“What?” I say.
Clare explains matter-of-factly that over the past few years her books have seemed to sell less and less well, she is not even that excited about writing them anymore, her husband’s business is thriving now anyway, she’s sick of feeling guilty about not writing, and what she has become interested in instead is the subject of happiness.
Happiness?
“Stop it, Kyle,” she says to her son. “Happiness! Yes! I’ve started to do all this reading, and it’s pretty fascinating. For instance, the World Health Organization has done this massive study across five continents. Turns out most affluent nations—not just ours—have higher rates of depression than poorer ones. Isn’t that interesting? There’s also this National Geographic guy named Dan Buettner who’s been studying what he calls ‘blue zones’—the world’s happiest cities and villages. Not only are ‘strong social bonds’ key to happiness, also key—check this out—is minimizing things you don’t enjoy. Top three least favorite activities of all people around the globe? Ding, ding, ding! Child care, commuting, and housework!”
“Oh my God,” I say, “that’s exactly our lives. Or at least 50 percent of mine. So what’s my excuse?”
“No, no, no, Kyle!” I hear Clare exclaim. “No! You’ve had two already! Anyway,” she continues, “there’s also this thing called ‘the paradox of declining female happiness.’ This was a Wharton School study where, using thirty-five years of data, economists found in spite of educational and employment advances, women were actually becoming less happy rather than more.”
“That’s depressing. So what does one do?”
“Well, of course you can change your point of view. I looked at one book called Stumbling on Happiness. It was all about quieting the mind and letting happiness come to you, but it seemed too Zen.”
“Yeah, sure, meditation. No.”
“I do better with more of a project,” she says. “It’s more motivating for me to think of happiness as something I have to hunt down with a club, kill, chop into pieces, and drag home. That’s the idea behind this New York Times best-selling book called The Happiness Project. Not the chopping and killing part, but where you literally make happiness into a project. The author, Gretchen Rubin, says that there are plenty of us moms who have good jobs and healthy kids and supportive partners but we still feel this sort of malaise. Phew. So it’s not just me. She begins the memoir sitting on a bus, looking out a rain-splattered window and wondering why her life feels so flat, and when I read that page I said, Bingo, that’s my kind of book!”
I’M RELIEVED to hear someone talk about chasing the blues away in such a rigorous proactive way.
Clare and I decide we will both do happiness projects, and we will apply the same discipline to them as when we were writing books. Which is to say we will meet once a week and hold each other strictly accountable. We are going to strap on trek shoes and fill water bottles and, dammit, we’re going to get this happiness thing done.
This morning I am already mightily cheered simply to be sitting on her familiar tan leather couch in her familiar cozy den framed with her familiar light boxes of cheerful garden windows. I like her kids well enough, but I couldn’t be more glad they’re at school right now.
This is great. This is great.
Just the act of smartly pulling out matching yellow legal pads is a reassuring Pavlovian exercise. Tearing off the plastic is a restorative act. Pilot pens are out, herbal tea mugs are filled, and it feels like our lives, like rivers, are coursing forward.
Clare puts on her glasses and begins reading: “A ‘happiness project’ is an approach to changing your life. First is the preparation stage, when you identify what brings you joy, satisfaction, and engagement, and also what brings you guilt, anger, boredom, and remorse.” Clare looks at me. “Guilt, anger, boredom, remorse. What brings them?”
“Ugh,” I sigh. “What doesn’t?” The truth is, I feel so shaky these days anything can tip me over.
“Well, of course,” I admit, “there are the usual quotidian irritants that can suddenly cause the elevator to drop. The overflowing laundry basket, this recent bill for two thousand dollars in back taxes I just got from the IRS, the continual both urgent and completely-impossible-to-understand-in-way-too-tiny-a-font missives from my daughter’s schools . . . ‘Fundraising! Jogathon! Gift wrap! Book drive! Book drive for the Jogathon! Jogathon for the book drive! And also bring lemons! Very important that we have the lemons!’ What lemons?
“More puzzling, though, are those things that aren’t by nature sad but that still cause the floor to fall out. For no reason at all.”
