Remember when you were a kid and down in the dumps about something and one of your parents would get you to cheer up by looking at you and saying, “don’t smile. Dooooooon’t smile. Don’t smile!” and you couldn’t help but smile. That was good parenting right there. It still works on adults, too, which you may not know. Try it on the next sulky person you meet. It even works if you say it to yourself.

The last two posts here have been a bit too Serious-shirt Poesy, with my ranting on Hemingway and yammering about Indo-European root words which probably no one cares about anyway. So to counter act that, I dare you to look at this picture of a Bhutanese woman grinning ear to ear and not smile. Seriously. Don’t smile. Don’t you dare.

Haaaaa you can’t even do it can you. You’re smiling your ass off right now I can see it. That’s OK I guess, I am too. I mean, is this picture not the pure image of happiness?

By the way, this comes from an article in National Geographic Traveler, which is mostly a vehicle for cheesy ads trying to get you to visit random destinations (Dear Nevada: It doesn’t matter how pretty your full-page spread is, I’m not planning a vacation to your state. Silly Nevada.), but does have a nugget of travel advice or intrigue occasionally. The article by Boyd Matson is about Bhutan’s commitment to increasing the country’s “Gross National Happiness.” The article also features this awesome quote, about the tiny nation’s position wedged between two huge superpowers: “If India sneezes or China farts, we get blown away.” Enough said, I think!