I must really be burned out if I can't get into the Christmas spirit. It's not like the whole holiday brings me down or anything. I love the season, I love the weather, I have a great time running around picking out presents. I even love trying to figure out why my damn text editor won't fucking wrap lines. I enjoy dreaming about the mall still being a place to shop rather than a extra large wrestling cage match. I love complaining too.

What I don't like is all the stories of Holiday Depression The newsdawgs like to bandy about this time of year. It almost seems like a self-fulfilling prophesy, keep yabbering about how depressed everyone gets this time of year, until we're all so depressed from the suicide statistics that we want to kill someone.

It's not like I'm lonely. My stomach hurts from laughing -- and drinking too much rum -- last night. My throat is sore from yelling into the night, my muscles ache -- rum again, and post party cleaning -- and there is still a serious amount of blue fuzz from the-grail-shaped-Angie's damn sweater. Do sweaters get the mange? I mean, there is a lot of fuzz. I've picked it all up twice and there is more apearing from god-knows-where every time I look around.

Even The X-Files got into the act tonite. I had to sit through an hour long crappy ghost story where the ghosts -- played in a lovely deadpan way by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin. (God my memory sucks. I'm gonna haf ta look her damn name up. Shit. Whoop! IMDB to the rescue!) It makes me want to scream. What a lame-o plot. Honestly, I care about the characters enough now that I care about their personal lives. I like the show a great deal. Enough to forgive them the occasional horrifically indulgent plot. But we've covered their lonely lives out side of work to death, and to bring it up again in this context seems cheap. This is a show that lonely geeks like to watch for escapism. I'm pretty sure that they don't want to escape to their own lives.

So many of these shows seem to want to jump out of their genres these days. The X-Files wanders around between gothic, sci-fi, and drama. Why drift into this introspective claptrap. If I want cheap psychology I'll watch Dawson's Creek or some piece of crap like that. I'd like to strangle the people who keep wanting turn my favorite comedies in to dramedies. Fuckers.

I kind wonder about the depression around this season. I keep hearing about SAD: Seasonal Affected Disorder (or something like that). You always hear these fun stories about how many Danes suicide as the days get shorter. Some doctor finally thought maybe its more than the season, maybe its the dim light during the season. Now we've got people with sunlamps hooked to alarm clocks to help out with sleep disorders. Pretty smart doctor, I wonder if he had stock in Sylvania or G. E.. Mom always said reading in the dim light would make me go blind, who knew she meant I'd get drepessed enough the pluck them out?

Why would our brains want us depressed when the days are short? I have wondered if there was good reason people eat more when they are depressed? Maybe depression is a side effect of a need to conserve energy and lay on fat. I mean, we're pretty complex beasts. We have enough brain power to ignore many of our baser instincts, to fight off our own bad habits, to offset our feelings with reason. Maybe evolution had to warp our mindset to steer us into proper behavior. I'd love to see a breakdown of SAD by race in a mixed race area. I'd be willing to bet that Nordic types are more susceptible to it.

On the other hand, maybe it's just the incessant itching from all these damn non-performing fleece sweaters.