Happiness is ...

When I'm not having suicidal ideations, being belligerent or getting sick, I realllllly enjoy being drunk. The first time I got drunk, I felt really happy and realized and said, "Wow! This is so much better than life usually!", and the next day, when I experienced my first hangover, I had a by-the-potty epiphany: "This is a lot worse than life usually." So although it feels like it at the time, happiness is not being drunk. And of course, happiness is definitely not being hungover.

There are two instances I'm recalling, both (one fairly, one very) recent, that felt like happiness in a very intense, but not overpowering, and pure way.

The first instance I remember happened almost exactly one year ago after my boyfriend's dad loaned me a vegetarian cookbook. The first recipe I attempted was for feta cheese and zucchini pancakes, and I made the attempt when I was home alone. I prepared a "in the kitchen" playlist, plugged my iPod into the speaker system and began to cook. Once I had combined all the ingredients into a batter, I was sure I had failed: The result looked way too dry and lumpy to form anything resembling pancakes. Still, the process, thanks to my so excellent music selection and love for combining dry and wet ingredients and slicing vegetables, had been really, really enjoyable. When I dropped a large spoonful of the batter onto a frying pan, I feared my fun was done, so I was shocked and elated to see the batter spread and begin to cook in normal pancake fashion. Less than five minutes later, I had produced my feta cheese and zucchini pancake, and it was truly delicious - sort of quiche-y, because of all the eggs in the batter. The efforts of that evening remain what I consider the most satisfying and successful time in my life. Truly. (It's probably really unfortunate that I'm not kidding.)

My most recent instance of supreme and serene happiness (the serenity is what distinguishes my favorite kind of happiness from other happy happinesses, like drunken happiness) happened last Tuesday. Because she couldn't get in touch with her yard boy, my Mom decided to give into my request for a lawnmower so that we could care for our own yard. To be cost and energy efficient, my Mom bought me a totally manual mower: a stand up and push machine. When I used it for the first time last Tuesday, and I could see the paths in the grass from where I had already passed, it was like a graph of how much grass ass I was kicking. And it smelled so nice! And my legs were super sore the next day! And my dogs ran around the yard, sharing in my excitement! And Eva Longoria called and asked me to come to her house next! So fun! I can't really convey the intensity of my feelings; I doubt they make any logical sense, and I don't want to make language leaps into the figurative and suppose something ridiculous like that there was something symbolically soothing about cutting the grass, each blade of which represented blah blah blah. It was probably purely physical. Just trust me: It was really good. I cut the grass again the Friday after, and I had been looking forward to going over the yard again tonight, but the rain is making that impossible.

But no worries. Happiness is also stormy weather, during which my favorite thing to do is watch the greatest (big-budget, implausible, action-packed) movie ever made: Jurassic Park.

Happiness is also knowing that your parents and/or parental figures will be going out of town in twelve hours. Mine are! Woo-hoo!