Category: Small Happinesses

Beth, my glorious hair cut person wot is very compassionate with my feral locks, has me on a strict hair cutting regime. Every 10-12 weeks I trot in for my Surprise Appointment in which I apologize for being late and then proceed to tell her about the previous three months of my life like a Days of Our Lives serial (and I say Surprise Appointment because I never note the next appointment down. Every text reminder’s a little shock that past me could be so organized).

This hair appointment regime exists because when it doesn’t, I quickly begin to look like I’m part of some religious cult wot doesn’t cut their hair. All I would need would be a little scarf to make people wonder if I was one of many wives and perhaps also to stop wearing mascara.

Anyway, this is quite a long introduction for a story that has nothing to do with haircuts, but it provides you with the context of why I was in town. Said hair cut had been finished and while the smart thing to do would have been to go straight home, the week before had been so awful, I decided some mooching and pootling was in order.

Let it be known that it’s been many, many years since I’ve been to one of those walk in massage places (no, not *those* places) but on this particular occasion I pootled right inside.

I have no idea what I was doing, and the math was not mathing on those prices, but because my guard was down and the lady behind the desk was quite persuasive, I nek minit found myself on the massage table staring at the ground.

In my mind, I had envisaged something relaxing. A time where for twenty odd minutes, I could check out and let the busy world go by. Recharge, if you will.

It seems I was mistaken.

It all started well. I pride myself on being slight of frame but with a density of muscle that can handle a surprising amount of force.

PRESSURE OK?? She breathed breathily into my ear.

‘Yes,’ I replied, thinking how she would be impressed at what I handled.

I’m not sure if she got enthusiastic, possessed by what she perceived to be a muscle knot, or if she lures all her unsuspectings in this way, but it appears that after some brief slaps around with oil, the jet engines started revving on the tarmac.

The space between my neck and my mid-section became her runway and her elbows took the stage.

Released with the force of a thousand buffalo, she pierced those pointers down the pot-holed express lane of my rib attachments.

I immediately knew what she was up to: I had chosen the type whose massage mission is to break you. I needed to sub-consciously send her the message that I was game.

‘PRESSURE OK??’ She jeered again. I gave her a weak thumbs up as there was no breath left in my body to reply.

For the next 15 minutes, it seemed as though she left my back and pressed her persistent little thumbs directly into the nerve centres of my brain. I activated all the techniques I would rely on if I was ever kidnapped and interrogated or enlisted for the army.

I stared at a dot on the floor.

I forcefully wrinkled my nose and did strange things with my lips.

I thought about how I could write about this afterwards but instead of calling it ‘Small Happinesses’ it would be the beginning of a new series called ‘Tiny Tragedies’.

I squinted my eyes in case limiting my vision would be helpful.

She wrapped up with a move I’ll never understand where they thump your back with their fists, and make the sound of an armpit fart, as though this is something we all really want to pay for.

Fortunately, I had the final word:

In a closing, passive aggressive parting, I lingered in the room for slightly longer than necessary getting changed, leaving her with more time to consider her life and actions.

That parting shot is my Happiness today. That, and the fact the massage ended as quickly as it started.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It all started when my eldest small person said I was ‘so cringe’.

His words travelled across the room and lit a match within my insides. Poor thing. So innocent. So young. So unsuspecting.

He thought The Cringe he was experiencing in that moment was the worst of it, but it was only the beginning.

A wee nail scratch on a mountain.

The first light drop of rain as the tropical storm approaches.

The light mist from the end of a fire hose.

After all, what’s even the point of being a parent if not to let the full force of your weirdness unleash on your children?

To go Full Cringe.

There shall be no suppression of The Cringe. Not on my watch. Not today.

Let it be known that I have little knowledge of the lingo of the kids on the streets in the Gen of the Z, but I have watched enough educational Instagram reels of people being chased by emus which bleed into movie trailers of films I’ll never watch where they call each other ‘Broski’ and shout things like ‘This hits different’ to be Just Dangerous Enough with my words.

It does, by the way, hit different.

(A point of clarification here: I’m not really that old and my kids are most definitely not on the streets. If they are, they are more like to run into a blue-ish black swamp hen called a Pūkeko than a gangsta human bean, but that fact is not useful to my story).

So here we go:

You have to eat and leave no crumbs. Don’t be mid.

I wonder all the time; do I have the aura to pull this off?

The thought leaves me low key panicked.

But then I remember: Bring Full Main Character Energy.

You got to pass the vibe check. Step into your Save The Planet Era.

It’s giving, don’t you say?

You heard me: Eat and leave no crumbs.

And when you’ve done that, come back and spill the tea.

(To be honest, I’ve used up the full extent of my vocab here so I’m not sure how to tie this off, except to say: My Happiness today is the Full Cringe. Do it for the people. It just hits different).

