Honestly, sometimes I just write here out of a fear of a big red X, and sometimes I suspect it's becoming crystal-clear. See, I've been Excel-charting my 5 chart-able New Years resolutions - despite my messy room and unorganized stuff, I like to make pie charts and lists and promises -and the best way for me to ensure that I feel guilty when I don't keep my promises is to have the failure recorded somewhere. (Negative reinforcement, people! The anti-gold star! It works! Screw what those evil child psychologists tell you!) For the last four weeks, I've failed at least one of the five. Usually two. And next to each failed week I insert a ClipArt GIANT RED X. And I have to look at them every time I check up on myself.

Living in fear of more red X's drives me to this page five days a week, and I am not afraid to admit it. But today something else drove me here, and that something is Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a big tease. He wrote a compelling novel full of dripping imagery and believable, intense relationships. He filled it full of well-placed objects that I THOUGHT would come to be of importance later in the story. He weaved three stories together seamlessly and set the stage up for what I THOUGHT was going to be a climactic symbol crash of all these well-placed objects, relationships, and storylines.

Wrong! Just as I was gearing up to cover my ears and be blown away, THE BOOK ENDED. I spent 7/8 of the book buried in it, ignoring my drivers at work, putting off using the bathroom, making my already too late bedtime later and later. I was spellbound, but also I was reading extra carefully to catch all the details so I wouldn't be confused when everything came together. It read like a detective novel - everything of the utmost importance. Since I'm not used to reading detective novels, I had to teach my brain to read that way.

And then what does Murakami do? He (spoiler, if you can count this ending as a spoiler) ends the book by putting a phone that keeps spewing murderous threats on the shelves of a 7-11, its murderous threats un-carried out. The main character goes home and sleeps next to her sister as the day breaks. Many of the major characters just sort of disappear and we never find out what THEY'RE doing.

Now, I'm actually not a climax junkie. I am perfectly happy with books having no discernable point as long as they're fun to read. But this book was set up like the most climaxy thriller ever. It had the creepy foreboding feeling. The seemingly pointless alternate storylines that you figure must be eventually relevant when they smash into the main storyline at the end. The lurking Chinese mafia (WHO NEVER ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING). All the characters having extremely creepy backstories.

And then... nothing. My cultural parameters have failed to expand wide enough for the Japanese style of storytelling, I imagine many Japanese majors would tell me. Maybe true. But he (Murakami) is still a giant tease.

Boulder is not aware of the fact that it's January. I'm riding my bike like it's April, in a T-shirt, sweating, and everyone's motorcycles are out. Every time I look out my window into the canopy of bare branches and out, all the way out to the plains to the east, I hate my landlord even more. What a perfect summer place. It's basically a treehouse. The only things we're level with are squirrels and stranded cats and power lines and mountains. And our neighbors. But we can't see them, so they may as well not even be there.

All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.

I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).

Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:

What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:

What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:

I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.

Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.

This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.

Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.

These things are travel and cats.

I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.

Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.

So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.

A mere sentence, or small paragraph, in the imitable Stumbling Upon Happiness (thanks, Erik!) caught my eye when last I read it (a week ago, but I'm slow at turnover, okay?) and that was the assertion that people who do not live in California think that they would be happier if they did live in California, while people who actually do live in California don't test out to be any happier than people who don't.

Not surprising, since (as the book points out and as I immediately thought right before I read it) beaches and palm trees and redwoods and sunshine don't make a person's debt disappear, or make their girlfriends love them, or make their jobs more satisfying, or keep their parents from dying. The distraction they provide is a novelty, one that becomes quickly routine, etc., etc.

But having once suddenly uprooted myself from my snowy upbringing, my windy sleet-in-the-face habitat, and thrust myself into an equatorial jungle for six months, I am going to tentatively and probably stupidly say that it DID make me happier, if only a little.

There's an indescribable freedom to being able to sweep out of the house without a thought to layering, or bringing an extra jacket because what if it gets cold, or gloves because what if it suddenly gets even colder. You don't have to have a backpack with all this what-if crap inside of it. You don't have to think, 'oh, I would LIKE to go hike in the park, but clouds are looming over the Rockies and they might contain rain or snow, which will make me cold and uncomfortable, so, here, let me put on an extra sweater, zip-up, so it won't be too hot if it doesn't get cold, and, oh, just in case I won't wear sandals because my feet would feel it first, and also, I better walk because if it gets too windy my bike will blow over and... oh, fuck it! I'll just stay home.'

