HOW to be Cheerful

Oh, I ran into Isosceles. He has a great idea for a new triangle.

Woody Allen


Me and the midget don't see eye-to-eye on it.

Belle & Sebastian

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The attribute of cheerfulness is one that has been as frequently maligned through the ages as it has been aligned, resulting in the bodies of the cheerful being carefully arranged in lines between such ancient cities as Rome and Matera, Athens and Sparta, and Carthage and Johannesburg. Cheerfulness, ancient anatomists and composters soon realized, was not something retained by the bodies after death, but something that the spirit takes with it, as any recipient of that ancient psychotropic, the spleen smoothie, can tell you.

And so if it is a spiritual attribute, this cheerfulness, spiritual means must be taken to make the needed alterations.

Many people have taken drastic means in search of cheerfulness (such as Faulkner), but we do not have to be drastic as those brave pioneers have already paid the price (or, more often, placed it on their tab).

For instance (speaking of Cheery F, as his bailiff called him), to be cheerful, all one has to do is not read The Sound and The Fury and then, when feeling down, simply remind oneself that it could be worse; one could be reading The Sound and the Fury.

Or, alternatively, one could go ahead and pick up a copy and a red pencil the Nobel Prize winner's many mistakes or, even better, try to figure out who the heck is talking at any given moment. Not only will your efforts be roughly as cheer-enducing as the Sunday Times crossword, but it will take seventeen times as long (not including naps)! Besides, a well diagramed Theory of Furious Dialogue will allegedly reveal just why Faulkner wrote the bloody mess in the first place, which question is sort of the Fermat's Last Theorem of literature.

But not everyone is apt to be able to find their cheerfulness through literary means or even kinds. Others require physical exercise, such as beating down elderly veterans in order to take cheerful joyrides in their mechanized wheelchairs.

Truly, mechanized wheelchairs are the greatest boon to cheerfulness since the death of Charlotte, the manipulative marketer and known spider! Rare indeed is the soul who cannot spend half an hour in a mechanized wheelchair and not feel all the happier for it!

Other readily accessible and thoroughly modern means of becoming cheerful include the boogaloo, sequel-skewering, contemplation of the bubblegum / public transportation paradox, falafel, mosquito tracking, mailing fake bombs to corrupt party officials, macaroni, and love. Aww.

However, we here at Thmusings cannot recommend any method higher than we recommend base-jumping. In part because we are afraid of heights and in part because we find cheer in that happy splatting sound.