Happiness is (fill in the blank)

So here's the kicker: I had a fulfilling and enjoyable weekend, even though it did not include a date.

(It is indeed possible. Thank the lord.)

It was also exhausting. Between Friday night and Saturday morning I slept, if you could call it sleep, a total of 2 hours. Most of it scattered between 5:30 and 9 a.m. Most of it upright in the driver's seat of a 15-passenger van, parked among 100 other such vans in a constant state of coming and going, surrounded by 5 sweaty guys also sleeping sitting-up.

It's difficult to explain Reach the Beach Relay either to non-runners, or to runners who don't enjoy going without rest or shower between a series of 4- to 9-mile jaunts, many on rolling hills, many that are steep in both directions, many through rural New Hampshire in the damp cold and cover of night.

I should just let you read the 44-page race handbook.

However, it is fulfilling. My teammates on squad Cheap Yellow Mustard made it even more so. I like hanging with them, generally, because they're good-looking, funny, nice guys who are also engineers who run 7-minute miles. And as running is so often solitary, I think we collectively embrace the chance to be running nerds together.

So anyway, enough about that. I'd say more about my sore butt muscles, but you probably don't care to hear, or if you do, would do better to see me in person and ask me to tell you. This weekend Drained my Brain, and this entry thus far has been an exercise in trying to overcome this mental fatigue. I hope you can't tell it took me 2 hours to compose these previous 5 paragraphs with all their adjectives and clauses.

It's apropos, then, this piece from yesterday's Sunday Times by resident uber-smart ass, Maureen Dowd. I came upon it last night, theoretically trying to sleep to catch up from the weekend, but in reality contemplating how I was ever going to get the energy up to rewrite my dating profile and, if I did and it actually succeeded in getting me a date, when I was going to fit one into my the next month with its rehearsals and training sessions and church choir and pesto-making-so-my-basil-plant-doesn't-go-to-waste.

The column is about busy women, and a research study that tries to determine if busy women are consequently happier. Speaks to the scattered way we try to better feel fulfilled. These lines, particularly, spoke to me:

In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved .....

“Choice is inherently stressful,” [one of the researchers] said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”

The more important things that are crowded into their lives, the less attention women are able to give to each thing.

Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.

They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants.

“Women have lives that become increasingly empty,” [one of the researchers] said. “They’re doing more and feeling less.”

I'm feeling that way today, despite the great weekend. Emotionally empty. A crazy schedule -- which in some ways I keep to be a more interesting person to date -- keeping me from having the wherewithal to actually find someone to date.