Rhinocrisy

I’ve been battling depression again for the past few months. Actually, I haven’t been “battling” so much as “surrendering faster than Vichy France”. For those of you who have never been depressed, in my case this mostly consists of:

• Not doing much.
• Not thinking much.
• Sleeping a lot.

E.g., this morning I woke up, in a technical sense, at around 8:20, but for some reason felt the need to lie around listlessly in bed until about 11 before I actually dragged myself up and about. Also I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of dilly-dallying and shilly-shallying that needs to be done around my house lately.

I don’t ordinarily write about stuff like this, because it’s frankly boring and uninteresting, and I’m already boring and uninteresting at this point; so why compound it?

However: my roommate suggested to me recently that I might suffer from such a thing as “seasonal affective disorder”. This is basically shorthand for: “Gets sad in the wintertime.” It even has a reflexive acronym. Neat!

Normally I am prone to scoffing at spuriously labeled diseases (e.g., “ADD”, “IBS”, etc.), many of which I think are overdiagnosed or fictitious. I don’t have a good reason for these beliefs; I am merely a cantankerous and unreasonably contrary type of person in this regard. But I like the idea that I suffer from SAD. The short summary of the “disease” is that it’s a product of shorter daylight hours^*, which has some sort of unknown physiological effect (depressed serotonin or melatonin levels being a couple of hypotheses). Estimates of prevalence are as high as 10% of the population. This fits in with a lot of other genetic pre-determinisms I’ve formulated with regard to myself, including propensity to thinness, high metabolism, poor performance in cold weather, etc., reflecting my clear adaptation to warm, lower-lattitude climates.

The logical course of action is thus to move to Arizona. It has warm weather, much longer days in winter, no mosquitos (I think), lots of stars, and probably has a reasonable supply of peyote for producing mescaline. I intend to get right on this, as soon as I finish this damn PhD.