Post-Halloween Holiday Season Kickoff Blues
November tends to be a difficult month to navigate, and the more stuff I can get out of, the more I tend to enjoy it. Not because I want to get out of literally everything, but because I really only want to focus on one or two events, and anything past that tends to make everything feel like more of an obligation and less like a holiday.
Things weren't especially bad this year. We actually had money to do celebration-things at the tail end of the month, and we got a few days off work. We ended up going over to my father's, but the event was low-key and we were able to skedaddle pretty quickly. I think "skedaddle" feels like the right word - appropriately cartoonish. Pay close attention, and you can almost see the moment our legs turn into those circles that indicate a truly high degree of scootin'.
As I mentioned before, I don't really care if the winter months go by quickly; the colder the weather and the sooner it gets dark, the faster this shit can go by. It actually sort of blows that I want to hold the Fast Forward button down through these months, and since it got cold earlier than usual, that desire happened early as well. My birthday happens in November as well, and I don't care much for that, either. Once you get past your mid-20's, birthdays are just unusually festive incidents of memento mori, so any of these events that take place sans human skulls feels like a wasted opportunity.
One thing I've been thinking on is the sort of gradual progress of cleaning, reorganizing, reprioritizing, and finishing tasks that takes place in the day to day of my life, where November seems like a surprisingly good time to take stock of that progress. As the holidays begin, we end up making a concerted effort to demarcate time for ourselves versus the events that sort of end up being obligations, and in doing so, I spend a lot of time sort of conflating that effort relating to time with physical spaces. The more we claim our own space by making conscious decisions, and the more we're able to save money so that owning this space seems like a reasonable thing we can do, the better I feel - and this has been a high water mark for that.
I guess that's it. Nothing really big happened this last month and, frankly, I want it to stay that way for a while as I continue to have this sort of success getting so much under control. The world is an especially difficult place right now, and there's this very little bit of hope I have for myself and our family that I want to encourage the best I can. I won't denigrate or reduce the moments of happiness we earn for ourselves, here, and we have some of that for now.