| Cathleen Falsani

Finding happiness is easier than you might think

It’s four. Degrees. Farenheit.

One, two, three, four.

That’s enough to make even the sunniest of dispositions a little frosty.

So if you’re anything like me — by nature a little more salty than sweet — the ungodly deep freeze has elevated every day surly to a whole different existential plane.

Lately, I’ve put the grrrr in grumpy. Just ask my colleagues and my husband as they dive to get out of my way as I arrive, red-nosed and misanthropic, from the outside world.

“Good morning, Miss Merry Sunshine,” someone with no apparent regard for personal safety said as I walked to my desk the other morning.

“Hurrgrrmmpthapahblargssshhhssssss!” I responded, if memory serves, in the spirit of the new morn.

Clearly, I need some help. But my normal sources of emergency cheer aren’t working.

Best friend in New York in equally horrendous, if not marginally worse mood. (It’s been really cold in Brooklyn, too.)

Krispy Kreme doughnuts no longer part of dietary regime.

Trusty Ethel Merman knock-the-blues-outya-butt CD missing from its jewel case.

It is truly the dark night of this particular soul. And it’s not even February.

Enter, skipping, the Secret Society of Happy People.

The society, of which I am clearly not a member, “was formed in August 1998 to encourage the expression of happiness and to discourage parade raining,” its Web site told me.

“The society believes happiness is contagious and that when more people talk about happy events and moments, it will be chic for everyone to do it,” the extremely upbeat site continued, before announcing that Jan. 18-24 had been “Hunt for Happiness Week.”

I’d missed it. Darn.

Still, these society members, they’re happiness experts, right? They must know how to reverse a subzero slide into melancholia.

“We like to say happiness is a moment,” Pamela Gail Johnson, founder and president of the Secret Society of Happy People, was telling me the other day. “Happiness for you might really be when you’re out fishing, or playing with the kids all day.”

Johnson lives in Texas and she’s writing a book about “45 different kinds of happy.” She has a head cold and she’s super chipper. If I had a head cold right now, I’d be dangerous.

“Sometimes happiness is content, which would be a feeling. Sometimes happiness is exuberance. Sometimes it’s relief,” my shiny, happy new friend explained between sniffles. “Some days content’s as good as it gets and that’s OK. In fact, some days, that’s pretty good.”

Intellectually, I understand that. But it’s not nearly as cold in Dallas as it is in Chicago. In the time I’ve been writing this column it’s dropped two degrees.

Now it’s only 2.

Johnson founded the society with about 40 friends and relatives six years ago as an alternative voice to all the 12-step groups out there for people with problems, she told me.

“Where are all the happy people?” she wondered at the time.

In Kansas, apparently. Her first new member was from Topeka. Now she says membership has swelled to about 6,000 all over the world.

On the society’s Web site, www.sohp.com, you can join for free. For $10 you get secret society lapel pin and a button that says, “Don’t even think about raining on my parade.” For $30, as a “cheerful charter” or “humorous” member, you get the whole shebang: “Don’t even think of raining on my parade” button, book, T-shirt, and bumper sticker.

Maybe it would help me to join. Just like that health club membership.

“Just because you’re not having a good day, that doesn’t give you the right to take away anyone else’s good day,” Johnson, who swears she was never a cheerleader, told me.

I was a cheerleader. The world’s most sarcastic cheerleader, but I was. For six years. I still have the uniform. And no, it doesn’t fit anymore. But I digress.

“Despite the cold weather, just take an extra moment to pick up your what’s-right magnifying glass and make an extra effort to recognize something that really made you happy today,” Johnson told me, as we ended our phone conversation on an upbeat.

OK, nice lady. I’ll try.

And I have. A few days ago, someone e-mailed me a link to a video clip from Vatican City.

It was grainy and the sound was terrible, but the image was unmistakable: A breakdancer in shiny gray sweat pants and a white T-shirt, spinning on his head on the ornate marble floor of the Vatican’s Clementine Hall right in front of Pope John Paul II.

As truly awful trance-dance music played tinnily on a teeny boom box a few feet away, the Polish breakdancer gave it his all — spinning, popping, flipping and posing — to the apparent delight of the aged pontiff.

The 83-year-old ailing pope cleary could be seen smiling — despite the Parkinson’s — lifting his hand in beat to the music, and even attempting to clap.

That was happy. He was happy. It made me happy.

Johnson’s right.

It is contagious.

And it’s supposed to be in the 20s this weekend.

We’re havin’ a heat wave

A tropical heat wave

The temperature’s rising, it isn’t suprising

She certainly can, can can!