Stupid Distractions
November in Germany is relentless. Cold, wet, the sky the color of old dishwater—the kind of weather that makes you understand why people used to just go dormant for months and wait for spring like bears in a cave. The darkness starts eating at you around day three. By day seven you’re calculating the survival probability of jumping from a low enough height that you’d just walk away with regrets and mobility issues.
What saves me is stupidity. Intentional absurdity. When I feel the seasonal depression starting to wrap around my throat, I make a list—not the productive kind, not a self-help thing. The deliberately pointless kind. Weekend ideas that are too ridiculous to actually do but just coherent enough to distract my brain from the real darkness. It’s not healthy, but it works better than whatever healthy actually means.
Barricade yourself in bed with someone who looks good and stay there until March. Hot water bottle, chocolate cake, just ride it out. You can double whatever you feel like—extra blankets, extra coffee, extra hours pretending the outside world isn’t happening. That one’s almost practical, buried under the stupid.
There’s something cleaner about the ones with no actual endpoint. Put on Lady Gaga and cover one of her songs so badly that the entire internet collectively decides you’re unhinged. It’s weirdly freeing, the idea of being that comprehensively, publicly bad at something that you loop around past embarrassment into absurdist celebrity. Listen to Regina Spektor until you can’t tell anymore whether you’re laughing or crying, until her voice has dissolved into some third emotion that doesn’t have a name. Sleep with someone with a good mustache just because you decided this week is the week for it—no external justification required, just a thing you thought of and decided to do.
Some are quieter. Hug a tree. They’re struggling right now, dealing with their own seasonal darkness, and they probably appreciate it. The ones that are pure nonsense—invent the internet’s successor, buy out Google and whatever embarrassing websites you can think of for spare change—those are fine too. They’re not supposed to work. They’re supposed to occupy just enough of your consciousness that when you’re lying awake at three in the morning, your brain is running through logistics instead of spiraling.
November’s still out there. The weather won’t change. But having a list of impossible, ridiculous things to think about instead of the real weight of it—that gets you through the weekend. That gets you to December. That gets you to spring eventually, when everything will probably still be complicated but at least the sun will be out while you’re dealing with it.