Which One Are You? An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

            This is one of the fabled “Boblets,” which I’m beginning to realize are not necessarily going to be shorter than bona fide Bobs.  You think it’s easy rolling the universe into a ball?  Maybe later I’ll condense this a bit and make it into a newspaper piece, but for right now I had something to say about happiness and wanted to say it.

Which One Are You?  An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

            I looked that up and it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln.  That’s a shame, because I’ve always had a soft spot for Abe.  I’d thought it was by Henry Ford and that was fine with me because from the history he already sounded like a jerk.

The quote presumes if you’re unhappy it must be your own fault, and that’s what makes my butt hurt.  Who wouldn’t rather be happy?  You think I like sitting down here in the garden eating worms and sucking entire galaxies into the abyss of my despair?

That’s an exaggeration.  I’m not always a black hole.  Just mostly.  Sometimes I find myself singing on a Saturday morning and realize I’m happy for no reason other than it’s Saturday morning.  But my default mood is a kind of Ain’t-Complainin’ neutral, shifting down toward glum or up toward cheerful depending on circumstances, health and relative humidity. 

Anyway I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought that hard about happiness before, but this has been an awful, awful year and I needed help.  Thus it was that I recently found myself reading a bestseller called The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, a sort of how-to manual on joy.

            I started reading the book with my accustomed negativity.  The first chapter seemed to be mostly about closets.  Hello?  I acknowledge that a reasonable level of tidiness, varying according to individual taste, is necessary for comfort, but how much ecstasy can a woman hope to achieve from a really organized closet?

            That’s the thing about these self-help books, they always mix the homely with the profound.  I remember reading one by the great and fluffy Helen Gurley Brown that admonished you to cherish your friends, because the people who love you are your most precious resource; and to keep rinsing until all of the shampoo is out of your hair.

            Ms. Rubin, though layers less fluffy, deals out similar mixtures:  “Do good, feel good” is side by side with “Bring a sweater.”

            But as I read on I began to understand the practicality of this sort of advice.  Her point about the sweater is that it’s impossible to be happy when you’re freezing.  Physical misery is one of the more basic deterrents to happiness. 

I have noticed this about shoes and certain items of underwear.  I bought a pair of black high heels with adorable little bows during one of my girlier moments.  They’re beautiful but they hurt, and not one day I’ve worn them has been anything less than tragic.  Similarly, some of my unhappiest business days have ended with me thrashing around at traffic lights trying to liberate myself from bras, which are instruments of torture left over from a barbaric past that also brought us the hair shirt and Spanish Inquisition. 

Anyway, physical comfort does contribute to happiness, and the book is full of useful pointers like that.  Take variety:  We think we like it more than we actually do.  If you were to stock up on two weeks’ worth of snacks you might buy everything from burritos to stuffed mushrooms, but if you go to the store each afternoon for something to eat you will almost always come out unwrapping the same Moon Pie. 

The point is, it may well improve your happiness to allow yourself to return from your next shopping trip with eight identical black tank tops if that’s what you wear every day.  Anyone who has ever had a psychotic episode in the light fixture aisle of Home Depot can tell you about the anxiety of too much choice.

Ms. Rubin also urges you to reexamine your basic beliefs – which she calls heuristics or True Rules – not so much to discard the ones that aren’t true as to modify the ones that don’t contribute to happiness.  For example, one of her husband’s – “The first one is not the right one” – is a keeper, she says, because though it’s probably not true it’s a comforting thing to say to a friend who has just been turned down for a job.

            I thought about my own heuristics and was sourly amused to find that most of them had to do with food:  “You can’t unsalt,” and “The only way to win at Captain D’s is not to go in.”  (I stand by that one.)

            I did reframe one of my nongastronomic heuristics to contribute to happiness.  Old:  Everyone hates me because of my vile personality.  New:  Everyone hates me because they envy my fascinating life.  What does it matter which is true?  Now every time another friend dumps me I just clamp my eyes shut and chant:  “Livin’ the dream!”

            Anyway, the most important point of the book was not these little tricks but the idea that happiness is, too, at least partly a matter of will.  One of the tenets of the book is:  “Act like you want to feel.”

