What is happiness?

For the last several months I have wrestled with defining happiness. I don't know when I realized that I didn't know what happiness was, but it has been lurking in the back of my brain for awhile.

Consider, I've always been seeking happiness, but I don't know if I've ever understood why certain things made me happy, and other things made me unhappy, over a long-term basis.

A number of things appeared to be causing me unhappiness over the past few years. Mostly, a sense of disenfranchisement, snow, rain, and having no money. But getting away from those things doesn't necessarily cause me to be happy, it just causes me to be less unhappy.

So what is happiness?

I think it is interpersonal relationships. Friendships. Companionship. Playing videogames is entertaining, but playing videogames with a friend is genuinely fun. Exciting even. Makes me happy.

The same is true for cooking. I like to cook, but I really like to cook when I'm around friends. I like sharing a kitchen while figuring out the best way to prepare tilapia.

Even stupid stuff, like going to a grocery store or sitting around TV is ultimately far more fulfilling when you're doing it with friends.

I'm not sure this definition applies to everyone, but it seems to apply to everyone I know. Marriages are mostly about a particular interpersonal relationship that two people feel like fostering essentially forever. Family gatherings are often, cynically, described as opportunities to get together and eat, but what they really are is opportunities to get together and interact. Similarly, parties are usually not about anything beyond interacting with other people. The internet, for all its fantastic information, has become infinitely more popular thanks to social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube, Reddit, and blogs in general.

Furthermore, what do people spend their time talking about? Usually it is other people. People seem to talk almost entirely about other people, usually people you all know. In fact, you can often piss everyone off by trying to change the subject to something other than people.

So I think I'm on to something when I say that happiness is about relationships with other people. I think the happiness of most people is tied, directly, to amount and quality of their social interactions.

The Upside to living at a Biostation

The roller coaster has upswings.

Tonight was one of them.

In actuality, this whole week has been one of them. I interviewed for a job that would pay great, and get me out of the academic muck. But beyond that, tonight was a fish-fry.

The maintenance manager at the station is an Oklahoma good-ole' boy. Except that he's cool and amazing. He caught 25 catfish last week when he could have been working (screw that!) and tonight he fried us up a feast of venison, catfish, gar, hush puppies, tater tots, and drunken chicken. Plus he had some 'drunken onions' which were, I think, marinated in vinegar and maybe alcohol.

The onions were amazing. The chicken was amazing. The hush puppies were terrible, don't eat them. I'll eat them for you (this is my way of saying that they were so good I want them all to myself). The beer was good (2 kinds of home-brew). The company was astounding. All good people.

I almost want to cry it was so much fun.

Tot means dead in german, so tater-tot is 'potato dead'...which seems appropriate.

There were other German words I learned, but I can't remember them.

Did I mention I'm drunk? Off a combination of tequila, wheat beer and home-brew. I haven't felt this relaxed in quite a while.

The facilities manager down here is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. He's honest, loud, friendly, guitar-playing, cooking fiend, etc. Reminds me of my buddy B from grad school. I miss the grad school field station. I feel like going back, because that was some really good times, but this field station in Oklahoma is pretty good too.

Less card games, more tequila, but damn. This is why I like field stations.

There are upsides to this whole profession!!

Chuck

First, I still don’t have internet in the house, and I’ve been really busy. However, I’m going to try to transfer some of the stuff I’ve been writing at home to this website because it keeps piling up and I like to make people read my writing. Lucky you.

Now, several months ago I promised everyone a review of Chuck Klosterman’s book “Killing Yourself to Live.” Here we go:

Chuck Klosterman isn’t a modern day Jack Kerouac, he isn’t even close to Hemmingway, and I wouldn’t even consider comparing him to James Joyce except in the most distant and obtuse way. I’m sure the ivory tower of academic elitists who decide who sits in the pantheon of ‘great writers’ of the English language will look at Klosterman and snicker. Guys like Harold Bloom no doubt think that Chuck is an idiot.

They are totally wrong.

