Q: I get very lonely around the holidays. My family is just my parents, and they’re far away. I don’t have a boyfriend right now. I have many friends and good people in my life, but instead of hanging out with them, I find myself isolating. So . . . it seems my treatment for loneliness is loneliness, and then feeling sorry for myself that I’m home alone. Help!—Pity Party Animal

A: Each of us gets into the holiday spirit in our own special way. Some of us build gingerbread houses; some of us build gingerbread psychiatric hospitals. To understand how you can long for human connection and (ugh!) long to avoid it at the very same time, it helps to understand the mechanics of loneliness—the pain we feel when we’re disconnected from others. Like other emotions, loneliness is “adaptive,” meaning it has a function. It most likely evolved to motivate ancestral humans to behave in ways that would help them survive and mate.

The problem is, our psychology is complex, and work orders laid out for us by different emotional adaptations—different functional feelings—sometimes conflict. For example, the sadness that comes with loneliness is also motivating—only it can motivate you to lie facedown on the couch. This probably seems anything but useful, but psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse explains that the slowing down in energy that’s a partner to sadness gives us time to examine our behavior, figure out whether we might do better with different tactics, and, if so, change our MO.

It’s important to take stock like this—to a point. But if you remind yourself of the evolved job of emotions, you’ll see that it’s sometimes in your interest to override them. In short, you can do your sadness homework without making your loneliness worse by spending your entire holiday mumbling into the throw pillows.

Tell your besties that you could use some cheering up, and give yourself an emotional work assignment: going to a minimum of three parties over the holidays where groups of your friends will be in attendance. Keep in mind—while you’re lifting what feels like your 3,000-pound arm to apply mascara before going to some shindig—that we’re bad at predicting what will make us happy or unhappy. Chances are, once you’re at the party, you’ll catch a buzz from the eggnog, get laughing with your friends, and accidentally slack off on your fashionable nihilism—your muttering that it’s all nothingness and you’re alone in the universe except for your unpaid debts.

Q: I’m a 32-year-old guy with a really great female friend. We talk on the phone, grab food, etc. She even kept me company in the hospital after I got into a motorcycle accident. I’ve started falling for her, and I want to ask her out, but I’m afraid of losing her friendship.—Conflicted

A: It’s just a bit of a twist on the friendship ring. You’d like to give her a friendship penis. Risk researchers find that decision-making in the face of uncertainty, when we can’t be sure of what the outcome will be, is really hard for us. However, by plugging in all the information we have, positive and negative, we can make an educated prediction about how things are likely to turn out—and whether we can afford the loss if our effort is a bust.

For example, if you have only one friend and if you’re pretty sure you could never make another—say, because you live on one of those tiny desert islands in a New Yorker cartoon—you might decide it’d be too costly for you to risk saying something. And if, on a scale from 1 to 10, your friend is a 9.2 and you’re more on the bridge troll end of the spectrum (in both looks and career prospects), your chances of romance with her might be pretty slim. (Shrek is not a documentary.)

If, after weighing the pros and cons, you decide to ask this woman out, you could simply say, “I’d like to take you on a date. Would you be interested in that?” Yes, it’s possible that doing this would tank your friendship, but chances are, you’d just act a little weird around her for a while. Then again, if you said nothing and constantly agonized over wanting her, you might also end up acting all weird—in ways that would make continuing your friendship impossible. (OK, so she’s not into you, but maybe if you send her yet another love poem written in your own blood . . .)

Bob Minkin has always been a collector. Before he got into music, he collected comics, stamps, things like that. Once he fell for rock and roll as a teenager, he started collecting concerts.

“It was such an experience, and I wanted a souvenir for myself,” says Minkin, who developed a passion for taking photos at live shows in his hometown of Brooklyn.

A certified Deadhead, Minkin first came to the Bay Area to photograph the Grateful Dead at Winterland in 1977. “Around that time, I was friends with the publisher of Relix magazine, based in New York—they covered that scene,” says Minkin. “He started publishing my pictures and paying me. I thought, there’s something to this, and I never stopped.”

