Something’s Fishy Is everyone on drugs, or is it me? BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

November is over. Thank God. Now we can all move on and pretend like the election never happened. I, personally, woke up last Wednesday morning overjoyed to turn over a new leaf. Even though, through the windows of the uber-pleasant Yoga Exchange, the sky was ominously dark and filled with Christmas lights, which is enough to put anyone in a bad mood at 4 p.m. on a hump day, I remembered the email I got that morning from a close friend in Brooklyn which read, "Hooray, it’s December 1st — it has to get better."

I’ve already received emails and had phone calls recounting horrible Thanksgivings full of family dramas and weird turns of fate. One friend recounted that his sister had announced to the family that her fiancé might not be straight and therefore he didn’t want to get married anymore but that they had decided to have a baby anyway. Another came home early, bruised and distraught. A guy I know brought his own vegetarian food and sat around watching football while everyone else ate turkey and giblets. Another had watery gravy and canned cranberry sauce at a diner in NYC.

I gained eight pounds, which was traumatic enough. It must have been all that spelt-bread stuffing and the magnum of red wine I ingested as a "coping" technique.

Last fall around Turkey Day, I went through a frantic period when I crashed my car five times. In my driveway. Some genius had decided I should try a drug called Wellbutrin after a break-up and a few weeks of insomnia. It turned out to be the equivalent of crack. This W made me so nervous that my hands would do strange things on the wheel and with the clutch or my feet would stick on the gas or, sometimes, all three would happen, like the time I went barreling backwards at 90 mph toward the porch as I took my hands and feet off of all control devices.

Once, I was talking on my cell phone after having had a few drinks, inhaling with a friend in her car, all mixed to become a lovely W cocktail of disaster, and I drove straight into my stairs. I kept talking because I couldn’t deal with both things at once. And I didn’t want to hang up and seem weird to the guy I was talking to.

Drugs, it seems, are the American way. In fact, I know more people on different kinds of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds than know shit about wine. I’ve tried many of them myself. Some work. And if you find the right one, it can be a saving grace, this much I know and so I’d never diss the pharmaceuticals, just the companies themselves. But, in Portland, for some reason, I’ve also come to know more people who dabble in alternative drugs as well. I have no idea why in New York City I was around fewer drug users (of the illegal kind — virtually everyone I know was on the prescribed kind) than I am here . . . is it the long winter? The darkness? The holidays?

Over Thanksgiving, my mother started Internet dating. Cats. Not men. Yep, cats and dogs all up and down the East Coast. She would log on to every rescue league on the Atlantic Seaboard and check out the pictures of cats with names like Pebbles, Sabbath, Crazy, and Cinder (who in the hell comes up with these names is what I want to know) and try to decide if one of them looked enough like — or dissimilar enough — her now-lost-but-still-beloved Oscar to adopt. Then she would get nervous, hit the off button without even saving the page to "favorites," and say that "by the way . . ." she didn’t want any cats, she was "just looking." Right, and 50 percent of American males "just look" at porn. If I asked her about going to look at cats at a nearby shelter, she would say, "Go away." And walk away. Once, after much deliberation, we got ready to go to a shelter and meet a gray cat with a cold and as I waited, coat and boots on like I was 12 again while my mother got ready, she decided she wanted to go boot shopping instead and check out the new Uggs.

It’s not like this lady is going to protest that, for heaven’s sake.

The day after Thanksgiving was my father’s birthday and I got him high as my gift to him and then we ate lots of pecan pie. You know you’ve turned a corner in your fucked-up life — or the country’s — when you’re getting your parents high and willfully indulging shopping addictions because who can fight it anymore when GW is back in office anyway?

The morning after I left, my mother picked up a cat at the vet. She hasn’t named him yet (we’ve gone though every actor, writer, and playwright we can think of), but apparently he is salmon-colored with gray eyes. And he doesn’t want to be called Fishy.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com