me to truly appreciate those few moments of true happiness, when nothing else matters and all of your worries fade away. Hopefully you will get something out of it too.

For those of you that do not know, today www.writemaps.com turns 1. My buddy Scott designed this great application to Create, Edit, and Share your sitemaps online. It is a great tool for anyone who works with websites. I am excited to see all of the new developments that have been implemented this past year and I am looking forward to the future of this application. If you do not have an account, sign up and check it out. It is free and he only shares the e-mails with me, so I can spam you guys. Just kidding. So, congratulations to Scott for his great application and Happy Birthday Writemaps.

I arrived home the other night. Things have been really busy, but I wanted to update this blog. In short, I could not connect to the internet while I was over seas, so I willl try to re-cap my trip another day. All of my applications have been sent out for graduate school, except for one. It will remain nameless, but it was the only school that still had a strict “slides only - no exceptions” policy.

My trip ran the full gamut of human emotion. Experiencing places of holy worship to traveling through the poorest place I have seen in my life, truly grounded me. I came back a more humble person. I have been to places some people only dream about and tried to take in every moment. With that all said, I have a lot of new material for my photomontages. When things get settled down I am going to start putting together my images.

The 6-7 hour time difference is a lot worse now than when I was over seas, so I am still trying to get adjusted. For now, I am going to get some rest. Here is a photo from my camel ride through the deserts of Giza, Egypt. Definitely one of my favorite experiences.

This is my first blog entry and the opening day of jonathanterranova.com. New site, new year…almost. Anyway, I’ll post some entries soon enough. This is just filler info for now. I’m still making some adjustments to the blog, but they are only cosmetic. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.

December 26th: All modifications to the design are done….