Overflowing with Valvoline

I opened the Kansas City Star this afternoon and saw my favorite comic strip dealing with my favorite subject. Optimism is a recurring theme in Zippy the Pinhead, and I was especially interested in the tie-in with the magically-appearing image on Zerbina's flapjack--another topic I visited recently. (To see the strip, click here, or visit Bill Griffith's site here. Sorry, but I could not get a readable version to print on this blog.)
I take comfort from the comic strips in my struggles with optimism. "Little Orphan Annie" notwithstanding, many of the comic strip artists seem to be wrestling with the same dark questions and doubts as me. (On second thought, maybe I shouldn't have said that about Annie. I've never really read that strip.)
Unlike a lot of optimism and self-help advice, the comic strips are at least honest. Is it better to deceive yourself into the happiness of optimism, or to look at the realities and become totally despondent? It's a question that hovers constantly over Zippy, and I'm grateful to see someone else asking it.
I've looked at just enough optimism advice to make me think there's something wrong with me that I can't just flip a switch in my head to change my thinking. So it's nice to know that comic strip artists are working through the same issues.
Here's a good one from the New Yorker--another source of dryly funny comics.

You can read it, recognize the pessimism and laugh at the same time. And that just makes me feel...better. Maybe my cup truly is overflowing with Valvoline.

Here's some animation on the subject;

Christmas in July

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try and improve my mood through sound. Specifically, the sound of my own voice. The theory: If we can improve our outlook through even forced smiling and laughing,as some researchers claim, then shouldn't changing our voice to a happier timbre also work?
I've been trying this and here are my thoughts so far:
1. It's still a little early, but so far I think this works better than either the constant smiling or the laugh yoga, for a couple of reasons. First, smiles and laughter are not always appropriate. There are repercussions if you laugh aloud during someone's sad story, or if you smile goofily all the time. You will be ostracized or perhaps mugged. But voice tone is something you can work on no matter the circumstances.
This sort of goes along with what I know from teaching piano. No matter what kind of a day I've had before 3 p.m., the students deserve an upbeat, positive lesson. So for those hours after school, I'm energetically and enthusiastically "on." (And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you won't find many teachers going a straight eight hours at a time. It is exhausting.) But I don't smile nonstop--because I don't want them to run shrieking from the room. The result is, I usually feel better after lessons than I did going in, if I'd had a bad day. Maybe it's the distraction, but I think at least part of it is the vocalizing.
2.It's no easier to remember changing your voice than it is to remember smiling. I have to constantly think how I sound when I'm responding to people in everyday conversations.
3. For me, anyway, it's easier to do the voice change first. Then the smile doesn't feel so forced. It just feels more genuine, to change something from the inside and then have the outside reflect that change.

It's a little hard to say exactly what vocal changes I'm making. From various required college courses in vocal music, here are a few things I try to do:
*put my voice a little higher in my throat. Not exactly a "head" voice, but definitely not a "chest" voice. When it feels right, my voice is coming from the back of the soft palate.
*avoid a downward slide at the end of sentences (this should be a no-brainer)
*be sure to breathe. Breathing energizes singing, and playing, for that matter. So I have to make sure I'm breathing enough (again, a no-brainer, but harder than it sounds).
*try not to talk too slow. If I do, it sounds like I'm running out of energy.

I'm still on teaching hiatus, but generally, this seems to be going well. It's still a little early to say if it's working but...so far, so good.

Let's have fun for a minute.Here are some examples of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, a great song because it's so open to interpretation. Listen a minute with your eyes closed and then decide which one is the "happiest" version. Which is the saddest? (How about the angriest?)

First, Frank Sinatra







James Taylor



Coldplay



The Jackson 5



Twisted Sister

Holiday Road

Everyone should have to take a vacation.

Listen closely. Everyone should have to take a vacation.
It should be required. Mandated by the federal government. The Nanny State should get it's tentacles right in there and make everyone take a vacation, by force if necessary.
Not just a trip to the grandmas, or a grudging weekend at the same lake you go to every year. Everyone should be required to take a vacation of at least a week, ideally in a new spot every year. It should be part of the bailout plan, and we should all get tax money of some kind to fund our trips.
To those who would cry out at the cruelty, the despotism of a government that forced its people to take--gasp!--vacations, hear me out for just a second. Because this just may be the answer to the economic problems facing the average hard-working employees who have not benefited from the handouts showered upon the money grubbing, paycheck-stealing CEOs at the top of the ladder.
Look at the things it would solve. Unemployment, for example. For years, businesses have subtly discouraged their employees from actually taking the time off owed to them. Required vacations would force these companies to hire a few more people. People who might buy products (remember, we need people to have money to buy products.)
Tourism would pick up. More hotels would be built, employing, again, more people. The transportation industry would gain. There would be more money available for road construction which would, in turn, mean more jobs.

