By Alex Rake (The Cascade) – Email
I’ve got beef with November. Of all the months in my calendar, it is the worst for a million reasons. For the sake of brevity, here are five.
It is agressively cold and wet. Sure, October’s a little chilly, and December is cold as hell, but November really hits you where it hurts. It may look crisp and sunny outside, but you know it’s going to be chilly because it’s autumn for goshsakes! So, you leave home wearing a light little coat. That was your first mistake. Your second mistake was not going back home immediately to wait until November’s over, because the sunny sky was just an illusion luring you into the reality of sudden, unrelenting rains. Cold, heavy rains. And just like that, you’re either dead or wish you were.
Then November slaps you with the reality that everything actually is dying. October’s colourful leaves begin making way for brown, sludgey plant matter at the side of the road, and the skeletons of trees shiver to warn you that nothing is safe. Animals start going into hibernation, because they know it’s the only thing worth doing at this time of year. This is not the kind of reminder of death that Halloween or a good book gives us; there is no joy, no perspective, only bleak hopelessness. And then Remembrance Day comes to remind us that war is a thing and that we should feel bad about it.
This is another problem with November: the lack of celebration. Sandwiched between months with arguably some of the best celebrations in our culture, October’s Halloween and December’s Christmas, the fact that the only official holiday is a solemn affair puts a further damper on the month. The US gets its Thanksgiving, sure, but Canadians get no official, widely-recognized celebration to get us through dumb, depressing November.
What we do get as university students are final assignments. Many, many final assignments that we’re somehow supposed to feel enthusiatic enough about to complete with a sense of achievement. But November makes me too aware of mortality and the void that is existence — how am I supposed to maintain enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s potential views on post-modern teenage love-making? What does that even mean? I hope my professor doesn’t know what it means either, and therein lies the reason it’s difficult to feel a sense of achievement instead of just a relief that the assignments are finally over: I barely care about what I’m doing in the November atmosphere.
All of this adds up to the fact that everyone seems to get crankier as November progresses. It’s cold death is everywhere, there’s nothing fun going on, and there is so much important stuff to do. It certainly doesn’t help that stores begin playing holiday music as soon as Halloween’s over, reminding us that there are no winter wonderlands to mystify us, or red-nosed reindeers to guide us in November. You can’t catch the holiday spirit this month, but you might catch an awful cold. Good luck!
But I’m not going to complain without offering some solutions. We cannot control the weather, but we can do our best to prepare for it; packing a large coat at all times may be a hassle, but it’s better than hating yourself because it’s cold and rainy. And though the scenery is drab, perhaps we can take this as an opportunity to further explore our environments, because the withering of your surroundings is only ugly if you are used to their summery state. Perhaps discovering a creek or a meadow and getting to know it in its deathly state will provide you with a sense of perspective.
As for celebrations, let’s just have some. Who cares what for? For love! For life! Gather some friends and have a feast of cheap pizza! Fight the late-autumn blues with a party, however that looks to you. This reconnection with other living souls will clarify what you are doing anything for, whether it be school, or work, or just plain living. Trivial final assignments can be bearable, even fun, if approached with a refocused perspective.
By railing against all the awfulness November insists on dumping on us, perhaps we’ll even be a bit less cranky, and a bit more empathetic towards everyone else trudging in their own way through this ugly month. Alternatively, we could enter hypersleep and wait for it to pass, but most of us aren’t escapists from the future, so railing will have to do.
