I'm sad, and yet apathetic. Sadly apathetic. Apathetically sad. Sad about being apathetic. Apathetic about being sad. Well, I think you get my point..."the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament." Whether I'm a genius, insane, or both, is, at this point anyway, mostly subject to opinion.

Call it depression...because it no doubt is. There's little more than a day left in this wretched year, and good riddance, I say. Sometime last summer I lost my joie de vivre, and it since seems to allude any firm reclamation. And thinking about this now, I wonder if really it didn't flit off months before that and I was just living off the fumes of previous joy all that time. Cheery thought, no? But the Year of the Dragon was supposed to suck for me regardless. The Year of the Snake is supposed to be better, but that just makes me think about the Snake who helped steal my sunshine, and whom I've been semi-obsessing about for the past week/year. So then I turn on the tv to try to distract myself and am quickly reminded of a pressing desire to leave the country for the next 4 years. It gets me all cranky and cynical and then I realize that at this rate I'm going to morph into the kind of malcontented grump who can't get enough of "can't" and generally makes my skin crawl, if that hasn't happened already. Sigh. This isn't getting me anywhere, is it?

I usually like to look back at the year that was and pick out the special moments that kept it from being just one big cesspool of blech. And I must say, without my friends (most of whom are probably not reading this -- hint hint, nag nag), finding those fond moments this year would be nearly impossible. You're the apple of my eye, the wind beneath my wings. In the words of a beer commercial, "I love you guys!" Even if you did vote for Bush. :)

But on to more amusing musings. Last night I dreamt that Britney Spears almost died from falling off a tall ladder down a very deep hole. But at the last moment, she did a backflip all the way back up to the top of the ladder, that plucky girl. This is what I get for inadvertently viewing her latest video just before retiring for the night. The reason I bring this up (besides lack of something better to discuss) is because said video was just playing on the Disney Channel, which is amusing enough in itself, but more specifically, there is a moment towards the end of the video where our overexposed heroine is walking through the rain fondling herself forlornly and suddenly looks down at her half-dressed self with confusion and surprise as if to ask, "What the hell happened to the rest of my outfit?" I'm sure I wasn't supposed to find this funny, but I did.