Dream, dream, dream

The New York Times ran an interesting story on happiness the other day by John Tierney. Apparently there's a study now that suggests that if you let your mind wander while you're doing a task, you're more apt to be unhappy later.
The study, conducted by Harvard psychologists, used an iPhone app called "trackyourhappiness" to randomly call people around the globe and ask them how they were feeling. The results: People who reported stray thoughts and daydreams were less likely to be happy a few minutes later and the stray thoughts caused the unhappiness, rather than the other way around. (Read Tierney's account here, and also in Science.)
And okay, I guess it makes sense that if you start fantasizing about finally having that loan paid off that you took out against your 401K so your kid could get through the last semester of college, that the thought might lead you to unpleasant other thoughts such as: Why did tuition go up by double digits at the state university for each year beginning when my kid enrolled and why didn't student loans cover everything and why won't time go faster so we can stop paying $50 a paycheck?
Wait. Hold on....Trackyourhappiness? Really? A stranger will call you up, ask you what you've just been doing and then how you felt about it. And people willingly signed up for this?
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't that kind of put the science in question? First of all, these are people who have iPhones. Secondly, they are paying a monthly charge for the connectivity, so they are likely fully employed. And third, they are extroverts who would willingly discuss deeply personal matters with an anonymous someone taking notes.
I've seen iPhones. If I could afford one, I'd buy it and then spend the rest of the time skipping around and laughing with glee. Rrrring..."This is a Harvard scientist. What are you doing right now and how do you feel?"
"I'm just bagging up a pile of warm dog poop. And I feel FANTASTIC! I have a job and an iPhone."
So probably, the results are skewed because of the sample.
But it might be interesting to see what the survey would look like if a different population was sampled.
Rrring..."Hello. This is Harvard calling. What are you doing right now and have you had any daydreams lately?"
"I've just robbed a convenience store. Daydreams? No, can't say my mind wandered. Gotta go..."
Rrring..."Hello, Harvard University here. We're doing a study on daydreams and happiness. What have you got for us?"
"Sorry, I've got six craft in my sector and five waiting in a holding pattern. Can't talk now, man."
"Ok, only just tell us, have you had any daydreams in the past half hour?"
"Look--no--I--well, no. But...'
"And do you feel happier than a half hour ago or no--"
"Oh yeah, yeah. Sure, great. I--oh s**t!/ (connection lost).
If the results hold, then these non-daydreamers would also be the happiest.
Me, I'm a die-hard daydreamer, and that's never going to change. I'll never be Zen enough to focus only on brushing my teeth. In fact I've had at least six daydreams just while writing this post. They're like little vacations you take inside your head. Vacations I desperately, desperately need. I will never give them up on the elusive promise of a slight increase in happiness.
So sorry, Harvard. Tell the positive thinking industry they can take my property and my dignity. But they'll take my daydreams only when they pry them from my cold, dead brain pan.

