281. Song No. 4,243: “Happiness Writes White,” Harvey Danger
Little by Little, 2005

Once upon a time, when I was much younger and in that relationship that teaches you so much about what it means to be a good partner and ruthlessly breaks you into something better in the process but it’s gonna be for someone else’s benefit and only after the most gut-wrenching breakup of your life, I used to bemoan how deeply unfair it was that, if we’re supposed to make a life and a living based on the one thing we do better than anyone else, the people in the kind of relationships that could show the world how to love had no way to parlay that into a viable career path.

Literal decades later, I suppose now you could argue that anything’s a marketable existence if you embrace the influencer life hard enough, but that feels a little too much like pretending that perceptions and realities are even close to being the same things, and also a little too close to end-stage capitalism twining its greedy tentacles around absolutely everything all the time and ruining the whole point of escapist flights of fancy. My youthfully naive gripe was with having no say in being conscripted into an existence that intentionally undervalues the rare and wonderful bliss of being so madly in love with someone that you very possibly could be the first couple to exist solely on that soul-deep satisfaction of finding Your 100% Perfect Person and, instead, is precipitated upon wanly participating in a broken system as another unremarkable cog feeding its insatiably indiscriminate maw.

The closest I’ve ever come to feeling someone else approximating that sense of injustice is the first time I encountered this sweetly simple and bouncy little tune about how finding Your Person makes life a better place to be, a truth amplified by the rote routine of existence that sustains the good parts while also taking you from the one place you want to be all the time because that’s where your truest joy lives.

There is something electrifying and dizzying about that first love that just consumes your entire being, but I’ve done that and I’ve done domestic bliss, and the latter wins every time. Sure, it’s exciting to find yourself in the throes of an infatuation that seems to be everything you could ever imagine wanting from a relationship, but burning that hot burns itself out sooner than you’d think no matter how carefully you’ve guarded it and your heart. The quiet comfort of a life partner, an equal and a treasured friend all wrapped up in the one person who feels exactly like home is supposed to isn’t the brilliant spectacle of fireworks, but that’s not what it feels like when the real thrill is charting your course into the future together and enjoying those small days of quiet peace that punctuate that journey.

But also, this song barrels in on a first impression that sounds unmistakably and uncomfortably like the hook in the Full House theme song, which is another one of those things never fully registering with my conscious brain until Last.fm threw that burdensome sliver of knowledge at me I’ll never be able to dislodge. But, like that time a lit professor told my class that any given Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the Gilligan’s Island theme, it’s one of those little happenstances of the humanities that inject some unintended charm into something that was already lovely enough on its own merit.

_{(If you like elder millennials waxing nostalgic and chatting about the media they love, my husband and his buddy started a movie podcast!)}