So in a little over four hours, I’ll be hitting the road for Orlando to pick up Jill. We’ll dine, then slam I-75, bound for ConFab in Lexington, Kentucky. All-nighter, baby! Looking forward to it, never been to Kentucky, and many of my favorite people will be there.

I need this badly. The last week has been Depression Central for me and, as they say, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. Seems like the littlest things set me off this week, as is evidenced by my AT&T Rant on Tuesday. But I stand by it, or rather, I refuse to pull the post. That’s Rule #1 here at 2HT. Never pull a post. If I pulled all the posts that I felt like pulling, there’d be little left here.

Just read an amazing post by PSU Mom regarding her own battle with depression and if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear the woman was reading my mind.

Despite my smartassedness on Twitter and here (I can talk a mighty good game), I’m quite the hermit most of the time, and a lot of that is due to the depression and the social phobia. I don’t know which feeds which, but they’re so melded together at this point, that I’m not sure it matters. The end result is still the same.

It’s healthy to mix with people. I’ve been told that by countless therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and many others with indecipherable initials after their names. I KNOW it’s important to be social, but unless you battle depression and social phobia, you have no idea how HARD it is to do so.

Thank God for the Interwebs. It’s my way of socializing most of the time. And it’s because I’ve met such amazing people on the Net that I push myself to go to blogger parties like ConFab and TequilaCon and BlogHer, even though a large part of me cringes and cowers mentally in the corner before (and often during) these events. More than once, I’ve retreated to my hotel room during a session or two at BlogHer, just because I’m so overwhelmed.

Lord knows I’ve considered rescinding my RSVP for ConFab dozens of times for various reasons. Thankfully, Jill is depending on me to drive to Kentucky and others are depending on me to pick them up at Blue Grass Airport tomorrow morning, or else I probably would just stay home. All the while regretfully reading the ConFab attendees’ tweets and blog posts and seeing their Twitpics and Flickr photos in the coming days.

So going is important for me. I usually leave these things feeling refreshed and pumped up, even if the effects are temporary. I’m sure I’ll have a marvy time hanging with most everyone. Once I get there and start mingling and laughing, it’ll all be good. The jitters and anxiety will take their 48-hour pass and fuck off for a while.

Right? Say “right.”

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for all the exciting Tweets from ConFab, and maybe search Twitter, too, for the #ConFab hashtag because lots of other folks will be live-Tweeting.

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Some of you know that I sometimes fight the urge to simply vanish from the Earth. I find it’s one of those things that cycles with my depression. When too much shit comes flying my way, I deal but it gets overwhelming and sucks the fucking life out of me. Then, the next time a deafening quiet comes across my plate, I just want to curl up in an armadillo ball, totally unplug the laptop and TV, and just freaking pop out of existence for, oh, maybe a year or two.

This is not very practical for most people. For anyone, really.

I’d be totally screwed if it weren’t for the fact that I work from home. The last few weeks have gone by in a ghost of a blur and I haven’t done shit for work. Now that I’m getting my head back into the game, ready or not, I find that my brain is still sluggish, choking on frozen molasses.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? No matter how down you get, there is no magic PAUSE button so you can temporarily cease the Earth’s rotations while you catch up with life. No, life pushes incessantly forward, with you or without you. Sucks.

The last few months, I’ve dealt with my share of assholes. At times, I even got sucked into drama I didn’t want to get sucked into…then regained my brain and said fuck it. Life is too short for trivial bullshit and trivial people. No more. Investing my energy into relationships that go nowhere is something I’m not willing to do any more. Like dealing with the bullies in grade school, the best course of action is sometimes just to ignore them.

Or hire a sniper to take the fuckers out.

I fuck with myself enough. I don’t need anyone’s help with it. I guarantee you that I can slam myself worse than anyone else can. So while it may be discouraging, dealing with some of these meanies off-line and on-line, the good part is that I’m trying to focus on the POSITIVE relationships.

Change comes. People fall by the wayside in one capacity or another. It’s sad, but life happens. It is what it is, as she said everyday.

I just found out yesterday that my sister-in-law has a mass in her brain. She’s still having all sorts of tests done, so there’s not a lot of information yet. All I know is that my brother and her have dealt with enough shit over the past couple of years.

If you’re of the praying sort, I’d appreciate some prayers and good vibes for my sister-in-law.

And I’m officially declaring a Cancer Moratorium. Nobody else is allowed to get sick. Clone stem cells, wave burning cloves over voodoo Barbie dolls, do whatever the fuck you have to do…but I’m tired of the monster called Cancer.

When do we get to the Star Trek: Next Generation moments, when hunger and sickness are things taught only in history books? Screw the flying cars, that’s what I’m waiting for.

Oh, and the holodeck. I’d wear those emitters out, I tell you.

Filed under Depression, Local Goings On, relationships | Comments (59)

I have an admission to make. I’m not a holiday person. Any more.

I loved holidays growing up. Would salivate as Christmas approached, and not because it was Jesus’ birthday. I couldn’t have cared less about Him back then. It was all about the pressies. I could barely contain my excitement when Christmas Eve rolled around.

It’s miraculous I was able to sleep at all. But no matter how late I stayed up, no matter how long I giggled and whispered with my brother and sister, I woke up magically at 3am. Every single year without fail, and without the aid of alarms.

There was a rule in my house, though. Parents were not allowed to be jarred to consciousness until 6am. I had no idea why this ridiculous law existed. After all, it wasn’t like they were doing the work. Santa was the one kicking ass and taking names…hopefully mine was on the Nice List. But no waking up the folks until 6.

