Why Are You So Sad? Read Online Free PDF Page B

time you felt happy?
    When I balanced our checkbook.
    Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?
    It was a you are wasting my fucking time with this survey kind of happy.
    Are you who you want to be?
    Last I checked.
    Would you prefer to be someone else?
    I am good at being me. You know that.
    Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
    I thought I might have a house with a swimming pool and a pink Cadillac. I didn’t realize my breasts would have a weight to them. I didn’t think they would hurt my back. I was a child. I imagined child stuff. This is a dumb question.
    Is today worse than yesterday?
    All days are the same.
    If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?
    Both.
    What does it feel like to get out of bed in the morning?
    Like popping a joint back into place.
    Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?
    I think I look great. You better too. Stop staring in the mirror and do some push-ups.
    Do you think people will remember you after you die?
    They better.
    For how long after you die?
    How would I know?
    Do you believe in God?
    Kind of. Not really. Sort of.
    Do you believe in life after death?
    I don’t like to think about that.
    Do you believe in life after God?
    I still believe in God, more or less. Is that what you are getting at? What is this about? This is madness.
    Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
    Look, I took those ones to quit smoking. And I took those others for my ankle injury, and I keep around the extras for the occasional hell-born menstrual cramp. And those others I don’t take but keep around in case I need to relax. Like after I see you are spending your time writing insane mental-health surveys, which winds me up, so then I want to take a pill to wind down. There is nothing wrong with that.
    Do you think we need more sports?
    Raymond,
    What is this all about? Did you write up this fake questionnaire because you thought I didn’t hear your paranoid nonsense the other night? Memo: The world is still spinning. Everybody is fine. People are unhappy sometimes. You’ll be fine.
    Love,
    Brenda
    P.S. Don’t take this to work. I don’t want to have to support you when you get fired.
    Was she happy? I would say she was not in touch with her unhappiness. Or maybe she possessed a gene that helped her resist the decline. She was of a blurred Eastern European background. There is probably a village somewhere over there where the women all behave like her. They all whistle the same tune while the men and animals fall over dead.
    I looked at the clock on the microwave. I was late for work. I find it difficult to move at that hour. Like there are ankle weights on my soul. But I had to move or I would be late, and I was always late.
    So I did get up. In a mild act of defiance, I put Brenda’s survey in the shredder—the data was corrupted anyway—and spread the confettilike end product in with the kitty litter. It might be more useful there, is what I was thinking. We have a cat. Gus. He’s missing a leg. I had wanted to call him Triangles, but Brenda thought that was stupid. It was stupid. That was the point. That cat is stupid.

    Â 
    When was the last time you felt happy?
    That’s just it. I don’t trust my memories anymore. When I think back to times I was happy, was I really happy, or just not quite as sad? I registered them into the mental ledger as happy, but now if I could graph it, my fondest memories might actually chart in a negative quadrant. An example: My father allegedly spent his nights taking care of his mother. He was a lawyer and he worked all day. Sometimes he came home for lunch or to drop off his dirty laundry, but most of the week he was at work or with his mother. Nobody was more insistent about this being true than