(If you've not entered the contest yet and want to, there's still a day or so left)

I've been thinking a lot lately about that elusive bird, happiness.

I KNOW I am happier right now than I was this time last year. I was contemplating that - now, I know, contemplating happiness too intently is kind of like dissecting a frog - by the time you've got it all pinned out and cut open, it's not really "there" any more, you've killed the essence of it.

But still.

I think a lot of it has to do with circumstances; I'm unfortunately one of those people who is strongly affected by events and by situations. If things are going badly, I'm down. If people around me are suffering, I suffer too, even though I may not be experiencing the thing that's causing their suffering. Likewise, small successes are enough to buoy me up and carry me along.

I think a big part of my feeling better this January than last comes from the fact that conditions are different this year. Last year, I had three big unsettling pieces of news - news about which I could do nothing, literally, but pray. An (extended) family member had died under unpleasant circumstances, my father was facing cancer treatment, a good friend's husband died suddenly. And there were other events in the larger world. And I walked around feeling like everything suddenly had started to come apart, that there was so much fragility around me, and I was fearful. Kind of in the same way I was after Sept. 11, 2001. (It's odd to think back on how freaked out I was then...how not being able to reach my parents IMMEDIATELY on the phone made me panic, how I took stock of my canned goods and first aid supplies...)

And this year, things are different. This year, my father is dealing with recovery from knee replacement. And I think that affects me in a very different way - I see it as a very HOPEFUL sort of recovery, an unwillingness to accept "okay, I will deal with less mobility for what remains of my life." I made the comment to a friend one day - talking about the replacement - "You know, he COULD live for another 20 years." And suddenly, I believed it - it was possible. I knew men who were 90 and over. And 20 years sounds a whole lot better than five - which is what I was thinking last spring.

I think another factor that's given me relief and happiness is finally having my dissertation accepted for publication. I don't like to admit to this, but I always believed in the back of my mind that if I couldn't get my dissertation research published in a "respectable" journal, that I was somehow a fraud, that my Ph.D. wasn't "valid" because the research wasn't "good enough" for publication, and that I was living a lie. (Yes, even scientists can be highly irrational). But now, it's been accepted, the last few revisions are done, and I'm just waiting on proofs. And that's a huge load off my mind and heart.

Another factor may be my classes. There is one particular class I teach - it can be very variable, depending on the students in it. Last time I taught the class, it had a largish proportion of students who were taking it solely because they "had to" - not because they had even an iota of interest in the subject. And I'd walk in the door a couple times a week and just be met with this WALL of hostility. Not even indifference - hostility - like "why the hell do we have to be here?" And it was totally draining. (And it was my first class of the day). This time, the class is different - different people are in it, there is a large enough of a proportion who clearly are interested and want to learn the stuff and want to fit it in with what they already know, that it's a much easier class to teach now. (Seriously - same material, but it's easier to be all energetic and enthusiastic about it when you know you're not going to walk in the door and find that 1/2 the class has decided to skip on that particular day).

I think also I've had a change of attitude. One of the things about American society that I don't think a lot of people notice, is that there's this constant drive to "go! go! go!" That if you've achieved your dreams, your dreams were too small, and you need to find some bigger crazier dream and chase after it - that you can't just stop and go "wow...I did that. It worked. That's so cool." and enjoy the fact that you managed to achieve something.

And you know, that's kind of stupid in a way. Why should we always be chasing after bigger and more expensive and more prestigious? Why should we never be allowed to look back on our efforts and go "You've done a lot of what you set out to do" ? Is there some kind of superstitious belief that if you finish everything you originally dreamed of doing, your life is over, and you will die shortly?

I don't know. But I think of the really big dreams I had in graduate school:

Get my Ph.D.
Get the Ph. D. research published in some respectable journal
Get an academic job
Get tenure at that job
Own my own house

All of those - at this point, I've done all of those. (There were other, more minor dreams, some of which are not totally dependent on my own efforts, that I'm not listing - and anyway, they are less important).

What remains in my mind are:
make full professor
publish more stuff (which can be an ongoing thing; you never quit doing research)
maybe get good enough at this teaching thing to win an award there

But most of the really important dreams have come to pass. And stuff I didn't even DREAM of at the time - like the whole youth-group-success thing (we have had seven of the kids join the church and they are going to be baptized in next week). And I think of the line that Gene Wilder (as Willy Wonka) used at the end of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie: "Do you know what happened to the man who got exactly what he wanted?....... He lived happily ever after." And I don't see anything wrong with that - with saying, you know, I've done a lot in a pretty short time, and instead of chasing after some new crazy thing, I'm going to enjoy what I have now. I don't mean I'm going to shut down and stop doing research or stop writing or stop trying to figure out new and different ways to present the material in class, but I think rather it's a feeling of, as the old knitting instructions say, "continue in pattern." Because this pattern is working for me right now.

And speaking of continuing in pattern, I think I'm going to knit up some more toys when Mr. Eggbert the Spherical is done. I've already got an idea very strongly in mind for the friend or relation of Mr. Dangly I want to make.

He is going to be Mr. Dangly's upper-Midwestern second cousin. His name is G. B. "Packer" Dangly. (He is going to be made out of the leftover grey-green and gold yarn from the Fibonacci sweater). He is, as you might expect, a fan of football, cheese, and ice-fishing.

And this, too, makes me happy - it's kind of a throwback to my childhood when I used to make a lot of "critters" and dolls, and I'd be sitting around some afternoon or some Saturday and a character would float up into my consciousness - a whole character, with a name and a personality and likes and dislikes, and the challenge for me was to create that character in three-dimensional form out of cloth (I didn't really knit when I was a kid, even though I knew how).

And I don't know - maybe I'm happy because I'm entering a more creative cycle. Or maybe I'm more creative right now because I'm entering a happy cycle. But whatever it is, I'll take it.