Recent realization: I am not very good at talking about, writing about happiness. My default modes are elegiac or wry, which is to say wistful about the recent past or dismissive of the present. I don’t think of myself as an ironist (I have very earnestly terrible taste and I will inflict it on you mercilessly) but there it is: all distancing techniques designed to keep me from sounding smug or eager, to keep things at arm’s length.

Which is troubling particularly because I have been happy, these last few months, very happy in an uncomplicated, easy way that’s itself hard to discuss or pin down or do anything but live with. I guess happiness also seems a little boring: here is the nice day I had, here is how things go smoothly. When your subject is mostly your own life, you find  yourself looking for the snags, whorls, eddies, the things that are not of a piece with your own familiar routine, and when your routine is pleasant, you end up ignoring it in favor of the more dramatic, or at least pathetic. You write about witnessing an arrest, and not the dry morning air, the ginger scone on the way to the station, the nap you took on the train.

So here I am in Los Angeles, ostensibly on vacation, come to witness a wedding. I don’t know what I’ll say about it, eventually, but it would be false to say that I’m anything less than thrilled to be here, and excited to wear Full Bridesmaid and watch this person who I love commit to a person who she loves. Last night I came home to steak tacos and a martini; my mother had rose and my brother drank scotch. My parents have remodeled the kitchen but kept my favorite counter-corner to perch on while everyone else bustles. I’m going to try to actually take a break for a few days, and come back ready to talk about that kind of thing: the things happening now, the things I am enjoying, how happy I am, really, most of the time.