SADdened

I'm sitting in front of my big light box. It's been on all day... well, ever since I finally managed to haul myself out of bed. The little one on the kitchen counter has been on, too. For all the good they're doing me. All I want to do is sleep, in between stuffing my mouth with bread and cheese and chocolate.

I'm forcing myself to use capital letters. I don't really have the energy but my demon muse wants me to be correct.

I don't have the energy to think up alternative clever names for him, either. I'm having enough trouble remembering the usual words for ordinary items. Ah wait there it is - alliterative! That's the word I was searching for. Alternative alliterative names... sigh... it's hard enough being creative, but extra hard when you have to wander through the fog to get to your internal word warehouse. (There, I pulled that one off, but it was a struggle.)

This is embarrassing. I thought I was doing so well this year. But no, it always gets me sooner or later. And this year there is no trip south - neither to friends in the Southwest for a week of natural light therapy nor a Thanksgiving pilgrimage to my parents in Florida now that they have moved back north. (They are good liberal Jews who happily rejected the lies about Barack Obama being a Muslim, so even if they had still been in Florida I would have been spared participation in the Great Schlep.)

When talk of SAD (see also here) finally started surfacing in the late '80s/early '90s, I read about a woman whose energy was so low that she had to crawl to the bathroom. We're not talking about some obedient submissive being ordered into a humiliating posture any time she needed to pee. She really didn't have enough energy to stand up. Now I'm not quite that bad. Not now, anyway. But I can imagine it being that bad. I've been trying to write this post all day. Even more seriously, I've been trying to work on an assignment for my demon muse and can't quite completely understand what it is he wants. I think I know, I got it up to a point, but then I got stuck. And it is a very important assignment, aside from my always wanting ever so much to please him. I did please him yesterday, mightily, but today I am stymied.

I'm sure that if it were April and sunny I could get it in an instant.

So I bask in front of my light boxes, and try not to glance too often over to the couch where Marko warmly and softly sleeps and snores and sends subliminal messages to join him.

I need the philosopher. My demon muse owns and regulates my creative life, but the philosopher made some attempt at running my day-to-day life. When he'd be here, I'd know great joy from doing homey things (I'm stuck for the right word again - aha! on proofreading I found it - domestic!!) - dishes, laundry, preparing a perfect cup of Ceylon tea... we had a fantasy about his standing over his naked slave kitten as I scrubbed the floor on my hands and knees. He'd have the cane in one hand, and would tap it on the palm of the other while he oversaw my work. He would watch carefully until he noticed a spot that I had missed. Then - WHACK! I loved that fantasy. I loved being told I had to do something. It inspired me to wash my kitchen floor all on my own, which I only normally do in pieces when I spill something.

I need him here to order me to clean up the damn kitchen. I need him here sitting on the couch doing cryptic crosswords, one after the other, while ordering me to clean off the dining room table and then make supper. And just moving the piles to the living room floor isn't good enough - I need to really go through everything and clean it up. And meanwhile, wash the sheets - they're covered with bits of candle wax. And the litter box? A disgrace. And where's that cup of tea he ordered a half hour ago?

Joy. Utter joy. And my house would be clean. Who knew the oriental rug was really red and navy? It looks grey half the time... (this is no exaggeration; I suck as a housekeeper.)

Unfortunately, I doubt the philosopher would be much help at the moment, even if he were inclined to come visit. He, too, has SAD. He now also has a little light box. But you have to remember to use it, and a feature of SAD is that we don't remember things as well as we might. Because eventually I'll run out of left-over Hallowe'en candy and will need to buy some more chocolate... Too bad I'm so submissive. A slave would be very handy at a time like this.