Vacation Hangover

Yeah, you know what I mean.

You return from somewhere luminous, invigorating, and no matter how much you tidied before you left, the house you come back to feels dirty, drab, colorless. It fits all stiff like cheap new shoes.

You have a stack of mail to go through and not one whit of it is anything other than bank statements or catalogs or those stupid flyers you can't unsubscribe from no matter how may phone calls you make or junkmail reduction sites you register with. And, viewed through your grouch-o-vision glasses, it looks like an awful lot like a big ol' chunk of landfill, because you suspect your local dump doesn't actually recycle anything.

And, if you live in the godforsaken Las Vegas area, it's freakin' 112 (yeah, I know the news reports it as cooler, but that's just so they don't scare the tourists away). Even getting groceries feels like too much effort in that heat, so you buy frozen crap for a couple days to avoid the commitment of meal planning and a full cart. And then you feel gross from all the preservatives your body is used to rejecting. And everything feels like too much effort; maybe you're just sluggish from the junk food. Or maybe what you really want to do is flee back to where weather was bearable, where hail in July seemed reasonable and fitting.

And why-- WHY-- did you have leftovers in the fridge when you left? Why on earth would you NOT throw that shit out when you were gonna be gone for two weeks? And since cleaning out the fridge in the first couple days back from vacation is even more depressing than finding that stuff there in the first place, they sit a little longer, mocking you with fat, oozy giggles every time you open the fridge door.

Those impulsive time-share purchases don't seem so unreasonable all of a sudden. There's this desperation in wanting to hold onto that iridescent hazy soap bubble, that time of no commitments and long lazy days, of eating amazing food and opening your world.

Can anyone suggest a remedy for this?