Oh No, Not Again: Holiday Edition

I mean, that's been a definite on-and-off thing with me anyway, but this year in particular... I'm not feeling it. 

Which is not to say that Thanksgiving didn't go well; it did. In some ways it went much better than usual, since nobody was trying to have a big family gathering and that lowered the stress level immensely. It's just that beyond my usual level of Not Very Excited By This, I'm... actually a little depressed this year? And I don't know why. 

Some of it, I think, is a delayed reaction to the Goddam President of the United Fucking States of America deciding that he really couldn't accept that he'd lost the election despite his best efforts to game the system; knowing that he was looking for someone, anyone to help him overturn the results and declare victory was mightily stressful. At this point it looks like he really has failed, but for a while there it was hard to be certain and I think it's all still sort of catching up to me after a couple of weeks spent doing my best to compartmentalize it so I could continue to function. And yeah, I realize that was massive run-on sentence and my sixth grade English teacher would be ashamed of me, but here we all are.

Some of it is my usual complaints, that the holidays come in and disrupt everybody's schedules, demand that we put in huge efforts to be social and make things work (and in the days of family get-togethers, do cooking and cleaning and preparing and buying presents and thinking about a whole bunch of shit that I frankly don't usually have the bandwidth for). Basically, the holidays tend to wear me out under the best of circumstances, even when I'm enjoying them. 

And some of it is just... I don't know. I'd really intended to get some of my writing projects done, or at least well on their way, this year. I'd have been happy with one. And this has (according to almost everyone who's trying to make a living at writing, or art, or any sort of creative endeavor) been an absolutely horrible environment in which to do it. Which should maybe make me feel better, but doesn't. 

I don't know. I'm writing this on a Saturday night and setting it to go live on Tuesday; by then I'll be back at work and the boys will be back on their remote schooling schedule (or trying, anyway). Very possibly I'll be feeling a whole lot better by the time you read this, just because I'll be back on a regular schedule, instead of trying to resist my instinctive urge to be nocturnal. Also, possibly, I'll feel better because we'll have had D&D night on Monday, and playing my elvish berserker will have given me a chance to indulge in a bit of therapeutic imaginary violence. 

Huh. Speaking of, it's 11:24 at night, and I'm suddenly thinking that I need to do a little vignette to feel out where he is now -- a lot of what I've written here on the Blog o' Doom has been about his brother Darvinin, but Ruin is at least as interesting a character in his own right. So now I have to decide whether it's more important to go to sleep at a sensible time, or to write a bit while the urge is on me. 

If there's a Ruin story on Thursday, I probably didn't go to sleep.