A Look On The Lighter Side: Looking for my happy place amid gloom

This particular election season has grown so strange and disheartening, I am practically reduced to a quivering pile of jelly every time there’s another scrap of news. 
“Maybe it’s time to go to your ‘happy place,’ Judy,” suggested a friend.  We were meeting for coffee and gossip at the bookstore. 
“I’d love to — but how? I don’t even know what that means,” I said.
“Well, there’s no shortage of books here to tell you that,” replied my friend.  “Just look around!” 
As she spoke, she stepped across to the section nearest us, and brought a book to add to the stack on our table.   
“See? Try this one: ‘The Happiness Project,’ by Gretchen Rubin.” 
I opened it randomly and read: “I wasn’t as happy as I could be,” wrote Rubin.  “I wanted to perfect my character, but, given my nature, that would probably involve charts, deliverables, to-do lists, new vocabulary terms, and compulsive note taking.”
“Yuck!”  I exclaimed, and threw the book down. I was already tired…of her!  To-do lists and “deliverables” were never going to get me to my happy place — unless that meant deliveries of chocolate, to my doorstep. 
My eyes glazed as I looked at the pile of books.  Only one of them piqued my interest:  “How to be Miserable,” by Dr. Randy J. Paterson.
“That looks promising,” I murmur.  
“I think it’s reverse psychology,” says my friend.  “You know, like telling your kids that they’re absolutely not allowed to eat veggies?  Since trying to be happy doesn’t work very well, he says, think instead about all the things that make you miserable, and stop doing them.”
I open to the table of contents. “ ’40 Strategies You Already Use.’  Sounds easy!  ‘Lesson number one:  avoid all exercise.’  Well, I already do that.  But is that a good thing? Or not?”
What finally wins me over is Paterson’s lovely writing:  “”The only caution about exercise,” he writes, “is that it must be avoided religiously.  Just thirty minutes of exercise, three times a week, is sufficient to disrupt unhappiness in most people.” 
For Number three, Paterson says to forget about sleep.  Instead, “Make wise use of the wakeful time before you drift off. Worry. Consider your life in a broader context, and all the problems you are unlikely ever to solve.”  
Number 39 says, “Pursue Happiness relentlessly.  It turns out that the relentless pursuit of happiness is actually a fairly good way of producing its opposite.”
“I’m all set, now,” I say to my friend, as we stand up and put the other books back. “This is the book for me. The one full of bad advice.”
I rush home to try some out on my husband. Lessons six and seven suggest:  “If you want it, buy it” and “Can’t afford it? Get it anyway!”
I drag him to the mall, to buy him new shirts.  
“This doesn’t make me happy,” he grumbles. 
“That’s good,” I tell him, “because I’ve read that ‘the relentless pursuit of happiness produces its opposite.”  
Two hours later we have finally found some shirts with the magical combination of the right neck size, sleeve length, and price. Then begins the ordeal of getting them rung up at the register.  
Between the ones we are taking home and ones we must order because they’re not in stock…and a long string of other keystrokes that seem completely random — the computer eventually spits out a result: my store card is over its limit and the transaction voids itself. 
“Did it at least keep track of what we want from the warehouse?”
Of course not. 
We have to start all over again, with a different credit card, and with the people behind us looking at us as if we had just crawled out from under a rock.  Yes, I wanted to say, we’ve hibernated ten years just to get in front of you today, at this very moment, and mess you up.  
We are finally home with our purchases. 
“It’s time for ‘Lesson Number 32: Let Your Impulses Be Your Guide.  Go with your gut.’  In other words, sweetie, I’m starving!  We have to get dinner.” 
As we walk into the diner, I want to re-hash that shirt transaction — “Lesson 11: Rehearse the Regrettable Past.”
But my bad mood evaporates as soon as the soup course arrives. There is something to be said for going with one’s gut!
And I have found my happy place: at the diner with a bowl of matzo ball soup.