Years ago, when I first started a Happiness blog, I didn’t know anything about publicity photos or “mastering your brand” or image management.
In fact, this was the profile picture I used:
Friends were giving me great feedback on the blog, both publicly and privately, but my favorite comment came from a friend who simply asked:
“Why are you wearing a hazmat suit in your profile picture?”
When I stopped laughing, I was able to explain that it’s not a hazmat suit, just a simple rain poncho, but it represents soooo much more than that.
That picture was taken at Universal Studios, during the one-minute of sunshine that day, when my mom was in town and we snuck into the park from the backlot (shh…don’t tell anyone). And it poured rain on us all day. And somehow we had a blast!
As everyone else streamed out of the park, we bought rain slickers for $1 and splashed around the whole day and didn’t wait in any lines. Then, to our surprise, they closed the part of the park with access to the gate we’d come through, and I had to tell a whopper of a lie to one security guard after another to get back to where we’d come in, and ultimately wound up getting an escort back to our car.
(Because my pass to the backlot was from Dreamworks, the lie had something to do with us being “guests of Steven Spielberg,” and since everyone in Hollywood is terrified of pissing off Spielberg, the last guard took us in a golf cart all the way back to the Amblin lot where we were parked.)
The lie is not the point. So let’s just forget that part of the story.
The point is — look at how happy I am in that picture. It just represents what a rainy day can mean to a happy person versus how a little water from the sky can ruin someone else’s entire day, or week, or vacation, or life.
If you’re happy, rain makes you happy.
If you’re unhappy, all the sunny days in the year won’t make a difference.
And if you’re Steven Spielberg, I’m sorry I used your name in vain.
We really did have to get back to the car.