Chuck Klosterman is a zen master of non-fiction. His writing (at least in this book) takes place completely within his culture and mindset. That isn’t to say that Chuck doesn’t draw upon influences from other periods or cultures, but he doesn’t really seem to think about them. For a book about a bunch of rock stars who died young, this is remarkable.

If asked, I’d describe this book as comedic, nostalgic, and tragic, but always immersed in the now. Klosterman weaves his personal relationships with women into a narrative that you could be fooled into thinking had something to do with rock music. I’m not saying Klosterman is David Sedaris crossed with Dave Barry, but that isn’t as far off as you might think.

The bottom line is that I only know of a handful of living authors who don’t suck, Klosterman falls into that category.

And at the same time...

My life certainly doesn' t suck.

Just a few weeks ago I hit the top, the most amazing moment in my life. I saw my son on the sonogram at the hospital.

Seriously. That was amazing. Beyond amazing really. I wasn't expecting much. I certainly wasn't expecting to just about explode with joy and giddiness. I mean, he's real. He's right there. And his hand is resting on his chin as if he's thinking about something.

Really no way to put that into words, and I certainly didn't expect the need to, but hey, having a kid is really astounding.


Plus this Ok Go song is really great.

The Crux of my Desire

Ever since I left Winfield I've had kind of a hard time being happy. What follows is basically me thinking aloud.

crux (krks, krks)

n. pl. crux·es or cru·ces (krsz)

1. The basic, central, or critical point or feature: the crux of the matter; the crux of an argument.

2. A puzzling or apparently insoluble problem.

In this case, the crux of my desire is merely finding that which I desire.

What do I desire?

I was once, even as recently as 6 months ago, driven entirely by the twin desires of being happy on a personal level and doing useful science.

Have fun, think hard, solve interesting problems.

Right now, I'm not so sure. These days, I'm not sure what is driving me, but having a child is throwing this whole thing out of wack. I've got new desires. Little Alton is going to need things. Not the same way I need a beer after a long day, but real, genuine need.

And between my wife and I, we've got to figure out a way to give it to him.

Suddenly I desire money. Like, a lot of it, relatively speaking, or at least a constant supply of it.

Shit.

I left graduate school too early for this desire. I intentionally took a job working on stuff I'd never worked on before. That was so that I could re-invent myself into working on questions I actually found interesting. I was really, really sick of working on DOM dynamics.

That's fine, and that works out great if I can afford to slum it for a few years while figuring out and publishing a series of projects that establishes my credentials in this new area.

Unfortunately, we can't keep slumming it. Our expenses are going up, way up. Health care costs alone are going to break us if we don't get more income. I mean, we can live really cheap. We worked it out last month, and our combined rent, car (gas and insurance), student loan payments, all our utilities and all our groceries is less than 50% of my income after taxes.

Yet we still found ourselves confined to our house, eating through everything in our freezer and going without bread and milk for the last six days of the month in order to preserve our budget.
Why? Because we have to spend a ton of money on medical expenses, we eat out too much, we go places, and we just generally don't stick to a budget very well.

So here I am, looking around for another job, one that will be pretty much guaranteed for the next 4-5 years. And what am I supposed to look for? I'm already slipping out of the DOM game. I'm not yet up to speed in toxistoichiometry, and I don't know a fricking thing about fish (which seems to be the job of choice right now).

I'm looking at teaching positions, but seriously who thinks I can teach? Let's see some hands. Oh wait, I'm not seeing any hands. I mean, sure, my CV looks like I should know something about teaching, but I really don't. I'm not bad at it, but I'm not really good at it. The most I can honestly say is that I put a lot of effort into it (I can't even put into words how much work I've done on this invasion biology class). I like outreach activities, but again, the best I can say is that I put a lot of effort into it.

Apparently this is what having a kid will do to you. I have no desires anymore that do not revolve around securing a relatively stable situation for my kid. Science? Really? Science? I'm supposed to still care about frickin' science?

I'm torn apart right now. I do not know what I'm supposed to do, or how.