2004-03-06 - 'Tis the Season for Neuroses:

Elaine was getting real sick and tired of family functions. This coming holiday season snuck up on her, somehow, like a someone she'd been trying to avoid for weeks suddenly appeared in the grocery store and started talking to her before she had noticed them herself: trapped.

It wasn't that she hadn't noticed the Christmas merchendise cropping up in stores everywhere, in fact, she had noticed, but had been trying to pretend like it didn't matter. She had actually been trying to pretend that she enjoyed the season, a pretense which made her cringe with self-resentment in retrospect.

But now that there was only a week to go before she was expected to be at her parents' place for the holidays, she was suddenly very aprehensive: the aprehesiveness usually started building up in her very early in the season, but this year, she'd been staving it off, until it suddenly attacked all at once on the 15th of December, and she was not at all prepared for the strain.

She tried to explain this tremendous sense of foreboding to a friend of hers over coffee. Darren had ran into her at the convenience store, where she'd been desperately obsessing over the expirey dates on the cartons of milk, practially in tears, trying (unsuccessfully) to project her sense of dread onto something more tangeable and domestic. Upon seeing her, Darren grabbed her by the wrist and said, "Forget the milk. I'll buy you a coffee." If he hadn't have been such a close friend, she probably would have refused, but, seeing no reason not to, she sighed with relief and agreed to the invitation.

"I've known you a long time," Darren said, after Elaine had tried to pinpoint what the problem was. "And you've never gotten this worked up over the season. I don't understand how you could dislike your family so much."

She poured cream into her second cup of coffee, spilling some into the saucer without noticing. "It's not them so much as everything they do. It's all the stress that comes with it," She said as she reached for the sugar. "It's like having your car stolen. On the day after you were supposed to re-new your insurance. The day you lost your job. And you've also lost the keys to your apartment. And your roommate is out of town for another week. And you have cats that need to be fed, but you can't get to them. But you can hear them meowing. Meowing. Meowing!" As she described this scenario, her voice became more and more paniced with each addition of terribleness.

Darren flinched involuntarily.