“Happy is a yuppie word…” so goes the chorus of my background music. It’s one of the cuts in Switchfoot’s latest album.

Cutie sis or better yet “Curious sis” made a comment, “Huh, what exactly does that mean?”

“Dunno…” was my reply. Nowadays you can hear songs being played with senseless lyrics or maybe the composer was just too poetic.

The sis was satisfied with my answer I guess ‘cause she went out of the room after a while.

I was not. I decided to take a break from my computer stuff and do some “very important” research. I have a bit of an idea what the word yuppie means (young urban professional) but I wanted to know more.

So, I went click-clicking… google-ing, yahoo-ing… finally found so many results, but the definitions via urbandictionary.com gave a different outlook.

Now, the research doesn’t stop there, right? How can you relate being happy with a yuppie? I decided to get it straight from the horse’s mouth and clicked on to the band’s official site. My investigation was not in vain…

In 1991, when Rolling Stone interviewed Dylan on the occasion of his 50th birthday, he gave a curious response when the interviewer asked him if he was happy. He fell silent for a few moments and stared at his hands. “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness; it’s either blessed or unblessed.”

This record was written somewhere between the blessed and the unblessed, between the godly and the ungodly by a few young urban professionals from San Diego. These songs are dreams and questions, bleeding together, breathing in and out – always somewhere between life and death. And I feel this tension, this distance now more than ever, like a numbing ache… deep inside. The distance between the way things are and the way they could be, the distance between the shadow and the sun. And this is where we exist: within the paradox.

Hmmm…. Research done.

Happy is a yuppie word. I may not be as happy as I wish I could be, but I am so blessed.

Back to work.