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!

It's a Midwestern rainy day in the desert. I've got a glove with a coat hanger twisted through the fingers making the 'rock on' sign in the corner, and a wasteland of chocolate wrappers surrounding me. I have a surprise birthday party coming up that, yes, I am supposed to know about, but not the details, and the details being a surprise is enough for me. I also have a surprise birthday dinner coming up that was wholly a surprise until I figured out the clues in a burst and rush of lucky guesses this morning.

It occurs to me that if this were a story, trying to 'illustrate' my happiness, to 'show and not tell' the details that made me that way, it would probably sound forced, but since it's real, and I'm not trying to write, and this is a fleeting feeling, it reads real, at least to me.

I lay in bed thinking about this.

It’s raining, finally. It has been raining for days. I need sheets to cover myself at night for the first time in months. Outside, my laundry is streaming soap and rainwater into the gutter, which is streaming soap, rainwater, sand, and orange leaves into the neighbors’ fish pond. A cream-and-white cat crouches on the tin roof overlooking this stream; its ribs loop painfully under its skin. It jumps in our kitchen window at night and eats our rats. Sometimes Ibu shoos it away with well-aimed kicks. I can’t understand this. Just because it washes the rats down with some of our trash.

I think about this, and how it relates to what I want. Mostly I think about how it doesn’t. I think about how I grew up. I think about my conviction that every only child is spoiled. I still believe this to be almost always true. It’s definitely true in my case. I’ve never denied that.

Louise was adamant, always, in her declaration that happy people will be happy regardless of changes to their environment, and unhappy people, the same thing. I believe her, even though I don’t want to. It makes wanting to go home irrelevant. It makes my now strong and pervasive desire for good food irrelevant – and when is that ever a good thing? What has the world come to when there’s no difference in happiness between masses of MSG soaked rice with a tiny, soggy cut of bay-caught, filthy-from-the-barge-traffic-tuna, and a wood platter stacked with an immaculate, perfectly cut variety of raw fish adorned with daikon, carrot, and seaweed?

It’s not that, though. I know this journal has tired of bearing longing-laden descriptions of faraway food, and I’m trying to quit, but at this point, it’s an addiction. Every thought train is derailed there.

Nothing really makes me happier, though, to wish for, than good food and an endlessly thorough back massage. And after that, a nap. In the sun. But not the equatorial sun, not this sun that’s impossible to cower under for longer than five minutes without beginning to feel faint. Somewhere Californian in June. And a swim in the ocean, at the kind of beach where there’s a slow, steady dropaway and bodysurfing waves. And more good food when I emerge. And then a soundproof music studio, equipped only with a great touch-sensitive electric keyboard and a microphone and no other human being for miles, just for good measure. Hours and hours of that, with snacks at hand, more hours until my voice is hoarse. And then a party. But a party with only my closest friends, and maybe their guests, and nobody who I felt I had to invite just to be polite or to keep up appearances. Getting drunk would be okay, but not getting drunk would not be prohibitive to having fun, and if the alcohol happened to run out, half the party would not take off for another party with a keg, nor want to. Everyone would take forever to get sleepy, and there would be a long period where everyone wavered in their minds between being asleep and being awake, and spoke with that dreamy quality that, if heard in the morning, wouldn’t seem to be following any thread. Everything would be uproariously funny – everything would hold gravity – everything would seem to hinge upon everything else. And everybody would fall asleep at different times and the conversations of the people remaining awake would drift into the dreams of the people who had fallen asleep.