Instead, you're lying in your house, which, for all intents and purposes, is the exact same thing as lying outside, because every window is open and the roof is made out of tin, and if you think, 'ooh! I want to bike up to Angkasa and sketch the view!' you just GO, because the temperature only drops below 70 when it's a)nighttime AND b)a serious, recordbreaking cold snap. (Every so often, now, sitting in my house in Boulder among the bare branches of winter, I check Jayapura's forecast on my desktop weather widget. Usually, it's 90-something. The other day, it read 68. I almost shit myself.) If it rains, it's like raining bathwater from a giant showerhead somewhere in the sky. You'll get wet, but you won't get cold. You'll almost feel like you should be shampooing your hair.

So the difference is in more than just being nice and pretty outside. The difference is in impulsiveness. Boulder makes it basically impossible and Jayapura encourages it. Being who I am, I need all the impulsiveness-encouraging factors I can get. I need as few excuses not to go out as possible.

It's the same sort of inching-up-the-scale-of-happiness factor as having a car, I think, in terms of impulsiveness. With a car, you don't have to worry about bus routes, most inclement weather, walking alone as a female at night, carrying a bunch of groceries, or going someplace that's far away. However, a car comes with a major (for me) caveat, and that is that being in a car is stifling and mind-numbing and just exactly like being inside!

What made Indonesia wonderful wasn't only the weather being welcoming and nonthreatening and predictable (though I have to say most people disagreed with me and found the heat stifling, fever-inducing, and soaked with sluggishness), but also that the mode of transportation was so exhilarating! Just the traveling part was an adventure in itself, and an outdoor one at that. Zipping around (not even zipping, I don't think I ever reached more than 40mph even on the long deserted roads, because at any moment there might be a three foot wide pothole or a runaway pig) on these crappy rough roads with the muggy sun burning your helmet and the wind smelly and hot... it was perfect.

So from this I gather the secret to at least marginal increases in happiness is living in coastal southern California... but taking L.A., throwing it in the ocean, digging up San Francisco with a bulldozer and placing it where L.A. used to be. Voila! Scooter/motorcycle/public transportation-friendly supercool city with a hot climate! (Oh yeah, and also eliminating dead parents and debt and unresponsive lovers and unsatisfying jobs.) Voila and ha! Back to you, Daniel Gilbert!

Reading an article about animal liberation (in this case, whale/shark/fish/sea cucumber liberation) started becoming a little awkward when I began noting the author's and the interviewees' struggles with pronouns. Here I was, sprawled nearly upside-down on my couch (head on the butt cushion, legs over the back cushions), meant to have my heart breaking for these poor sea creatures. I mean, these guys - these volunteers who had sacrificed whatever they left back in their normal lives to come out here on what were essentially pirate ships for all the protection they got from any government - were describing the bloody struggling fin-thumping sharks on the decks of boats, and tuna dangling by the roofs of their mouths, and so forth, and I was going along, heart in my own mouth, wishing I hadn't been raised on sushi so I didn't love it so much, when suddenly the pronouns started becoming palpably forced, or else noticeably omitted.

Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.

Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.

The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.

So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.

A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.

And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.

We Spent Our Childhoods Being Told

We spent our childhoods being told by books and by movies and by cartoons that if we were just good enough, true of heart enough, curious and eager enough, bright-eyed enough – everything that children in storybooks are and everything that’s overlooked in real children – we would stumble across lands populated entirely by talking animals, discover underground caves full of treasure, have our cuts and bruises healed by magicians, fly through the air on the back of softly scaled dragons, and maybe, just maybe, become the ruler or leader of a land full of tiny thankful creatures; elves, maybe, or gnomes.

We tried to be true of heart, and curious, and eager, and all those things; we looked in the unlikeliest of places, hoping for magic. Mysterious doors set in the sides of buildings without porches – only invisible flying people must use these! Rabbit-sized holes in the sand at the city beach – must be sandcrabs who’ve eaten growth powder! Dog-shaped clouds – some very tall giant must be up there shaping them!

And as for the good enough part, and the true of heart part – we even did these, though more grudgingly, and certainly in private. No kid wants another kid to see him being a goody-goody, so I don’t know what anyone else did, but I would go outside after rainstorms and move the worms from the sidewalk so they wouldn’t dry out in the sun. It must have been years before the inkling slipped from my head that someday, while I was sleeping, the Worm King (complete with crown) would appear on my bed, awaken me, and proclaim me savior of WormLand. I would travel down into the dirt with the Worm King and pass vast chambers of bowing worms on my way to the throne they’d been saving just for me.

