Tag Archives: weather

I don’t know if I’m going to make it

It’s been raining here for the past few days. I don’t know, maybe it hasn’t been that long, but it feels like I haven’t seen the sun in forever. This doesn’t happen that often, and so it’s really starting to mess with my head. I can think back, every once in a while we’ll get a stretch of like a week or a week and a half where it’s nothing but clouds and rain and gloom. And I don’t know how people in Seattle or Ireland cope, because, like I said, it’s only been maybe three days, but I’m feeling like I’m ready to give up.

I can’t get up in the morning. I never really want to get up in the morning, but most days I’ll just do it, I’ll hear the alarm clock going off, I’ll roll over, and I’ll get out of bed. But the past couple of days, it’s like I don’t even have any recollection of having been woken up. And my alarms are all set. So it’s like, I must be getting up while I’m still asleep, taking one look out the window, making a mental note of the pouring rain, and then turning the alarm off and going back to sleep for another two or three hours.

And then I get up and I’m all groggy, which makes the day not that productive. And then my dog doesn’t want to go for a walk. I can never get him to really do what he needs to do when it’s raining out. Usually I get up in the morning and he’s sitting at the foot of the stairs, his tail wagging so fast that it’s making a really loud thwap thwap against the wall.

But when it’s raining, he doesn’t even want to get off the couch. He curls up into this ball, and I have to drag him by the collar to the front door so I can put his leash on. I open the door and he fights it the whole time. I want to be like, come on man, I don’t want to go for a walk out in the rain either. But you have to do your business. That’s how this works. You can only hold it in for so long.

We’re outside and he’s just not interested in taking care of any business. He has his tail in between his legs and he’s constantly pulling his chain, trying futilely to will himself back to the house. And when we finally get back, after him not having done anything, he runs inside and shakes off. His stomach probably hurts so he won’t eat any breakfast.

And it’s the same for me. I’ve been out of milk and breakfast stuff for a whole week now. And every day I say to myself, nah, I don’t feel like going outside again. I’ll just wait until tomorrow, until this rain clears. But it just keeps raining. And the more I put off getting food, the more lethargic I’m becoming, making it even less likely that I’ll ever actually walk the three or four blocks to the grocery store.

It’s got to break soon, we need this to stop. My sleep schedule is becoming irreparably damaged. I guess I shouldn’t complain. Three or four days of rain isn’t really a big deal, especially with all of the droughts I keep hearing about out west. So I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.

Still, my feet have been wet for almost a week now. The basement is starting to get that wet smell. I don’t know how much longer I can take. I need to buy like a heat lamp or something, or a tanning bed. I think I’m getting vitamin D deficiency. I think that when the sun finally comes back, I’m going to be blinded, like my eyes and my skin have already adapted to a bleak, sunless future. I just … I don’t know if I’m going to make it.

Talking about the weather

Every time I find myself in a discussion about the weather, it’s not even like two sentences back and forth when this awareness clicks in my head. Shit, I think, I can’t believe I’m talking about the weather again. And chances are, I’m the one that started the conversation. It’s like, when I’m presented with another human being, there’s something inside of me that does whatever it can to avoid even a quarter of a second from slipping by without a steady stream of words coming out of my mouth.

And so I don’t even realize it, I’m just like, “Wow, can you believe how cold it is outside?” It’s such a cheap trick, because once the topic of weather is introduced, it’s a guaranteed minute and a half to two minutes of pure automatic banter. You don’t have to worry about any awkward pauses or having to think of anything especially clever to say.

No, you make a comment about the weather. Then you wait for whoever you’re talking with to respond, usually it’s something like, “I know, right?” All right you’re both on the same page, you’re both amazed that it’s actually this cold out, even though it’s February. “But the snow! I think we’re getting more snow next week!”

That was me, adding another layer to the veneer of dialogue. I don’t even know where I got that from. I probably just made it up. That’s one thing that I’ve become painfully aware of. Considering all of the nonsense weather related chit-chats I’ve been guilty of initiating, you’d think I’d at least have a dedicated tab in my browser open to some sort of a weather web site, if not several weather related smartphone apps.

But there’s nothing. I never check the weather. You don’t need to. First of all, most of the forecasts are very loose predictions. Anybody remember those three-to-thirty inches of snow we were supposed to get last week? Sure, the science is there to give a prediction of what the weather might look like ten, seven, five days from now, but unless it’s a three-day forecast, it’s probably not going to come true.

Then we finally get to that three-day window, and say something of interest is actually on its way to our area, that’s when everybody starts talking about it. My mom will tell me about snow, or I’ll be in line at CVS and I’ll see everybody in the store buying their weight in rock salt. Again, at this point I could flip open my phone and see what’s what, but why bother? It’s obvious that everybody else has done most of the research on my behalf.