Ok, full disclosure here. We just got back from a few days camping near Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. It was our first get-away in two years, but because of our recently reduced circumstances, it was a vacation we almost didn't take.
But at the last minute, we decided that with a high schooler in the house who only has a few summers left at home, we just couldn't spend this one here. I worried about the money, of course, because it meant dipping into the disaster fund we have in case the car or any major appliance breaks down (and they're all on their last legs.)

What I didn't realize is that I needed--desperately needed--a vacation from worrying about money. For just a few days, I needed reality to be suspended. I needed to be in a different place, away from all the obsessive thoughts and recent unpleasantness of Kansas City. I needed to be able to say, "Yes, we can spend the money for everyone to go on the ferry to South Manitou, because we will never have this chance again."

Taking a trip is like life-giving water to my imagination, which has taken a decidedly unhealthy turn of late. In Michigan, and in our one day touring downtown Chicago, it was possible to imagine other ways of living, in a friendly (yes, Chicagoans are friendly) environment with a large body of water nearby and many more job options, one imagines.

And did this trip help our mental health? Well, my daughter kept saying how amazed she was to see me laughing. And I now have hope--honest hope--that we can come out of this without a default or bankruptcy. What does that tell you?

So, yeah, we should all be required to take a vacation. Stress-related health care costs will go down. Employment will go up. And maybe, just maybe, those of us not in top management will feel like humans again.

Let's put America back to work by getting them the hell away from work for a week. How about it Congressman Dennis Moore?

Improve your tone, missy!

My quest for optimism and it's byproduct, happiness, landed me in an interesting place a few days ago. As I was looking up Gretchen Rubin's "Happiness Project," I found another Happiness Project--this one by Charles Spearin. Since Spearin's is a music project, and since I am a musician, this resonates with me.
Spearin is a Canadian instrumentalist, founder of post-rock instrumental group Do Make Say Think and an original member of indie rock group Broken Social Scene, according to his blog. His latest album, called "The Happiness Project," takes the lilting vocal tones of people in his neighborhood as they talk about happiness, and then uses them as the basis for composition.
If you go onto his website and click "sounds" you can listen to bits from the various people he interviews and the music that came from them. Particularly interesting is "Vanessa" who was deaf until she had a cochlear implant.
Spearin follows in the footsteps of Steve Reich, among others, in using speech as a jumping off point for composition. (Here's a little bit of Reich's "Different Trains," by way of example.)




But as I listened to his samples, I began to wonder about the whole relationship between sound, facial muscles, laughter and mood.
Here's a quick recap of some studies I've read about in the past six weeks:
Upbeat music can change your brain waves and lift your spirits.
Smiling, even fake smiling, can change your outlook for the better.
Laughter (as in laughing yoga) has stress-relieving properties and can improve mood.
Now comes Spearin with his interviews of people talking about happiness and I wonder, how does the voice change when we're happy? Is it something you can fake or is it more subtle? And do people react more positively to you when you have these vocal sounds?
I haven't found a lot on this, but if I were a researcher, I'd guess that happiness has a somewhat higher pitch and quicker tempo. Maybe a lifting contour in the phrases. If you can fake that, how effective would it be in changing your mood? In other words, is it more effective to listen to a happy song, or to sing one?
I'm tempted to become my own lab rat and try this for two reasons: 1.I never was any good at the big gushy greetings like you used to see on the Seinfeld show. (Come see the BAY-bee!!) and 2.It only makes sense. In college, we had a chorus professor who was forever telling us to put a smile into our faces to improve the tone. And it did! So what if I start with the tone? Maybe that will make it easier to improve my face (which is in desperate need, believe me.)
So I guess I've got this week's experiment. And--ooh--maybe along the way I'll write an upbeat tune about all this Great Recession stuff. No reason to let some good suffering go to waste.
Here's what another Canadian musician (Dave Carroll) did after an airline mishandled his luggage. (Hate bloggers, don't get excited. I have no intention of trashing any individual or company in song.)

