Friday 30 December 2011

The Ghost of Christmas Five Days Past

Hey folks! Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day... hang a sec, let me check the calendar... Proclamation Day? I have no idea what that is and I have no intention of putting precious time into finding out. Someone leave me a comment explaining it please.
   Anyway, I'm sure that at least some of you will have been enjoying the holiday season up to this point. New games to play, electronics to mess around with, books to read, yeah? That's how I've been spending my past five or six days.
   Thing is, I like lazing around. I enjoy having a good long sleep-in on every day that I don't absolutely have to get up at a certain time. (Is anyone else afflicted with that weird curse where when you do have to get up early, it's at some ungodly hour, ie five o'clock? I am. Does anyone share my suffering?) I like to spend my days playing casual games of chess, solving mildly challenging puzzles in the pursuit of furthering my investigations and reading hilariously funny books on the Amazon Kindle that was presented to me. I even don't really mind watching all the films that my entire family has accumulated and are desperate to watch. In my eyes, all the above actions are just normal, run-of-the-mill holiday things.
   However, things aren't always happy-happy, are they? Let me tell you about my average Christmas. Oh, don't worry, I'm not going into detail. I'm in far too good a mood for that.
   So Christmas Day is a blast. Presents, dinner, general merriment. You get what I mean. Christmas Day is just an awesome all-round good time for the whole family. Then the day ends and we all go to bed ridiculously late (or early, if you're Skald).
   The next day isn't quite so good.
   There's a point where things peak. For example, a mountain. That is the obvious analogy to be used here. The mountain slopes up, peaks, and then slopes back down. Good times are like that. They get better and better, peak, and then get a little bit worse for a while until everything's back to normal. Of course, we could go into how the land on the other side is rarely the same level as the soil on the other side of the mountain, but that's taking it a little too far.
   In my household, Christmas is pretty much identical to what we have here. You wake up, the day gets better and better, reaches the ceiling at around six o'clock and winds down after the Doctor Who Christmas Special ends. (Oh, and am I alone in thinking that the Christmas Special this year was really just terrible, with minor peril added and a very predictable soppy ending? I'm not letting this drop. I'll speak of this later, mark my words.) You go to sleep and wake up groggy with a splitting headache because you either a) drank too much in the way of alcohol b) drank too little in the way of water or c) a combination of too much and too little. The day isn't nearly as good as the day before in any possible way, apart from maybe that the electricity bills go down for that one day and there's no possibility of a stray candle setting the whole house on fire.
   I call this phenomenon the 'Boxing Day Blues'. I give it a name because I suffer from it almost every single year.
   I'm not sure if I'm alone in feeling this way. However, I do know that it's certainly the biggest downside to any exciting time that I've ever experienced. The same happens with the 'End of Holiday Blues'. As you get closer to the end of a two week break or something, you realise that life actualy has to go on as per usual. As a result, I personally don't enjoy those last few days simply because I'm preoccupied with the future. I guess we just have to learn to live with the inevitable, don't we? If we can't do that, then life doesn't progress. Live for the present and to hell with the inevitable. What's going to happen is going to happen. End of. Get on with it, yeah? At least, that's what I tell myself. It works, mostly. Even so, we all come down with the holiday blues sometimes. This is me saying that I'm suffering that just now.
   What's the cure? You need to get up and go do something. Travel, write, blog, if you do something then you feel better. To fall back on a recent-but-not-too-recent event, NaNoWriMo really collapsed when I stopped for a break. Contrary to my belief, the break really stunted my work. I couldn't bring myself to do anything simply because I had too much time. Of course, it picked up and I won it eventually, but picking myself back up was the most difficult part.
   I think the best cure for this sort of thing is to lose yourself in something that is actually beneficial to you. That doesn't mean reading a book or making progress in a video game. Get up and do something. It helps. I know. Trust me. You probably shouldn't, but do so anyway.
   Anyway, here's hoping that those blues will go away as I reboot the blog for 2012. There's work to be done. I'm gonna make this year the best yet!
   Ahem.
   As a finishing note, happy New Year to you all! Prosper in the New Year. Make a resolution. Send a card. Throw an egg at Matt's house for the fun of it. Just generally enjoy yourselves.
   Toiling away to make the wheels of The Kettle turn, this is Professor Pisces signing off. But not for long, mind.

To the rest of the Kettle: Don't think I've forgotten you! Okay folks, break's over. Back to work in the New Year, please. And yes, Matt, this is the general New Year, NOT Chinese New Year that I speak of!
   Alrighty, rant over, I shall leave you in relative peace - for now. Muhahahaha...

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