Why not February?

Screenshot anime Hyouka (OP 2)

Am I pretending nothing happened in February for five years? The screenshot is from the second opening scene to the anime Hyouka, which I wrote about back in November 2012, about living on the other side of the glass from the world where everyone else lives.

As I uploaded my previous entry, the upload tool presented me with an alphabetical list of folders. I noticed to my surprise that there was a gap from “feb13” to “feb18”. Yes, that means I had not uploaded any pictures (and therefore probably not any main journal entries) in February since five years ago. That’s quite a bit of time! I know I have uploaded other entries from time to time, so why not February?

Perhaps it is something about the season: Winter in Norway is cold and dark, and in most years February is the coldest month of the year. So far it seems that I am pretty much immune to classical depression, seasonal or otherwise. There is an increasingly widespread theory that in men, depression can take the form of a feeling of disconnect, so there is that. But truth to tell, I suspect I feel a lot less disconnected than I am in the eyes of other people, in so far as they give me any thought at all. Being single and childless and 59 years old, I certainly should qualify. But it is my brother who has struggled with depression, even though he is a great guy and has a great wife and kids. Life is not always fair, and depression, in particular, strikes me as cruel and capricious. The people who could need it are not the ones who have it.

Be that as it may, looking at an entry I wrote in February last year and never uploaded, it details my discovery that I was actually strikingly and obviously evil inside. For some reason, I had failed to notice this particular detail. I can’t attribute that to depression either, as it was more like pulling off the mask I had worn in the mirror for many long years. Ever since then, I removed the “good” trait on my self-sim in The Sims 3, although I did not go so far as to replace it with “evil”. Rather, I replaced it with “gatherer” (more like collector in the Norwegian version), which I for some reason had not found room for in the past even though it is a constant struggle to not fill my apartment to the rafters. Well, the current apartment is for sale so that may help a bit right now.

There is really a lot of things I could write about, both about my life and my interests, if I had continued in the way I started for the first ten years or so. But I think the time for that is long past. We have social media now, where crowds of people are eagerly photographing their food and throwing out bombastic opinions based on their emotions, and there are even people who play computer games on YouTube for everyone to see. They are topping me like the Himalayas top a small hill, in the kind of things I used to do when the Internet was new, back when it was rare to get a chance to look in through the window to a stranger’s life and heart.

Writing Grammarly

Screenshot anime Amanchu





