Beware the Ides of February

Toward the end of my teaching career, I told myself that I’d start taking an annual solo trip in February, a Long Weekend of Lisa. I’d fly to Sedona and eat raw foods and sunbathe until I remembered that I don’t like doing either of those things, and then I’d fly back home, ready to tackle that forty-five-week stretch to Spring Break.

I never did this, of course. My coworkers and I were already teaching 8 out of 7 periods—why yes, that IS mathematically impossible—to cover the onset of pestilence and shortage of subs in January, and I could never bring myself to make the situation worse.

But that’s a topic for another post, and probably another therapy session.

The point is that I harbored this fantasy because February is, historically, a low point in the school year. Students are falling off the PowerSchool grid. Coworkers are talking about how their diets are going. Everyone has a sinus infection. Administrators are shooting Jeans Day certificates from t-shirt cannons and stuffing mailboxes full of Hershey kisses—the striped kind, even—to stem the tides of despair, but it’s no use. 

February is just a rough month to be a teacher. And now that I’ve been working outside of education for a while, I’m comfortable going ahead and expanding that statement.

February is just a rough month to be a human.

By Valentine’s Day, we Hoosiers will not have seen two consecutive days of sunshine for like five weeks, likely contributing to most health problems that exist. My houseplants look like they’ve been watered with RC Cola (which I’m almost certain I haven’t done), and I think their shriveled foliage is a pretty accurate reflection of the condition of my brain tissue.

Also, the wind chill will be in the single digits as far as the Weather App can see, keeping us indoors and probably finishing off any remaining vitality not decimated by the lack of sunlight.

And that’s just a normal February.

In a normal February, I have to listen to three Wham! songs in the shower so I won’t give up before I get to the conditioner. In a normal February, everyone drags out the Instapots they got for Christmas because we know if we don’t have the chicken going by 2:00 PM, we will choose starvation. In fact, swaths of early humans starved to death in February because they fell asleep on the couch watching The Great British Baking Show instead of getting up to roast the lemmings they’d been keeping in the back of the fridge.

But this is a pandemic February. The final boss of all Februaries. And I don’t know about you, but all I brought to the fight is one blinking heart and a Master Sword that has run out of energy.

To illustrate, we’re rolling into a four-day weekend in our school district. In an ordinary February, this would elicit some cheers and perhaps a visit to Great Wolf Lodge or some other kitschy, moderately enjoyable child-centered getaway. Instead, I didn’t even notice the days off until yesterday. When I told the kids, they erupted in a resounding, “Oh. Okay.”

Now, I am certainly glad the teachers are getting a break. THANK GOD they are getting a break. They will spend it, of course, grading late online assignments and tracking our state legislature’s commitment to ruining their profession, but at least they can sleep in a little in the meantime.

For our family, however, a couple more days off looks a lot like having a couple more days on. We’ll be at home. The dog will eat a couple of Legos and then throw them back up someplace. The kids will fight with each other. I’ll cook something delicious and underappreciated. We’ll all be asleep by 9:00 PM.

We will continue to live lives almost entirely absent of novelty. It’s real-life Groundhog Day, which is a state that kind of kills you creatively. But what are you gonna do? There’s nowhere safe to go indoors, really, and nowhere reasonable to go outside when it’s twelve degrees. We’ve played every board game in the house and baked every conceivable type of bread. We’ve watched all the shows and scrolled the entire internet.

Yeah, Caesar had his whole thing, but I say beware the Ides of February. It seems to me that if you’re going to get stabbed or usurped, mid-February is a much more likely candidate than a week before the tulips push up.

So, all of this is to say that if you’re feeling a little like this month is the panini press and you’re the panini, you’re not alone. Nor are you without reason. If every day is running into the next, you’re huddled inside all the time, and you can’t even remember where your freckles used to be, then you’re missing three fairly powerful sources of dopamine for your cold, sad wintertime brain—novelty, nature, and sunlight.

No wonder you’d rather be sleeping.

I have no advice, other than to feel the feels and try to latch on to something that makes you feel a teeny bit like your vibrant pre-February self. I, for one, curled my hair and watched the Zoolander gasoline fight, which technically put me at four Wham! songs today, and it was just enough to get me to dinner. We’re all in the same boat.

At some point, it’s gonna be May.