Miscellaneous, etc.

I admit, I missed Monday because of nothing but old-fashioned laziness. There was snow on the ground, my car was really filthy, and I was all tired and cranky from a sort of weird weekend, and blah blah blah who really cares anyway.

I missed Tuesday because I was still kind of mad about Monday, and I seem to be fighting with anyone who will listen to me, and I’m so angry with my car that I’ve decided I’m going to turn it in three months early rather than have to deal with another day of its bullshit. I yelled at it yesterday, as if it could hear me. I called it a son of a bitch.

I’m settling nicely into my regular, vicious February depression, if it can be accurately called that. I call it depression because it loosely conforms to a bunch of criteria I read on a poster at my doctor’s office one time, but I can’t say for certain that I should fall into the same category as people who need medication, therapy or a twenty-four hour deathwatch. There’s a fine line there, I figure.

On the one side are the people who, as far as I understand matters, are chemically and biologically unable to be content with themselves, their lives, their decisions, or anything else. I am horribly pig-ignorant of their situations, because of two factors:

1) I don’t know very many people who suffer from this kind of depression, but
2) I do know lots of people who think they suffer from this kind of depression, but actually just like the attention they get when they talk about suffering from this kind of depression.

So, either through a simple failure to observe or a willful decision to ignore, I’ve discovered that I don’t know very much at all about depressed people. All I’m really aware of is that I now treat depressed people as Depressed People, as though they are part of a wandering, unhappy tribe that criss-crosses the landscape.

And also, I’ve learned that there are a lot of Depressed People around, so many that it’s becoming a demographic — there are more characters on television who are in a Brave Battle Against Depression than there are, say, in a Brave Battle Against Cancer, or even something as unfashionable as a Brave Battle Against A Sexually-Transmitted Disease. I can find myself watching an ad for an anti-depressant while I’m watching the NFL, and end up wondering whether it reminds me more of a maxi-pad commercial, or a cigarette spot before they were banned by the government. Either way, the commercials are so sunny and filled with activity that it makes me wonder just what Depressed People are suffering from. Can Depressed People not ride bicycles, or hang-glide, or jog on the beach, or eat ice cream on sunny days with their friends? Or are they simply unable to enjoy those things very much?

So much to learn.