            Of course you can’t be happy just by deciding to, but Ms. Rubin says it’s not a bad start; even faking a laugh or forcing a smile for some reason raises the spirits – and then of course you can always try her little tricks.

            Furthermore, she points out, happiness is the socially conscious choice:  Happy people make others happy, whereas unhappy people drag others down.    

I thought about that and it’s true.  I know slightly a young man who’s always happy whatever his circumstances and, rather better, another who’s always miserable.  The train wreck is smarter and funnier and really I like him more, but at worst he says something mean I have to forgive him for (because he’s unhappy) and at best he’s so gloomy I do somersaults to cheer him up.  So it’s actually less work talking to the dumb guy.

So Ms. Rubin’s stance is that pursuing happiness is not just our constitutional right, it’s a virtue.  She cites the case of a young French nun, St. Therese of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925 for little more than what sounded like Extreme Perkiness.  She didn’t lead any armies or get crucified upside down.  She was just real, real cheerful.

One happiness trick Ms. Rubin recommends is reading disaster accounts – you know, the kind of memoir that begins, “I’ll never forget the day I was diagnosed.”  The idea is, they make you feel grateful it isn’t happening to you, and grateful people are happier.

I can attest to that because of the tornados that tore through here in April.  People whose houses were left standing almost universally used the word “blessed” to describe their feelings.  That included me.  In fact, I felt so blessed I didn’t start to whine until precisely the sixth day without electricity or flush toilets.  (That was the day it rained on me while I was burying rotting chicken from the freezer in the front flowerbed.)

But the point was brought home to me more vividly a couple of weeks ago when my husband told me about a fender-bender he’d had on the way to work.  He’d been following too close, he admitted, and when his cell phone rang he rear-ended the car in front of him while he fumbled to answer it.

My husband didn’t think he’d done that much damage but of course he stopped and so did the car in front of him.  The other driver got out and my husband, who had seen from behind that he was very short, now realized he was a dwarf.  The guy walked around his car and all he said was, “I’m not happy.”

“So,” my husband concluded, “I asked him, ‘Which one are you, then?’ ”

Get it?  The Seven Dwarves?  My husband hadn’t had an accident at all, it was just some crap joke he’d read on Facebook.   We were dressed up to go out to dinner and I laughed so hard I cried off all my eye makeup. 

It was only later I realized it wasn’t that damn funny.  I had just been easy to please because the last time my husband admitted he’d followed too close it had cost us $700.

            So.  I’ll conclude by recommending the book, and admitting I’m a convert to this happiness thing myself.  Maybe I’m not genetically predisposed to perkiness, and maybe some rotten things have happened to me in the past year.  But I can anyway try.  

Since the job is open, maybe I’ll be Happy.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays happily in the dirt.  More or less. 

The Gardener and the Market: How Radishes Started Civilization, Or Something

            For out-of-town readers (if I’ve got any):  The Trenton Ingle’s Market was damaged in the April 27 tornados that ravaged our area.  Rumors abound about why it has still not reopened – it rents the space from Soloff, a big shopping-center realty concern, and Soloff ain’t sayin’ either.  But its absence is driving everybody in town nuts.  Or at least your narrator.  One of the only two competitors costs too much, and I’m still mad at them about a chocolate chip cookie in 2009; and the other prominently features preformed yam patties in the meat section.  I ask you.

The Gardener and the Market:  How Radishes Started Civilization, or Something

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You hear a lot of nonsense about how it all began.

Religious people will tell you that everything was made fresh and clean in a matter of days, and scientific ones will bend your ear about fish slowly growing legs and monkeys developing thumbs, leading to an increased ability to manipulate tools and, ultimately, beer cans. 

I’ll tell you what it really was:  It was radishes.

I know this because my neighbors grew radishes one year and gave me a bushel.  I thought it was nice of them at the time but radish by radish I realized it had been an act of desperation. 

See, tomatoes you can can and green beans you can freeze, but the only thing you can do with radishes is eat them until your insides commence to combust spontaneously.  That pleasant peppery little zip they have turns on you after the first dozen or so, blows you up like swamp gas and makes it feel like you are practicing for Hell.

            And then there’s lettuce. 

