I now officially hate the holiday season.

I can’t really explain this sense of dysphoria churning inside of me right now. I am angry and depressed at the same time, at nothing specific. There is no target of my ire, just this vague feeling of wanting to bash something with a baseball bat.

It’s ironic that now that I only live 2 hours away from home, I still can’t really come home. Not in a metaphysical sense, at least. There’s something missing. It isn’t really the fact that my sister is 3,000 miles away, because for years now neither my brother nor my sister have been home very much.

It’s just that the last few holiday seasons just make me think of an old VHS tape being played over and over again, each time losing some of its quality, deteriorating from wear and tear.

I don’t want to say it, and I don’t want to believe it, but nonetheless: I think it’s because we are all growing old. Not just older, either. And there aren’t any kids in the family. There is no one with a sense of wonderment around, no one to ooh and ahh the pretty lights and the decorations and the special dishes and the turkey and the pumpkin pie and the cambing and the bibingka. It’s just the same old, same old each year, and one of these days, someone is simply not going to show up, and not because they have something better to do. Yeah, I’m being morbid.

Speaking of which, I basically spent the weekend killing things. No, not in real life. But, bizarrely, it has become a sort of tradition between me and my brother. We sort of mutually decide on a particular video game and play it for hours and hours on end. This year it was Halo 2.

Maybe it was the fact that we beat it so easily, and the ending was really anticlimactic. (But that’s all I’ll say about that.)

and again, I really get too much time to think as I drive back and forth between S.D. and L.A. I realize that at this stage in time, I don’t have a long range plan. I’m sure if you knew me well, you’d think that this wouldn’t be surprising, and you’d think it would be ludicrous for me to saying something like this, but it’s really odd. If you’ve ever watched “The Princess Bride,” you’ll remember Iñigo Montoya’s little soliloquy about not knowing what to do now that he has avenged his father, after about a decade and a half of looking for his father’s murderer. I guess you could say I feel a little like that, what with finally finishing med school after how many long hard, dark years, many of which were spent in going in circles and in backtracking. And sure, there are a few short-to-medium term goals that I have, but they’re merely details.

I’ve always been a big-picture kind of guy, and right now, there isn’t one.

I know, I know. Day by day.

Maybe it’s because of the dream I had last night. I had a really hard time going to sleep for some reason and I woke up with a horrific headache. But I dreamt about my ex-girlfriend who has recently gotten married. The content of the dream eludes me at this time. All I remember is being frustrated, or maybe jealous. I don’t know.

And basically, when I come home, it’s just backstabbing and shit-talking. I suppose my parents and my aunts and uncles are at that stage in their life where it’s all about looking back, and they keep digging up all this old bullshit that just pisses people off in one way or another. There’s this phony facade of getting along, but deep down, there are grudges brewing, and venom simmering. And I know it’s all pointless, because you can’t undo the past without undoing the present.

I guess it’s just the depressing idea of feeling so alone amidst all these people, my family. Home these days means this squalid, one bedroom apartment that I barely sleep in, much less live in, because I’m always at work. I only feel safe here because there’s no one around to do any emotional or mental harm, not because it’s really Home™

And that thought sends me tumbling down the tired old discussion of the futility of ever finding someone who’ll come along with me down these twisted paths, the paths least taken through life. Someone who wants to come along, not because they’re desperate to be with someone, anyone, as long as its a warm body, not because I’m hopelessly in love with them and they can manipulate me like a puppet on a string. Just someone who is going the same way as I am, and someone who’d welcome my companionship on this journey.

I don’t know. Who knows what I want. All I know is that the lifestyle I’m leading right now can’t be permanent, because one day I’ll get completely bored with all my useless free time and quite possible blow my brains out.

(P.S. That wasn’t suicidal ideation. I’m just being melodramatic as usual.)

Whatever. As they say, tomorrow is yet another day.