Ladies, Sing the Blues

[Guest guest]

This is quite funny even though you have to pull out your dictionary for the

first paragraph or two.

 

Ladies, Sing the Blues

By MAUREEN DOWD

 

 

WASHINGTON — I was feeling pretty happy, in a guilty-pleasure sort of way.

It was a banner week for schadenfreude.

 

First the tumble of the arrogant colossus, AOL Time Warner; then the

unraveling of the imperious Hollywood Svengali Michael Ovitz; finally the

news that the batrachian Enron executives may do time for manipulating

energy markets in California.

 

As in Greek myths: Hubris gets its just deserts.

 

AOL Time Warner was the humongous beast that got a stomachache trying to

gobble up everything in sight. The Internet crowd was in the throes of a

narcissistic and economic explosion two years ago. It treated its partners —

such as Time, People, InStyle, Fortune, HBO and CNN — contemptuously, even

though they provide most of the conglomerate's products. The dot-com cabal

dismissed content as the vestige of an obsolete universe.

 

But now that the company has lost $54 billion in the first quarter, we must

ask: What is AOL, anyhow? Isn't it just cyberspace tin cans strung together?

 

AOL placed a losing bet that the bottle was more important than the wine.

The universe is not so easy to master, after all.

 

Maybe Mike Ovitz and the hotshots of AOL and Enron, all those emperors of

etherea, those peddlers of pseudo-services, will have to get real jobs now.

 

I was reading the paper, gloating that the puffed-up were not prospering,

when I learned that my glee could kill me. Happiness could be unhealthy.

 

Articles detailed new research indicating that a pale shade of the blues may

actually be good for women's longevity. A Duke University study showed that

women with mild depression were 40 percent less likely to die prematurely

than women who were not depressed, or than those with severe depression.

 

This was going to require some tricky calibrations in our personal lives.

 

Single women can now call off the exhausting and maddening hunt for Mr.

Right. Mr. Right would bring bliss — and an early grave.

 

But women will also have to try harder to avoid Mr. Wrong. Mr. Wrong, or a

series of Mr. Wrongs, would lead to a slough of despond — and an early

grave.

 

For the sake of our health, women will now have to look for Mr. Slightly

Wrong, someone a little annoying, a man who can modify, qualify, deflect and

overturn our happiness just enough so that we wake up not happy and not sad.

We must find men who leave us with a sense of malaise, but who don't leave

us.

 

O.K., I thought, I'll find Mr. Slightly Wrong and live very long.

 

But then I read about the Attack of the Killer Potatoes. Swedish researchers

found out that frying spuds spurs the formation of a carcinogenic molecule.

 

French fries and potato chips are my major food group. I've downed enough

Pringles to shingle Versailles.

 

Now I was really depressed. My life was rapidly growing shorter.

 

I pondered psychopharmacology: I could lift my unhealthy deep depression to

a restorative mild one by taking an itty bit of Prozac.

 

But then I spied the front page of The Washington Post, which reported that

sugar pills may work just as well as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft.

 

So maybe I'll just put sugar in my tea, a beverage that dramatically reduces

the chance of death following a heart attack, according to another new study

this week.

 

Besides, the Duke research implied that anti-depressants would lull me into

not fixing the problems in my life, and thereby shorten my life by making me

too happy.

 

My imperative was clear: I had to dwell on the sad things with silver

linings, at least if I wanted to stick around to keep being moderately

saddened by them.

 

The new research sounds like the old Catskills joke: Restaurant-goers

complain that the food is awful — and the portions are too small.

 

As much as boomers cherish age-attenuating measures, maybe it's better just

to be happy, quickly. In the opera "The Makropoulos Case" a 16-year-old is

given a magic elixir by her father that allows her to live for three

centuries. When we meet her she is a ravishing 337-year-old opera singer,

bored with fawning men and perpetual reruns.

 

That is when she realizes: Brevity is the soul of life.