This is a terrible time of year for me. I’m half mad from a combination of cabin fever, foolish anticipation and angst – I keep waiting for something to come along and rescue me from a life of ordinary mediocrity, but nothing appears. My moods flip back and forth between extreme melancholy to bat-shit insanity with a sprinkling of insincere optimism, and it’s making me very tired.

I know it’ll pass – it always does – but it’s getting very hard to hide my angst from the world around me. My temper is impractically short these days, so I’ve been hiding from almost everyone in a misguided attempt at keeping myself from blurting out horrible things in a fit of irritation. It doesn’t always work. I called Ed a pussy last night, and not in an affectionate way. I apologized, but he’s still mad at me and I guess I deserve it but it still sucks.

As always, my end-of-winter depressive state comes with a deep and meaningful self-realization to make me feel better about being so crazy because hey, what’s a little insanity without some kind of grand dawning comprehension on the side? As I trudged onto the sea turtle yesterday to go home, I suddenly grasped the reason behind my utter loathing of transit: it’s all so ORDINARY.

I have a fear, you see. Beyond my fear of tarantulas, children, and tarantula children, I am *terrified* of being ordinary. I have had dreams of the white picket fence and 2.3 children and soccer practice and tuna casseroles, and literally woken up in a sweat – nothing could be more horrible to me than a life of boring, normal, humdrum, vanilla routine. The reason I hate taking transit so much is because I imagine I can see the defeat in the faces of all those people – they’re going to a job they hate, putting in the 8 or 10 hours for a paycheque, then heading home to sit in front of the TV until it’s time to go to bed and do it all over again until they die. I’m afraid that this is as exciting as my life is going to get, and that I’ll end up a brittle shell of a person sleepwalking through my days with nothing to look forward to except the few moments of peace I get while taking a shower before I have to face family and the world. I’m terrified that this is all there is, and I will waste my life desperately hoping something magical will happen. Walking with the crowd as we file out of the sea bus doors and up to the streets makes me feel tiny and invisible and ordinary, and I *hate* it. I hate it so much. I am pathologically afraid of being just like everyone else, and while it is a pretty stupid fear, I feel absolutely no need to get over it.

I don’t necessarily think that I am a beautiful and unique snowflake (although I totally am), but losing myself in the morning crowd makes me feel as though I am truly losing myself – like I might emerge from the masses wearing white sneakers with black nylons and carrying a Lululemon bag holding my sensible work shoes and a baggie of celery. I can’t handle that feeling. It is a deep primal fear, like my fear of Cheez Whiz. My own cowardice of normalcy is making me short tempered and angry, which leads me to calling people names from the comfort of my bed while running over pedestrians in a stolen taxi. It is insane. It needs to stop.

My fear of the masses probably won’t go away, but I would like it to become a little more manageable so I am not paralyzed with dread over something I am normally okay with (like work and getting to work and not being able to run away to join the circus). Better weather would definitely help, as would my life getting back to its regularly scheduled program of adventure and fun and inappropriate behaviour. Some things are Up in the Air, and I will feel better once they’re squared away and back to whatever passes as routine for me.

You know, that’s pretty much the only thing keeping me going at the moment – knowledge that yes I am fucked in the head right now but it WILL get better one way or another, and even if the sea bus doesn’t break out into synchronized dance this afternoon, something hilarious and awesome is bound to come my way soon. One of the few things I like about myself is my ability to find humour in almost everything – this is a test, is all. Something about this is very, very funny and I just need to find out what.