Tell Me Now How Do I Feel?

Today was Blue Monday, reputed to be the most depressing day of the year.  This is based on things like weather, time since Christmas and debt thereof.  Of course it's really just a concoction in which a company creates a self-serving news story.  In this case, it's a travel agency that wants to make us feel bad in the middle of winter.  And apparently the company in question isn't even in business anymore, thus demonstrating the power of viral marketing.

But today didn't really seem that bad.  In fact, whenever I've been made aware of Blue Monday, it never is a worse-than average feeling day, at least for a winter day.

I suppose part of the reason is that the concept comes from Britain, so there are going to be different factors involved.  For one thing, the British seem to get a lot of their winter melancholy from the limited daylight, while we in Canada get most of it from the cold, which reaches its peak a month or so after the winter solstice.  The Americans surely weren't depressed, as this was Martin Luther King Day, which - while solemn - is a day off for many.

So I'm wondering what factors you'd use to figure out a saddest day of the year in Canada.  I would suggest the following factors:

• Accumulated snow on the ground
• Remaining road-salt reserves
• Time until Leafs' playoff elimination
• Number of times The Weather Channel has used The Red Screen Of Death
• Snowmobiles at the bottom of average lake
• Percentage of TV ads that are for sunny vacations
• Average Number of times a snow plow has blocked the end of your driveway

Glacial Change

I was just reading this article about an underground complex of tunnels being carved out of a glacier in Iceland.  They're trying to make it into a tourist attraction, putting in shops and exhibits.  I'm sure it's only a matter of time before it is turned into an ice hotel.

Once again, I'm amazed that Canadians are failing to make the big cold-weather adaptations.  It was bad enough that the Swedes beat us to making ice hotels. Now Iceland beats us to the idea of building things out of glaciers, even though we have far more people, more industry, and more ice.  Worse, the same article points out that the Americans built a secret base in the ice of Greenland.  Is there any crazy winter ideas that other cold-weather countries haven't beat us to?

Okay, Molson made that ice rink in the mountains that they're always talking about on their commercials.  But that's not really on the same scale.  Here's an idea: don't just make an ice rink; carve an entire arena out of the glacier.  Make a big pit, put the rink at the bottom, and shape the sides into rows of seats.

Panic! In The Winter

Remember readers? I don't mean people who read, I mean those books we were given for English class in elementary school. They were filled with a selection of what I now realize were really short stories.

One time, around grade seven or eight, we did a brief unit on science fiction, using the four or five stories in our reader's sci-fi chapter. I loved science fiction, but that was a little awkward to me. Most of my English teachers thought Stephen King was the epitome of science fiction. And the selection of SF stories in the readers was never good. It's hard to write science fiction in such a short form, and the editors of the reader were constrained by the need to keep it accessible to young people who may not be familiar with the tropes of the genre. And in our case, there's the further constraint of finding Canadian short science fiction.

In one story, I don't really remember anything about it, except one line.  It was a throw-away reference to the fact that there were very few wooden items in the home of the protagonist, because they were sacrificed in "the panic winter of '96." (I may be wrong on the year, but it was some time in what was then the future, but is now the past.) That line bugged me for a variety of reasons that I couldn't articulate at the time. But I'll try now.

First of all, it seems to be a betrayal of sci-fi principles. Contrary to non-fans, SF isn't really techno-utopian, and indeed, is open to the possibilities of science and technology not overcoming challenges, or even being the challenge that does us in. But envisioning humanity being sent into disaster by bad weather? That just seemed silly and unrealistic, like a non-SF writer accustomed to historical fiction would resort to.

But worse, the line is just so damn Canadian. It's been observed that Canadian literature is centred around (some would say constrained by) the idea of survival against the elements. This seemed to be the most grievous example possible. Even in a science fiction story set in the future, they found a way to fit survival in as a theme.

Of course, about ten years later, there was the ice storm in Quebec that crippled the power supply for days in the dead of winter, and forcing millions to find improvised ways of getting heat.

Then I was just walking through Victoria Park here in Kitchener. With the weather warming up, crews are getting to the work of cleaning up the damage from this year's ice storm. Seeing the trees that have been removed or cut back, I'm only now realizing the extent of the damage. So, although I have not been pushed to burning my furniture for warmth, I guess a severe winter storm can have a lasting impact on even our modern world.  My apologies to you, Canadian science fiction author I don't remember the name of.

Axial-Tilt Blues

We're slowly building our way from one solstice to the next, and the days are getting a bit longer.  It's about time.  The short days and long nights have been getting to me.

Reduced winter daylight never used to bother me.  As a child I would be parked in front of the TV before six anyway, so I hardly noticed the shifting of day lengths.  They say lack of exposure to sunlight can contribute to depression, but it never seemed to have any effect on me.  The winter semester in university where I had no classes before 2:00, so I never got up before noon.  The February I worked in a cubicle facing away from the windows, so I only saw the sun on lunch break and weekends.  None of it seemed to get me down (at least no more than the rest of my life.) 

But this year it has bothered me.  It'll be, say, 4:00pm and it hits me that we've got only about an hour of day left.  That'll seem kind of depressing, in spite of the fact that: a) I've always been a night owl, and b) artificial lighting is readily available throughout the developed world.  So maybe this is a sign that I'm becoming more in tune with nature.  We'll see if I start getting the urge to get up with the sun too.