Things that make me happy

The ongoing list of happiness, the yin to my “things I hate and would like to remove from the face of the earth” page’s yang, or is it the other way around? I’m not very zen-like sometimes, though I do have my moments. This is not one of them however. But here it is, things that make me happy:

• trite as it is, baby animals. Like kittens. And puppies. And lambs. And little baby quail that run in long lines behind their mothers. I like some babies too, but not all of them. Looking at a screaming baby is not enough to make me happy, or even a quiet yet ugly baby, especially very small ones. Once they get older and can actually recognize that outside things exist, I like them better. I do like babies much more than their parents, however, for my feelings about most (please note! not all) parents, please see the things I hate list…that’s coming soon. I didn’t want to start with the negative, I hope to use that list to vent…
• writing something that is really fucking good.
• paychecks
• eating ice-cream out of a sugar cone on a really hot day, rainbow sherbet is by far the flavour of choice…though I worry that it isn’t actually ice cream. I am always tempted by things with chunks of cookie dough or reeses peanut butter cups in them, and the first few bites of those are splendid. And the aftermath is not. So rainbow sherbet it is, it just keeps getting better AND it refreshes.
• smoking cigars poolside, i just tried that and it agreed with me.
• going places I have never been before
• hummingbirds
• the ridiculous
• When Chanoch asks me questions like, “if I drop this pencil, do you ‘believe’ that it will fall, or ‘know’ that it will fall?” That one has kept me occupied for some time as I’m still not sure what my feelings towards gravity are. Except I don’t really like it.
• the moors in sun and mist
• People marching. I don’t believe that marches are very effective at changing a damn thing, and even so, they make me cry. With, er, happiness. Or something deeper than that. People coming together for anything perilously like the greater good gets to me every time.
• A latte in the soporific hours of the mid-afternoon
• the smell of orange blossoms
• the existence of things like tapirs, echidnas, and platypi. Platapuses. Platypi. That word makes me happy too.
• the sound of waves
• the stars the way you can see them in the middle of the Arizona desert in the utter darkness of a cloudless sky
• staying up all night talking about everything and nothing
• dancing while cleaning my room, folding my laundry, doing dishes, cooking….to live music, to a good dj, to the music in my head
• wandering around the city, any city
• sleeping in
• playing and watching soccer, though I prefer to call it football, I also like being in countries where I can call it football and people know what I’m talking about, that definitely makes me happy.
• lizards…they take me back to my childhood, I like to catch them, and the trick is to immediately flip them over and stroke their stomachs with one finger…that is how to make lizards happy. And crocodiles apparently, but I am very afraid of crocodiles. Lizards now, they are magic except for the really big ones with bright blue bellies, those bite. Hard. They will slice your skin off, so i wouldn’t advise catching them, you’ll be sorry and so will the lizard after the shock has made you hurl it against a wall.
• vanilla
• small fires that are under my control (in a fireplace or a firepit), not the ones raging through the forest
• singing
• hot showers
• being on a boat
• beers with old friends
• nights so warm that you can fall asleep wrapped only in a sheet and with the fan full on (white noise makes me happy too)
• trains
• buttered toast
• gloaming…the word and the time of day and the magical quality of the light
• when me and my three brothers are all together and getting up to mischief. Not least because that’s one of the few times I feel short, or because they are the only ones on the planet who can relate to the contradictions of our upbringing. But also because it is so rare, and because my brothers are so cool now, even though I spent much of my life hating them…or in a tactical alliance with tristram against mike and dan. Ah, those were the days.
• Reading about things like ammonites and nautili and trilobites. And owning them. Well, the fossils at least. Live trilobites, honestly I don’t know how I’d feel about those! I think I’d like them, they roll up into little armored balls and seems like they might be cool to have around.
• Rocks, minerals, gemstones…thinking about all those millions of years when humans weren’t even around
• the ducklings at Echo Park Lake
• Ru Paul’s Drag Race, I’m rather smitten with Nina Flowers
• Eccentrics, like John whose thoughts can be heard by Nasa, and the guy we knew as Elvis from the Morrison, and Bogdanov, and ornamental hermits and the englishmen who hired them and…well, the list goes on.