You'd better watch out . . .

Feeling profoundly off game these days. There's drudge work involved in so many things and people are just not fucking jolly anymore. North American Christmases set up retarded expectations. In Europe you drink mulled wine or proper foamy eggnog with lots of alcohol and that makes you jolly, but here we're expected to get jolly on a diet of saccharine Christmas carols, garish store displays and seasonal goodwill towards all men when we spend the rest of the year punching each other in the head to get on the fucking metro first. The least, the fucking least the provincial government could do to help us get into the true spirit of Christmas is let us drink outside in December. Although I understand why it doesn't. Ontarioans have been coddled with infantile, retarded drinking laws for so long we've become infantile, retarded drunks, and any relaxation of the laws will probably result in a generation of 18-to-50-year-olds dying in a series of ever more infantile, retarded drunken mishaps.

As you can tell, the Nutcracker only went so far to put me in the mood. It was exactly like last year in terms of staging and production, which made me feel gypped: if it's such a money-spinner for the National Ballet, you'd think they could throw in a few fucking surprises here and there. Gigi's pleasant inclusive non-denominational politically correct holiday party went a little farther. Today I'm not going to work and will take care of my Christmas cards, which may have some effect. But the truth of the matter is that there are a couple of things pissing on whatever errant sparks of seasonal joy fly within me. First, it's mid-December and it's 13 degrees above zero outside. Much as I fucking hate the winter, the warm makes me very unsettled and worried about the future of the planet and of myself: it fills me with happy, Christmassy visions of parching to death in an arid, ruined landscape that used to be a thriving city. Weeeeeeee!

Second, I'm having a hard time with some sort of second adolescence. When I was a real adolescent, I was sulky and angry and awful, but far too pre-occupied with what passed for angst to come to any useful conclusions about my relationship with my parents. And now that I'm older it's hard to realize how avoiding conflict with them has created a distance between us. Because now I can feel emotionally and creatively undermined when I've accomplished - well, not so much, but obviously more than they were expecting - even though I honestly believe they have no intention of doing any undermining. I haven't been talking with them in the right way and now I'm afraid I've lost the balls to talk with them properly at all - just carry on through life running away from what I interpret as their disapprobation and never scraping together the balls to do what's really right for me. Being afraid of it is probably a good sign I'm going to deal with it soon, but you know what? For the moment, it puts me in an un-Christmassy pisser.