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Sex, Baths and Joy Division
Coping with post-holiday depression
Copyright 1995 by Lynna Landstreet. This column originally appeared in Xtra magazine. Published by Pink Triangle Press, 491 Church Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4Y 2C6.
 ccording to my calculations, this column should hit the streets just in time for the post-holiday depression period. Two issues ago, I wrote about how to avoid getting overly stressed out by the season. But since even my capacity for blind optimism has limits, I thought perhaps I ought to devote this issue's column to what to do now that you've ignored my advice and gotten all stressed and depressed anyway.
So, here's my list of suggested methods for coping with depression. As before, some are serious and some not so, and I take no responsibility for the consequences of the latter...
- Hang out with people more miserable than you are. Retail
workers are a good bet. Most of them have just finished a month of
working 10 or 12 hour days of non-stop hell with no lunch breaks,
no overtime pay, and virtually no time off for Christmas. One look
at their shaking hands, bloodshot eyes and rapidly graying hair will
make you feel much better by comparison. Note: if you are a
retail worker, this tactic will probably not help.
- Haagen-Dazs. The dairy industry's answer to Prozac. Or, if
you prefer local to corporate, Greg's Ice Cream at Bloor & Bedford
offers amazing homemade ice cream in a bizarre variety of flavours
from Mango to Stout.
- Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Sure,
it's a cliché, but doing nice things for total strangers can
genuinely make you feel good, or so I've found. Then again, if that
seems too saccharine for you, you could always try the opposite approach
and do something really rotten, preferably to someone who richly deserves
it.
- Baths. Long ones. Preferably with some kind of really decadent,
nice-smelling bath stuff added. This doesn't have to be expensive
-- you can make your own bath salts with Epsom salts, food colouring
and your basic cheap perfume oil. The ever-popular dyke standard,
Patchouli, works well for this, but I'm partial to Amber myself...
- To borrow a saying from the Yippies of my parents' era, be a
thumbtack in the heel of fascism. Minor acts of resistance against
an oppressive social order can be very uplifting. Look, I said minor,
OK? Now put that TNT down and get away from Queen's Park!
- Pets. Cuddling something warm and furry (get your mind out
of the gutter, people, I didn't mean that!) is an excellent
depression cure. If you don't have a pet, borrow one. Or check out
Cawthra Park for a wide variety of four-footed stress relievers, which,
if you can succeed in winning the owners' confidence, you may be allowed
to pet. True, gaining admission to their fraternity is difficult without
a dog of your own, but you can always pretend you have one at home.
Better yet, tell them you're visiting from somewhere exotic, like
Vancouver. Be sure and complain about the weather to make it sound
authentic.
- Even better than the dogs in Cawthra park are the birds,
which can sometimes be convinced to eat out of your hand. Try tossing
little pieces of bread or sunflower seeds to them, then dropping the
pieces gradually nearer and nearer to you, then slowly -- very
slowly -- hold out your hand with a little beak-sized piece of food
in it. It may take a few tries, but usually one of them will be brave
enough to take it, especially in the winter when food is comparatively
scarce.
- Depressing music. This may seem counter-productive, but it
can in fact work quite well. There's nothing like listening to some
nice, uplifting Leonard Cohen, Joy Division or Coil to make you feel
like someone else has it worse than you.
- Non-depressing music. Some people go for soothing and melodic,
but I find what one friend of mine calls "scream-along"
songs most effective. Anything fast and loud will do. Crank up the
volume loud enough to drown out your attempts at harmony, and let
loose. The friend who coined that term swears by Hole's Live Through
This, but I'm still partial to Sonic Youth's Goo, even
though it's several years old. Machines of Loving Grace and Pop Will
Eat Itself are good picks, too.
- Sex. This is a good cure for depression by itself, but it
works even better in combination with some of the above methods, particularly
numbers 2 and 4. However, attempting to combine it with 6 or 7 could
lead to undesirable consequences, such as visits from the Humane Society
and having intimate parts of your body pecked into little pieces.
There. Cheaper than therapy and less permanent than
suicide. Don't you feel better now?
All content copyright 1999-2006 by the
individual authors, where cited, or by
Lynna Landstreet
where not specifically credited.
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