 

This past few days in our household, we’ve had a situation. You see, my boys went to stay in a little cabin we own a handful of hours away, and a few years back, we planted there some grapes.

This year was the first year they’ve really properly fruited.

“There were four bunches of grapes,” my husband proclaimed, “and I put two in the fridge and told everyone, ‘THOSE ARE FOR MUM.’”

But when they got home to me, 100 percent of the grapes were mysteriously missing.

“I mean, they even grow in shareable packages,” I lectured my children. “You don’t even need a knife!”

Both looked more delighted than remorseful.

And then I remembered:

I wasn’t going to tell you this story, not because I am ashamed, but because it wasn’t a story I’d thought to tell.

We have an orchard in front of our house that produces a sizeable fruit explosion every year.

Apples are our most reliable resource, but we’ve also gently tend to peaches and apricots, and a sprinkling of others. So far, the more exotic fruits have arrived in disappointingly tiny batches. We just take it in our stride.

There was one tree though that put up a particularly good effort this time round. A brief count came in at half a dozen. I casually walked past and noted one particularly good-looking peach hanging from the tree.

I gave it the kind of squeeze you do when you’re an Official Peach Tester.

‘Not yet,’ I noted, ‘but I will most definitely be coming back tomorrow.’

Tomorrow came and let the record show that I was starving. I managed to find a small herd of plums that were too heavy to carry, so I ate them all instead.

And then I remembered:

That giant peach.

As far as peaches go, she really was a beast. She was truly enormous.

Answered back with just the right amount of firmness when squeezed.

Completely unpecked by birdlings.

As you can imagine, I was elated.

It did occur to me as I drew her closer to my mouth that I was potentially breaking an unspoken family rule:

That when there is a limited number of fruits, there’s automatic sharing. That you must cut it up and hand it round because that’s The Right Thing To Do.

But I didn’t feel like sharing. I wasn’t feeling in any way sacrificial and quite felt that I deserved it. So, I did the next best thing:

I sat down and ate that whole massive peach in one short sitting. When I finished, I was almost over full.

Wandering back inside, the family were gathered round the kitchen table.

‘I just ate the best peach I’ve ever had,’ I told them, juice all over my jumper and possibly up the sides of my face.

Immediately, the room fell silent.

‘Was that the peach overhanging the fence?’ They answered back. ‘Flynn’s peach? He’s been checking on it every day.’

I did a quick scan of my mental google maps and confirmed that indeed that was the peach.

‘Mum! I Can’t believe you would do that!! That was MY Peach.’

‘He has been really excited about that peach,’ the rest of the room echoed, as though that was something I should automatically know.

Perhaps, to feel guilty would have been the most right thing in the moment.

Perhaps I was high on peach juice.

Perhaps it was just a really good peach and it made all other consequences worth it.

Perhaps all three.

But at the end of the grape conversation, I added:

I’m so glad I ate that peach.

It still was 100% worth it.

 

 

It’s easy to think about happiness in a very specific way. Joy is much the same. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been sold down the river of such experiences existing within a certain Feeling Framework.

‘Come live on Happiness Island,’ they tell us, ‘where life is bump free, your skin is smooth, and you’ll never have to cook for yourself again!’

Weirdly, despite my dedication to Happinesses, I’m untrusting of people who appear to be perpetually that way. I had a neighbour once who you could never talk to about anything that didn’t have a pleasant and neat ending. I found this massively boring and had very little to say.

Her censoring to the pleasant snagged my tongue because it reduced life to black and white, when it’s actually many colours and tones and spots and speckles (isn’t speckles a lovely word?!).

No, it seems that happiness and joy are actually quite gritty. And once again, perplexingly and mysteriously, they’re wholly dependent on their opposites to come to life in any meaningful and fleshy way.

One of my most best writers, Ross Gay, had this to say about joy:

“Far be it for me to define someone else’s joy, but the way I’m defining joy is that it’s what shines from us as we help each other carry our sorrows.

It implies many things, things that we would mostly think of as sorrowful, like the fact that we’re always heartbroken, every one of us. Among those heartbreaks is that we’re going to die, or who we love is going to die or change.

I think of joy as a grave emotion, because it almost emerges from the fact of the grave. If we ignore that, I think we’re talking about something else.

But there’s often a kind of immature approach to joy, which is why “serious” people will often say things like, “How could you talk about joy at a time like this?” First of all, it’s always a time like this somewhere for someone. Secondly, joy emerges from times like this.”

I know up until now, I have shared my happinesses of leftovers and dogs doing the zoomies and memories of childhood rides, but today, I want to talk about shared worries and sorrows, and how when you meet both of those things in a truthful way, there’s a very specific kind of joy that leaks in through the edges.