Clare empathizes, and we decided to call them “gloomlets.”
However trivial, we make up our lists.
Sandra’s Gloomlets
The sound of the voice of this particular classical music DJ we have here in Los Angeles named Jim Svejde—used to love it; now it fills me with an unutterable suffocating sadness
My eleven-year-old’s wish to become a contortionist for Cirque du Soleil—I fear her dreams will be crushed in the big competitive dog-eat-dog world of . . . contortionism (?)
The color yellow
This show on the Food Network called Pioneer Woman
I really don’t have any great shoes, and this absolutely frustrates me
All manner of muffins (aka can’t have)
Puppies
Vivaldi
Wall calendars from my realtor or from the bank—feels like a used-car salesman actually drove a 2007 Ford Fiesta with a sagging muffler over my grave
The food samples at Trader Joe’s—so limited, always so disappointing
The color yellow—did I say that already? The color yellow? I have no attention span
Clare’s Gloomlets (and “I don’t know why I’m overidentifying with the downward arcs of celebrities, but . . .”)
The fact that Dr. Phil is just not as amazing as he once was—now his show just seems kind of trashy
Speaking of which, the fall of Oprah; thought she was invincible—she keeps putting it out there, but can’t escape the fact that golden age is gone
Cilantro
Smell of cilantro
Spelling of the word “cilantro”
The kind of Lean Cuisine that has only pasta and vegetables
The fact that cake pops are so tiny and yet they are 170 calories each
I am curious as to how depressed Clare has actually been, since experiencing the writer’s block and hopelessness around her latest book.
“Oh my God,” she says. “The massive night eating, the drinking—Scotch, why am I now suddenly drinking Scotch?—and weirdly enough, it sounds strange, but—”
“But what?”
“Computer Solitaire.”
Oh well. I assured her that everyone does that.
“But I mean it’s bad,” she says. “Some days I will play so much my fingers ache. I’m saying literally so much I will look up at the clock, see two hours have vanished, and I’ll be so depressed by the gigantic waste of time I’ll immediately think about having some Valium. This is before ten in the morning.”
“Well, look,” I say. “Even Jonathan Franzen has admitted to a Solitaire fetish. Presumably his close friend David Foster Wallace did not have a Solitaire fetish, but sadly look how that turned out. Perhaps, in fact, Solitaire is the only thing keeping us going. Perhaps being addicted to Solitaire puts us into a kind of emotionally healthy Jonathan Franzen camp, as opposed to a not-able-to-experience-pleasure-at-all David Foster Wallace camp.”
So I manage to convert even that into a win. What can I say? We are flailing. We are taking this happiness thing one day at a time.
“Anyway—good—great,” Clare says, tearing her list off her tablet. “Gretchen Rubin says that’s just the first half of the process. The second is, and I quote, ‘the making of resolutions, when you identify the concrete actions that will boost your happiness.’ As evidenced by Rubin’s subtitle: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sin
g in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.”
“Fun,” I wonder aloud. “Yes. Whatever happened to fun?”
“At one time, if I recall, you had yourself a bit too much of it.”
“That is true.”
“But here’s the thing.” Clare leans forward, her voice dropping. “Outside of a rip-roaring affair, which you had, and which was fun for a moment before it became absolutely horrible, have you ever noticed how often the adult things that are supposed to be ‘fun’ really aren’t? Adult ‘mixers,’ for instance. Don’t you dread them? Or the beach. Yikes!”
“Or certain holidays.”
“Or holidays on the beach. Like Fourth of July.”
“The worst.”
“The parking, the shlepping, the Gladware.”
“The fireworks’ too-loud booms and the sand in the undies and the hysterical exhausted children.”
“Farmer’s markets,” she says. “On what planet is that a fun weekend activity? Alan—” her long-suffering husband “—took us to one the other week. First I always think: We’re going to the fair, the fair, the fair! But then I always find, on approach to those tents—those sort of self-satisfied, pointy little blue tents—I actually feel dread. Dread! Why? Because it’s the Lucy-and-the-football thing over and over again. I always look eagerly toward the first line of booths as though I’m going to see something Willy Wonka wonderful, but oh no, it’s just piles of bok choy. Bok choy and turnip greens and broccolini, the very things I try to avoid at restaurants. There is too much organic produce. Why am I pawing through all this produce?”