I'll Take E coli for 500

If you can say a deep and heartfelt thanks for E coli, then I think you're absolutely on the road to optimism. Or something.
Yes, thank you E coli. Thank you Costco and thank you JBS USA, whoever you are. You have improved our normally cash-stretched month of July.
It was about a week ago that Mike was interrupted by a robo call. Something about a beef recall and Costco. It was fast and vague and, because it was a robo call, there were no questions. We vowed to look it up on the Internets and then forgot about it. If there were any stories in any of the papers or TV stations we watched, we missed them.
Only a few days later, when I was planning out the grocery trip did I think to look it up. There it was. JB Swift was doing a recall because of concerns that beef processed there "may have been contaminated" with E coli.
Those who know me will get the cosmic joke here. I am usually very cautious--super cautious--about food safety. I wouldn't let my kids eat fast food burgers for years because I don't believe they're adequately tested for mad cow. If it's a choice between paying more for ground beef that is processed at a smaller regional plant or going without, we go without. The same goes for other meats. I'd rather have mostly vegetarian meals, punctuated by costly but safe chicken and beef, than the uncertainty of what comes in discount meat.
I made this one exception, though, for Costco whole beef tenderloins, vacuum packed. We'd gone the better part of a year without steaks, back when gas prices pushed the cost of everything up so high. The Costco tenderloins were less than half the price of grocery store filets, which were then going for about $18 a pound. All we had to do was a little cutting,wrapping and freezing. We'd probably rinse any possible contaminants off the surface, so it was safer than the ground beef, I reasoned.
That first batch of steaks was great, rich and tender. It was such a success that we kept peroidically refreshing our freezer when we ran out. We'd had a big steak dinner with my sons and a guest only a week before the robo call.
We looked in the freezer and found three steaks left. But was this part of the recall? It wasn't clear.
So back to the Internet I went. Finding information on this was like a treasure hunt. After a couple of searches, I found myself at the JBS page, which directed me to click on a link to a press release, which again directed me to the USDA, which sent me on to another USDA site with the helpful information that it was a Class 1 recall with a health risk of "high." Finding no product list there, I clicked on another link that gave me a long, unintelligible list of boxed beef products included in the recall. I found two abbreviations that could possibly stand for the whole beef tenderloin I'd bought.
"Well, I guess I just bag them up and go ask Costco if they have us on the computer," I said sourly. Seems likewith a class 1 recall and high health risk, the industry and government would make it a little easier to find out what's going on.
As it turned out, Costco did have us on the computer and we had consumed some of the beef in question. Rare. But we didn't get sick. And--woo-hoo--we got our $53.72 back. That just about pays for our daughter's mid-summer soccer camp.
So what can I say. Thank you, meat processors. I making a note to buy your products more often. And while I'm at it, maybe I'll sign up for a health study on some experimental diet drugs.

Happiness is...

What would the opposite of an evil twin be? An angelic double?
Whatever you call it, I believe I have found the parallel universe version of myself on the Internet. Her name is Gretchen Rubin, creator of The Happiness Project. She's embarked on a journey very similar to my own: Try out everything you can for a year to improve your happiness. And of course, since this is the parallel universe, she's doing a good job and having great success.
I found out about The Happiness Project from a friend named Barb, who mentioned it as we huffed and puffed our bicycles over the hills around Lake Olathe (I saw two blue herons on this trip. But I'm sure it means nothing.)
So I went right home and looked up her blog. Then I looked at her picture and clicked "about." Whoa!
Not only is she beautiful, but, "At Yale Law School I was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and won a writing prize. I went on to clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court."

Help me. Can't. Breathe. Fighting back extreme urge for snarkiness.
There's more.
"I had a great experience in law, but I realized that what I really wanted to do was to write. Since making the switch, I’ve published four books. I’m currently working on The Happiness Project. It will hit the shelves in January 2010 (Harper)."

Oh, and she's from Kansas City. Didn't I tell you it was a parallel universe?

Okay. Someone who was editor of the Yale Law Journal and clerked for the first female member of the Supreme Court, someone who is good-looking enough she doesn't have to use a bug for an avatar--that person is as entitled to search for happiness as anyone, I guess, though it doesn't sound like much of a search. I mean, where's the struggle? But never mind. Anyone that successful probably has something worth checking out. So, jealousy aside, I decided to see what she advises.

The first of her "Twelve Commandments," is to "Be Gretchen." In other words, let go of the useless striving to be the person you wish you were and just embrace your own likes and dislikes. As an example, she says, she will never be a person who hangs out in artists' studios or visits jazz clubs after midnight. And she will try to get over not being that kind of person.
That sounds reasonable. I don't have strong feelings for the NFL. Once in a while, I envy people who enjoy Super Bowl parties and talk for hours the next day. But it never makes me wish to change myself into a face-painting cheese-hat-wearing fan.
What about the things I do want to change, though? For instance, I would like to be more optimistic. Really. But the more I study it, the more I see what a huge personality change it's going to take. In fact, the more I study it, the more impossible it looks. Does that mean I should give it up and just embrace the fact that I am a cynical outcast who can never change?
Or--here's a horrifying thought--maybe being unhappy is what makes me happiest. Maybe I'm such a sick, sick puppy that only my despondency keeps me afloat. Does that thought make me happy, or unhappy?

I've wandered too close to the trippy edge here. I think I'll make my way back with a funny movie. I wonder if our Horsefeathers VHS tape is still playable.
Here's a clip. If you want to go straight to "Whatever it is, I'm against it," it's at about 4 minutes.