Month: January 2021

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Concentrate And Ask Again

I no longer have Wednesdays off work, and it’s a complicated thing for me to work through, surprisingly.

On the one hand, it’s undoubtedly a good thing: the reason I did have the middle of the week free for half of 2020 was because I was furloughed at THR for that day, thanks to a pay cut brought about by COVID and the understanding that I shouldn’t have to work the same amount as usual for only 70% of the usual money. Thankfully, as of this week, my pay has been restored, and so, my hours have been, as well. Like I said, it’s a good thing.

It also keeps the rest of my work week from being quite so harried, because now I have another day to do everything necessary — no more panicked Tuesdays, preparing a post to run first thing Thursday, or whatever. I like that aspect of it, as well.

At the same time, though, the midweek break has become part of my routine by now, and something I’ve come to really appreciate and rely on, emotionally and mentally. What started as an uncomfortable oddity — with me almost raring to go sit down behind the laptop and just get stuff done because that’s what I do on weekdays, dammit — became something that I looked forward to, planned for, after a few months. It became part of my rhythm, for want of a better way to put it, and now that’s no longer there.

As strange as it may seem, I’ve finally — at age 46 — come to appreciate time off work and the need to relax and recover; the holiday break just passed, and even the Thanksgiving break before that, were unusual in that I could feel the mental benefit of taking a break in real time. As a former workaholic, it’s an amazing, wonderful thing… that I seemingly only got my head around in time to see me get less time off.

Will the trade off (less time off, but more money and hopefully less stressful days that I do work) work out? Ask me again in a few weeks. This is just the first Wednesday of the year, after all.

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Move Over Here

When I was a kid, I learned that the holidays kept going until the official twelfth day of Christmas, which I remember as January 4th — although, curiously enough, my two sisters remember it as January 5th and 6th, respectively, suggesting that my family wasn’t exactly consistent in its timekeeping when it came to taking down decorations. Nonetheless, the point remains the same; the holiday season, when I was young, was something that continued into the week following New Year, for tradition as well as a lack of wanting to go through the effort of taking all the decorations down.

This year, however, while the fireworks were still bursting in the sky and frightening dogs throughout the land — no, really, fuck you, fireworks people — I quietly thought to myself, it’s New Year, thank God we’ve gotten through the holidays.

Was this a sudden attack of anti-seasonal grinchiness? Was it just frustration born of wanting my dog not to be losing his mind because of the fireworks, and feeling as if the entire concept of New Year wasn’t worth the trouble in the first place? Maybe both, but the restless feeling of wanting to just get on with everything and leave the tinsel behind lingered across the next few days; the decorations were gone before this morning came around.

I can’t explain my desire to get moving into the year. It clearly doesn’t make sense, especially given that it means I want to jump firmly into January, the darkest, dullest month of the year. (February, at least, has the good grace to be short, and March has spring going for it, with plants returning to life and the feeling that things are happening again; January is just there, long and cold and without much sunlight.) And yet, here we are.

Perhaps it’s a need to put more distance between ourselves and 2020, the year that felt endless like a Doctor Who plot. Or maybe it was a realization that there’s more to be found this year than usual, and it’s time to get started,

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Through Vale and Field, You Flow So Calm

I don’t have a lot of special New Year’s memories, mostly because New Year’s is a bullshit holiday that exists for entirely arbitrary reasons that owe, I suspect, to the desire for everyone to have some more time off around Christmas by hook or by crook.

That’s not to say that I don’t “believe” in New Year’s as a concept — it sure is the start of another calendar year, I know that to be true — or that I’m not entirely susceptible to the idea that there’s something special, even magical, about the idea that a new year can mean a do-over, or at least the chance for a fresh start. (Really, though: who would have a problem with that? Who doesn’t want to start again and do better?)

Nevertheless, when I think of New Year’s, I find myself remembering one New Year’s Day from when I was a young kid — young enough that the fact that I was awake early on January 1, and no-one else was up yet aside from my mother, almost disturbing in how unusual it was. Normally, the house was filled with people and noise in the morning, and things were unsettling in how quiet they were, everyone else having stayed up until midnight the night before, if not later.

With the house, essentially, to myself, I did what any kid would do: I put on the television and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was inexplicably playing at the time. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched it, and I knew by this point that it was boring and slow and not what any movie with the word “space” in the title should be, but there wasn’t anything else worth watching, so I switched it on, anyway.

It had already reached the point with all the psychedelic colors and stargates and oh boy were these guys on something, and I can remember sitting there, watching it and thinking to myself that it was too bright and sunny outside for that time of year. All of a sudden, it felt as if something strange and unexpected was happening, as if the weirdness onscreen had somehow crossed over and altered reality.

I sat there, feeling as if something had changed in some significant and indescribable sense, and I remember feeling very clearly that this was what the start of a new year should feel like.

Here’s to a year that feels like that, only less disturbing.