Lettuce is even more perishable in the garden than it is in the crisper, so during the growing season it’s hard to walk down the road without some hollow-eyed gardener body-slamming you and begging you to take some before it goes to seed.  They call that process  “bolting,” which I find apt because most of your trouble growing lettuce is chasing down people to eat it.

            And what of zucchini?

Zucchini is a vegetable that takes over whole neighborhoods, proliferating furtively beneath its spreading foliage and militantly resisting any effort to control its throbbing Italian fecundity.  Gardeners pushing zucchini tend to be needier even than your radish crowd.

What, then, could be more natural than that these overburdened growers should come together for the mutual good?  That they should develop a system of exchange to ease surfeits and supply deficits?  That someone should take advantage of the crowd and sell hot dogs? 

Thus it was, at the dewy dawn of time, that gardeners unwittingly created the concept of the Market, and thence civilization.

I have mixed feelings about that. 

See, the thing got out of control.  We started turning everything from food to finer feelings into a market commodity.  Hungry?  Buy a burger.  Feel bad?  Buy some pills.  In love?  Buy a ring.  When I was young (she said coyly), that was not the effect that followed that cause. 

            I have a friend who instead of antiperspirant uses a salt stick she gets at a health food store.  The light film of minerals allows you to sweat but mitigates the odor.  My friend uses it because she worries that antiperspirants contribute to breast cancer.

            I wasn’t sure I believed that – what’s the FDA for if not to protect us from products that kill us? – but I decided to err on the side of caution and bought a salt stick myself. 

Then recently I realized I’d had the same one over a year and not much of it was used up yet.  The part that’s gone is mostly through attrition, which is to say dropping it on the bathroom floor.  So it may be around to pass on to my heirs.

            And thinking that, I found myself suddenly believing my friend’s theory.  The Market works best with commodities you use once and throw away, like toilet paper.  What would happen to America if people bought deodorant only once in a lifetime? 

So tumors schmumors, antiperspirant, and the Market, must roll on!   And if you don’t believe FDA allows products that kill people, just look at the diseases that processed food has visited on America’s children.

This past year has been my annus horribilis – that means “horrible year,” by the way, and is not a lead-in to anything else I have to say about toilet paper – but if no other good has come of it, it has showed how little gardens need have with the Market.   

As I dogpaddled morosely around my sea of troubles this spring, basil volunteered from  self-seeding, parsley and sage from roots.  Potato plants sprang from spuds I’d missed harvesting last year.  Eating-size asparagus grew up beside the porch steps and down by the mailbox, ostensibly through spontaneous generation. 

And flowers?  Cleome appeared magically in a spot where I’d grown it several years ago, and in the front border petunias were blooming before I’d quite realized they were even capable of self-seeding.  These are simpler blossoms than the big flashy doubles I had there last year but the colors are beautiful and I love them.    

So when my horticultural fervor finally kicked back in, it was simply a matter of rolling around in the dirt liberating the plants from weeds, neatly illustrating the one overriding message of Bob’s Little Acre:  Gardening is something you do, not something you buy.  

Yes, when I moved here from the big city many years ago, I did so with the idea of escaping the Market.  I wanted to twine flowers in my hair and grow all my own food. 

But when you live at the anal end of nowhere, and work at home, it’s not long before you figure out that the Ingle’s is 75 percent of your social life, and anyway you can’t grow toilet paper.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this column:  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT INGLE’S?  EVERYTHING I NEED, ONE OF THE OTHER GROCERY STORES CHARGES DOUBLE FOR AND THE OTHER DOESN’T CARRY!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!

Ahem.  What I meant to say was, as a nation we must wean ourselves from our pernicious dependency on the Market, in favor of the steely self-reliance of our frontier forefathers.

And above all, we must not plant radishes.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

The Boblet is Born!

Bob goes Blogger:  The Birth of the Boblet, or Essu

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Today in the newspaper I read about Ginger Lee, the stripper who got that politico Weiner in so much trouble.  The crux of the article seemed to be that she was attributed as saying things on her blog about Mr. W. that she in fact hadn’t, but I got confused partway through because I didn’t understand the term “reblog” or, really, even the concept – if it wasn’t something she wrote, what was it doing on her blog?

