Perforation Problems

When we were kids, my mom worked for a small business owned by a couple that went to our church. American Leak Detection—they found leaks in swimming pools. In high school the couple gave me my first job, helping them with random grunt work a day or two a week for $5.15 an hour. Lois, the squat, curly-haired wife (the epitome of a grandma) would have m&ms and goldfish for me to snack on when I got there. I decimated them on the reg, but man, I did an excellent job of sorting the brochures in their supply closet. I'm sure I was a huge asset to them.  But back before I was old enough to work, American Leak Detection gave my mom her first job after having kids. And in the summers, when she was off being their accountant three days a week, the three of us were left gloriously alone. Ah, summer days of sleeping in and mindlessly watching episode after episode of Bobby's World and Animaniacs, of laying on the couch reading the romance novels I swiped from my mom's library ...

I don't think I used to get depressed in the winter, but maybe I just wasn't very cognizant of it. I don't remember thinking, "wow, winter is really fucking depressing" until I was in my late twenties, working in a cubicle in an office. Maybe that was part of it, too. Life looks different from within mauve cubicle walls. One year, one of my friends gave me an extra sun lamp he had, and I put it in the corner on my desk so the white glow would hit me as I stared at the computer. I don't remember it working. When I was a teacher, I don't remember thinking of winter as particularly bad—but in those days January meant second semester, which meant it was that much closer to summer vacation. And it was romanticism and modernism time in American Lit—Thoreau and Whitman and Hemingway and Faulkner. My favorites. Also, when I was teaching, that "I can't wait until summer when I don't have to work" feeling was with me all year round, so what dif...