I’ve got a friend who’s feeling down. Everyone likes her significant other so much, because he’s so nice and unoffending, that she doesn’t feel like she has anyone to talk to and is afraid that people wouldn’t be willing to give her support or hear her doubts. She’s feeling pretty lonely. I tell her, yeah, that’s life, so get used to it.

November 17th, 2006 | Comments Off on

Why is November consistently such a hard month? It’s those tiny short circuits in my head, the little fugues that make me unsure of which is reality and which is a collective of fear, anxiety, doubt and wish-fulfillment.

Maybe this whole daylight savings thing isn’t such a great idea. You have a few months of spring/summer where you think life is bright and stable, that no matter what, there’s a positive force on our side because there’s excitement in the air and the promise of infinite possibilities. And then its end, when we’re suddenly plunged into premature darkness, those drives home that make you feel so achingly empty and alone, especially when you look around into the cars surrounding you, and you can feel that the people around you share the same ache Is there anything worse than that first workday after we turn back the clocks and we leave work to find our worlds engulfed by the night? Every day that I step out of my office, I feel a sense of loss.

My mom never goes to movies in the afternoon…she says it’s an awful feeling when you come out of the theater and it’s completely dark outside. The same thing with taking afternoon naps too late in the afternoon so you wake up after the sun has gone down. I think it affects our sense of equilibrium when we aren’t gradually eased into the transition of light to darkness. I think we mentally have to prepare for the darkness. Maybe it’s lodged in our primitive subconscious, the parts of us that still remember what it meant when night fell, that the darkness was our greatest enemy against our physical survival. Maybe the disorientation comes from not knowing which senses to believe when your suddenly thrust into darkness, your primal instincts or your finely cultivated intellect. Because isn’t intellect just an abstract collection beliefs based on logical assumptions gathered throughout the history of human communication, agreed upon to some degree to be universally true? And what if the original basis of these assumptions, the very foundations, are misdirected or misplaced? Then what relation does our intellectually perceived world have to an actual universal order? Regardless, I don’t like it, this brutally sudden fall of the curtain on the day. I suspect I like it when it rains in the fall because I feel like the rain provides cover. Maybe, hidden somewhere deep in my evolutionary code, I feel like when it rains, the predators are at bay so I can rest more peacefully at night.

November 13th, 2006 | Comments Off on