Nope, this isn’t fiction. Sounds like one of my short story titles, though, doesn’t it?

Been rolling in the grey lately. Hanging around naked, sleeping a lot, letting the days go by.

And my bed-seeking urge is off the charts. It was really hard for me to get out of bed today. My bed has turned into a gravity well again, and it takes a lot of emotional thrust to escape it.

And I have been looking at the clock when I wake up from a nap and if it’s close to a meal time, I feel like I have won something.

The signs are clear. I am depressed.

But I am not going to beat myself up over it. This is a diagnosis, not a judgment. Getting depressed over being depressed is extremely counterproductive. What matters is the solution.

First, though, one must define the problem precisely. The more clearly one defines a problem, the better the quality of the cure.

The thing is, my mood is not terrible. I haven’t had deep feelings of hopelessness, or that there was no point to anything. Anhedonia is low. So the physical depression is not, as of yet, resulted in emotional depression on a large scale.

I think that’s because the coming of Xmas is providing a little structure to my life that I desperately need when school is not doing the job. Having something to look forward to has a very strong effect on my mood, as does a feeling of financial security. I have both right now.

Admittedly, if I had realized this was a five week month, I might not have ordered the KFC^[1] I ordered last Saturday night. But meh. As it stands now, I have no more planned spending before next Wednesday, so the $350 or so I have left will have to cover 4 weeks at $87.50 a week.

No prob. I get get by on that no problem. And January is a GST cheque month, so that will supplement things.

My planned Xmas Eve at Riverport will be a little expensive…. probably something like $50, unless the restaurant I go to has a “dinner and a movie” deal or something. But that won’t matter too much. I will be able to work around it. Some things are worth investing in, and not feeling dangerously lonely on Xmas eve is one of them.

It’s weird that I will be going to therapy on Xmas Eve. My psychiatrist is Jewish, so it’s just another day for him and his people, but it’s a little strange for me. I will be going to therapy, coming home, then something like three or four hours later, heading off to Riverport by bus.

Riverport is not that far from my therapist’s office, come to think of it. Maybe I will do the movie first.

At any rate, I got plans. See the Star Wars movie, have a nice dinner, come home by bus, go to bed, get up, wait for Joe to come pick me up for Xmas dinner with his family.

Not bad for a single dude with no family nearby.

Looks like I will be eating at the Old Spaghetti Factory out there at Riverport. Other times I have eaten out there, I ate at this decent little brew pup called something like Old River Brew Pub or something. But when I went to look up restaurants at Riverport I came across some very negative reviews of the place and so I am thinking Old Spaghetti Factory sounds like a safer bet.

Their food isn’t impressive, but it’s good.

Anyhow, back to my twilit world. I have decided that the best way to address the problem is to simply remove expectations from the equation. Maybe I had ideas of what I “should” do over the Winter Break and I am not really doing any of them, but the worm has turned on those expectations and they have become poisonous. They have become something to beat myself up over and thus become something that drives me to hide from the world with bed and naps and distractions.

So, whatever. My only obligations are to do my words for you people every day and to finally get around to doing a LOC for Felicity. Next semester will start no matter what, I don’t have to invest any more energy in that to keep it going. It is perfectly fine if all I do is nap and blog and play video games for the whole two weeks. If I am to do more, it will have to be because of a naturally and organically occurring desire, not some artificial pressure from “above” about what I “should” be doing.

Having trouble focusing. My interior mental processes must be trying to usurp more mental resources than I can spare while consciously focusing on what I am doing. I just spaced out for thirty seconds in the middle of writing about how much trouble I was having focusing.

That’s some of that irony stuff I have heard so much about.

Oh well, my brain will get its way when I am done blogging. Then I will just unplug and let my conscious mind go slack so those busy interior processes can have the place to themselves for a while.

In other words, I will “zero out”, as I like to call it. It’s not sleep, but it’s a state of being totally unaware of your environment and time passing subjectively fast and sometimes I dream, so it is a lot like sleep. But when I return to reality, I don’t feel like I have slept.

More like I was lost in thought for a while. Which I was, in a sense.

So anyhow, whatever happens between now and Thursday is cool. May I will get back to compiling my portfolio, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I will send stuff out to markets, and maybe I won’t.

It’s all cool.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.