I Hope You’re Happy!

“I hope you’re happy!” That’s one of those versatile Texas sayings that can express either deep disapproval or the opposite. Either way, it is ironic.

“I hope you’re happy!” is the sort of thing your Texas mother might say when you have willfully ignored her careful social instructions, done things your own way, and royally botched things. It means, “Now look what you’ve done!”

And because it is that kind of expression, it is also used as another one of those backhanded Texas compliments that means, “Now you’ve really started something.”

Here’s an example. A few years ago I happened across some great mechanical pencils with lead that had three colors, arranged like a pie chart of green, blue and red. You could literally write a rainbow, and because the colors were transparent, you could layer them and actually do full-color drawings with just one ordinary-looking mechanical pencil.

Naturally I told all my arty friends about them. I bought tons of them, in fact, and gave pencils away at meetings.

The result was that everyone else got addicted, too. Not only did they love those pencils, but when they got home, they had to fight their children for them. One woman had to ransom hers back from her kids and their friends by promising to buy each and every one of them a pack of their own if she could just have hers back now, please.

The problem was that the rest of the world had not discovered those pencils in great numbers, so the pencils were being discontinued. My friends were spending hours, driving for miles and miles, running all over Houston, Conroe, and parts of East Texas, seeking out the few remaining packages in various stores.

For weeks, I kept getting email message and postings on our Yahoo group, saying “I hope you’re happy! I drove 50 miles today, rounding up 5 packages of those pencils!”

And you know what? I was.