            The truth is, I know squat about blogging.  It’s too new for me!  I’m a dinosaur that cooks!  In fact, as I typed them just now, the spellchecker highlighted “blog” and “blogging.”  I’m still using a version of Word that doesn’t recognize them as words.

            Yet I am a “blogger.”

            Damn.  Spellchecker didn’t like that one, either.

            My point is this has never been much of a blog.  I started it because I needed someplace to put Bob’s Little Acre that people might actually read it.  I’d been fighting with the newspaper I wrote for to put Bob on their website, and for a while I won:  A desultory collection of my columns may still be viewed in the Sentinel archives.

            But it was never that satisfying.  At the rag, nobody really cared about the Bobs but me, so they would always go up with misspellings in the titles or something else a little wrong that would spoil my pleasure in them.  If I insisted I felt like a prima donna, and in the end I just gave up.  (Since then I gave up all my fights with the newspaper and am much happier as a result – but that’s another story.)

            In any case, the technology, or my tolerance to it, had improved enough by last fall that I was able to post the Bobs online all by my pink self, and that has given me a great deal of pleasure.  Mark Twain said he could live off a compliment for two weeks, but your modern writer lives off “hits.” 

            Though they were pretty dismal at first.  I still remember my joy when I saw I’d gotten up to 15 – and my disgust when I figured out they were all me!  There was an option you had to select so the program wouldn’t count it as a hit when you went in to correct your grammar. 

Bob’s Little Acre has never “gone viral,” but these days I do notice when I’ve written a new one my hits soar for a few days.  That makes me so happy I practically pee myself.

            But the thing is, I can’t write a Bob’s Little Acre every day, or really even every week.  There’s this business of making a living, for one thing, and for another, writing Bob’s Little Acre is hard!

Yeah, yeah, you say, Bob’s Little Acre is frivolous and breezy and mostly about beer, how hard can that be?  Well, go back and read one (she said with icy dignity) and you’ll note they’re tightly organized, that they try pathetically hard to make some pithy point about Reality,  and that in some cases they actually strive to make the world a better place.  Hell, you try it.

When I first got the idea of doing Bob, that idea was to write a gardening column that was funny.  I don’t know what happened!  Sometimes when I get worried about money, or ambitious or something, I try to go back and become a real gardening writer, impart a little useful horticultural information here and there, you know the type of thing, talk about soil acidity, to see if I can’t get other newspapers to take me seriously.

  Fat chance!  Either I see an opportunity to cop a cheap laugh, and go for it every time, or I start imagining the disappointment of the regular reader, searching in vain for some sly double-entendre as I drone on and on about alfalfa or something, or I get clear aim at Big Food, or my brother Frank, and can’t resist taking my shot.

So Bob is what it is, I can’t change its spots.  And I can’t write more Bobs – but here’s my point, I want to write more SOMETHING.  I’ve got topics and topics on lists and lists all over my computer and throughout my notebooks.  The reason you go into writing is you’ve got so much to say, and are flat-chested, so that nobody pays you any mind in person.

            That, and the fact that I’ve given July over for self-improvement, gave me the idea of writing, and posting on this site, much shorter or at least much more general pieces, on a variety of themes, simply because I want to write them and I hope somebody will read them, whether or not they’re suitable for publication in the newspaper or anywhere else.  The caveat is that they shouldn’t rob me of much time in which I’m supposed to be working.  Thus I conceived what I originally called the “essu,” a cross between an essay and a haiku.

A haiku is a poem of a set number of syllables along a central theme.  Haikus compare favorably with other modern poetry in that they are, anyway, short.  Here I cannot help quoting to you my favorite one, a spoof written by Richard Brautigan:

A piece of green pepper

fell off the wooden salad bowl:

so what?
            But since I’ve already learned – I’m now on page 4 of the double-spaced version of this entry – that writing quickly doesn’t always mean writing tersely, perhaps we’d better abandon the “essu” idea and just call these pieces “Boblets.” 

Boblets will not be as studied and organized as Bobs, and they will not work so hard to get a laugh, but there will in any case be more of them – so that maybe this will start looking more like a blog, and I’ll start feeling more like a blogger. 

To that end, I have anyway added the words to my spellchecker.

More soon!

END