Then I would be shown a feast of feasts – a sumptuous, mind-boggling feast of foods never before seen by man (but somehow suitable for his digestive system) and let alone to sleep the rest of the night on a mattress made from layers and layers of the finest silkworm’s silk.

What did I get, though? What did we all get? Silk mattresses from the worm king? Dragon rides over the South Pacific? A gift of our very own invisible wings? Sumptuous feasts and cross-species storytelling?

No. We got adulthood. We got our parents telling us there was no Santa Claus once we were deemed too old for him. We got our stuffed animals being stuffed into plastic bags and given to the Salvation Army. And being true of heart, being eager, being curious, suddenly became being idle, being lazy, wasting time. Digging holes in the sand to find sandcrabs just wasn’t cute anymore, and it wasn’t tolerated until we had finished our math homework.

What kind of child-rearing philosophy is this, anyway? Whose idea was it to use magical creatures and stories as bait to create good, giving, open-hearted children, and then whisk them away and hope that the goodness would remain on its own? Did no one think bitterness and disillusionment would go along with the whisking away? That they would blame the world for misrepresenting itself? Did no one wonder how the children would feel as thirty-year-olds when they went to a beach and realized there was no reason to dig down into the sand? These thirty-year-olds will drink instead; down their piña coladas and doze and try to tan and think about swimming but only that, think, because there’s so many reasons not to, you know? Wet hair, wet clothes, sand sticking wetly to skin, and then sandy clothes. You’d have to take a shower or something. Too much trouble.

No, I get the original idea. I understand the motivation and I can understand how whoever thought it up thought it would go. As our minds matured, we were supposed to transfer our imaginations into something more honed and practical. We were supposed to appreciate the value of ordinary things without sticking long, trailing tale tails on them. They expected us to think: ‘I wonder what made that burrow under the roots of that tree. Hey! I should become a naturalist!’ Or, ‘That door that’s half-underground sure is bizarre… hey, I should become an architect and find out why anyone would build such a thing!’ Our thoughts were supposed to start gravitating towards what we will spend our practical adult life doing. They were not supposed to continue in the ‘perhaps that large burrow leads to an underground kingdom or a parallel universe’ vein.

The jump, though, seemed jarring to us. There’s nowhere that feels right for the sudden jump to straight logic and no lingering doubts. When I was fourteen I still winced at handling my stuffed animals in such a way that, were they alive, would kill them. I didn’t drop them on their heads, I didn’t throw them, I didn’t stuff them into suitcases, and I didn’t roll over on them in my sleep. I didn’t launder them or allow anyone else to launder them. Sometimes I would try, because my adult’s mind was butting in, telling me that I should be able to do these things without cringing, but my hands, my body, wouldn’t obey. There was still an off chance in my heart that they were alive and they were begging me mutely, like a pet, to take care of them and not to hurt them.

Even when we were children, eight or nine, we would have to psych ourselves up with a healthy dose of group insanity to be able to play the game where we toss our dolls into a moving ceiling fan to see where they’d be flung. And afterwards, we would all be depressed, preoccupied. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was waiting for them to leave so I could apologize to my dolls.

I miss having that now, that intense unconditional respect for helpless creatures or invisible kings. I miss it being revered as a quality and I think it still should. We’re not really supposed to have respect for anything intangible, with the notable exception of God. It’s not frowned upon, exactly, but it’s seen as kooky and a little bit stupid to be superstitious or to expect to find unknown magic everywhere we look.

To have respect for people and things, not in spite of, but because of the fact that we have absolute power over them – this fades in adulthood, and must be engineered to fade in adulthood. If it didn’t, where would we find our slaughterhouse workers? How would we make our engineers designing oil lines to slash through old-growth forests?

We wouldn’t. The slaughterhouse workers would secretly pardon animals whenever they could; pigs and cows would constantly be found running free in nearby forests. They might only do it because they thought the pigs and cows might come back with their friends and provide them with lifelong meat and milk, but they would still do it, because that’s what happens in fairy tales: save someone’s life and they’ll reward you handsomely. Whether that someone is an animal or a human or even an inanimate object, you will be rewarded.

The engineers assigned to the pipeline task would see agonized faces on all the trees, all the animals fleeing their habitat, and they would up and quit, only to be scarcely seen from then on. Well, of course! They’d have a cozy mansion sky-high in the highest branches of the redwoods and millions of sparrow and squirrel friends to cater to their every need.

And, tell me, what good would that do society?