Just a letter. That's it, that's the whole thing.

 Hey,

I just felt extra like writing you a letter today. I'm composing it in gmail and everything! Twelfth Night and I just wanted to catch you up. Someone in the Alaska-twitterverse compared Twelfth Night compared it to "white people Juneteenth". So Happy White People Juneteenth. Woo, I guess?

The new semester starts on Monday. I. Am. Terrified. Because shit is real starting on Monday. No more playing around with orientation classes and "how does this relate to the AOTA framework". It's going to be RESEARCH and CADAVERS and a bajillion group projects and API in March. I'm also very excited. Because I think? I love this.

I hope your Christmas went well! The Magic o' Christmas has certainly grown on me over the years if only because I've been unrelentingly seeing it through a child's eyes for the past...what...thirteen years if you count the children's section stint at Barnes & Noble? So that's been good. There's still not a lot in the way of directions that go down but my kid asks for something new every year it seems like. Christmas is just in the zeitgeist and she picks up on little things. Some of the most heinous things come from Youtube channels like A for Adley and Like Nastya. I have absolutely no intention of making a leprechaun trap for St. Patrick's Day or dying the toilet water green. ...but it's nice to see the...joy? Little activities like that breed. Arguably your brain doesn't know the difference between seeing things like that happen and actually doing them. So as long as we don't think about the Big Disappointment things will be fine. Right? Hah.

Not growing up with Santa Claus didn't do me any favors. Although I don't know if it does anyone any favors growing up with Santa Claus? Did you grow up believing in Santa Claus? I don't remember if I ever asked. Anyway, this year she asked for Elf on the Shelf (CRINGE). So I ended up finding the one Elf on the Shelf on my local Buy Nothing group and then ended up getting chosen for it. So we did that and it mostly worked out because I could move the elf around every morning before I went to work at Starbucks. I've said NOTHING about how the elf on the shelf is supposedly watching you and transmitting info to Santa. Dude. I don't know. My mom archly asked my kid "And what does the elf do?" right after we started doing the damn thing and my kid replied, "I don't know. It's just for fun, Memaw." And...okay. Yeah. It's just for fun. And whenever she talks about Santa or asks around Santa's realness or not I'm aggressively neutral. We visited Santa for the first time this year because she saw it in a movie and asked about it. And...that's about it. Her dad left out cookies and milk for Santa for the first time this year and up until that point kept trying to spin a narrative (in collusion with my mother-in-law) about Santa only coming to Grandma's house and not our house and...it's just too much, dude. Probably just let perception erode gradually over time as the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky mote it be.

Right after Christmas it got wicked cold. Water molecules crystallized in the sky and floated around as ice fog causing nosebleeds and dry skin. Not like those God-fearing water molecules that actually, you know, create moisture and stuff. Make life better. Beautiful, though.

I'm trying for (alcohol) sobriety this year. By extension other types of sobriety as well since fieldwork starts this year and that will likely involve a 12-panel drug screening. I'm honestly just tired of it. Don't feel like myself in my body (for the fifth year in a row), I'm too tired, have too much to do, don't want to spend the money, want better quality of sleep, etc. Youngest stepson was asking about alcohol and why we drink it and I think I got as far as telling him sometimes people with anxiety use it to self-medicate and that it's problematic because it crosses the blood-brain-barrier but stopped when he lost interest. But I didn't get into the nuts-and-bolts so here you go: alcohol functions as a systemic depressant so some people with anxiety use it (like me) to inhibit all the activating business that goes along with anxiety (tachycardia and such), or inhibit parts of the brain that are involved in making sure you don't do dumb shit which are also involved in making sure you don't talk to people you don't know very well so you can be social in circumstances that would otherwise shut you down. So it serves a function (especially for peeps with brains like myself) but there's probably a better way. My God - there has to be a better way.

Happy New Year!

May all your wildest dreams come true, sir.