I’ve been sick. Not earth shatteringly sick. Not the kind of sick that people should worry about. I mean I haven’t spent the last month ticking off the boxes on my “things I need to do before I die” list. Which, as you know, I don’t have but if I did, this would not have been the time to use it. Really, I should have known. About three weeks ago I got off a plane, one that I had spent five hours sitting on beside my friend who had a cold. She can’t help it. She has little kids and that’s what happens when you have little kids. But I don’t so I can only conclude that you don’t have to have little kids to get sick if you are sitting beside someone who does. For five hours. On a metal tube without any real ventilation. It’s not like I could have opened the window and stuck my head out to get some fresh air. They frown upon that on a plane. So there wasn’t too much I could do except sit there and get sick. Hence, for the past three weeks I have not been feeling that great.
Looking back at it now, as one often does when one finds oneself in situations such as this one, the worst part was not the sneezing, the sore throat or the alternating between too hot and too cold for no apparent reason. For sure, none of those things were that great. The clincher was the coughing, mostly because one day I coughed so much that I pulled a muscle in my back. And that’s what’s been keeping me up at night and making my life generally miserable for the past three weeks. It’s also why I haven’t posted on the blog which is really what all of this has been leading up to. As a shallow person you would think I wouldn’t have to explain my absence but I do. Because it there is one thing I’m not shallow about, it’s the shallow blog. Ironic, isn’t it. Ok, enough with the kvetching (google that if you need to). I’m starting to feel better so here I am.
The thing is, before I got sick, and the sole reason I was on that plane, was to attend a conference. It was a good conference, much like most of the conferences I have attended in the past. Lots of speakers, lots of people, lots of stuff to take up my time. I had thought I might write about what I learned at the conference but I’ve done that before and, to tell the truth, other than discovering that I still abhor hot, sticky, rainy weather that makes my hair go curly, I didn’t learn too many new things. So I had decided that rather than write about what I learned I would write about what I did while I was at the conference.
Now I should tell you that five hour plane ride took me to the land of a million theme parks and I come to that number only because I figure if you have a theme park called the “Holy Land Experience” it has got to be one in a million. And, in retrospect, as prudent as it might have been to have used my shekels to have Jesus (yes apparently he was resurrected, at least for this gig) heal my ills, I didn’t make the trek to the Promised Land on this trip. Instead, I chose to meander through the rather more secular and pedestrian world of Universal Studios where the wizards carry wands rather than sceptres. So, in keeping with the whole movie theme, I had decided to share my experience of that day by relating to you “the good” (the Simpson’s ride has got to be my most favourite ever!) “the bad” (we walked 9 miles in that hot, sticky weather and by mid-afternoon I had little choice but to shove my no longer sleek hair into the hat I had so fortuitously brought with me) and “the ugly” (given the number of amusements I had to pass on due to their propensity for making riders either very wet or very sick I figure this outing cost me about 20 bucks (yea, that’s U.S.) a pop).
But I didn’t write about any of that because, as you now know, I got sick. Which is why, instead of reading all about what I did while I was at the conference you have instead, just finished reading this.
Here’s what I’m thinking. You’re thinking that I’ve been so busy with my “Happy” course that I haven’t had time to write the blog. And perhaps you’re thinking that I’ve become so happy and have found so much meaning in my life that I can no longer find it in my heart to write about being shallow. Of course, that was always a possibility when I signed up for the course. I knew from the “get-go” there was a chance, however slight, that this course could, once and forever, change my inner being, my worldview. Perhaps alter the very core of my existence in this universe of ours. And it might. If I could only get started on it. You see the course is now in Week 3 but unfortunately I’m not. I’m here in the “big city” doing other stuff and since I’m relatively happy anyway, my initial excitement for the course, and for gaining a better understanding about how to be happy and find meaning in my life, has waned. Even so, I still read the emails of encouragement they send to me each and every week so I know that right now, at this very moment, they are talking about the importance of being kind to others which, coincidentally brings me to the thoughts that have been swirling around in my mind for sometime now. Yes, I do think about what to write before I actually get to the writing.
I’m about to embark on another learning journey. Surprised? Me too. But if you have been following me for some time you’ll know that, not too long ago I attended Harvard where I completed a course that explored the rather esoteric concept of justice. Ok, to be fair, I didn’t actually attend Harvard. I took that course online with maybe a hundred thousand or so other people, give or take a few. But I passed and now my Harvard certificate is proudly displayed in a most prominent spot on my office wall. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t been reading this blog carefully enough. Shallow people know there’s no shame in exploitation when no one gets hurt. And honestly, is there any harm in people expecting you to be just a little smarter than you really are? Or happier? Because you see, for my next foray into the world of academe I will become immersed in the exploration of the “science of happiness”. You heard me right. I’m going to learn how to be happy.
I’ve written about them before and apparently I’m going to write about them again. It seems to me that people like lists. I haven’t actually done the research so can’t say it’s an empirical fact or anything like that, but I do have some evidence to support my hypothesis. Take my 
I learn a lot from Facebook. For starters, I now know where each and every one of my friends go for fun and entertainment, even when they are having all of that fun without me. I know where they go to eat and what they ate when they got there, saving me not only time and money but often ensuring that I have an even more satisfactory culinary experience than they did. I’ll be the first to admit that I learn from the mistakes of others. And it’s now exponentially easier for me to learn about my friend’s political views, who they support and don’t support, what issues are important to them and what they like and don’t like. Afterall, it’s not the way it was in the “old days”. I mean back then if you wanted to protest something you had to march down to city hall and join a crowd of possibly thousands of like minded people carrying placards, singing protest songs and chanting some catchy phrase like “Hell no! We won’t go!” (“we” weren’t really in any danger of “going” anywhere, but that was beside the point) and there were so many people that no one even knew you were there. But now all you have to do is post a video of Rob Ford or some activist pontificating about the plight of women or men or the need to spay and neuter (the latter being primarily with regard to animals, btw) and we all pretty much know where you stand.
Shallow Be My Name 