“Well, it is a farmer’s market,” I say. “It’s what farmers sell.”
“Sure,” she says. “I get that now. But as I’ve found, the high point of farmer’s markets has nothing to do with farmers. The high point is the Julia Child moment—”
“Oh no, not even the Julia Child moment but the Meryl Streep playing Julia Child moment—”
“Oh no—next level,” she says “The Meryl Streep playing Julia Child in a Nora Ephron movie moment, when you select some artisanal vegetable that will be part of some amazing transformative dish you’re actually never planning to cook. Three weeks later, as usual, you’re pitching all those weeping brown legumes into the garbage. Summer squash? Mustard greens? Organic heirloom Japanese tomatillos? Why do I want these? Why would anyone? Who have I become?”
“Exactly,” I say.
“What about Kickstarter?” she adds, shrilling higher. “Pardon me, but I don’t want to hear about anyone else’s Kickstarter. The album, the play, the film—why is funding everyone else’s creative project suddenly up to me?”
“That’s right,” I agree. “There used to be another word for Kickstarter. It was called ‘grandparents.’ ”
We embrace the notion of a happiness-boosting field trip, which will involve shopping but—here’s the key, we decide—not at any depressing stores.
“I can’t face Michael’s,” I say. “I’ve been there too many times on emergency scavenger hunts working off fourteen-item lists for my daughters’ awful school projects. The fiberboard, the dowels, the button eyes, the glue guns.” One of our most notorious escapades was Hannah’s fourth-grade “California mission,” when, while trying to affix the lopsided bell tower, with a scream I accidently jammed a toothpick into my thumb, resulting in the project’s new moniker: “Mission of Blood.”
“No Michael’s,” Clare agrees, shivering. “I friggin’ hate that place. We’ll go to the fancy German-named art store we never allow our children to enter because everything costs three times as much.”
Seizing the moment, we fill up our water bottles, jump into her Prius, and immediately:
Go to Blau’s to buy Clare some clay for sculpting (“I’ve never sculpted!” she declares, “I want to sculpt!”).
Go to the music store to buy sheet music for Clare to learn to sing the entire score of West Side Story. Back in the car, she throws her arm up into the air and keens: “One handed catch!”
Go to Crate and Barrel to brainstorm mad new paint colors for my too-ice-blue and hence to-me-depressing bedroom—perhaps a hue called “Burnt Tangiers.” I can actually visualize this color in my brain. It echoes a kind of Moroccan burnt tangerine color I once saw in some throw pillows on some wicker in some other section. We also energetically smell—and savor—and enjoy—and meditate on—about fourteen different “flavors” (Rosemary Mint, Japanese Plum, Ylang-Ylang) of six- and twelve-inch pillar candles. Ommm.
Go to Cost Plus World Market to buy severely colorful plates. Severely. To “happy up” the chore-filled eyesore that has become my home, I’ve decided that everything in my household must please the eye. Also a set of four hand-painted coffee mugs. “I need something to get up for in the morning!” I exclaim. “I want a pretty mug! Not just all these dismal chipped unmatched things from all those damn public-radio pledge drives.”
On our way to Target (less depressing than CVS) to pick up persimmon-colored (and why not?) nail polish, Clare’s eye lands on a USA Today magazine. Its cover is a cheery megablast about the joys of “extreme couponing.” “Look how happy that woman looks!” Clare marvels. “Why have I never couponed? That sounds like fun. I want to start couponing!” This reminds me of how my mother used to collect Blue Chip stamps in the sixties. I share the memory: “I totally remember my mom sitting at the dining room table in the afternoons gluing those Blue Chip stamps into that neat little booklet—it seemed so deeply pleasurable. That, and her cigarette at the end of the day. In fact, I feel like I have some memory of her blissfully doing Blue Chip stamps while smoking cigarettes.” Feeling psyched, we pick up twin green plastic sleevelets that can apparently be used as coupon organizers.
