Seasonality, Projects, and Escapism
I’d like to offer a word of advice to any readers who deal with with SAD: remember your known good state.
When you’re seasonal, you can find your life suddenly unrecognizable. When the dark months come, the ideas, routines, duties, and people you care about will seem distant and unappealing. You become a different person, but it’s nearly impossible to see the change from your low, gloomy purview.
It affects me the same way, year after year: I start looking around for new projects that will take me away from the familiar; I consider moving and uprooting my life as a distraction from the depression; I blame the people around me when they try to point out these changes rather than heeding their concerns. Every year gets a little easier, though. Every year I manage to listen less to the voices that want me to make foolish changes, deflecting them with a mantra composed of the qualities of the person I am when I’m not under the winter’s cloud. I remember my known-good state.
The person I am under sunshine is committed to his friends and family, happy living in DC, proud of his job, engaged by the information security field, and so forth. A combination of factors, not least of which is the absurdly mild winter we’ve had here, has burnt off the cloud cover, particularly in the last few days. As ever, it’s a relief, and this time around the fallout is minor.
I started several projects while moody and looking around for distractions. Two of them I’m still excited about (one well predates the winter blues). I’ll be announcing them here soon. The other two I could use your thoughts on whether to go forward with.
Questionable Project #1: a weblog about digital DJing.
The design and static content for this is all done. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but is probably too time-consuming to do well, and possibly unnecessary given the respectable coverage of the topic that Scratchworx offers. I enjoy writing about the subject, but maybe my time would be better spent behind the decks than at the keyboard?
Questionable Project #2: a registry for people who want to fall in love.
No, not quite a dating site. The idea is this: there are dating sites for every sexual orientation, age bracket, ethnic group, religious affiliation, hobby, lifestyle, fetish, and hair color under the sun. Most of these sites pander to short-term dating, or allow for a range from friends/activity partners to long-term with the sleazy outlier of “play” or “hookups”. There is not, to the best of my knowledge, a website exclusively for people who want to fall in love. eHarmony comes close, but is creepy.
My site would be free of the gimmicks of most dating sites – blogs, social networking, quizzes – and free in cost. Members could provide salient details about themselves in a freeform fashion, not suffering the tedious and restrictive profile questions most sites offer. Members would provide their preferred method of contact, eschewing the awkward in-site messaging systems most dating sites employ. It would be simple, humane, and encouraging for the romantics out there. Maybe you’d even put the lil’ badge for the site on your blog: “I want to fall in love”. Aww.
It’s easy to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this project, and the upfront development time isn’t that long. Everyone I’ve talked to about it likes the idea. If it got popular, however, maintenance could quickly become a full-time job. On a selfish personal level, it’s also more time spent coding when I could be out meeting people the normal way; that is, it might be a solution, but it’s more likely to exacerbate the problem.
So now you know a couple of the sort of things a lovelorn geek and bedroom DJ comes up with in the grips of SAD, along with fancies of going back to freelance web app development and moving to Portland or Vancouver or someplace soft, airily lefty, and forgiving. Jekyll and Hyde, innit?
Your thoughts are welcome and encouraged.