Happy. It’s such a little word, such an easy word to spell. Then why don’t we really understand what it means? If you look up Happy in the Merriam Webster dictionary, you’ll find this poor excuse of a definition:

hap·py adj. hap·pi·er, hap·pi·est

1. Characterized by good luck; fortunate.

2. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy.

3. Being especially well-adapted; felicitous: a happy turn of phrase.

4. Cheerful; willing: happy to help.

I know happy people are cheerful and dumbly smile all the time because they are either so successful, so in love or so stupid. But when I think about happiness as an abstract thing, I’m not sure how to obtain it. Where does it come from? How do you find it? And once you have it, aren’t you sort of unhappy that you have nothing to strive for? Would that make happiness boring?

The only thing I can relate to in the official dictionary definition of happiness one little word: enjoying. I enjoy drinking. Sometimes I enjoy over drinking. And there’s truly no one thing that brings me more happiness right now than the perfect happy hour.

Happiness to me is a perfectly poured beer recommended by a totally adorable bartender. Happiness to me is sitting around with my friends discussing our track-to-nowhere lives with the aid of martinis and finger foods. The mixture of cold drinks and mouthwatering food suddenly makes everything disappear. We laugh too loud. We talk too much. We give funky people our phone numbers. We play horrible songs on jukeboxes, buy strange men with weird piercings shots, and sometime we tell people that we’re things that we aren’t, like employed, engaged and mentally stable.  And we’re happy when we do it.

The Happiness Project is my own experiment, a sort of test I’m doing to try and  find a hint of happiness in my chaotic and confused twenty-something existence. During the Happiness project, I will be hitting at least one bar and some times more (Because sometimes I get extra thirsty) for a little therapy for my mind and taste buds. I will be chronicling my adventures and reviewing each bar I hit, so that you too can get off your ass and find some happiness in a tall glass.

I have two ideas of how this little thing will turn out: I hypothesize that I’ll either be “more happy”  because I’ll be eating good food, drinking drinks and meeting new people, or I’ll be more miserable because my only long-term life plan will be to not die young, start flossing and never leave my house without a bra, but also have a throbbing hangover for overindulging in my quest for happiness. And waking up with a frothy mouth, my boots still on, and for some reason smelling like a mixture of mayonnaise and sweet peppers.

By:

Ashley Spencer