Happiness revealed … again

Okay I’m snarky. I shouldn’t be, but I am. And I don’t know why. Despite having every material thing that I’ve ever really wanted, modest though my material aspirations might be. Despite having had, at one time or another, every non-material thing that I’ve ever really wanted, as well.

On a day like today, with a gluten-free breakfast crepe for breakfast and a mocha latte not far behind, with unseasonably spring-like weather outside, a good book in progress and a performance tonight, with new creative opportunities fast approaching … on a day like today, I should ooze positivity. Wherefore snarky, then, Romeo?

“It’s my nature,” said the scorpion.

I was talking with a fellow cast member last night about one of my pet peeves. “Have you ever noticed,” I asked him, “how foreign restaurants tend to play American rock ‘n roll music in their dining areas?” He said that he hadn’t, nor was it my impression that he much cared if they did, but I pressed on. “Why can’t the sushi restaurants play shakuhachi music, for example, and Peruvian restaurants play whatever’s native to Peru?”

Then I caught myself. “You see the kind of problems I have to deal with,” I said. He chuckled. The minor irritations that count as “problems” in my world aren’t problems at all, but what the roughneck character in our show would call “Gertrude and Margaret at the automat” issues … how not to drop crumbs on the carpet … how to build the perfect BLT … with not too much mayonnaise and crust removed and using only the tenderest parts of the lettuce.

Now would be a good time, I’m sure, to revisit the TEDx video embedded here — “Happiness Revealed” — which I last blogged September 15, 2011.