Sippi Lovin'

I refuse to waste time apologizing for not posting...those who know me well, expected as much. What my brother views as the prostration of our family name, I see as the validation of many years of sporadic letter writing and belated question answering. Fortunately, over the holidays I was able to speak with most individuals who frequented this blog in better times. For those I wasn't able to see, well, I suppose I am a little sorry.

The three week reprieve I had in Minnesota were well deserved and much appreciated. Michelle and I spanned the entire state in her new Accord as we visited her sister and brother-in-law in Rochester, my parents in Bemidji, and the rest of her family (minus Maggie) in Albany. In-between, we managed several runs, dinners, movies, shopping expeditions, parties, a trip to the casino, basketball game, and one or two quiet nights in St. Paul. All the running around, while making for exciting times on the one hand, also sped up the break on the other. As my departure for Mississippi approached, I began to wish we had spent more nights trapped in the dark confines of the apartment whining of boredom and watching the clocks grind to a halt.

Additionally, while home I learned that my distress here in graduate school was more palpable than I'd previously thought. My mother is worried about my mental health, Aaron mentioned that the blog had a distinct freakout quality to it, and I caught Marye watching me on more than one occasion with a worried and motherly look in her eye. (Marye, if I'm misrepresenting you, I apologize...it might have been a tinge of narcissism, which surfaces from time to time.) Yeah, yeah, it's true, times were hard, but I'm doing just fine and plan on taking this one semester at a time.

So, the braces are on now. Well, not exactly...they've put brackets on both the top and bottom teeth, stretching back until the four gaping holes in my smile. Behind those gaps are two teeth, where spacers were placed in between all four sets in anticipation of encircling the tooth just dorsal to the gap with a metal band and having it act as an anchor, drawing the crowded teeth back. Cool, huh?

Earlier today I was perusing through a series of journal articles for my thesis proposal and came across a few that I thought might prove interesting to my readers. Unfortunately, I can't specify the exact thrust of my study within the realm of religiosity research at this time, but today's reading beckoned the following questions...What drives individuals to religion for extrinsic purposes? Furthermore, who is driven to religion for extrinsic purposes? Extrinsic religion is the use of religion for outside ends such as security, status, or solace. Previous research has indicated that individuals scoring high on religiosity measures experience longer lives, greater subjective well-being, volunteer more (if you're African American), engage in fewer risk behaviors, recover more quickly from various surgical procedures, and commit suicide less frequently. Of course, this is a general trend and isn't true for everyone, mediating factors do exist in the relationship, and other less desirable associations, such as reduced openmindedness are also reported. That being said, ample evidence is available supporting future religiosity research. My research would be correlational, which seems to irk some of my peers for reasons unknown and having it anything other than correlational would be highly unethical and troublesome. Altering religious beliefs isn't anything I could ever sneak by the Internal Review Board, nor is it an activity I'd like to engage in.

The last snippet I've got for everyone is a study conducted by Kausar Suhail and Haroon Rashid Chaudhry titled, "Predictors of subjective well-being in an Eastern Muslim Culture." The authors hail from Pakistan and report, among other things, that the mean life satisfaction across nations looks something like this (I've omitted a few for brevity's sake):
On a scale from 1-10 w/ 1 being very dissatisfied and 10 being very satisfied
Bulgaria 5.03
Russia 5.37
Belarus 5.52
Latvia 5.70
Romania 5.88
Hungary 6.03
Japan 6.53
Nigeria 6.59
Korea 6.69
Pakistan 7.07
Spain 7.15
Argentina 7.25
China 7.29
Brazil 7.38
Norway 7.68
United States 7.73
Netherlands 7.77
Canada 7.89
Denmark 8.16
Switzerland 8.36

Later on, the authors write, "Studies conducted in affluent countries have shown a surprisingly weak correlation between income and happiness whereas Diener and Diener have reported a moderate correlation between the two in poor countries such as Bangladesh and India." Continuing on, "It has been pointed out that wealth is like health: Its absence can breed misery, but having it is no guarantee of happiness. In the current study, work satisfaction appeared to be the best predictor of life satisfaction and personal happiness."