Hey Coffee Eyes

January is the most depressing month. When I was listening to my Teaching Course on Classical Mythology this morning, I learned that we get the word January from the Roman god Janus, who was the god of doors and beginnings and endings. He had two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. That's what January is. We wake up one morning and it's an entirely new year, and nobody finds this odd. I feel like I was just getting used to 2004, and now I have to clean my house and change the sheets all over again, just because 2005 is here. But can't I, in the interest of, well, myself, and maybe personal philosophy, go on living as though it is still 1980? Or any point in time? Yes, things are much different now than they were in 1980, but isn't that obvious enough, without adding the whole marker of time thing to it? Things change. It's the only constant in life (I'm pretty sure I stole this off of a Hallmark card. Or a Lifetime movie). So, if everybody is en accord that things are always changing, why do we have to run around like drunken idiots, pretending like we can't wait for the new year? Why can't I just say, "Well, lookee here, it's the 25th January of my life. Ain't that something?" (And, yes, in my version of reality, I talk like Yosemite Sam.)

This is all bulls**t. Nostalgia rules my life.

On another note, I really like Laura Linney. Ben gets her confused with Mary McCormack and Sherry Stringfield, but he also really likes Sloppy Joes. I don't want to live on that difference. Anyway, I was watching Love Actually last night while I was cleaning, and there's a moment where she gets asked to dance, and the camera lingers on her face as her dance partner walks out of the shot, and the look that hangs on her entire body is the stuff most actors will never have. She just looks absolutely horrified, but also hopeful and deeply sad, all at the same time. For those of you who aren't Laura Linney, you know that shit is impossible. For those of you wondering how I managed to clean the house while watching a chick flick so closely, how dare you. But same answer.

My boss just emailed me some stuff to print out, and in the body of the email he told me he wants me to Fedex it to him. Thirty seconds later he called me and told me to print out what he just emailed me and Fedex it to him. I deftly cut him off with a "you already told me that in your email," as loud as I could, to which he got flustered and asked for his voice mail. I'm going to have to start slipping some Anafranil in his coffee.

My French page-a-day calendar saying of the day: "Est-ce que tu as faim?" I'll dedicate my first book to the person who translates this without the help of a dictionary slash altavista.com.

So, yeah, January. It's like the thing you have to get through in order to really feel like time is moving on, and you're not just having a dream, and when you wake up it truly is 1980. Or 500 B.C. January is a vacuum, people. It's what you pretend to do while you're comatose in front of the television of your life. It's the ultimate diversion, lessening the pain of another year going by and the realization that you still haven't completed your first novel.