photo: iona gordon

OK. so. this has little to do with me doing miami. but. its been on my mind, like second foremost, after TB. a friend sent me a link this morning to a study. about women and happiness, and apparently women are getting less happy all the time, even as i write this. when i get a link like that i always look who wrote it. M or F. check box. when its M i pretend that the study was conducted and written, not by say Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinum or Hilary Clinton but by my husband. so. lets ask him if i appear happier then when we were first together, and he’ll probably tell you that he doesn’t think so. ask me and i will tell you that i am, just about one million thousand and three times happier now than twenty years ago. i still love him madly. i adore my kids. i just bitch more now, cause there is more to bitch about. then ask me what would make me  happier than, say yesterday and my answer would be:
1. if he remembered, after 15 years, that wednesday is garbage day. 2. if he put his cereal boxes back after use. 3. if he talked less about models  4. if i could make time to do some lucrative work/not feel so guilty about no longer being the superduper #1 breadwinner. 5. if i wasn’t constantly reminded by everything, TV, the supermarket, my kids, my job, my gay neighbors, other moms, ads on buses, billboards and facebook, that i’m no longer somewhere between the most fabulous, gorgeous, sexy age of 30-40. 6. I would definitely be happier if i could be less politically correct and not worry about swearing in front of playdates, enjoy secondary smoke, get drunk, get stoned, flirt outrageously, drive too fast in a snazzy car, leave the kids at home alone to hang with my friends more often, use plastic bags at the supermarket, drink lots of little bottles of Poland Spring (that have been in my hot car for weeks), worry less about hunger in africa, obama, peace/war, scream at rude teachers, actually really slap my neighbor, eat without thinking about what and how much, use aerosol sunblock on the kids, feed them high fructose corn syrup because its in EVERYTHING, did not have to kid-compete with other mothers/get them into the “gifted” program asap or else they’ll fail as human beings, and make a mess, and fall on my face and just screw up completely occasionally (and know that i’ll be ok). the other thing i think when i read happiness studies is al those women in the third world who hold a starving child to their chest.  not for one minute do they wonder how happy they are on a scale from 1-5. they may wonder how totally fucked they are on a scale from 1-5. and when i read the results of these pop-studies i reckon we, the lucky ones, score  a big fat 5 on the scale of increased privileged fuckedupness.