January Blues and I don’t want to leave the house and do anything and the thing is, neither do you, so when I finally make the supreme effort and say, hey, you want to go do this thing and you say no, I want to die because I wasted all that energy I didn’t have on a rejection. January Blues and everything is dark again — the brief promise of Solstice that the nights are getting shorter seems like a lie, it’s still so dark.

Ok, it’s not so bad. Especially not in the afternoon, facing south, when there are no clouds…

Life is not so bad, even when there are clouds.

Life is pretty good.

Being alive is better than the alternative — most of the time.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket — who’s carrying the handbasket, by the way, and why a handbasket, and what is the origin of that expression, I want to know — but in my little corner of it, everything is ok.

Except it’s still dark and I want to hibernate.

Can you give me permission to spend January in a pillow fort?

Or in Cuba?

You: You could give yourself permission to do that.

Jane: We both know I won’t.

January Blues and a commitment to self to not cancel plans — very hard — I deal with it by avoiding making plans in the first place but also, if you ask, I’ll say yes, even though I don’t want to, because leaving the house is not a bad thing and being around other people is a good reminder that the outside world exists and that spring will come, eventually. (They all seem to think so.)

But also, it’s hard and noisy and I want my pillow fort. Why did I say I’d go to that party?

You: You could not go.

Jane: I said I’d go. I can’t cancel.

When you start cancelling plans, the world ends. True story. I refer you to March 2020.

Looking at the colour spectrum and wondering how much effort it would take to create January Yellows. I’d need to get through the Greens first, though, how is that possible?

Possible, if one is in Cuba.

I dream about Cuba.

I remind myself that life in Cuba s actually very hard. The socialist paradise does not exist.

I still dream.

January blues, but actually, not as bad last year or the year before. I can tell by March, I’ll be back to baseline. I buy red and yellow flowers for my sunny house, I wear bright clothes, I eat dessert.

January Blues but, hey, we’re a third through the month and then it will be February Slushies and then March Muddies but then April Yellows and May Greens.

I got this. You got this? We got this…

68 days until Equinox.

xoxo

“Jane”

PS According to the Grammarist.com, the earliest known documented usage of “going to hell in a handbasket” dates back to 1682:

“…that noise of a Popish Plot was nothing in the world but an intrigue of the Whigs to destroy the Kings best Friends, and the Devil fetch me to Hell in a Hand basket, if I might have my will, there should not be one Fanatical Dog left alive in the three Kingdoms.”

This discredits the common origin story that during the French Revolution’s Great Terror, when the bodies of aristocrats and enemies of the revolution were separated from their heads via the guillotine, their heads fell into handbaskets and also answers my question as to who is carrying the handbasket — the Devil, obviously (but also, why handbasket and not just basket?).