Under the Artificial Sun

This past week has been rough for me. I think a lot of us have experienced some weather-related depression as of late. But not everybody freaks out about it the way I do. I kid you not, yesterday I was lying on the mat doing something at the gym with the trainer, and I was like, Ohmygod my depression is bad what am I going to do I'm never going to be able to get a job because I'm mentally unstable what is wrong with me what if I lose control and end up spending the second half of my life in a mental hospital?

And then I was like, "Okay, I'm done with my crunches now."

Light therapy is supposed to be good for weather-related depression, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. What you are supposed to do is buy an expensive lightbox designed for such a purpose, and then sit next to it for 20 minutes a day or something like that.

I'm with my lightbox right now. Hence the title of this post.

Side note, it is the ugliest freakin' thing in the world.

What you should probably not do when you're depressed is imbibe depressant substances, even if those depressant substances are red and pair nicely with a cranberry goat cheese.

Guess what I did last night?

I went over to visit my oft-mentioned, oft-hyperlinked friend Katie, who has a sweet pad with a killer view of Lake Michigan. I had the goat cheese and some crackers in my bag, along with two bottles of wine, which I presented with the statement, "I brought two bottles in case one was gross, and not because I think we should drink one bottle each or anything like that."

Uh huh.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm some kind of lush. In actuality, I'm more addicted to the cheese than the wine. As I always say, I have my demons (see: this blog), but alcoholism isn't one of them.

But it's fun to have some wine sometimes, and especially when it means I get to take the whole night off from my life's responsibilities and engage in such frivolities as lying on the floor, Googling people, and doing metric conversions. Did I mention that Katie and I are like the coolest people ever?

I somehow stayed coherent enough to change from my Pajama Jeans into my actual pajamas, because I was sleeping over at Katie's. I don't really like to take the train home at night, because the Metra commuter train to the suburbs is kind of a buzz-kill.

Then I passed out underneath a quilt made of Katie's Math Team t-shirts from high school. One of the shirts had a horrific calculus equation that normally gives me the shivers, but I'm pretty sure I solved after drinking all that wine.

This morning I put my Pajama Jeans back on (boo, they have salt stains) and rode the 9:35 train back to reality.

And today ... ugh. Because you know what's really awesome when you're hungover?

Lights.