There's Something Evil About February

blaming the concept of a month for my problems

How many times can I start this blog with an apology for lateness, Stumpies? The answer is: infinity! But this time I have a tremendous excuse that will certainly explain why I failed to produce posts for the past week 10 days two weeks… you see, for the past two weeks it has been the dastardly month of February.

is it dramatic of me to use a screencap from a zombie movie for this edit? possibly.

Time to share my oddly specific beefs with something that can’t fight back

I have long found February to be, by far and away, the worst month of the year. This might be due to the fact that February of my junior year of high school was when I found out I fell from valedictorian to salutatorian. But probably not!!! That’s not a grudge I will carry with me to the gates of hell and beyond!!! Jk, I feel confident I would have won in a fist fight or perhaps a shootout, which is what counts in the real world, babyyy.

Or could it be the harrowing experience of waiting for undergraduate and then graduate school acceptances, only to be met with a steady deluge of rejections to many fine institutions. Jk, we call those “bullets dodged.”

So maybe, just maybe, it’s not my fault! Maybe February just sucks ass and there’s nothing we can do about it. Either way, enough about me. You already have far too much information.

February exists in that uncomfortable time of year that I like to consider our collective sophomore slump — we’re all so cute in January. We’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; we have so many adorable, delusional plans! More importantly, we all have a marvelous excuse for why we haven’t achieved any of those plans *yet*. If I had a nickel for every email I sent or received in January that said something to the tune of “sorry I haven’t gotten to this yet! Still catching up on email after the holidays haha,” I would be still-not-rich-but-have-a-lot-more-nickels. The point is - no one has expectations of us in January. In fact, if anything, folks expect you to be a little behind, a little disoriented. But if you bring that shit from January to February be prepared for an ass kicking!

By the time February rolls around, insufferable fools have started to slip deadlines [shutter] into the picture. Suddenly, all of our charm has worn off. Everybody very thoroughly believes you should have it all figured out by February. But I hypothesize that February becomes a festering scab of backed up obligations. No one wants to be That Guy and put pressure on January. We know it’s taboo to demand anything out of people still wrenching themselves from their candy cane champagne comas. February, however… oh February is fair game. February is the Tuesday of a year. Everything is in full swing, and if you fucked off on Monday, you will feel the drowning sensation on Tuesday. The boss will not excuse your unproductivity on a task that you were assumed to have started eight weeks ago [eight weeks??? that cant be right it cant possibly be eight weeks ago just yesterday i was singing auld lang syne with a lampshade on my head and swearing i would start that thing tomorrow].

i did the Analysis and february woated confirmed

February is on the ropes! Let’s keep kicking it while it’s down!

Allow me to throw more fuel on the fire for my utterly justified hatred of February. On top of the fraction of a blink that it takes for tomorrow’s problems to become today’s as we pass this first transition of the year, February is also perhaps the bleakest month. Now, I have lived in both Texas and Michigan. For those of you who aren’t geographically attuned, that’s roughly the difference between 29°44'59.7'' N to 42°16′53″N. Or, as we might say more colloquially, real damn hot to real damn cold. In both instances, February can go kick bricks.

The weather in February is an unrelenting bleakness. Just as we have a charm and jolliness in January that wears off after precisely 31 days, so does the winter weather. In January, the cold is lovely! It’s stark! It reminds us of the seasons of change! There are snowflake decorations, there are winter sports, everything is blue. Even in Michigan where we get approximately six minutes of sunlight total in January, there’s a refreshment to it all. January justifies buying all those nice winter clothes; it fulfills the weather promises of Christmas, which is never as white or as chilly as the movies want it to be; it makes all the bugs die.

By February, I no longer care. Get out. Git. Go. Shoo!!! In February, I have endured enough cold-and-gray days. The vitamin-D deficiency within me is mounting. I feel terrible, I look pallid, and then February rolls around and I don’t fare much better [made myself chuckle at this joke].

Even worse — February is a tease. She’s a dirty mistress who occasionally flirts using the idea of good weather. In the north, I have learned they call this “fool’s Spring,” the first of which generally rears its ugly head in February. But I’m from the south, so I’ll call it a rat bastard! It’s not enough that February can be nontrivially colder than January, nooooo…. she must also remind us how good it can feel to enjoy a 65-degree day in the sun before plunging us back into the depths of despair. Perhaps constant pain is easier to endure than the whiplash from occasional joy? Maybe it’s easier not to know that better things are possible? Possibly I’m just annoyed whenever my toes get cold because I’ve optimistically underdressed for the weather? No, nothing is my fault.

these are two photos i took in february in the same place merely hours apart

Stop, stop! She’s already dead!

February is not only a tease; she’s a right minx. Every other month of the year simply has no problem behaving itself. January? 31 days. March? 31 days. And so on. But February simply must be that bitch, huh? It’s not enough that February has the third largest consumer holiday [a mid holiday, at that… not even a day off work and i have to display an emotion. barf!]. It’s not enough that February has Presidents’ Day, which none of us really care about but does pull its weight re: time off work. Noooooooo… February demands to be eXtRA sPecIaL.

