Why I Haven't Blogged in Awhile, or What Has The Weather Been Doing for the Past Month, or Some Information about SSAD

I will admit that I am a person of excuses. If given the opportunity to give an excuse for a failure, shortcoming, or fuck-up I am entirely comfortable with explaining away whatever problem has cropped up by introducing an external factor or three. For example, if someone were to ask me why I haven’t devoted any time to this stupid information blog in the past two and some weeks the answer would be “SSAD” and also “Fuck you” (it is a two-part answer). The second part is easier to understand, so I’ll give you some information about the first.

To start, I did not make a typo. Most people have heard of SAD, or seasonal affective disorder, a mental situation where you have depression because of the winter. SSAD, or subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder, is like SAD Lite. In terms of excuses it is a much more reasonable, believable, and comforting than a disorder whose acronym is tragically self-descriptive. There are two main problems that accompany psychological problems trendy enough to have wikipedia pages and television commercials. The first is that they often cause arguments between people who accept the prolem's existence while only holding a dim understanding of what the problem entails, and people who reject their existence because they refuse to believe that chemistry is a pretty viable explanation for everything that has ever happened anywhere, ever. The second is that the first kind of people mentioned will all the time believe they have a problem they don’t actually have because they do not understand the problem.

Having SAD is like having Bad Depression for some time of the year due almost entirely to the fact that it is is a certain time of the year. Bad Depression (expensive books and professors who would be upset if they read this would call it Major Depressive Disorder) is a problem (not the preferred clinical word) that makes people kill themselves, gain weight, lose weight, do mistakes, and not do anything, all while feeling terrible all the time no breaks. They have to do this for six months before they are allowed to go around bragging about their problem (not recommended), which makes it hard to do on a seasonal basis. Some time ago, however, people from Alaska and Finland complained and suicided enough to get the psychiatric world’s attention for long enough to come up with an official problem to give these people, and thus SAD was born.

The trouble with SAD is that everyone thinks they have it because people think that depression is eating a whole bag of chips and then calling your friends to tell them that your day has not been good enough (for the record this is a symptom of someone who should be suicidal but who opts instead to just be a huge fucking pain). The truth of the matter is that a lot of people feel lousy a lot of the time, and during the winter most people feel lousy some of the time, and during winters that seem to keep going on and on forever with no end in sight some people start to feel like shit. But they don’t want to kill themselves and they can get out of bed if you give them long enough and they don’t just listen to this on repeat. So they don’t have SAD, right? Right, they have SSAD, and so they start keeping snack food in their desk drawers instead of pencils, and they don’t return calls or emails, and they forget to take a shower every day, and they have a hard time preparing meals that are any more complicated than just a starch and peanut butter, and they don’t have as much motivation to write blog posts explaining everything in the fucking universe to the 8 people who read it. Now you know you're welcome.