Dictionary of Obscure Joys

An attempt to chronicle life's many ephemeral forms of happiness. A (presumptuous) complement to the brilliant Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

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The Story

A little ways into the semester, one of my friends went through a tough breakup. He felt betrayed and hurt and each subsequent setback was magnified because of the insecurity he was feeling. He had told me before that he struggled with depression when he was younger before adopting a new, more positive outlook in high school that buoyed him ever since. He said last week that he hadn’t felt this low since middle school and he was worried about being able to bounce back. I recommended that he check out the Counseling and Mental Health Center on campus. I’m a Peer Educator for the center so I’m always encouraging people to use it as a resource. He made an appointment for the following week but the day he was supposed to have the appointment they had to cancel it because of a crisis situation in the counseling center. After hearing that his appointment was cancelled, he texted me asking if we could talk for a while about what was going on. I warned him that I was no professional, but we still talked for about an hour or so about how he was feeling. After our talk he said that he really felt like things were going to be okay. I felt so fulfilled- I know at someday I want to be a therapist, which is obviously different than talking to a friend, but it was still really confirming for me to hear that listening and sharing my perspective could help someone. 

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Miscedence

v. to feel happy that someone has chosen to confide a grief or sorrow to you or has sought you as a companion when they are upset. You are not happy because they are sad, of course, but you are proud of yourself for doing any number of small things to assure a fellow human that you will not make their melancholy worse. Perhaps, they even feel that you can share some comfort or wisdom that will make them feel better. 

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The Story

When I was growing up my mom worked in a busting office and my dad stayed home with my sister and me. There were several occasions when my dad could not watch us after school, because of a doctors appointment or other obligation, and so he would drop us off at our mom’s office for the evening. At he time my mom was the head of the accounting department of a luggage company called Travelpro. My sister and I would sit in her office constructing games out of office supplies and bide our time until my mom was the only one left in the office, which happened often. Then we would play tag running through the empty building. We discovered a room where they kept all the sample luggage- rows and rows of empty suitcases. We built fort like structures- houses, neighborhoods, entire cities out of the rolling baggage. My mom eventually discovered our architecting, but our secret was safe with her. 

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Velpro

n. The joy of being in a usually crowded place after hours. The satisfaction of sprinting through deserted hallways rushing past the echoes previous occupants stilted pace. Being in your school at night, walking out of a mall movie theatre into a lobby of darkened storefronts. Not the eerie stillness of abandoned, ruined places, but the nameless feeling of perfectly alive functional places that happen to be empty. The poignancy of your presence induced by years of consuming cinematic apocalypse fiction, the comfort of fluorescent lights and ticking clocks that assure you humanity is still there, but simply sleeping.

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The Story

At the end of the summer a few friends and my sister and I went on an adventure after midnight on a Sunday to climb the train tracks downtown. While we were on the tracks, we heard the wail of the train coming and ducked into the foliage by the side of the tracks as it whoosed past, mere feet from us. I had dinner at my parents apartment the next evening. They live downtown, and in the middle of the meal I heard the wail of a train as it chugged through the city and I smiled. I decided there should be a word for the giddy feeling of having a reckless, invisible secret.  

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pondrie

n. the gleeful desire for something, someplace, or someone that is illicit or taboo.  Pondrie occurs dashing past ‘do not enter’ signs and crushing on a best friend. It is thrill of watching TV in your pajamas when you should be in class. It is our basic desire to do what others have said we cannot; a runaway train that decries our reason; wailing “I CAN have it all,” before we resume control of our engine, divert our gaze, return to school, forget our love and lust and sit down to dinner with fellow civilized humans, satisfied that our discretions are invisible to them.

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How do I blog?

Figuring out how to start is the hardest part, but I suppose it’s best to start with an introduction, and follow that quickly with an explanation of what it is you are reading and why I wrote it. 

So without further ado, I am Samantha, a student at the University of Texas studying Psychology. I am fascinated by people and their subjective experience of life. I find that reading and writing make it possible to recognize elements of my subjective experience of the world in others. This blog is one of those attempts to illustrate a collective human experience.

This blog is not my original idea. It is based on the brilliant and haunting Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The Dictionary, according to its official description is “a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for. The author’s mission is to capture the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that roam the wilderness of the psychological interior. Each sorrow is bagged, tagged and tranquilized, then released gently back into the subconscious." (Link: http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

This blog has a similar mission, but instead of defining life’s sorrows, I hope to expand our vernacular of joys. And unlike Mr. Koenig, who aims to “bag, tag and tranquilize” each sadness, I hope that identifying these fleeting joys will make them more tangible, recognizable, and enduring. Whether the act of naming these joys will strengthen them or inoculate our clever hearts from their effect is a question I wish to answer. 

Confession time: this blog was started as part of a class. I am taking a Positive Psychology class, and this is my attempt to chronicle my happiness throughout the semester. My Professor says “positive psychology is not a spectator sport.” So here I am, officially joining the rat race of content creators offering their words for public consumption and criticism. I only ask that you bear with my inadequacies, quirks, offenses, and typos.

Thank you, sincerely, for taking any time to explore this strange little blog of mine.