The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness by Paula Poundstone

Author:Paula Poundstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2017-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

THE

GET ROLLING

EXPERIMENT

Conditions

Toshia has left for higher ground. She feels strongly that the “services” for the disabled provided by the state will fulfill her needs. Thomas E insists that I drove her away when in fact she took the bus. I have made a lot of mistakes in my relationship with Toshia. People always say that with kids you’ve got to pick your battles. I chose rhyming and the weather.

Thomas E has noticed that I do many things wrong and is making a consistent and strong effort to bring it to my attention. I’m wondering how “Gee, and she tried so hard” will look on my gravestone.

Alley chose a college in Oregon. I drove her the seventeen hours from here to there in time for her freshman orientation before I realized, I can’t do this every day. So I just left her.

I could feel her disengaging as we neared the school. She started calling me “Mother” instead of “Mom,” but fortunately, I’m familiar with that from Bye Bye Birdie.

For me, it was an ordeal similar, I imagine, to severing a limb, but Alley apparently didn’t feel that way, so I kept it to myself. At the time, it seemed like a good place for her to be. Later I found out that some of the little faceless men had broken off the rod on the school’s foosball table, and although they have a Ping-Pong table, there are no balls. So now I’m considering bringing her home.

Hypothesis

I needed to do something drastic to score some happiness. Until now, I had experimented with what I thought would make me happy, but I was wrong a lot and this was beginning to feel urgent. I decided to ignore my own instincts and try a more mainstream idea.

I would rent a fancy sports car.

Constants

I am thousands of dollars in debt. I drive a minivan with many dents and scrapes. I don’t know where the dents and scrapes came from. I am not a good driver.

Field Notes

The only thing I knew about sports cars was that James Bond’s went very fast. So on a Saturday afternoon, from high atop the bed in my hotel room in Troy, New York, I took a few moments out from reading a book about the banking crisis, of which I was understanding about three words per page, to Google “sports car.”

Eventually, I found myself on the website of Carefree Lifestyle, a company that rents luxury cars. I figured a week should be a long-enough time to reap a balou or so of happiness from a sports car, if there was any to be harvested. The site had pictures of about twenty cars, most of which I wasn’t familiar with at all. I ruled out names like Benz and BMW right away, because they didn’t sound sporty, even when they add the numbers and letters to the name, like the BMW SG241. It’s still just BMW to me, which are cars that therapists drive, using the money they saved when they

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