So Many Holiday Decorations!
It's time to distract myself from staring into the abyss.
I still have to clean my apartment and I am currently assigned to 15 projects at work in addition to filling in for another copywriter on vacation, but I am prepared to call this week a success. This is mostly because my criteria for assessing this kind of thing is somewhat of a mess. Successfully making a green curry lentil stirfry more or less cancels out working until 10 PM every night; some of the most critically dire vibes I have ever encountered during a project briefing are counteracted by looking out the window and watching two cars narrowly avoiding a fender bender and one person getting out of their car in the middle of a four-way intersection to throw a milkshake at the front windshield of the other car while shouting, “I hope your dad fucks your wife!” None of this can reasonably compensate for getting worn down by a high-stress and demanding job, but at least it is tantalizingly close to the holidays.
If the deep jankiness has sometimes made it harder to do the things I aspire to accomplish if I had a better work-life balance, it has also added some depth and color to the experience of being stuck at the office for far longer than I have ever cared to spend. Mostly, working overtime as consistently as I do is kind of a bummer, especially as the months melt into days. So I put these intrusive existential conundrums aside and decided to decorate my apartment because the months between October and December carry an unusual magnitude of strange and strangely festive spirit.
In October, the apartment is filled with whimsical Halloween decor: Fake spiderwebs, cardboard cutouts of bats that my girlfriend made and taped to the wall, Tim Burton-esque figurines of ghosts and skeletons and witches. In November, we put out one of those things that I’ve been told are called cornucopias. Since my girlfriend is a Christmas maniac, and since my birthday is on Christmas Eve which makes me the opposite of that, we adorn our common area with cute little wintery items like a 5-foot-tall nutcracker.
Surely there are more productive methods of channeling this depressed energy than relying on decorations, but healthy habits are no match for warm lighting. The omnipresent darkness within is no match for string lights.
So I will enjoy this moment because things get bad in January—actually, things get severely fucked up in January. But I won’t think about that right now because I still have a decorative skeleton in my window. Although, I read on Reddit that if I keep my Christmas tree up until mid- to late-January, it can stave off my inevitable depression for a little longer.
Over the next few months, plastic junk from Wal-Mart represents the fine line between perseverance and despair. Nobody else will see them because nobody ever comes over to my place. All this garbage is purely for me.
Maybe watching a Hallmark movie will help.
They're throwing milkshakes at windshields now?
My milkshake brought your Dad to your wife’s house. Toronto is just a big polycule now, like those giant fungi that occupy whole forests. Cornucopias are becoming rather based-adjacent.