the happiness project

so this afternoon I had a dentist appointment. And the fact that I was actually looking forward to that little blip of activity in my regularly scheduled activity of moving the baby to a more orderly rhythm of feedings and naptimes might give you an indication of the kind of crying that’s been going on around our house the last couple days. The crying is loud, very, very loud, and pretty soon it will be coming from me in addition to the baby.

But that’s a different story.

Let’s start again. This afternoon I had a dentist appointment. And the dental hygienist was a lovely woman who I really enjoyed chatting with. When I first got in the chair I was suffering from an obvious case of new baby tourrette’s, which, in case you aren’t familiar with new baby tourrette’s, let me assure you is highly annoying. For about five minutes, regardless of what she asked me, I managed to answer in some way that pertained to my new baby.

‘So you’re here for a toothache?’ she wanted to know. ‘Yes, I would have come in sooner but I just had a baby.’

‘Are you on any medications?’

‘Just prenatal vitamins, you know, because I’m nursing my new baby.’

‘On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the pain of your toothache’

‘Geez, I don’t know, does a pain scale even work for people who just got done having a baby?’

Don’t worry, at least I am aware enough to hate myself for that conversation too.

Once the tourrette’s was worked out of my system we started to talk about normal, non-baby things. (Though after they numbed me up, I still managed to drool a little something about how, due to the numbing agent, I wasn’t going to be talking much better than my baby could. BudumBum! New baby tourrette’s! It’s more annoying than Paris Hilton! If that’s even possible!) The dental hygienist found out that I live in the country and so she mentioned that she lived in the country as well. We got to discussing nuances of the lifestyle which began with the usuals like how you have to cluster fifteen errands every time you go into town and how you must have a grocery list or you’ll totally forget the most important thing you have to buy (which, for some people is milk or bread, but in this house is lump charcoal.) After those points were covered, we moved on to the more unique benefits of country living. Like how you can act like crazy wild people howling in the night and no one will ever call the cops on you. Or how you can tell the outside world to eff off for days at a time, and not have to interact with anyone who doesn’t sleep under the same roof you do. And then she absolutely won me over and made me remember all the reasons I don’t tell the world to eff off and turn into a permanent hermit, she goes, ‘Yeah, and then there’s the times my husband will go into the garden in the morning wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and boots with a cup of coffee. That’s not something you can do if you have neighbors.’

‘You’re right about that,’ I said, ‘Partially-naked people hanging out in gardens is not exactly neighbor-friendly.’

‘You gotta love country living,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘You gotta love it.’

On the way home from my dentist, after I had told Andrew the story and we were already way outside the city limits, we ended up behind a truck that was going really, really slow. Far too slow for the speeds most people maintain in the country. So slow that I could wiggle my half-numb tongue faster than his wheels were turning.

‘Is he kidding?’ I asked Andrew, I mean, didn’t this guy know that we needed to get home? There are hundreds and hundreds of acres for us to walk across in nothing but skivvies and shoes­—country living takes time, people, lots and lots of precious time.

Andrew was muttering under his breath about how slow the guy was driving and how annoying it was and I think he was just about to start cussing when he spotted something that stopped him in his verbal tracks. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘Does that guy have a cigar hanging out of his mouth?’ Sure enough, you could see the silhouette of a big fatty hanging out of the slow driver’s mouth through the back of his truck. ‘Yup,’ Andrew said, ‘And he’s also got cigarette windows.’

I was all, ‘Cigarette what’s?’

‘Cigarette windows,’ Andrew said, ‘The shields that go on top of people’s car windows so that when it rains, they can still smoke.’

Aaaahhh, I see, cigarette windows. Right then and there, I knew this was primed to be a continuation of the ‘what you gotta love about country living’ conversation. In the city, people do things to their cars. They tint the windows, get fancy rims on the tires, invest money in speakers so other people on the highway can hear their cars go BOOM. But in the country, what do people invest in? From one perspective, you could say cigarette windows are an investment in an almost-definite smoking-related death at an earlier-than-natural point in your life. And maybe you’d be right, but you’d also be a party pooper, because the other answer is that cigarette windows are an investment in telling the Surgeon General to go to hell in a handbasket. Not only are you definitely keep smoking today even though the government is telling you to quit, you’re also not even going to leave open the possibility that maybe, on a day like tomorrow, you might give up the habit. No New Years Resolution. No Scary Pictures of Charred Lungs On Billboard Guilt Trips. You’re going to seal your fate with a blazing fatty and a set of cigarette windows and if some bleeding-heart liberal comes along to explain the cost your imminent smoking-related death is going to cost the health care system, you’re going to blow smoke in that sonuvabitch’s face, get in your car and drive off into the rather hazy sunset.

Stubborn assholes always drive into the sunset. It’s, like, a requirement for the life script of that particular personality type.

On the other side of that sunset is a pair of boots and a set of boxer shorts waiting to be slid into on a humid August morning. When you’re baby starts screaming in the wee hours of the morning, you’ll thank those sweet, faintly twinkling stars you can walk outside without changing clothes or worrying about the neighbors. Just do the brand new pink lungs of your baby a favor and don’t smoke when you’re it in the garden, wait until you’re solo in the car—and you’re only killing your own lungs. Oh, and even though you’re hard at work on that task, could you do the folks behind you a favor and step on the gas? Looks like you’re driving that poor guy crazy, and the woman next to him looks like she’s about to lose her mind—there’s drool running down the side of her mouth and she keeps blabbering on about a new baby.