illegitimi non carborundum

I'm bored. I haven't even been able to blog about anything, because despite having a million thoughts and feeling flitting about in my head, none of them seem worthy to type out. I feel like some horrible Gen-X cliche - get up and go to work every day, cook some dinner, plan a few weekly outings, moan about my job or the sorry state of the world. Ugh. How depressing.

I presume this is something that most of us feel at some time or other, some people more, some people less. Isn't that odd? That at any given time a decent percentage of human beings are just sleepwalking around, wondering when the next episode of Top Chef will be on? Shit, I'm totally entrenched in that 'fuzzy' kind of place again.

Speaking of that 'fuzzy' kind of place, I just read an interview with Douglas Coupland, who wrote one of my favorite books, Life After God. There's a great little segment about happiness:

It seems like right now there are so many books out about happiness. Everybody wants to learn about happiness, and presumably learn why they aren't. Do you think this whole pursuit is fruitless, or is happiness a good thing to study?
In the '70s and early '80s, when the whole New Age thing was going on, what made it so strange was that everyone was being so woooooo! about it. Now, it's almost as if everyone's being almost military about it — like, what experiments do we have on light intake to maximize happiness? How much vitamin D do I have to take? What's my optimal energy curve? Everyone's being wildly practical about it, which is unprecedented I think. Way beyond just vitamins and Wellbutrin and stuff. I think it only gets scary when it starts to turn into industrial efficiency, like people wanting to be happier so they can be more productive.

I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately too, and it is pretty strange how intent we are about finding it. Makes sense, obviously, but Coupland is right - it's so pointed and specific, this quest, that it's a bit scary. And it's weird to notice myself getting all Type-A about finding it along with the rest of humanity. I don't think I'll be securing happiness with my well-aimed efforts at trying to stay positive and healthy. (These are good aspirations, mind you, but they don't deliver the grand prize entirely on their own.)

Ironically (or maybe not), in my own quest for happiness, I've been trying to be more at peace with my loneliness and anxiety. Since those "negative" emotions are so much a part of what shapes us, I'm working on giving them a little bit of overdue credit. A passage from the book I'm reading (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) explains this well:

Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

One has only to consult the 2002 edition of R. Stanbury's Illuminating Statistics and Cross-Century Comparisons, under "Grieving," to learn that the very idea of being Brokenhearted, Wretched, Desolate and Despairing is a thing of the past, soon to take on the amusing novelty of such archaic things as the Jalopy, the Jitterbug and Jams. The average American widower in 1802 waited an average of 18.9 years before remarrying, while in 2001 he holds out for an average 8.24 months. (In the "By State" snapshot, you wil see in California he holds out for a horrifying 3.6 months.)

Of course, Dad made it his business to rage against this "Cultural anesthetizing," this "ironing out of deep human sentiment, leaving only a flat, unwrinkled vacuity," and thus he'd deliberately raised me to be an insightful, sensitive sort of person, someone aware, beneath even the most tedious surfaces, of good, evil and the smoky shades in between.

Unfortunately, at the present moment I'm in that smoky shade of b-o-r-e-d-o-m. Not to curse myself or anything, but I'd almost rather deal with anger or evil or any of the other really negative emotions than the lack thereof. With boredom you don't even have the energy to really hate something or someone, it's just that terrible "ennhhh" and a shrug of the shoulders.

I know I don't have anyone to blame for this state of being except myself, and I know I can change it. But I think I might need to wallow in its foul beige pity for a little while. Though I have to admit that it gets so bad sometimes, even mid-wallow, that I want to do really drastic things like spend $5000 on clothes or hop on the next plane to Indonesia or even make myself run for miles and miles. Just to break it up a little.