Holiday Interlude

I figured I’d cheat on this article and break from the Vignettes Project. I figure all you folks are in post-family mode. Happy and safe and holiday-drunk, right? And it’s “Black Friday,” which means I should post a link to my Amazon Wishlist! Eighteen pages of cult culture, and I turned on third party ordering so you can get me shit for a penny.

I rely on getting gifts from friends because what’s left of my family kind of ignores me come Christmas time. They give me $20 gift certificates to places I’ll never show my face like Red Lobster and Boston Market. Occasionally, they’ll get me one for a place like Sears or something. Then I’ll think, hey, that might be useful, and I head out and find something and the markup, compared to Amazon, is about 293%. So the gift certificate covers taxes and that’s it.

But my friends get me stuff off of my Wishlist, which makes me all warm inside.

My plan was to write an article about my usual seasonal depression and schedule it for today, the traditional start of the Horror of the Holidays. But I got depressed thinking about it… As you read this, I’m with my extended West Virginia family. Oddly enough, they’re in Orlando. They fled West Virginia, saying that it was dragging them down and a hopeless gyre of poverty and confusion, and then proceeded to set up a sort of expat commune in Orlando that’s a hopeless gyre of poverty and confusion. As compensation for skipping Christmas, I’m forced to put in Thanksgiving. Two days and three nights in Orlando, then back into the madness of working six jobs just to make ends meet. I’m living the dream!