It's Hard To Be Happy

This post has been a long time coming. It's just that right now I need to be writing, reading, and studying other things so it is the perfect time to procrastinate with all the other thought my mind is entertaining.
It seems like everybody around me is in some state of depression. And dear god, I don't even know what depression means exactly. Of course I know that no one is happy all the time, but there is this overarching tension, discontent within the lives of the people all around me. Is it because we are just bored out of our minds doing all this work for something that doesn't seem directly meaningful in our lives? Is it because we live such disjointed lives that we have no fulfilling social interactions? Is it in the food? Do I just attract sad people?

The thing is...I feel it too. I was always a pretty easy-going person until about a year ago when some fresh pain hit me hard with the death of a friend. The whole community of people that I had been rooted to felt it too. And there's so many things that I can blame on the people around me: always telling me to be careful rather than throw yourself in fully, making important things that are entirely unimportant and forgetting the things that are most important...but some of this has got to have birth within myself too.

This all feels so muddled in my head. But, here it is. I am tired of being sad/depressed/whatever. I am tired of my friends/family/people I love being sad/depressed/whatever. So, I'm going to listen to some happy music, finish all these damn finals, write a paper about happiness according to Aristotle that might be complete bullshit, then I'm going to do (for the rest of life) what makes me happy. And that probably entails some vegetables, mountains, baby sheepies in a place where love and pot are legal, country music, good people, and the least complicated life I can imagine.