For the last 40 years, Minkin­—who would move to Marin with his family in 1990, after a decade of frequent visits to the area—has amassed a collection of live concert photos numbering in the hundreds of thousands. He shares the best of the best from his time in the North Bay in a new book, The Music Never Stopped: Marin County’s Music Scene, that boasts over 500 never-before-seen images, including performance shots and intimate backstage, off-stage and at home photographs of over a hundred local musicians.

Highlights include a rare shot of the Jerry Garcia Band performing in Fairfax in 1981 (pictured) in a set that featured Dead bassist Phil Lesh joining Jerry onstage, a rare treat for JGB fans.

“It blew me away to see Jerry in this low-key setting,” says Minkin. “When he came to New York, it was always a big deal, but here in Marin, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s playing in Fairfax, wanna go?’”

Covering the Marin music scene closely, Minkin says there was a brief lull in the late 2000s, after the original Sweetwater closed in Mill Valley, but since the opening of Terrapin and the new Sweetwater, the local scene is as strong as ever.

Minkin is currently the house photographer for the Sweetwater Music Hall as well as a prominent presence at Terrapin Crossroads and other venues, and he has established himself in the scene and gained access to stars like Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and others featured in the book.

Categorized by city and venue, The Music Never Stopped is a virtual concert road trip for Marin music lovers. “The idea was to honor the musical heritage of Marin, to honor the musicians, and to honor the fans,” Minkin says. “I’m a fan, too.”

Minkin’s book also includes several contributions from musicians like Steve Kimock and Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, a forward from Phil Lesh and an introduction from Pete Sears—all of which add personal insights into the stories behind the shots.

Minkin also gives room in the book for the younger musicians coming up in the scene. “A new generation has picked it up and are moving it forward,” he says. “So truly the music never stopped, and, hopefully, it never will.”

Bob Minkin appears on Friday, Dec. 7, at the Depot Bookstore & Cafe, 87 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley. 7pm. Free. 415.383.2665.

Supposedly there are 35 films about Vincent van Gogh. It’s a tribute to the depth and clearness of Willem Dafoe’s acting that the latest, At Eternity’s Gate, is as affecting as it is.

At Eternity’s Gate is director Julian Schnabel’s best film, giving a small-camera approach to the drama, shot amid the medieval ruins and hills of the South of France. These landscapes are given a little digital toasting to make this fairest place on earth (except for Northern California, of course) look like van Gogh’s paintings, gilding the weeds, purpling the shadows and bringing out the bright orange stripes in the painter’s straw hat to match the accents in his self-portrait.

Dafoe is very pure here. The rawboned face hides nothing, showing lucidity even in the torment of his madness. This film doesn’t poeticize the artist’s insanity, as per the complaints comedian Hannah Gadsby made about the received idea that van Gogh painted because he was mad, instead of despite it.

Schnabel even airs a conspiracy theory of how the artist died. True, he was persecuted. The great-grandparents of the people who charge you to see van Gogh’s house signed a petition to get him out of Arles. But the vortex of the sadness is the abandonment by his friend Paul Gauguin (a calm, unflamboyant Oscar Isaac). Such an unfortunate friendship, between a man who needed love so desperately and a man who never really cared much about that kind of thing.

Schnabel has the good taste to black out the self-mutilation, but in the end, he corners his subject clinically with a pair of interrogations, one by the doctor Felix Rey (Vladimir Consigny), the other by a priest (Mads Mikkelsen). As a longtime fan of Emmanuelle Seigner ever since Bitter Moon, I enjoyed watching her measured friendliness as Mme. Ginoux as she chats with van Gogh about books, before he scares her off with his intensity.

The film could have used a bit less of Tatiana Lisovskaya’s soundtrack—a lot of piano with the hard-pedal leaned on; it clashes with At Eternity’s Gate’s successful attempt to give van Gogh an aura of silence and space.

‘At Eternity’s Gate’ opens Friday, Dec. 7, at the Smith Rafael Film Center.