Not to leap ahead here, but before we keep going, pencils up:
MENOPAUSE QUESTION
When it comes to menopause/depression tips, why do typical lists of “solutions” always look like activities one would do at a Finnish Christian work-study camp for moderately slow children? Why is it always:
Sing!
Clean out your closets!
Organize your sock drawer (you’ll be amazed at how satisfying it is)!
Take a daily walk!
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!
Cut and arrange some fresh flowers in a pretty vase!
Why don’t those lists ever have items like:
Have a pitcher of margaritas and just get fucking bombed!
YouTube until your eyes bleed to see who’s fat in a bikini!
Eat raw chocolate-chip cookie dough until you puke!
How about a heady bit of Nordstrom’s shoplifting?!
Three words: Bang a sailor!
Just asking. “One handed catch!”
I find that, by hook or by claw, my happiness project is actually working. These manic “project” activities masquerading as incredibly happy busy-ness are doing an okay job of covering up some of the day’s shifting fogs and fens of stealth guerrilla depression. Perhaps it is because my little projects give me something to focus on, like a cat distracted into hypnotically batting a paw against colorful guppies in a fishbowl, while at the same time being free of anxiety-producing deadlines, negative critiques, or yardsticks of dwindling resources. (For example, I’ve long enjoyed the tactile, deft, satisfying keyboard-smacking experience of paying my bills with Quicken, and yet no amount of colorful pie charts can mask the fact that month by month my money is draining away.) As I beaver away at my personal not-connected-to-anything-at-all-crucial to-do lists, it is like the first day of school, red apple in hand, snap of autumn, when I was young and first realized: “Yay! I am good at sitting at a desk and filling pages with neat if perhaps not always terribly meaningful handwriting! And I will get rewarded for it!” I can’t really do much about global warming, world hunger, or the deficit. Today’s problems are too large, overwhelming, and ever present, on that twenty-four-hour news cycle. You can recycle all year lon
g, but get on a plane and in a flash your ecofootprint sprouts giant bunions. So one’s goals begin to shrink. And that passitivity on my part is rather sad. After all, my generation of females came of age in postrevolutionary times: The good fight had been fought, we had coed schools, a pro-choice society, and all avenues of personal freedoms open to us. Our generation of women was going to change the world—to feminize the power structure and workplace while giving up our subjugation at home. So why then, three decades later, are we staring in a glaze into a Starbucks vitrine counting the calories in a raspberry cake pop? It’s all we can do to manage our own moods in a day. It’s all we can do to watch HGTV until noon and not overdose on antidepressants, and that itself is sad. Because are we not still women? Do we not still roar? Do we perhaps need our own female version of a Fight Club? All big questions and a bit too much to take on, but in the meantime, what’s wrong with a little extreme couponing? That’s a win-win. Because now I am no longer passive. And I am no longer focused on my usual also Sisyphean tasks. Mortage, what mortgage? Health-insurance premiums, what health-insurance premiums? So what if my IRA has so declined in value that my children will be able to afford only three hours of community college? That’s not what’s at stake here! My happiness projects have one goal: happiness!
• • •
I AM CONTINUING to build around myself a protective, ever-growing mandala of crisp new legal pads and folders and binders. Ever more ideas and lists and resolutions are coming to me—Pilot pen out:
I’m going to finally, for once in my life, drink eight glasses of water a day and see what actually happens (I buy a metallic blue water bottle—just admiring its sheen makes me happy)!
I’m going to get a sassy new haircut!
I’m going to get a pair of those new Shape-up-type thingies!
One of these days I’m even going to decide what version of Burnt Tangiers I want to go with, as my bedroom walls are covered with so many slightly different paint colors by now it looks like an insane asylum!
In fact, next level, I’m going to actually finally open all those old Pirate’s Cove cardboard boxes and rebuild my small personal library. I will perhaps even—oh hey, ding, ding, ding!—rebuy One Hundred Years of Solitude. I will commit to correcting my youthful past by even reading a South American magical-realist novel all the way through, and maybe at least one Henry James!
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 5