It's really shameful how long it took me to find time to sit down to sit down and post something. I am afraid to look. I'm not going to look, oh hell... December 21. Well that wasn't so long ago. I can safely say I survived Christmas with a minimum of holiday strife. The post holiday depression succumbed to post holiday busy-ness in my office, and New Year's Eve anxiety was drowned in a raft of cooking from my new cookbook.
I don't know if depression is quite the right word, maybe Christmas melancholy is more what has afflicted me in past years. There is a wistfulness and tenderness associated with everyone going home to see their family, and gathering with friends. At the same time everything is laced with a slightly elevated sense of anxiety and dislocation. Your schedule is disrupted, productivity stops, sometimes for a couple of weeks. There is a falseness about the presents and the wrapping and the commercialness of it all. People who voted for George Bush send cards saying Peace on Earth. I buy a book for my mother on the chance that she might like it. I give last years gift from a friend to a teenage friend of the family and allow her to believe that I picked it out in a store. And so on.
But we have another year behind us. We have dispensed with the holiday season and it is back to the grind. By virtue of the job transition I strangely have a week to spend on vacation and I find myself in sunny Los Angeles. I have spent the last two days in Venice Beach, California, which really is very charming, there is a little section with canals and lots of little arts and craft bungalows. Plus the beach of course, which has a deserted carnival feel to it. So far the weather has been quite rainy, but it is looking like there is hope for today. It's endlessly strange to me that it does get cold here in winter. It doesn't seem right, that this place you see in the movies always seeming warm, actually gets quite chilly in January. I take it personally.
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