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Shining a light on the February Blahs

Do you get the February Blahs? I know I do.
Hay-Harley-03091
Harley Hay

Do you get the February Blahs? I know I do.

February is like a big pit that you’ve been digging since October, deeper and deeper, darker and darker, until that pit looks suspiciously like the perfect place for a pine box, if you know what I mean.

The cold winter and the lumpy streets and the grey days and the early black nights just get to a point where you say right out loud: “All RIGHT! Enough already!” But of course nobody listens, except the dog who agrees with you by briefly opening one eye while snoozing on the couch because he always agrees with you on account of him being your dog.

And the shovelling and car window scraping and the mindless, endless waiting for spring gets real old in February until you find yourself shouting again, right out loud: “WHAT AM I DOING HERE?!” But nobody answers because half of the people you know are either in Hawaii or just getting back from Palm Springs and don’t have a clue what you’re on about because they’ve been temporarily cured from the February Blahs, and the other half are just as depressed as you are and are shouting the very same question.

When I was in university, way back before Columbus discovered Hawaii or Palm Springs, the university bigwigs recognized the seriousness of the February Blahs by scheduling mid-term exams smack in the middle of February and then taking off that week to go to Vegas. (This was the place Columbus discovered and then lost all his money and returned home in a snit and told everyone that the New World sucked and that it was part of India.)

Then the university bigwigs, in their wisdom gained by years of hanging around a university, finally realized that many students were dropping out in February which meant that the bigwigs had a lot less tuition money to spend in Vegas. So they figured they’d give the students their very own break from the blahs while they, the bigwigs, returned to Vegas.

In Canada they called it Reading Week, whereupon the depressed students can catch up on their work, study for upcoming exams and read.

In the U.S., they wait a couple of weeks and call it Spring Break, whereupon students-gone-wild can party in Mexico, go crazy hitting on hotties and get arrested.

The Canadian cure for the blahs? Take a little time off to work even harder while occasionally staring out of dull frosty windows to a frozen landscape of dreary and dank, endless winter.

The American solution? Hot beaches and cold beverages, bikinis and bars, debauchery and decadence.

And therein lies the fundamental difference between our two countries.

It just sad really. And really, I do mean SAD. As in Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD is a very real and serious affliction that really shouldn’t be made fun of, unless it was called something like February Affective Reaction Disorder or FARD, in which case no one could resist making fun of it.

Thing is, SAD is a seasonal depression that affects many people when the dark days of winter become, well, depressing. And February is the saddest month of all.

But there is hope in the form of a simple, effective treatment for SAD and the really good news is, it doesn’t involve a catchy acronym.

After much study over many years by scientists who convene in Las Vegas every February to study why people who don’t get to go to anywhere in February get depressed, they (the scientists in Vegas) have come up with a brilliant solution (literally). It’s a box of light.

Since they figured people were getting SAD because there was just too much grey and dark light in winter and not enough happy yellow summer sunshine rays, the solution was to invent an electric light that would be unlike other electric lights in that it would cost about 50 times more.

And believe it or not, this “light therapy” has proven quite effective in making some scientist quite rich. And, happily, it also seems to help those with SAD. The SADDISTS, for lack of a better term, place this box of extremely powerful light beside them off to the left for an hour or so a day, and voila! they have an intense sunburn on the left side of their face.

You know those huge banks of light up on poles at football stadiums? That’s about the same intensity of scientific light emitted by the little SAD light therapy box. But while the paint is peeling off of the kitchen walls, and dog is forced to wear sunglasses, the person with the real February blahs is feeling much better.

I speak from experience.

We have one of these light boxes at our house. We also use it as a security flood light in our back yard at night which apparently gives the thieves in the alley just enough light to see what they are doing as they break into our car.

So if you get the February Blahs, don’t worry, there is hope. You can get a pricey retina-melting light box, or you can ask the neighbours to tell you all about their holiday in Palm Springs.

For me? I have a therapeutic light box. And it’s about the only thing I’ve found to effectively combat the February Blahs. I sit in front of it at least an hour a day and it seems to work wonders. It’s called a TV.

Harley Hay is a local filmmaker and freelance writer whose column appears on Saturdays.