The Unserious Half

SundownLEISURE

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I have never really grown out of this. The costume changed and the sword got confiscated, but the operating principle has held.

Most of life is Tuesday

Not the bad Tuesday. The ordinary one, where nothing is wrong and nothing is interesting either and you have somewhere to be at ten. Nobody warns you what the ratio is going to be. The extraordinary days are real and they are rare, and a life built to work only on those is switched off almost all of the time.

So I have spent a while thinking about crumbs.

Take every small good thing out of one unremarkable day. The first sip while it is still too hot. The song that arrives at exactly the right moment. The dog you were not expecting. Save them the way you would save crumbs, and by the end of a year you have a meal. Probably several. Nobody has one enormous meal a year. That is not how eating works and I do not think it is how living works either.

The accounting version

Here is the version I actually believe, in the only vocabulary I have, which is unfortunately finance.

Most people try to raise their happiness by increasing revenue. Bigger wins, better news, more of everything. That works briefly, it is expensive, and almost none of the revenue line is up to you.

The other side of the statement is entirely up to you. Happiness has operating expenses. The grudge you are still carrying. The comparison you keep running. The thing you have not said to somebody. The room you will not clean. Every one of those drains the account daily, quietly, whether or not anything good happens to you.

Take the costs out and the arithmetic changes. If your expenses sit near zero, any revenue at all leaves you positive. You do not need a good day. You need a day with nothing subtracting from it, and then the crumbs are enough on their own.

Profit does not have to clear the bar for happiness. It only has to be greater than zero, and greater than zero is contentment, and contentment is available on a Tuesday.

A house of contentment is built by removing things rather than acquiring them, and it stands up in weather that joy does not.

Collected on purpose

I take an unreasonable number of selfies for nobody in particular. I film short videos of completely ordinary afternoons, because a year from now the ordinary afternoon is the thing I will want back and it is the only thing nobody thinks to record.

I talk to myself constantly, out loud, and I tell myself jokes, and I find them funny. This is either a warning sign or the cheapest entertainment ever devised and I have made my decision about which.

And once a day I send somebody a real compliment. Specific, unprompted, to somebody who was not expecting anything from me that morning. This is not selfless. Watching a genuine compliment land, the small recalibration, the way somebody holds themselves differently for the next minute, is unmatched by anything I can buy. It costs nothing, it takes about eleven seconds, and I have never once regretted sending one.

Why I am always trying to make you laugh

People read the jokes as confidence. They did not start that way. They started as a door I could get through. When you are the smallest boy on the field and the worst one on it and still working out the language, there are not many currencies available to you.

Nobody has ever asked whether I was qualified to be funny. They laughed or they did not, and the transaction settled instantly.

So I got fast at it, and specifically under pressure. I am nervous more often than anybody watching would guess. The only difference is that my nerves come out as a joke instead of as silence, and a laugh is a genuinely useful thing to do with adrenaline. It lets the air out of a room that was holding its breath. It tells everybody else present that they are permitted to be human here.

And if somebody is having a worse day than me, I want to find the thing that fixes it, fast. Failing at that is cheap. The joke lands flat, everybody moves on, and the only casualty is a small piece of my dignity, which I stopped guarding at around nine and have not missed since.

The rest of the inventory

I surf El Porto most mornings before class and teach lessons there on weekends. Training for the Santa Cruz Half Ironman, racing HYROX in Anaheim in December, lacrosse at USC, ran track, four years of football. None of which explains why the best hours of any summer are on a lake with a rope in your hand and no plan at all.

I invent recipes and make my friends eat the failed ones. I hold strong and unwelcome positions on bulgogi, on grilled cheese, and on the correct Arnold Palmer ratio, which is more lemonade than anyone will admit.

Stand-up. Small films with no audience. A journal nobody has read. And I will put my face through any hole in any painted board I encounter, without hesitation, every single time. There has never needed to be a line.

I also read pathology and nutrition research for fun, which is a strange thing to put in the fun section, and I am leaving it here anyway.

The people, mostly

Almost none of the above is really the point. The point is who is standing next to you while it happens, which is the sort of thing you are supposed to work out much later than I did.