Listen, I understand the necessity of leap years, okay? I get it. 365.25 days blah blahdiddy blah. It’s fine! It’s fine. All I’m saying is that for some entirely headass reason we 1) decided February would have 28 days normally, which is already peculiar compared to the rest of the months, 2) decided our month with the bizarre number of days would fall neither at the beginning nor end of the year, but rather smack in the middle, and 3) occasionally we should compound this existing complication by adding an additional 29th day. How often does this phenomenon occur? We may never know. It’s as mysterious as the Loch Ness monster or Bob Dylan’s concert experience. All I know is that, periodically, the shittiest month of the year forces me to endure for 24 more hours, and that, folks, is a bridge too far.

Covering the grave with dirt that is nutrient-depleted and rocky!

In case I have not yet sold you on why February sucks ass, allow me to provide a definitely-not-definitive and extraordinarily cherry-picked Terrible Hits collection of bad things that Google says have happened in February:

1. 1959 — The Day the Music Died

2. 1976 — A 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck Guatemala

3. 1846 — Buffalo Bill was born (killed a lot of buffalo)

4. 1473 — Nicolaus Copernicus born (dummy, wronglord)

5. 2011 — Rebecca Black releases “Friday”

6. 1929 — St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago

7. 2004 — Justin Timberlake causes a wardrobe malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII, sparking very annoying opinions from everyone

8. 1935 — Sonny Bono was born (mean to Cher)

9. 1582 — The blasted Gregorian calendar that concocted this stupid month was established!!!!

Unsatisfied that the list ends at #9 instead of an even #10? Well get used to it! You’re going to get to soak in that discomfort again every February 29th!!!

And let’s not forget that all sports in February bite. Football is over, and it generally goes out with a whimper of a game that 98% of the country does not care about. Basketball has been happening for a long time already but still somehow isn’t at the interesting part. Who knows where baseball is or when it will be back.

Now, I won’t say that February doesn’t have some redeemable qualities (e.g., Mardi Gras, Black History Month, and of course, Groundhog Day, our only national holiday dedicated to hog), but that’s not the point of this post, so I don’t expect I will be addressing them.

Moving on with our lives now that the body is cold

This whole post is an awfully long way for me to say that I was aggressively overbooked during the month of February, as I seem to find myself most Februaries. This time last year I would have sworn that February 2024 could not be as chaotic as February 2023, and yet I’m always surprising myself by the myriad of situations I can get myself into. Are almost all of them self-inflicted? Sure. But hey, it wouldn’t be The Stump if I weren’t using this platform as a means to outsource my complaints at my own foibles.

More importantly, let’s talk about how we fix this going forward so that I all of us benefit.

fixing february will totally fix all my problems and not just be a stopgap solution for so many other problems.

My original idea was to find the Gregorian calendar and burn it down. However, the internet [smarmy s.o.b.] seems to think that there is no “““single physical copy of the Gregorian calendar that you can hunt down and destroy, Katie.”””” So that’s out.

My second idea is that we all hibernate like bears through the month. Given the everything about this blog, you might think I mean that facetiously, but I assure you I am being quite literal. Based on a 2,000-calorie diet, we only need to eat about 56,000 calories to sustain us the entire month of February [or sometimes 58,000, because this is a moronic made-up month]. A sausage McGriddle with cheese is 480 calories, and a cookie dough Zone Bar is 180 calories. From my math, if we ate about 75 McGriddles and 112 Zone Bars on February 1st, we could all just curl up and snooze until March 1st. I dunno about y’all, but I’m already hitting pretty close to those numbers on the daily, so this really feels like it’s just the natural next step.

Okay, fine, FINE. You don’t want to eat 75 delicious McGriddles and 112 yummy Zone Bars in one sitting. Because you’re a coward. It’s fine! My very last idea is that we all collectively skip the month of February. We just duck right past that sucker. February who? February what? February when? I believe that if we all sustain the collective delusion hard enough, we could make this one work. Logistically, I think this means we all must will ourselves into a sort of liminal space/void where we no longer exist. This is already something I am doing anytime someone at work tries to talk to me, so I assume this is a universal skill. If we Just Say No to the concept of February, they can’t stop us all.

this post is not sponsored by the U.S. DOJ… but it could be

Me to editor: “I need a transition to my closer”

Editor to me: “Therefore,”

Stumpies, I am, of course, apologetic that this post is a full bona fide two weeks late. That’s totes my bad. But instead of blaming me, what if you blamed the inevitable passage of time? How can I really be at fault for being late when the insurmountable obstacle of February stood in my way? For a combination of factors - both good and bad - I was extraordinarily busy this last month. But, with my unscheduled time off, I’m feeling as renewed as ever and looking forward to getting back on my Stump to shout about anything and everything.

I’ll see y’all on the other side of February, assuming we survive it.

I like the questions so I’m going to keep doing the questions…

1. What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you in February that won’t bum me out too aggressively?

2. What is the best month and why is it October?

3. February contains both Pisces and Aquariuses. Where do we move them in the zodiac calendar if we eliminate February?

4. How many people do you think will unsubscribe to The Stump because they forgot they had subscribed over these past few weeks and this post will remind them to clear their email list?

What The Stump is Reading:

T. Dalton Wolf

- Actually writing a whole-ass crime novel on Substack, which is baller as hell

the beer and coffee fund, for a weary Stump whose car also broke this month