And Now It’s February, Same Same
A month ago I wrote a post, It’s Still January, which is a re-hash of all my other posts bitching about January. I regret nothing in the anti-January posts, but I need to add February. I have good scientific reasons. Also other reasons.
When the post was published, January 2026 was lying low. But since then I had to update with two cold snaps (like, nearly Minnesota-cold, nearly Boston-cold, nearly Yellowknife-cold), between which my furnace had a low-probability failure and the heat went out for 4 days; and then a snow storm that piled up 8 inches and an ice storm that piled up 4 more inches on top and condensed the whole mess into a solid on whose surface, still, a full month later in the mid-Atlantic, large people can walk. My garbage cans have gone nowhere and won’t any time soon. My car battery died in the cold, I wasn’t using it enough; and when that got fixed, the car itself died slowly on the interstate and with the help of modern telecommunications, I got it to a dealership that took a week to diagnose a low-probability throttle problem. I was beaten, I no longer cared, it was the dealership’s problem, it’s why God invented ride-shares. January and February are, and continue to be, an all-out brawl that raises my hair straight up off my head.
Talk about stress and cortisol levels. Because here’s the really bad news, which you already know. Stresses like the kinds January and February come up with raise your cortisol levels, raised cortisol levels cause all hell to break out in your body: physical and mental disease both, the list is long and as I say, hair-raising. Google’s impeccable medical sources all say so. Then they say the cure is to eat healthily, exercise regularly, and generally don’t have stress. Not sure which planet Google’s medical sources live on.
Fine. I’m a card-carrying science writer and as such I know to find sources that are actually science. I begin by focusing the question, then asking it right. I’m less interested in cortisol. Are bad things more likely in January and February? that is, are those months, in fact, evil?
I randomly made a random list of bad things. And as you’d expect, many bad things were caused by other things that were not bad. That is, the months during which the bad things peaked (scientists say “seasonality”) were different according to: the length of day (scientists say “photoperiod”), temperature, storm (tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons, blizzards) seasons, school year, and holidays. Divorces tend to happen after holidays and before the school year starts, so late spring, early summer: obviously people balancing mutual dislike with less disruption for the kids. Car accidents, civil wars, and reports of work injuries, tend to happen in the summer: obviously, respectively, more people travelling, heat and poor harvests, and who knows.
The really bad things, the things that aren’t one and done, are mental illness and death. Mental illness is sort of seasonal. Certainly seasonal affective disorder is: with shorter photoperiods in winter, people get depressed, don’t eat well, don’t sleep well, are more anxious, don’t want sex, have trouble thinking; and I’m not going to continue that list; back off, science. Other psychiatric disorders also depend on photoperiod, though not necessarily seasonally but by latitude — the farther north, the less happy sunshine.
But death, death is seasonal and the season is January and February. Rates of dying are 25 percent higher in the winter, especially the days around and after the winter holidays. Respiratory infection (scientists say “flu-like illness”) peaks then and carries off anyone on whom it can get a firm-enough grip, especially the people over 65 (scientists say “the elderly”). Deaths from heart disease, the same. Deaths from diseases of the digestive and endocrine systems, same. (Deaths from cancer have no seasonality.) All deaths (scientists say “all-cause mortality”} peak at the end of January.
Told you so. But my well-posed question was, are bad things more likely in January and February and the answer is sometimes no, but death is yes. Then I went on to claim the months were just evil, and if I’m going to claim any credibility whatever in this matter, I have to say what the reader is undoubtedly thinking. That is, there’s no clear connection between likelihood of death and my car’s throttle or the furnace’s air scoop or the ice-on-top-of-snow storm — let alone the massive infrastructure failures of previous Januaries.
So rather than be wrong, I forego credibility. I move beyond science and say that anyone with eyes to see and brains to remember knows that January and February emit evil, they give off a miasma of evil, they’re a drifting miasma of bat-toothed evil. The best we can do is stay alive until spring. And meanwhile, we’ll distract ourselves with Olympics, Valentine’s Day, and carryout Indian. Also — as I advised in my last post — with the kindness of strangers: the lady who chased me around the market with the soup I’d paid for but not picked up; the lady who told me to get ahead of her in line, the kid who’d never seen me before who called me “auntie.”
These kindnesses happen every single day, it’s just a matter of keeping track of them. Recently: a neighbor said if I helped her with a bad jigsaw, she’d give me champagne. A little family on a 45-minute trek to the grocery store asked if they could get something for me. And the neighbor who carries in his head the knowledge of every kind of electronic port, whom I asked if he’d like a charger with an adapter that wouldn’t fit my cell phone, didn’t answer but showed me how to identify adapters, then handed me the exactly-right dongle for getting from USB subspecies 43A to USC(39). It happened so fast, like it just showed up in my hand. I was stunned. “I had it in my little jeans pocket,” he said. “I’d found it and didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in my little jeans pocket.”
The kindnesses are not temporary distractions. They’re solid evidence of the good that’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see and brains to remember. They’re evidence of the beauty of good in other people, that is, in the world. They’re a direct line to the kind of good that meets evil and annihilates it. January, February, you’re fuckers but you’re toast.
___________
pictures from the redoubtable Public Domain Review’s reprint of Various Apocalyptic Scenes from the Prophetic Messenger.
The post And Now It’s February, Same Same appeared first on The Last Word On Nothing.