November Blues
I don’t like November. It’s not a fun month. Personally, it’s not the worst month of the year (that award goes to the awful hell that is September), but I’d definitely rate November as one of the worst months of the year. It’s just… so bleh as a month.
A lot of it is the weather. Although, thanks to man-made climate change, November is a less awkward month when it comes to weather, it just doesn’t compare to previous months. October is the start of autumn and is when things start cooling down, but there’s still some warmth to the air. December is obviously colder, but it’s also more crisp and snappy. November lurches in the middle and is just mediocre in comparison.
There’s also very little that goes on in November. October has Halloween, December has Christmas, but November has nothing outside of the US. Thanksgiving is a purely American and Canadian tradition, and Canada doesn’t even have the same Thanksgiving as the US. To be fair, other seasons don’t have as many celebrations as the end of the year does, but at least other seasons have different things going for them, like being a fresh new start like January, or having the nice weather of June and July. August has the summer break and May generally has Easter. April contains my birthday, which automatically makes it a good month. The only month that really compares is September, which is always ‘back to school’ and the summer ending, as well as going back to work.
This trend also appears in video games. October Halloween events make huge amounts of money, especially in the cosmetics department. But after Halloween fades away, you tend to get a few days of leftover Halloween goodness, but then it’s business as normal. You might get an event for Thanksgiving maybe, but most games I’ve seen don’t really do that. Sure, Pokemon GO has constant events going on, but even those events aren’t as good as the Christmas and Halloween events that we always get. The only event in November that’s of any interest to me is the leaked Garchomp raid day, but Mega Garchomp, as cool as the shiny is, isn’t as good as Primal Groudon, who came out back in August.
I even almost forgot that November existed. Or, rather, I thought I had somehow skipped November and moved on to December. Every month, I put together a magazine, doing the layout and placing articles and adverts. At the end of October, I got to work doing the November issue, except I somehow found myself starting on the December issue instead. I completely forgot that November existed, up until I needed something from the previous issue. My dumb brain said the previous issue was November, and I spent 20 minutes trying to work out why I couldn’t find the November issue. Of course there was no November issue, I hadn’t made it yet. Eventually, I realized I was supposed to be creating the November issue, and had to redo all the December parts I’d already made. This dumb fuck-up of mine luckily only took an hour to fix, but that was how I forgot November was even a thing.
Really, November isn’t bad. It’s just boring. It’s a boring slog while we wait to get to December. And I personally can’t wait until December, because I’ll be going on vacation for the first time in about five years. Yay!