I’ve had a week of that. Of health scares with my most loved, and being witness to others  regress in matters of their health, and finding myself sitting quietly in the room squashed up against the feeling of mortality. We know this, of course, all the time, that we are mortal. But some days, her reality shines bright and we hold the vision more clearly of life danced on the edge of a volcano.

My happiness today is for all my most dearest who have held my worries with me for this week. And how, in amongst it, after the necessary words have been said, a laugh always carbonates herself amongst our insides.

I think it’s the most human of things, to find our happinesses this way.

I was going to start this letter by saying “I installed a widget” but actually that’s a lie. I didn’t install it at all. I tinkered with it, yes. Made it magnificent *flips hair*. But the installing part I left up to Sir Randall.

Sir Randall is a tech genius wot lets me email with computer complaints that I gaslight him into believing are ‘invitations’ or ‘requests’ by the use of strategically placed emojis.

For instance, I might be saying this:

Sir Randall, can you please help me install this widget wots being a little pesky? 

When what I mean is:

Look, this thing is giving me hot sweats and makes me want to poke my eyes out. I’m about to throw my laptop in the ocean. I might have to sell my kids (that’s unrelated). I beg of you, Sir Randall, please. Save me.

Because I like you, I want to break this conversation down.

You can see what I offered here was an “Emoji Sandwich”.

A quick tutorial, if you will:

You start with the something that leads to a positive emotion

… followed up with the truth of how you feel

… and then leave it as though it’s easy breezy

It works, because what I have now is a chat box on my website. So, you know… proof.

The thing is, I am in New Zealand and Sir Randall is on Eastern Time, which means there’s exactly eleventybillion hours between us.

At some point, Sir Randall went to bed, and I was left, acting cool  dealing with some rather massive questions.

‘Do you want to install an AI chatbot’, the chat thing asked (so meta), to which I frantically replied that I did not. AI be gone! *Flaps around sword*

And just when I thought I had it sorted, upon testing, a strange window popped up.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

Lord above.

….complete with a strange little man who seemed to do a lot of talking.

What follows is some two hours of my time figuring out how to change the text, delete the man, and fiddle with the contents of that window.

Let it be known that Customer Support has been transformed into the Department of Creative Curiosity.

My welcome message states: You’re talking to a real Human Bean, in case you’re wondering”.

Side note: High on my own tech skills, I told this to my friend. She replied, ‘Together we rice’. The calories from that comment have been feeding me for days. I may never need to eat from this point forward.

But THIS, my friends, is the whole reason (aside from being unemployable and some other practical logistics) that I am self-employed.

I can write Human Bean as an official title on my own damn website on an almost-self-installed widget, and there’s no-one around that’s here to stop me.

And if that doesn’t make you happy, then I’m afraid, I’ve got nothing here for you ( ).

Widgets, Department of Creative Curiosity and proper Human Beans are today’s Small Happinesses.

xx Jane

So far, it’s just been me and Randall chatting back and forth but it’s really boosted the page views on my website.

We’re unsure if we’ve spoken of Tango previously, but as time moves on, it seems we have no choice. Yesterday, he made a shock announcement:

Tango is running for Prime Minister of New Zealand.

With job suitability not being a requirement, and the understanding he’s free to say what he likes over the course of his campaign with zero expectation he’ll follow through, he feels confident his chances are as good as any.

The thing is (and this is where the family feels the stress) the opposition have really started digging. They uprooted a viral video that Jane, his human, posted on her Facebook business page a while back, eclipsing everything she’d ever shared. Over a short period, it ticked upward of a million views. It was only 15 seconds, but they were telling.

(What follows is adult content, and discretion is advised: Footage showed an irreverent, hairy horse bucking his small big bottom in her face. The fact that she found it funny was an inappropriate reaction to the stress).

Jane has also been heard on more than one occasion saying that her cause of death will most likely be Tango:

When approached with a feed bucket amongst other horses, he absolutely will not yield. Jane fears she will be sandwiched between him and a much larger horse, and that one day she will be found with them all intensely eating round her limp and lifeless body.

As you can imagine, people are talking.

That Tango is part of the Tiny Horse Mafia, going on secret missions at night.

That he is too Food Motivated for the role.

That he will let go of his morals if there’s dinner.

That he has “Small Horse Man Syndrome”.

That he is orange.

It’s a tricky, delicate time, and we ask for privacy while we garner our responses.

But in the meantime, we feel pressured to say:

1️⃣ Vote One Tango.

And if that turns out to be a bad idea, it will be too late anyway.

xx Jane

The other nasty rumour is that I make up ridiculous stories for my children in response to basic questions like, how are the horses?
This may or may not be a Small Happiness (for me, not for them. I think for them it’s suffering).

If (hypothetically speaking) it was a Happiness, it would be #17.

I’m told that our brightest memories are the ones attached to the strongest emotions, so it makes sense that finding the plum and chocolate muffin in my car was something I remember so clearly.

