Smile

I'm told smiling is therapeutic.
True: smiling at the right girl at the right time can get you syphilis (which probably means she was more of a left girl), but all in all there seems to be value in this postulate.

Simply exercising those few muscles needed to bend the curve of your lips slightly towards a local minimum (sorry, math joke) is reported to release wee bits of endorphine in your body. Endorphines: literally an internal band with Mark Sandman: if that isn't cheering you up, you need a spanking. And if that doesn't cheer you up, I'm sure it will cheer someone else up.

But seriously: this link between smiling and feeling better is obviously a design flaw: it would have been so much easier if I were to feel better from lashing my eyes, inhaling or digesting (come to think of it: most of those things do at times make me feel better - though in at least one case more 'less bad'. Was that a sentence?) It is a simple fact that raising the corners of my energy-intake requires a bit of concentration and diligence -especially when I could do with a supersize-me portion of yee-haw. And even when I'm not particularly occupied, I often catch myself, walking around with a face like someone's cat just drowned and I was their cat.

What helps me most, at these times, is looking around at other peoples faces: you have to hope that looking like the bright side of life is somewhat transmittable (sexually, if need be), as everyone around generally seems to be having their own cat-drowning thoughts - or at least the matching facial expression (tempted to write fecal expression - but that would be more the digesting part). And yes, I do know this: when somebody is smiling at me, regardless of their being the visual equivalent of a fart with sugar on top, the little pink man in my skull immediately presses the emergency-lip-bending-button. So, as a humanist, I have my motivation for smiling. I can only assume that when I, visual equivalent of apple sauce and sausage, display my jolliest face in anyone's general direction, some may pick up the signal, enhance, and pass it on, even!

Mind you, there is a catch for the fuzzy-(Fozzie?)brained would-be realists among you (me, me, me): it is oh so easy to forget that it works. Say you decide to give it a try: you will frantically keep it up (your right mouth corner) and you'll even throw in the other right one. As theory predicts, you're bound to have a good day, feel like Christopher McCandless on sight of a bus, and ergo be ignited to become even more of an upright emoticon (One wonders if the sole purpose of war isn't to keep humanity from exploding in a mushroom cloud of endorphines). And that is where the cable gets kinky: any old cynic (well, any new cynic - considering the original cynics weren't all that euh... cynic) will come to the obvious conclusion: damn right I'm smiling now: if I have such a fine day tomorrow, I won't need to say cheese either. God damn right it's a beautiful day - uhuh. Then you get up in the morning and you observe your face in the mirror, scratch your hangover or notice the cat in a nearby pond, forget to smile and grumble on through another lucky day in hell.

So: I hereby oficially invite all and everyone to remind me: it's silly like armpit farts but it works: (-: