anti-darkness antidote

12.3.14

The last month of another year and the news around the world always seems bleaker.  Do more people become depressed when it’s darker longer?  Are wars worse, acts of violence and injustice more terrifying, is more of everything just that more wicked, as if it’s humanity’s last chance to kill  before time runs out?  Christmas ought to be the anti-darkness antidote but it only adds to an empty glass.  

Every morning this week, minutes before heading to the office I have these awful feelings, we’re all getting sacked for budget reasons, we’re being sacked for offenses no one knows about, someone has died and I have to fly back, someone was in an accident and I have to teach their classes and today we learned a colleague was standing on a table to change a light and the table gave way and so he went down breaking his leg in three places.  And tomorrow we have midterm exams. 

Today is the fifth day in a row I have had an internet signal.  Wow, I don’t know what to do with myself except turn off the television and watch clips of late night television.  I like them but after an hour of men being smart and funny it’s enough. 

Two ladies in one of the offices are decorating their space.  I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed Christmas.  That is depressing.  I’ve persuaded myself it’s a family holiday for children.  The joy and the spirit of the times should be shared with people you care about around you.  I might book a room in Al-Ain on the day this year.  I’ll have a good bar meal, go to mass the next day, and try as hell to stop thinking that any kind of Hollywood miracle is going to happen.

I spent a lot on my two days last weekend, I don’t know if I’m up for sleeping in a $150 room when five kilometers away is a free bed, and a damn comfortable one at that!

The nights are refreshingly cool, upper 50’s that linger until the sun rises close to seven and within minutes we’re back in the seventies and then eighties by nine am.  This Friday we’ll cross the border, attend mass, go to the mall for a coffee and buy some Christmas cards.  Where will I be able to mail them?  A good question.  I do not trust the local post office here.  Managed by underpaid foreigners who don’t give a crap about my letters to family I don’t know what to do.  Would the hotels in Al-Ain mail them for me?  Would the hotels have stamps? 

Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence will end mankind.  He’s needs to go to India and Bangladesh.  How can a brilliant man make assumptions already felt in the west and not consider these assumptions will never include the east?  There are farmers in the Nepal that still use stone age tools to till their land and churn their milk.  I tell you what, the west will kill itself off and the Nepalese will continue living like they have for three millennia. 

The mendacious man sits in the chair in front of my desk and acts as if his atrocious behavior is nothing to consider.  I do it all the time in my country.  It’s our way of saying we don’t want to be bothered.  I am making that up.  I’d like an apology, a confession, because right now I am appalled at his indifference and I am appalled that it is bothering the crap out of me because he doesn’t apologize for his insolence.  Don’t let someone else’s behavior control your own is good advice learned a decade ago and I am being tested here.

12.4.14

I slept bad last night, two shots of cheap whiskey before bed did not help.  An early arrival at the carnival house to submit one midterm and now back in the grotto, a bright moon two days from full rises in the late afternoon east and the internet is still here. 

It takes a lot of effort to fight off the self-pity blues.  I am where I am because of choice.  It should have been easy to find someone to commiserate with, commiserating alone is a bummer.  Beatles love songs aren’t helping but youtube is working, what to do?  I light a candle, it’s too dark to read Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase.  I could use a reason right now to celebrate the season.

Always be grateful.