Ate too much at Thanksgiving; my fabled gluttony transformed into a sort of "Shooting the Elephant" thing. Good stuffing though.

I was late because — and this so far is the highlight of my week — I was up late at Ben's playing Gears of War co-op on his new Xbox 360 and his family's gigantic HDTV. It was wonderful; my idea of a good time.

If you scoffed at that, I hate you just a little.

I don't know what it is about this week, but I find myself wondering if I'm turning into a horrible person. Not the conceptual horrible person who neither the Politician or I (to recall for the moment a very inside, very comforting running joke) will ever be, but rather the specific kind of horrible person I was at a point in the distant past, before the onset of even the near-mythical Catholic Dan epoch.

For those keeping score at home, seventh grade was my least favorite grade: there was stress, awkwardness, even a few bullies. However, it's the ninth-grade Dan who, though he had his moments, I'd most like to punch in the face.

(Old friends are reminded at this point that it is very bad form indeed to pile onto another's self-deprecation, especially when it's more than half sincere.)

To the point: I worry that I've once again become too judgmental and too detached, and I've got enough respect for this problem not to conclude that this worry in-and-of itself magically resolves the issues.

Ninth-grade Dan eventually solved this problem with the combined power of incessant self-deprecation and religious faith, but this time around I've got nothing much to believe in — and unlike ninth-grade Dan, that pompous jerk, I don't feel superior; the problem isn't that I'm wrongly putting myself on a pedestal.

(And I don't think that Our Bold Hero could really stand to be kicked around at the moment, in any case.)

Normally, though less so since I read Joseph Epstein's Friendship and abandoned some of my old romantic concepts, I've had some sense of leniency in my judgments. Like, you know, a sane person does. Everyone has faults, most of us can probably see them, but we all take them into perspective.

I appreciate the irony of having my cynical, unapologetically judgmental nature, something I usually count as one of my best qualities — that probably sounds absurd to you, but I'm not here to make the case for it now — become such a negative force. I do. But irony doesn't fix anything, and the Return of the Evil Eye isn't making me any better or happier.

In fact, all it's doing is making the world look worse, and that's where I have to live. And it's not like I can wave all my cruel judgments all away: I'll be right a lot of the time, and feel like I'm right all of the time. Or whatever that statement ends up meaning.

Call it a conceptual crisis, reactionary introversion, a bad week, or maybe just a foul mood, but ugh, lately. Some lows, a few highs, and some times (like tonight, watching Casino Royale) when I can relax and forget. I hope that this new perspective doesn't too last long.