Recession Zen

So here we are. It's been a year and eight months since the big income cutback. We've tried various ways to make money--selling stuff in our garage left from the previous owner, writing a garden book, etc.--and sometimes we've been successful. We've slashed our household spending to the bare minimum (ask us about our front tires) and then spent a lot of it in a fit of rebellion this year because, dammit, we need a life, too.
And now our second austere Christmas is looming and there is no indication that our situation is anything but permanent.
So how's my positive attitude coming along?
That's hard to say. I suppose the best way to track something like that would be to somehow put all my emotions on a chart, and if it were possible to do something like that on Blogger, I would. But since I don't really feel like working out a lifetime emotion chart, I'll just have to describe it.
I'll skip past childhood and adolescence, and go straight to adulthood. Graduation from college and getting that first job--euphoria. Finding out how hard it was to live on a reporter's salary--the Dumps. Getting a better job--euphoria. Getting married--euphoria. Having kids--daily euphoric highs followed by Dumps, lots and lots of dumps. Finding out how hard it is to live on basically one salary--well, you can see how this is going. My chart would look like just about anybody else's on the planet.
Now that we're approaching Christmas, have added a 16-year-old driver (but not a car) to our insurance and are looking ahead to college, I really should be in the dumps big time.
But I'm not. My emotional chart has flat lined. No elation. No dumps. It's just hard to get excited about anything.
(I identify a lot with author TM Shine, who wrote this really funny piece recently in the New York Times.)
Is this a good thing? Maybe. Back when I thought I had control over anything, I was always getting upset and unhappy because I should have done better. Then I'd get out a legal pad and start making lists. When things went well, I'd be flying high.
What I have now sounds a lot like resignation, but I don't think it is. It's more detachment. I haven't stopped wanting the nice stuff that goes with money. The new clothes, the respect, the occasional movie, the feeling that your car isn't going to shake apart at speeds over 60 mph. It's just that I'm exhausted from caring anymore.
This is how I imagined Buddhism. Detachment. Why care about a world you obviously cannot control?
And I'll say this: It certainly does protect me from scraping along the desperate bottom as I did a year and a half ago. It doesn't exactly feel like happiness, though.
But I'll need a lot more than Zen detachment to make things better.
Now where's my legal pad?

Ironically, we were unafraid

By now the pundits have weighed in on the Comedy Central Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Either he wasted an opportunity to engage middle-of-the-road folks who are turned off by politics and do not vote. Or his rally was simply an exercise in irony and too-cool-for-school self awareness. On the one hand, the rally didn't do enough to stir people to action in tomorrow's election. On the other, nobody really watches cable news, so why get so worked up about his media criticism? Yet the press, obviously, was annoyed.
We watched almost the entire rally live, giving the house a sedentary vibe so weird for a Saturday that my daughter said it felt like Thanksgiving Day and the Macy's Parade. I would have gone if I could have. But alas, not enough money. (Although I briefly considered hopping a freight train chugging slowly past our house.)
Apparently no one knew what to expect. Some news organizations wouldn't let their reporters attend (on their own time off) out of fear of being partisan. Yet the very non-partisan appeal to reason and moderation also kept it from getting huge amounts of prominent space.
And they all have good points (she said, reasonably.)
But it's too bad that no one talked about the opposing force of the rally, as personified by Stephen Colbert. It's too bad nobody mentioned the fear.
Because that is what I think the rally was really about. How can any of us maintain that go-get 'em American spirit in the face of seemingly overwhelming fear about every possible thing, 24 hours a day?
I don't mean just the fear you see hyped on the evening news--the child predators, avian flu, carcinogens in the drinking water. The heartbreak of psoriasis. I'm talking about the very real fear many of us have now, of waking one morning without a job, or health insurance, or a home because of forces beyond our control.
Colbert, in character as a faux conservative TV host, made a pretty good opening, supposedly cowering beneath the stage in an underground bunker. I've felt like that, after looking at our budget and counting the days until my daughter looks toward college. How can you get up the guts to spend the money on night school, or invest in your own business or apply for a new job when you're worried you may get thrown out of the house you've paid on for a decade? How can you dare to take the risks involved in improving your station in life?
It's fear, plain and simple, that is the paralyzing force that hobbles us and keeps us from being the great nation we used to be. FDR had it exactly right. Right now we have the realistic fears about joblessness. And on top of that, we have all the other fears pumped up by people who want to sell us something or force us into an ideology.
So yeah. If you wanted the rally to be a call to action against certain political parties, then it probably was a failure. But me, I looked at all those people on the mall--250,000 by some estimates. Out of that many, a lot are probably as scared as I am right now. And yet here we are, able to enjoy a sunny Saturday, laugh at a few jokes, forget about our troubles for a couple of hours.
Some say that's irony.
I say it feels like optimism.

So on with the laughs. Here's the latest, an Auto-Tune send up of Stewart's closing speech: