I didn’t know about Bitchy Resting Face then, but sitting in the morning sun looking out across the Serengeti plains, I know I didn’t have it.
I felt lucky to be me. That was the feeling. Despite everything, I felt plain, perfect lucky to be me.
And I was glad — as I always am — that the Ginger was there with me, but just as on that day when I felt like a pea bobbing alone on a giant ocean, I also felt that this luck was mine, as the measles had been, only obviously it was a good thing so about 10 trillion times better.
It’s up to me, I thought. Whatever ‘it’ is, it’s up to me.
And before you ask if I was having one of my special breakfast tequila drinks, no, I was not. I’d had a dawa the night before, dawa meaning ‘magic potion’ in Swahili; and actually, when you mix gin with honey and fresh lime juice, it does work a certain magic, but it’s short-term, especially if you’re only having the one.
That Mbalageti morning glow had nothing to do with gin, and not only was it the most wonderful feeling, but — better still — it never completely went away.
Sure, some days I feel sorry for myself or a bit fat or too poor or seriously annoyed or unfairly put-upon or sad that the world can be so full of complete and utter b*st*rds — who doesn’t? Unlike the zebra who can run back to the herd and blend in when something hideous happens, we humans have emotions that need acknowledging at the very least.
But these days, more like the zebra, I can move on. Not from the mauling of an offspring by a lurking lioness, obviously, but from the minor setbacks life insists on throwing up: bad hair, a thoughtless friend, a sh*tty review, a troublesome body part.
Unless it’s an arm or a leg, it’s not an arm or a leg. And even if it’s an arm, it’s probably not a leg. And if it is, well, there’s more where they came from and a few extras beside.
Using this approach, before I know it I’ll soon start feeling lucky again.
Lucky and happy are very closely related, I believe. Sisters, even.
1. At home on a Friday night when you’re probably 30-something, maybe 40-something, and finally realise that if you stay in wearing your PJs, eating bagel crisps and watching True Blood re-runs, you’re not a loser, you’re just someone who likes salty snacks and vampires.
2. For me, the beach, with a good book, and the right amount of SPF (15). For the Ginger, the beach, with a good book, a big umbrella, and the right amount of SPF (412).
3. At the top of/beneath/in sight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
4. Tuscany.
5. At a wedding, wherever it’s being held, when the people getting married are meant for each other.
6. Anywhere in nature where the things all around you (mountains, lakes, animals, oceans) are big, because it puts you and all the things that come with you (troubles, worries, doubts, pimples) in perspective.
1. In any queue.
2. In most public lavatories.
3. On the Auckland Harbour Bridge, in rush-hour traffic, when your car’s just died.
4. In the unheated bathroom of a Kiwi camping ground in winter.
5. In Spain, surrounded by gay men and gorgeous Scandinavian women.
6. At the sushi counter when the guy making it has just sneezed on it. (This has happened to me twice.)
7. On the SP104 in Taranto, Puglia, Italy. (This has only happened to me once, but was way worse than the sushi.)
Just a spooNFUL of self-help makes the MEDICINE go down
I started to read another book about happiness recently. It’s a serious one called The Antidote, and it’s aimed at people who can’t stand positive thinking. I don’t have anything in particular against positive thinking, so perhaps that’s why The Antidote didn’t grab me. And anyway, isn’t not standing positive thinking about the same as not standing babies or kittens or flowers? Positive thinking is hardly a threat to world peace, so not standing it seems a bit mean.
Actually, after reading the beginning of The Antidote it started occurring to me that, while I have no strong feelings either way about positive thinking, what I really can’t stand is books about happiness.
[Ed: SK, now is really not a good time for this to start occurring to you.]
And when I say books about happiness, I mean books that claim to have the answer to it, rather than to present a particular approach to it — a wicked one, for example.
[Ed: OK. Over-ruled. Proceed.]
I did read The Secret when it was all the rage a few years back. Well, if it’s good enough for 19 million other people, it’s good enough for me. The strange thing is, I can’t quite remember what the actual secret is. This is pretty weird, because that’s all the book is about. It’s not called The Secret and Other Suggestions. It’s just The Secret. I think, maybe, the secret was to think positively.
And I remember at the time that I felt bad because I thought I had already been thinking positively, but I obviously wasn’t doing it properly as I had yet to win Lotto or even to be able to afford a drafty villa in Ponsonby.
Actually, this is kind of what the guy who wrote The Antidote is saying: that if you bugger up thinking positively, then there you are, thinking negatively, which makes you feel even more sh*tty than you felt to begin with, thereby reversing the effects of the original positive thinking.
He goes on to say that never mind botching it, just take all that negative sh*t and learn from it. It’s kind of a Screw You Dolores approach, I guess. He claims that lots of philosophers — probably Roman or Greek ones, I don’t know, I only read the first few pages — say that you need unhappiness to balance the happiness.
And can I stop here to say something about reading only the first few pages of a book? If it’s one of mine, that is not acceptable. And I have satellites out in space that can detect through complicated heat radiation technology at which stage a book of mine has been abandoned, and if it’s not at THE END then you should expect your microwave oven to never work again, and for your hair-drier to frizz your hair even worse than it already does.
But back to not knowing much about philosophy (although I have been to Rome and Greece — Greece has better food, but don’t tell any Italians I said that): what I do know is that balance probably is the key, but it’s not as easy as getting on a tightrope and merely aiming for the other side. You need to have the near misses when you almost plummet to a grisly death so you can work out what to do to avoid them in the future.
You know what? Maybe those first few pages of The Antidote grabbed me more than I first thought, because my book is also saying that you need unhappiness to recognise happiness.
[Ed: It is? I thought your book was saying Screw You Dolores.]
My book is saying that happiness is not a golden shawl woven by magic fairies that clings delicately to your shoulders at all times of the day or night. Rather it hangs in your wardrobe like the holey jumper smelling of BO that you can’t throw out because you were wearing it when your dog died. That was a really bad day, that one, and looking at that jumper makes you feel you are about to cry, although it is a particularly fetching shade of purple and — oh, look! What’s that behind it? A beautiful golden shawl woven by magic fairies who gave it to you the day you got the new puppy, who, now you come to think about it, has been very quiet for the past few minutes, which you hope has nothing to do with the box of chocolates that was sitting quietly on the coffee table waiting for you to start selecting your favourites.
If that mutt has eaten the dark chocolate hazelnuts, you are going to drown it.
[Ed: Meh. I’m a cat person.]
Life is full of highs and lows, and it’s also short. Too short to spend much time reading too many self-help books. Read as many as you are able, by all means, but my advice is to not take them as gospel. Don’t even take the Gospel as gospel. Take what applies to you, and can help you, and add it to your own personal melting pot of whatever-the-hell-gets-me-through-the-week. And what works one week might not work the next. But hey, that’s what book shops are for.
One book tha
t I read many years ago and actually did get something from was Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. I can’t remember now why I read it. I don’t know what my fear was, or if I did it anyway. And the thing I got from it wasn’t a big thing, such as running for president of the United States or becoming Miss Universe. But Susan Jeffers says that if you don’t want to spend so much time worrying about the world and everything that’s wrong with it, then don’t start your day listening to the news or reading the paper.
I took that advice and I take it still. If anything really bad happens (9/11, losing the America’s Cup, Brad Pitt leaving Gwyneth Paltrow/Juliette Lewis/Jennifer Aniston), someone will ring and tell me. Anything else, I don’t need to know or, if I do, I can seek it out.
This attitude is probably why I never won a Pulitzer for my hard-hitting journalism. Whatever I was trying to hit, I missed, but only because I wasn’t looking and didn’t give a sh*t in the first place. I felt guilty for years about being such a soft-missing journalist. In fact, worse, I felt stupid, which was weird because I’m no dang fool, as I may have mentioned before.
But then one bright sunny day I realised that if I didn’t know what someone was talking about, then neither did most other people, because most of us aren’t dang fools. A few of the seemingly smarter ones can make us feel that we are, by speaking in a way that has us assuming that what they are saying is beyond us. But if it’s beyond us, then they are the dang fools and we’re the smart ones!
Establishing that was one of the first building blocks in the foundation of the confidence that helped eventually unleash my inner Dolores-screwer.
It also made it impossible to make sense of almost anything any politician said, ever. Ditto sportspeople. And scientists. And most teenage boys.
[Ed: Actually, I have teenage boys.]
[SK: Yes, they’re the ones I’m talking about.]
[Ed: Objection!]
[SK: Ed, you need to stop watching so many courtroom dramas.]
[Ed: Over-ruled!]
[SK: Or at least work out if you are the judge or the prosecutor.]
[Ed: Adjourned.]
[SK: For the Fat Guy With The Beard In The Hangover Movies’ sake! Enough already.]
While I have your attention can I just bring up a small matter of house keeping*
* And no, it isn’t ladies a plate, although that would be good.
Usually I am much politer than I want to be. Your eyes would bleed if you could read some of my thought bubbles.
But in the spirit of Screw You Dolores, and of turning 50 and seeing things for what they are and not wanting to change them but to work with them, and in so doing find an acceptable level of contentment, I’m about to be very frank about something that may hurt your feelings if you did not personally yourself buy this book or receive it as a gift from someone who bought it especially for you.
I write books for a living, you see. It is not a hobby; it is how I get to Paris. Although being a columnist for New Zealand Woman’s Day actually has a lot to do with that, too. But if no one buys my books, I really do have to stay in a small dark room down an alley that smells of wees and drink preloved caffeine.
Writing is a profession.
So every time someone tells me with great joy that they borrowed my book from their sister-in-law, loaned it to everyone in their small town, then sent it to the next slightly bigger town so that everyone there could enjoy it, too, I am only pretending to be thrilled.
What my thought bubble is reading is this: ‘You know, I only get $2.50 a book, so it would be much better for me if you and your sister-in-law told everyone how much you loved it and got all the other miserable f**kers to put their hands in their pockets and fork out $30 for their own copy. Seriously, have you people never heard of libraries?’
As you can tell, I would make a cr*p cartoonist. As you can also tell, New Zealand authors actually get paid by the libraries when you borrow our books, so we’re cool with that.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get the book from someone whose aunt’s neighbour’s cat ate it and shat it out, and their Siamese twin stitched it together again with cotton she unravelled from a 1950s house coat. I’m not saying that at all. Reading is ALWAYS better than not reading, no matter how you come by the material.
What I am saying is please spare a thought for the sensitive artiste who might have spent months if not years of her life crafting that book, and who might have to go back to being the world’s worst waitress if nobody actually ever pays for it.
She would probably prefer to hear a fib about how you bought it and it was worth every penny, than the truth about how a gazillion people read it after one of them found it in the discount bin, and anyway most of them only thought it was so-so.
Oh my GOLLY GOODNESS most GRACIOUS me
There are two sorts of people in the world: the sort who want to go to India, and the sort who would rather go anywhere else. I’m the latter.
I can’t do yoga and I hate those poo-catcher pants. Yes, I can handle a curry, as long as it’s mild, and I do like a good naan bread, but India was never on my radar, owing to having too many poor people and the wrong sorts of smells.
Then, a month before I was due to turn 51, so ending the Year of Me, the Ginger was offered a job in Mumbai.
So little interest in India had I that I had to look up Mumbai on the map to see where it was. Actually, I had to look up India on the map. Mumbai, it turned out, was the old Bombay after which the gin is named. It’s on the west coast, sort of halfway down.
The Ginger was offered the job on a Sunday and gone by the Friday. He would be away for two months.
Now, I can cope on my own for a week or so, but any longer and I get hungry and the house goes to rack and ruin. Also, as travel editor of the country’s biggest-selling weekly, it seemed churlish to pass up the opportunity to do some travelling outside of my old favourites, New York, Paris, Australia and the Pacific Islands.
Not that I have any problem with a bit of churl. But a couple of weeks after the Ginger departed, so did I.
Incidentally, it took me a couple of weeks to work out how to even get there. I mistakenly thought Hong Kong was on the way so arranged to go there first, but then it turned out there were no direct flights to Mumbai so I had to re-route through Singapore.
I arrived in Mumbai without a visa, which is not ideal. You don’t need one if you’re there for less than 30 days, but trust me it’s advisable, otherwise you can spend a long, long, long time filling in forms and getting things stamped and chatting to lovely people about the Taj Mahal but not actually getting out of the airport.
The Ginger, waiting anxiously outside while I dealt with this little snafu, was beyond shocked to see me emerge from my visa trial, eventually, with a smile. But here’s the thing: even though it took two hours and 10 people, everyone was lovely — friendly, interested, polite — just a little tied-up in red tape.
And at the end of it, I was in Mumbai. What was not to smile about?
Now of course I do understand why people who go to India come back wearing poo-catcher pants, smelling of cumin, and gagging to go back there again. It is hands-down the most unexpected, awe-inspiring, electric place I’ve ever been to in my whole entire life.
Of course I’m making a gross generalisation, because I only went to a tiny bit of it — mostly Mumbai, with a quick trip to Delhi and the Taj Mahal thrown in for good measure — but I excel at gross generalisations, as it happens. And anyway, how many other people do you know who have spent four weeks in Mumbai? Apart from her? And him? And her and him? And them? Well, anyway, it’s still not a lot of other people, so there.
Mumbai showed me more about happiness than I ever could have imagined.
Yes, there are a lot of poor people, but their poverty didn’t seem to affect them the way I expected it to. I thought they’d be lined up in the streets crying. And a lot of them were on the streets, but they were often laughing, or chatting, or cooking a meal for the
family, or playing with their children, or a baby goat, or … you get the picture?
Quite early on I met a taxi-driver, Pinto, who took me out on regular excursions. Despite barely having gone to school, he spoke near-perfect English, had a delightful sense of humour, and was only too happy to share his take on India.
Pinto himself had come to Mumbai to find Bollywood when he was 12, but was surprised to discover so many other people looking for it as well. He spent more than 10 years sleeping on the street while at first working in restaurants and then driving taxis, but for the past few years had splashed out on a boarding house in which he shared a tiny room with two other taxi-drivers. And when I say tiny: I made him take a photo one day, and you could fit those three beds in our bathroom, and we do not have a big bathroom.
Pinto’s wife and children live up in Jammu near the Pakistan border, a 36-hour bus and train journey away. He sends them money every week.
Pinto was not only good company, but he also provided a lesson in appreciating what you have. He was completely thrilled with his lovely clean taxi, owned by a friend whose father had given Pinto a break many years ago for which he was still grateful. He knew where to go to catch a movie for three rupees, he loved a cold Kingfisher beer, and he ate only Kashmiri food because according to him the Mumbai ghee is too greasy. I wanted him to take me to get some of this Kashmiri food, but he said ‘ma’am’ wouldn’t like it because of the dirt and the flies. He was probably right.