Happiness is......

Hubby and I are watching a programme called ‘Karl Pilkington – The Moaning of Life’ at the moment. 

Essentially Karl is a typical northern bloke who just happens to be friends with Ricky Gervais, who annoys some people with his strange laugh.  Karl originally agreed to take part in a series where Ricky essentially sent him all over the world to sample the culture but always sent him to do the horriblest (yes, this is a ribenaism) things and stay in the worst hotels.

This series has stemmed from that series. Karl says what he thinks and while he moans a lot he is incredibly funny with it.  This series sees him visit different parts of the world trying to find the meaning of life.

This week’s mission was to discover how different people find happiness.  In Mexico he met a group of people who use old used tyres with string and wire for shoes and a small wooden ball, the size of a tennis ball, to find happiness.  How?  Why, by kicking the ball as far as they can, over and over and running after it for miles and miles of course. 

Karl quickly determined he couldn’t cope with tyre flip flops after all, blisters in-between toes is never good a good thing.  He found a pair of boots (no idea where from) and deemed that while he couldn’t catch up he wouldn’t give up. 

The people who joined in this game from the tribe ran 28 miles, Karl managed 15 and I was quite impressed with that; especially as it was in a desert type area and no less than 32 degrees celcius.

One particular comment about how crazy it was to find happiness by running for miles after a wooden ball when the women and children were at home in a concrete square without a roof was particularly funny.  Reading this back it doesn’t sound funny at all so it’s obviously the way he tells it.

Anyhoo, to get to the point, some people have freaky, and I mean freaky ways to be happy. 

Karl met one man who finds happiness in how beautiful he is.  After 120 surgical procedures his face is triangular, he has bigger cheeks than a hamster storing dinner for later and the weirdest biceps in history.  I didn’t even know you could get bicep implants!  All well and good I guess if they are in proportion but when you have arms almost as thin as a skeleton and bicep implants that look like footballs that don’t move it just looks plain freaky!

It got worse!  Karl then went to visit a group of people who find happiness from pain.  One man had inserts in his ear lobes to make the piercing bigger.  There will be a name for them but as I am old I will call them earrings.  This man had holes in his ear lobes the size of door knobs.  Weird enough you may think until he showed you his arm which had strange hard implants up and down his forearm.  Yes, apparently they hurt but he gets happiness from it. 

I don’t judge people by the way they look, each to their own; after all I have four tattoos and he was prime evidence of that as he is a lawyer.  When Karl asked what he did about the ‘earrings’ during court appearances he showed how he twisted them and stuck them behind his ear with some duct tape.

The party progressed to people having meat hooks attached to their shoulders, back and knees to be hoisted up and suspended on them.  I have watched operations on the TV time and time again and never had a problem with anything I have seen but even I had to turn away from the TV.

I am still trying to wrap my head around why that causes people happiness, let alone wondering why the skin does not tear.

Enough of that, I am getting queasy again.

The last thing he did was visit a company that allow you to smash things up, to release your anger and frustrations on an inanimate object.  That I can understand! There are some days I could happily while away 30 minutes beating my frustrations out on a random piece of rubbish at a scrap merchants.

Karl found this somewhat confusing as he struggled to find something that he was frustrated or angry at.  His way of releasing tension is to moan about something at the time, not bottle it up.  By moaning he releases the tension and frustration and then just moves on.  A by-product of that is that he is quite funny while he is twittering about how stupid or useless something is.

He eventually decided to take his frustration of PPI cold calls out on a car….

The programme is definitely worth a watch and while I don’t think that moaning all of my frustrations out on those around me will help family life the idea of smashing something up would be rather liberating on some days.

Mind you, working from home I only have the 4 dogs during the day who can hear me moan at something so maybe I should give it a go.  After all, what’s the worst that can happen; the dogs get sick of hearing my voice or I give them depression.

I’m not sure moaning will make me happy, all I am going to need to do is pick up the nearest doglet and give them snuggles!