xmas 2023 nervous breakdown: let’s try this again

I’ve been working on a post that details my xmas 2023 nervous breakdown but it’s too long and depressing. Going over it isn’t helping me to feel any better about it, it’s actually making me feel worse. So instead I’m just gonna sum up what happened:

• I was excited for the 2023 xmas season.
• By about halfway through December, I was starting to feel stressed and overwhelmed even though I didn’t have any good reasons to feel like that.
• The closer we got to Festivus, the more on edge I became.
• Festivus arrived, and for the first half of it I largely enjoyed myself but also worried about how certain guests were enjoying themselves — there were some guests who didn’t know many other people and I felt like I was failing them by not introducing them to people and helping them connect. So I spent a fair amount of time with those guests, instead of doing what I wanted to do which was say hi to people I don’t get to see very often. That wasn’t terrible but I felt conflicted about it.
• By about 1 am, I felt like the party was a flop, and I was disappointed in myself for not being a better host. That’s how I continued to feel till the end of the night, around 5 am.

That was the last Festivus Jenn and I are hosting before we move away, so it really bothered me. Xmas eve and xmas day, I continued to spiral, second guessing our plan to move north, questioning the person I’ve become and the lack of solid family connection I have, worrying I will be lonely and sad in our new home. I started taking down the xmas decorations on xmas day because looking at them was too sad — they just made me think about how I spent so much time collecting all these gaudy vintage decorations when no one besides Jenn and I will see them once we move. I knew I was being melodramatic but I couldn’t stop it. On top of that, my cold that I had prior to the holidays had come roaring back with a vengeance. Maybe that played a role in my weird headspace, I’m still sick now so I can’t say for sure yet.

Anyway, Boxing Day I didn’t want to do shit but we had plans to go to Sointula and I knew that I needed to get moving and back to real life to kickstart getting out of my funk, so I put my big boy pants on and did that. Since then it’s been slow but steady improvement, with less crying each day, yayyyy.

The point of this post is that I had been feeling pretty prepared for moving to Sointula and saying goodbye to various routines and rituals I have had for years, but the mess of feelings that came out over the 2023 holidays have revealed to me that I actually have some serious sadness and trepidation about the upcoming changes. Which is nuts! How can such powerful emotions hide inside me without me knowing it? It’s been a real kick in the teeth. But on the other hand, this is a good learning experience, even if the lesson is “you have no idea how you actually feel about anything, and you may have a breakdown at any time.”

Tomorrow is new year’s eve. We’re going to Kate’s for a bonfire and I’m looking forward to seeing people and making up for the good feelings I didn’t get at Festivus. I still might well cry in front of everyone but that’s ok, if it’s to be, it’s to be. Everyone loves to see a person break down into a sobbing mess at a party, don’t they?

Happy 2024, everyone.

minor catastrophes at hot wing night

Last night we hosted a hot wings challenge night. It was like the Hot Ones show on youtube, where we made a whole bunch of wings of increasing hot-ness to see who could make it through them all. It was a really fun night, but not without it’s challenges.

First off, I assumed the wings should be cooked from frozen. Wrong. So that added an additional time-intensive step into an already busy process. I mean, we needed to make at least 120 wings, plus more for the spectators who just wanted to eat not-so-spicy wings and watch the rest of us kill ourselves.

I bought myself a bubble tea specially for between-wing cooling and it wound up getting knocked off a ledge and shattering. It spilled all over the counter, underneath the bread box and into the clean dishes I had been washing. This was right in the middle of wing making so between the loss of a special drink I was excited for, the giant mess, and happening at a terribly busy time, it triple sucked.

I was a fool and wore my new shorts and a shirt I like lots while making wings, and of course I got stains on them.

I totally forgot about the final bag of wings which we had set out on the back of Liz’s car to defrost in the sun at the start of the evening. This morning while lying in bed, I suddenly remembered that bag of wings and wondered what had become of it. I was worried our dog had found it and eaten an entire 2 kg bag of raw chicken wings. Luckily for me, the bag rode down the driveway on Liz’s car before being thrown onto the side of the road. I was able to grab them on the way to work this morning and throw them in the dumpster so it could have been worse but I still feel pretty stupid about wasting that much money and meat.

For some reason this morning, each of these little disasters really bothered me. But the point of this post is actually not the catastrophes, it’s that I’m still glad we did wing night, because even with those frustrating elements it was still a great night. A lot of friends got together and had a lot of fun doing something we’ve never done before, and I’m happy that we were able to make that happen, to organize a fun, goofy event that people were pumped on whether they were eating hot wings or just watching others do it. Some events fall flat and those ones are bummers but when an event goes well, it makes me glad I put the effort in to make it happen, even if I did fuck up a crucial aspect of the food prep, make a huge mess, spill my dang bubble tea, ruin my new shorts, and stupidly waste 2 kg of chicken wings.

more thoughts on homes

Yesterday a co-worker asked me to host a party. I said nah. We have been the go-to party hosts for like 15 years now, and the disappointment and frustration of trying to throw parties during the pandemic has me burnt out on it. If someone wants a party, why don’t they throw it themselves? I suggested to my co-worker that they host it and they said “nahhh, maybe if the weather was nice and we could be out on my deck but it won’t be nice for a while…” I thought maybe they were nervous about their place getting trashed by a rowdy crowd or something (even though that seems like a silly fear at middle age) so I said what about just having people over for a potluck than? My co-worker simply replied, “I can’t.” Now, they have a totally decent house, centrally located, plenty of space, so I’m not sure why they “can’t” have people over. We’re not talking about having a rager here, we’re talking about a dozen or less co-workers having a few drinks together.

Another co-worker overheard this convo and said basically the same as the first co-worker, that if the weather was nice they would be happy to have people over for an outdoor thing, but their house “is no good for hosting parties.” I’m not clear on what that means though because to me, most people just want a place to get drunk and smoke weed. It’s better if the venue is clean and tidy, and even better if it’s got a cool vibe but those aren’t necessary. So really, any house is good for hosting parties, by my standards.

My first thought is that maybe some people are ashamed of their homes, like I have been feeling about the prospect of moving into a mobile (ahem, MANUFACTURED) home. Maybe they know their places are messy, or they haven’t gotten around to patching that hole in the drywall, or they haven’t finished those 4-yr old renovations, stuff like that. Maybe they just think their places look shitty or smell bad, like they will appear poor or something. Anyway, I don’t know if this is necessarily the reason my co-workers didn’t want to host an indoor party but I bet it’s a fairly common reason. I think the other common reasons would be laziness (don’t want to decorate, clean up, have to deal with drunks at the end of the night, etc), fear of their stuff or place getting damaged, and fear of failure, ie hosting a lame party. Those are the things that have prevented me from having parties in the past.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to encounter the possibility of other people being embarrassed of their homes right when I’m wrestling with that issue myself. Good timing, universe.

^{I just love this dang gif.}