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Happy Happy Joy Joy
Michael considered fate at 15:39   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Some of the people that know me.. heck, a lot of people who know me - and know me very well - don't realize the level of depression that I am sometimes capable of. The funniest part is that it is never particularly warranted. You see I've lived a pretty charmed life. Very charmed. If they made a TV show about my life they'd have to buy that stupid Spelling's production of the same name just to cancel it and destroy all reference and knowledge of it's existence in order to name MY show Charmed.

Because I'm charmed.

I've lived up on a bluff overlooking the ocean now for over two years. In fact I'm going on three. The parking signs out front say "City Services - No Parking Tuesdays 8 AM - 12 NOON". This is the city's way of saying:

Sometimes we sweep the streets and we can do a better job if there are no cars parked on the street at the time but if their are cars parked on the street we will just sweep around them, no problem. If, on the other hand, we don't happen to be sweeping on a particular tuesday but we feel like being complete jackholes we will send a metermaid up to your location and have them ticket your vehicle just for fun. Really, for fun. We actually chuckle to ourselves down at city hall when we send people out to do this because it's so unnecessarily evil and pretty hilarious. If the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day and there is no reason to be anything but carefree and happy we will not only ticket your vehicle but we will do it at 8:01AM and then immediately tow your vehicle at 8:02AM. This way, when you wake up to go to work you find your vehicle missing, call city services to find out where it was towed (we will have trouble finding it and try to tell you more than once that no vehicle of your description has been towed), drag a friend or neighbour out of bed to drive you there (undoubtably it will be a tow lot as far away from you as possible, despite the fact there is one a short walk down the street from you), pay the $65 to get your car back - all to find that when you actually get to your vehicle there is a parking ticket on it for $25. We laugh particularly hard about that last part.

Somehow, despite this, I have been lucky enough to never ever get towed by the city. It's not because I always move my car in time, either. The first summer I lived up on the promenade I would forget to move my car all the time. It was more often than not a matter of being lazy and not wanting to drag ass out of bed at 8am. I would stumble out my front door at 8:45 or 9:15 or even 10 sometimes and always, there looking at me, was my car - unticketed and untowed. After my roommate got towed and ticketed a few times I got better. I'd park in the driveway on Monday nights or go around to the side street. If I did park on the prom I would skuttle down the back stairs in my boxers and Tevas and move the car by 8:15 or so, then head back to bed. In the winter I just avoid it all together by parking in the driveway that I share with the tenants in my building - it's first come first serve but I've been lucky.. charmed even.

Until today. My mind slipped like a bad clutch and I didn't even realize what day it was as I pulled up to the front of my building last night. I was busy thinking up a storm (no doubt my mind smelling like a burnt clutch) and raced into my house to change for my run. It didn't occur to me that today was Tuesday until this morning at 10AM. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, tied my shoes, and as I walked down the stairs to the front door it hit me - WHAM. "Oh crap," I thought, "It's Tuesday!" At the time I thought this I could see the front of my car through the front door so it wasn't a real "OH CRAP" it was more of an "oh crap". I fully expected a ticket fluttering in the wind on my windshield but when I got out to the car it was bare. No ticket. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Nothing.

Like I said, I live a charmed life. Some might scoff at this - "what's parking tickets got to do with anything?" they'd say. Well, it's got everything to do with everything. A parking ticket would be a major affront to me. My life is so charmed that my biggest worries are parking tickets and making sure I get diet soda at the bar when I ask for diet soda. No kidding.

I lead a charmed life. No one in my direct family has ever died, been maimed, or contracted a serious disease - no cousins or uncles or aunts or sisters or friends. I have never gotten in a serious accident, been caught rhyming or stealing, or even had a problem wetting my bed as a child. My largest physical flaws are flat feet and small hands. I'm intelligent enough that high school was a joke and college was a easy enough that I was drunk all the time. My parents were never overbearing, divorced, hateful, or alcoholics.

I lead such a charmed life that amazing deals such as $8/month gym membership, free cable tv, and free wireless broadband from my neighbour just fall into my lap. I got dual-citizenship through a loophole with my mother that resulted in a ~75% drop in my college tuition. I just saved $500 on my car and motorcycle insurance and I didn't even switch to Geico.

One of the reasons I'm so charmed is that I was born in the United States of America and people forget that sometimes. People forget how lucky the are to be - as Ben Folds says - male middle-class and white. Maybe you're not male and maybe you're not white and maybe, even, you're not middle class but you know what - if you live in America you are pretty much the middle-class white male of the world - symbolically speaking. And I don't want to hear any bullshit about the poverty line either because I have friends working the poverty line like they were on strike against work and they're doing just fine.

All this charm is probably why no one believes that I could ever be depressed. God forbid. But I can be. Just like anyone else. Just like every other charmed motherfucker in this country - and even Canada too, and Britain and France and Germany.. lotta charmed motherfuckers out there and damn if a whole bunch of them aren't a bit depressed too.

My freshman year of college was a charmed one, to be sure. I met some amazing friends right off the bat and had some old friends too and I learned what real drinking was and how school work - no matter how amazingly difficult it looked - could always be done later, after the beer and the hangover and the trip to the chinese take-out. Regardless, though, I hit a funk mid-way through. Daylight savings had kicked in and it was early December. Finals were fast approaching for the first semester and I just didn't want to do a damn thing. I'm not sure what it was, exactly.. not homesickness or lack of motivation or anything like that.. I was just sort of bummed out. For two straight weeks - and I'm not kidding here, Alex can confirm - I remained in bed till ~5:30PM when everyone would congregate in my room to head for dinner in the cafeteria. Considering I was hitting the sack around 4 or 5AM that means I was regularly recording over 12 hours of sleep. It also meant I wasn't seeing a single ray of sunlight. It also meant I was skipping every class. It also meant I was awake in time to a) eat, b) shower, c) go out drinking... which meant I wasn't studying much for finals.

I pulled out of the nose dive somehow, recorded some decently acceptable grades for the transcript, and stopped sleeping through sunlight. Christmas break helped to break up the monotony I was feeling and the new semester brought new classes, new lecture halls and buildings, and a new light to it all.

I never did quite figure it out but it's been with me ever since. The darkness of wintertime in the Northeast - less than 9 hours of sunlight - has been a serious factor for me ever since that Freshman year of college. It just makes me SAD. Unfortunately it also kills my motivation to post here, which is a shame. Sometimes I'll head home from work and hit the street with my sneakers and iPod and run down to the ocean listening to some Creedance or Frank Black or Weezer and a million thoughts will run through my head. I'll compose amazing posts. I'll confront many a demon and foe. I'll construct witty responses to tired old arguements. I'll discover the perfect sequence of words and sentences to say to the girl in order to make her see the light and come about and realize her fate and accept her love.

And then when I get home it's all gone.

I flip open the iBook and stare at the screen. I check my email and read blogs and listen to mp3s and read books and cook food and shower and take a multi-vitamin and watch tv and brush my teeth and take off my shoes and clean my dishes and talk on the phone and go down to the bar for a beer and go for a run and sleep and sleep and get up to turn off my alarm and go to work and put on my clothes and sit and work and drink coffee and take a shower and work and sleep and turn off the alarm and go running...

and all those posts in my head, they're gone.

Luckily Spring-Ahead is just around the corner which will shift sunset forward an hour and we'll be looking at over 10 hours of light soon enough. Luckily I have the willpower of a giant willpower machine. Luckily spring gives way to summer which gives way to large life decisions and realizations and new places, people, things, and cats.

I can't wait.

Can you?


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Check out heroecs, the robotics team competition website of my old supervisor's daughter. Fun stuff!
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