2000-12-06 - 3:34pm

On the internal soundtrack: An old commercial jingle for Camay soap -- the "Camay All Over" campaign. Ugh.

Not a good day on the internal soundtrack. The jingle is alternating with "If You're Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands", because I found a link to the Secret Society of Happy People in one of my regular weblog reads.

Even I find the site occasionally sacchrine, but they have an interesting point. Why is it not cool to be happy?

Personally, I think it's because general happiness (as opposed to those Big Moments like falling in love, having a child, achieving something of great significance to you) is, in a word, boring. It lacks drama. There's nothing interesting about a life that is the same day in and day out. It's the soap opera factor, I guess.

That, plus if you are happy and talk about it, you might seem to be bragging when unhappy people are around.

They have quotes in their "Boosters" section. Here are the two that I can relate to the most:

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions. The little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, countless infinitesimal of pleasure and genial feelings. Said by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of all people.

I seem to get the most joy out of little things. The blueberries in my breakfast cereal, for one. A smile from a stranger is something that I'll remember for years afterwards. Once I was stuck in traffic in Philly, on my way home from college, and there was a van next to me from some A.M.E. church. I was singing along to my tape, feeling pretty good, and I looked up and caught the eye of a girl my age in the van. I smiled, and she gave me one of the most amazing, beautiful, real smiles I've ever seen. I don't know what it was about that particular moment, or what it was about her, but it was one of those moments that was perfect. A connection with a stranger based on nothing but a smile and being stuck in traffic together.

All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it's truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy. Dennis Prager.

I can't vouch for the complaining/unhappy connection, but what got me was the first sentence: "All happy people are grateful." In my case, this is ridiculously true. I'm grateful for everything. From Poindexter to my loving family to the people I work with all the way down to the blueberries on my cereal. If I were to make a list of everything I'm grateful for, it would take all day and I'd still be finding new things tomorrow.

I'm not sure how much of this is temperament and how much is a deliberate effort on my part to focus on small positive things. I do know that part of it is conscious. I am more focused today on the pleasure of small things than I was in high school and college. Rather than look for what's missing, I look at what's there and appreciate it. You've seen me get all excited about my damn basil and parsley (which are, by the way, thriving quite well in the guest bathroom, the sunniest room in the house). Yesterday I was happy because the weather wasn't too cold and I could walk to the library without shivering.

I do, of course, have things that are missing, but I take a certain pleasure in planning for them and knowing I will have them someday.

The move to Philadelphia, for instance. I have NO sentimental feelings for the immediate area where I live. It's really pretty gross and in some ways the antethesis of everything that is my ideal. But I know I'll be moving someplace I like better within a few years. And in the meantime, I focus on the fact that I can walk to the library, or to CVS to pick up a few things, and I'm basically 10 minutes from anywhere.

Odd coincidence that I should be directed to this site the day after I go to the library and come back with a handful of books on depression.

I have said before that the happy/unhappy distinction does not apply to people who are clinically depressed. That is a whole 'nother ballgame with different rules.

Depression is something I have a very strong interest in, so I'll ramble about it for a while. It will be pretty simplistic, because I'm aiming at folks like my mother, who know next to nothing about it. If you are knowledgeable in this field and find mistakes, please e-mail me and set the record straight.

I have been reading the journals of a woman who is currently undergoing treatment for clinical depression. What struck me about her journal was how much of it made sense to me. We had pondered a lot of the same things about life. Despite the fact that we are nearly polar opposites on the depression spectrum, I found that I agreed with her, or at the very least could see her point, on a great number of them.

In a lot of ways, I think we look at the world from the same perspective, from the same level of detail. If we were to look at a scene out in public for five minutes, then discuss what we saw, we might very well point out many of the same things.

All except for one difference: I love just the fact that I'm seeing life and the world in its infinite variety, and it makes me happy. She is either indifferent, angry or sad.

There, but for the grace of god, go I?

It is as impossible for me to grasp how these things can make her feel so overwhelmingly miserable as it is for her to grasp how the same things make me feel happy, or in the case of the bad things we both notice, how I am still happy in spite of them.

I have an idea, from a physiological standpoint, what is going on. As I understand it, depression causes chemical changes (including lower levels of serotonin) in the body that cause a distorted view of the world, leading to the anger and sadness, which leads to more chemical changes which lead to more distortion.

(Or you could argue that the depressed person is normal, and the rest of us on the planet have the distorted view. The woman I spoke of has argued this point, I believe. Makes sense to me -- our view is distorted because we are doped up on serotonin. Quite frankly, serotonin sounds a bit like that soma stuff from Brave New World.)

However you look at it, and this is something a lot of people don't seem to realize, it is NOT POSSIBLE to just "snap out of it". You have to do something to change the chemical balance in the body.

Ordinary people experience what you might call "the blues". You can snap out of those, because they are by nature transient. Or they are so mild that it is not very hard to turn things around by focusing on the positive for a while. But in cases of clinical depression, the chemical imbalance is so far off that it requires a combination of medication and therapy to bring it back. And even then, they still remember how they saw the world when they were depressed, so they're never going to see it through the rose-colored glasses that I do.

I have a lot more to learn.

The reason I am so interested in depression goes back to my experience in Fishkill three years ago. I've been alluding to this for weeks, and I might as well just write up the damn thing. I'll put it in a separate entry, which I'll put here.

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