I’ve long suspected that I may have seasonal affective disorder. Despite living in Southern California, and despite the fact that currently, it’s 75°F outside and sunny, the critical factor has always been the number of hours of sunlight. So my mood always ebbs when Standard Time comes by, reaching its nadir around the winter solstice, then picking up again when Daylight Saving Time starts up. Rainy days (like the last few) make things worse. Unseasonably warm and sunny days like today make things better, but don’t fix things completely.

I suppose I am also at a major crossroads in my life. An existential crisis of the usual epic proportions. I simply don’t know what to do with my life.

Certainly, the practical answer is to get an actual job, but, truth to tell, I haven’t been pursuing this very effectively.

I haven’t felt this lost since I finished undergrad after having been rejected from medical school, and not having any job prospects.

As I lay marinating lightly in my misery—although in truth it’s really more like a tepid malaise than a full-roiling depression—I was caught up in a sensation that I find difficult to describe, not having felt it for a very long time. I suspect there isn’t really a word for it, and the best I can do is describe it with approximations. Which means that I’m going to try and tell it as a story, although I’m not sure it actually lends it to that either. But here we go.

So when I was a kid, I was a typically latchkey kid. My mom worked the swing shift and my dad worked the usual 9-5 (or, more accurately, 10-6) so there was a definitive gap in adult supervision for me and my sibs. Neighbors would pick us up from school and drop us off, and we’d watch cartoons for three hours. I’m not entirely sure how long this setup lasted for, but in retrospect, it seems like it was for a while. We managed to not burn down the house or maim ourselves, although this was not for lack of trying.

So as I lay in bed the other day, for some reason, I flashed back to these memories, and what hit me was this feeling of things that I haven’t felt in a long while, which I can only poorly approximate as sense of possibility, and a sense of wonder. Anticipation, perhaps. We were always waiting for something. Waiting for our dad to come home from work. Waiting for our mom’s next day off. Waiting for the weekend. A lot of my childhood could probably be condensed into that, waiting for something, and not doing much productive while doing so.

Oh, somehow I got my homework done while watching TV, and I pretty much went through K-12 on cruise control. (My sense of intellectual invincibility would manage to remain intact until the second semester of freshman year in college when I barely managed to pass calculus.) I did play a lot of video games with my brother and my oldest friend. But that was it, really.

But what I also remember are completely random moments of wonderment, to which we often attach the adjective “child-like.”

For example, there were those days of Santa Ana winds. I remember those days where the winds would howl through the canyons and passes, strong enough to make it hard to walk outside. I remember thinking (perhaps mainly being influenced by “The Wizard of Oz”) that those winds were a prelude to being transported to some imaginary place. There were those days that fog would actually roll far enough inland to completely obscure the small valley that my parents’ house overlooks, so that it looked like we were stuck on an island floating on clouds, and when the fog would finally melt away, perhaps the landscape would’ve have changed dramatically. There was the access panel in my sister’s room that really just led into a tiny space underneath the roof, but which I imagined was a secret passage into some mad scientist’s hideout. There were days where the setting sun would shine onto the houses on the lower reaches of the mountain to the north of us, and some houses would reflect the rays of sunlight intensely, looking like some kind of beacon, perhaps to summon aliens, or presage the opening of an interdimensional portal. There was this patch of what in my mind looked like the stereotypical fairy-tale forest on the way between school and home. Maybe you could find elves there. Maybe there were portals to the elves’ homeworld. Sadly, this patch of trees and overgrown shrubbery was razed when I was in college, perhaps in anticipation of a housing development. Strangely, in over a decade, all they really ever built there was a stub of a street with a single street lamp, but no landscaping, and no houses. Perhaps there was a curse on the land or something?

Perhaps the right word would be “imagination”, with the qualifier of “overactive.” The gist of it is that there were plenty of mundane occurrences that deep in my heart I kept hoping were preludes to something fantastically magical, things which never did happen, and which I’m pretty sure will never happen, although, interestingly, what studying science has actually taught me is that there are probably very few things that are actually physically impossible. Still, whereas voicing such things as a child would be acceptable (although certainly people would look at you funny), saying such things as an adult could possibly be taken as evidence of clinical insanity, unless you couched them in terms of a science fiction or fantasy story, and even then, most people are less apt to consider you “normal.”

Writing this down, I’m starting to get the feel for what my problem might be. I’ve spent too much time hoping for the fantastical, but I’ve gotten extremely good at accepting the mundane. And yet, I’m not sure I could ever bring myself to aim for whatever is realistic, although I’ve become too afraid to dream big.

Still, there is something about those hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. It’s those hours right before sunset that I’ve grown to love. It’s probably because my parents’ house has this awesome view, and you can just watch the sunset behind Mt. Hollywood or Adams Hill from their backyard. The family room has a sliding glass door that lets all the rays of sunlight filter in and illuminate the room, and the dogs like to lie there and bask in the light. If I could freeze time, that would be the hour, I would choose, right before sunset.