It had been a long three days at an away-from-home training clinic, and I was starving and sadly out of food.  Rumbling around the glovebox of my car, I found an uneaten muffin, pristine and forgotten, purchased from the café the day before.  How it had been ignored, I’ll never know, but I’m not going to defend myself here.

For the next five minutes, it was just me and that soft and fluffy muffin, and as with all good love stories, for those moments, nothing or no-one else existed.

The story that follows is quite similar.

The other night, G was picking up our boys from a friend’s house and time had begun to run away.

“Why don’t you get takeaway?” I suggested, an indulgence and a luxury when you live in a place where the closest thing you have to ‘Door Dash’ is fighting your way into the house without letting the dogs in.

Dinner that night went the usual way (and yes, the curry was most excellent), but it’s the day after I want to talk of to you here.

The moment, when at lunchtime the next day you are hungry, hypoglycemic, and uninspired. When your mind runs through the usual options, finding none of them tasty or appealing, and then you remember…

Leftovers.

I admit that I’ve never extensively discussed this with anyone to see if this is a peculiarity to me or a commonly shared delight, but I assume it is that latter.

The elation that runs though you. The acceleration and speed towards the fridge. How you don’t even have to heat them up for them to taste good. You can eat them cold! You are that kind of crazy! How you absolutely aren’t willing to share, and if asked, you’ll most probably pretend it never happened. How it’s always the best thing you’ve ever tasted.

It was the other day, but it meant so much I made a note about it in my iPhone:

Leftovers. Small Happinesses.

So here we are, reliving that same moment: Leftovers are my happiness for today.

 

Our biggest and most-softest-insided dog, Lupin, has always had some social struggles. Being a German Shepherd, I was aware of needing to channel her energy from the beginning and at puppy training, she was quite the showoff.

Embracing Hermione Granger energy, she could sit, drop, wait, and do fifty million other things by 16 weeks old while her classmate compadres were still working on basic bladder control.

What she lacked was capacity for friendship.

And what she had was the world’s most loudest bark.

Her technique for making friends involved choosing one of two primary strategies:

1. Screaming and running for the hills as though being attacked and dragged down by a bear
2. Barking at a decibel designed for certain deafness

Stella, our old dog who has since left this earthly realm, was really not that helpful. She thought Lupin was a horrendous waste of space, the worst decision we have made, and consequently, spent most of her time ignoring her or speaking in hushed tones that were full of doggy swear words.

That is, until we brought home Frankie. Frankie may be small, but she has the constitution of a firm and solid brick of concrete. She enthusiastic, game, and right up in your business.

Loud barks do not deter her. She will continue to pluck at all your soft bits until you surrender, lower to her level and start to play.

And let me tell you, I’ve never seen two dogs more delighted. If Frankie and Lupin are separate for a time, they smile and lick and frolic. And they run and leap and roll and frisk all day.

Just when I think, it’s too much! Back off! I’m not sure Frankie’s strong enough to take it (after all, Lupin is a beast), she’s leapt up and is back amongst the game. In fact, for the most part, I’m suspicious that she starts it.

It’s impossible not to smile and snort and wince as you watch them dart and play.

They are most definitely a somewhat naughty, hairy Happiness that winds itself through each and every day, and a very worthy Happiness for this moment.

Number 15 to be precise.

 

I’m usually not one to fall for such displays, but this was so seductive. The way it glided on the glass. The satisfying level of grime that disappeared, leaving a transparent surface so clear and crystalline, you really got an appreciation of why some people walk into plain glass doors. Whoever owned those doors obviously had one of these machines. The good people never stood a chance.

So yes, I left the hardware store that day with that little handheld window cleaner and after a brief burst of enthusiasm, where both the kids and I fought over who would use it, it was placed under the house, and we returned to our usual half-blind living inside of opaque glass.

Once or twice, she did make a revival, but the charger and the coverings got lost and so, as such stories often go, she lay for years unloved and listless. Until this week, G sprang into action (what provoked it is a mystery to us all), new charger afoot and cleaned our murky glass.

When I walked inside, you’ll appreciate the shock. I was dumbfounded. I hardly could believe it. The whole family stood, united, staring at the same view we’d seen for years with renewed appreciation.

I reached out and touched the window as though searching for ET (carefully, I didn’t want to smudge it). It was like the barrier between me and the outside world had disappeared.

We talked in scattered, illuminated conversation…

That perhaps the sun had come out after all, but the problem was we couldn’t see it.

That we felt slightly exposed.

That you could invite the FBI over and they would struggle to find our prints.

That perhaps we needed sunglasses on to look at each other.

It was just so gosh dang clean.

Every time I walk inside, I am delighted.

Which can only mean one thing. Unexpectedly, and somewhat weirdly, Windows are my Number 14 Happinesses.

We never could have predicted such a thing.