JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Oatmeal has some thoughts on happiness that puts it into the proper perspective.

My solution to seasonal glumness: Read a good book (I’ll post a selection soon).

You’re at a party you really don’t want to be in: Find a quiet spot, read a good book. (Though my first solution is: Don’t go. Granted, you have to train for decades to resist the social pressure. I started by avoiding family gatherings from the time I was 11.)

You’re stuck in traffic, read a good book. If you’re driving, listen to a good audiobook.

If you need a plausible excuse to be absent from festivities, leave a comment and I’ll invent one for you. Who says fiction is not useful? Don’t feel guilty. It would be worse if you forced yourself to show up and made like it was a funeral.

Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg is on weekends at the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Clocktower in Fort Greene. I want to live there.

It’s like entering a bank vault and emerging in your childhood. It was perfect flea market weather: one degree Celsius, and the wind could take your face off.

I resisted the mind-boggling array of vintage eyeglasses, concert T-shirts and other clothes, vinyl records, magazines and games.

But not the necklace with a plastic dragon pendant.

The vendors sell all the stuff you’ve thrown out over the years and now want to get back. It’s not really the stuff you want, you know, it’s the past. When you look back you realize those were the good times, but you were too busy waiting for the future to arrive.

You can buy back your childhood. An attractive proposition, since the future circa 2016 has been a whopping disappointment. Sure, there are new toys, but you want the things that were around when you were a kid.

Did anybody save their pins, T-shirts and stuff from the street parliament years, 1983-1986? Show us.