So we kids were forced to struggle with nothing more than our gigantosaurus Christmas stockings for three fucking hours while Dad and Mom lazed away in bed. First I’d wake up my brother and sister, then we’d squee with delight as we tiptoed gingerly - and by gingerly I mean with the grace of a herd of buffalo - down the stairs to a glorious lighted tree with presents spread out underneath and throughout half the living room.

We grabbed our stockings and lugged them back upstairs to our rooms. Well, Karin came into Chris’ and my room. And we poured our goodies out on the beds. Candy, small books, Matchbox cars, dolls, comics, Silly Putty, multicolored pencils…all stuff that kept us occupied for a good 20 minutes or so until we were so hopped up on sugar we were pinging off the walls. With another 2 hours and 40 minutes left to wait.

I’m sure Mom and Dad heard us downstairs. Chris’ and my room was right above theirs. But apparently, parents can sleep through graceful buffalo like you wouldn’t believe. Probably because they got drunk the night before, anticipating Santa’s touchdown. They got to hang out with Santa when he got there, told him that I was probably not nearly as bad as what he’d heard through the nefarious North Pole grapevine, convinced him to leave the coal in the sleigh, and all that.

But we waited, and waited, and waited. DAYS. Until the clock showed it was 5:59am. And you can bet your sweet ass that we were knocking on our parents’ door at the very STROKE of 6.

“It’s 6 o’clock!” we’d squeal to very little reaction from the bed. “Dad! Mom! It’s 6 o’clock!”

*groan*

“It’s Christmas! Merry Christmas!” we’d all shout repeatedly and tirelessly for the few minutes it took to pry open their eyes and hear them say, “OK, OK! Go out to the living room and we’ll be right there.”

But they wouldn’t be right there. Instead they tortured us by getting dressed first, and then having to go to the kitchen to make the vile substance known as coffee, and we couldn’t open presents until the coffee was ready and those were the days before automatic programmable coffeemakers, which would have had the shit ready before they stepped their slippered feet into the living room.

Five fucking minutes we’d have to wait. Sometimes we didn’t even hear the first shred of wrapping paper before 6:08! Can you believe that shit?

And what a whirling dervish of paper it was after that! We ripped into each package swiftly and with great precision, tossing anything clothes-shaped to the back of the tree and saving those things for last. The Disney Haunted Mansion Game, a Talking G.I. Joe with Kung Fu Grip, coloring books, model cars, another few books in the Bobbsey Twins series, Lite Brite (making things with Lite!), a Captain Kirk doll with Mr. Spock and the Enterprise Bridge with Built-in Transporter, a mechanical tank that ran ruggedly over anything as steeply inclined as a comic book, Operation, the Welcome Back Kotter Game…the list went on and on. And I’m leaving out the girly shit because who really cared about that stuff, except for my sister?

Then, hours and hours later, we’d be forced to get dressed so we could leave our fantastic new toys behind and travel to all our relatives’ houses for more presents. And food. Torture.

Years later, as a teenager, I was much less enthusiastic about Christmas. We were in New Mexico at that point, and I was a disc jockey at a local radio station. And we were poor. Food stamps poor. Christmas became smaller and less exciting. Keep in mind that I wasn’t the slightest bit religious, so I didn’t care about those parts of the holidays. I got more and more clothes as gifts and, yes, they were needed but since when was Christmas about getting what you need?

By then, I was struggling to get out of bed early myself. The 3am wakenings were long gone and I could see what Mom and Dad had been saying all along. Sleep. Goooooood.

It wasn’t until I had my own children…a scant four years later…that Christmas resumed being fun. It was then that I realized Christmas is really about the children. It’s fun to watch everything through their bright and amazed eyes. It was also then that I realized precisely why my parents wanted to sleep until at least 6 in the morning.

Flash forward another five years or so. Divorce. Depression. Yes, I still had my daughters for Christmas (or the week after Christmas, alternating years), and yes, it was still fun to have them. But I missed family. I missed MY family. Not my parents and siblings, I mean the family I’d had for six years, the one that got torn out from under me. Things just weren’t the same.

And let’s face it, they haven’t been the same since. Sure, I discovered spirituality, even religion, and Christmas took on a whole new meaning. But the family part? I miss it. Sometimes dearly. To this day, whenever I dream of my now-adult twin daughters, they’re 5 or 6. I’ve had some serious relationships since my divorce…a few. But never came close to marriage.

The holidays now just kind of…are. I realized years ago that, while my depression is chronic, it’s definitely affected by this time of year. I’ll be going to my sister’s in a few days for Thanksgiving and I love being around my nieces, but it’s kind of bittersweet because, well, it’s a reminder of precisely what I don’t have.

Now I view the holidays as a chore, to be quite frank. More than anything else, it’s work. It means putting on a happy little face and driving around to this house and that house and making lots of cheerful phone calls and wrapping presents. Granted, a lot of the shopping torture is minimized thanks to the Internets, but still…I suck at wrapping and there seems to be so MUCH of it.

I feel like I’m just going through the motions most of the time. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Happy Hannukah and all that shit. I admit that sometimes I feel that wistful little boy inside when I drive by an elaborately decorated house at night, all the lights twinkling and the inflatable snowmen smiling. But for the most part I’m just phoning it in.

If I had the power, I’d probably fast forward 6 weeks once we hit mid-November. Just past the new year.

But then, aren’t the days already fast forwarding enough? One birthday blurring into the next, one Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Years Eve smudging the next. It seems that just yesterday I was freshly divorced in my mid-20s. I blinked and now I have these lines on my face, a basketball in my belly, and I’m suddenly 42? How the fuck did that happen?

I  keep praying for the new year to get here quickly, but truthfully? What I really, really want? Is for Christmas to be magic again. For me to have something to look forward to. A significant other.

How about that shit, Santa?

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