Reminiscences of a familiar late adolescence......
Maureen Dowd:
Happiness Is a Warm Gun - New York Times: "Sometimes happiness means being protected from news about other people's unhappiness.

Washington may be gripped by a malaise over the miasma in Iraq. But elsewhere, in business, books and academia, there is a scavenger hunt under way to root out the scientific, economic and emotional reasons for joy.

When I was in college, in the Vietnam-Watergate era, sullen mugs trumped smiley faces.

'Happiness was very uncool,' my friend Michael Kinsley recalls of his Harvard days. 'There was a huge premium on being depressed.'

Leon Wieseltier, who graduated from Columbia about the same time, agrees that 'happiness was considered embarrassing, a mark of shallowness.' He still calls joie de vivre 'a sign that you're not paying attention.'"