It’s the weather, it just happens. Sometimes it’s raining, most of the time it’s not raining. Unless you live in Seattle, or Ireland, but I don’t, so I don’t even know where my umbrella is unless it’s actually pouring outside and I have to take my dog for a walk.

So you’d think that, considering my awareness of how ridiculous it is to talk about the weather, I wouldn’t be that guy that’s always pulling meteorological half-truths out of his ass. I don’t know why I do it. I’m looking back at my post history here on this blog, and it’s disgusting, at least twice a month I write something about how hot the summer is or how cold the winter is. It’s like I can’t even stand the idea of pause in between blog posts, so I just start babbling away about the temperature, precipitation, or lack thereof.

I’m the guy that makes fun of anybody that dares to ask me, “Cold enough for ya?” on a really cold day, but then I go ahead and ask everybody that I meet for the rest of the season, “Hey, cold enough for ya? Huh? It’s winter. It’s wintertime. It’s cold.” And what if it wasn’t cold? What if this winter were a really warm one?

“Oh man!” I’d talk and babble, “You call this a winter? It’s so warm out! I wish it were colder. I really like snow! I heard something that we’re supposed to get a blizzard in three weeks. Maybe. I think there’s like a one percent chance. I’d better get some rock salt. Do you have enough rock salt? You better get to CVS, I think they’re going to sell out. There’s never enough rock salt. Is the heat on in here? I’m freezing.”

Three showers, three pairs of jeans

I’m having one of those days where I can’t get comfortable, like I got dressed in the morning, but my jeans, I don’t know how to explain it, they just felt greasy, and I’m not a dirty guy, I wash my clothes somewhat regularly. Shirts, totally, I only wear them once, and jeans, even though I get multiple days in between each wash, I’m not one of those people that goes a whole season without washing. I’d say once a week, two weeks, tops. But still, these were like especially grimy, I don’t know, so I took them off and put on a clean pair.

But I still didn’t feel right, I tried ignoring it, but an hour, two hours in, I figured, all right, you know what? I can’t let this go, for whatever reason today I just can’t get comfortable in my pants, I took those pants off, I hopped in the shower, even though I had just taken a shower, I needed a clean start, another fresh start to the day, even though it was coming up on lunchtime.

And this shower, I usually don’t take two showers so close to each other, but it was so comfortable, maybe it’s because the seasons have recently changed, we’re getting our first few really crisp days of the season, like not cold enough to warrant a coat or anything like that, but definitely a sweatshirt. Heat? I don’t know, I don’t know if the heating has kicked in yet. Although, now that I mention it, I think I was supposed to get the furnace serviced. I think.

I was thinking all of that in the shower, and it just felt so good, like a sauna, I lost track of time, when I got out, my skin was raw, and when I found a third pair of jeans, these ones absolutely clean, they just chafed against my legs, it was really itchy, a violent, persistent itch that, not even five seconds after I stopped itching it, it would start up again, I just kept sitting there and squirming.

So, and I never do this, because I’m just not in the habit of doing it, but I got undressed and I started applying my wife’s moisturizing lotion, like a lot of it, by the pumpful, this stuff comes in these giant, I’m talking big dispensers, like you’re totally supposed to use a lot of it each time, and it felt great, finally the itching subsided a little bit, cool relief against my over-washed skin. I thought to myself, I don’t know why I don’t use this stuff more often. I guess, yeah, there’s a little bit of a stigma, like it’s a girly thing, a daily moisturizer. But so what? What am I that bound by ridiculous gender distinctions, that I can’t use a product that’s clearly doing something right here?

But then I got dressed, I put on my clothes and everything felt grimy again. Was it the lotion? Because, yeah, I’d expected there to be some lotion residue, but this, I couldn’t imagine it had been this bad before. I tried to put it out of my head, that whatever slimy sort of sensation I was feeling under my jeans, whatever, it was a hundred percent clean, just clean skin and fresh moisturizer.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for more than five minutes or so. But what can I do, I mean, a third shower is out of the question, that would be such a short-term fix, because I can’t handle any more hot water, not today, I’ve got to let my skin rest, replenish some of those natural oils or whatever. But a third shower, I probably should have thought out my day a little better. I wanted to go running, but, you know, I’d need to take a shower after, so I probably shouldn’t.

So I don’t know, I think I’m just going to stay in for the rest of the day, I could probably get away with not doing anything, in which case, I guess I could just take a really quick third shower, I’ll change right into my pajamas after. Do you think this is going to count as a sick day or a personal day? Because, it’s definitely something physical, right? Or am I worrying about it too much, in which case it would be mental? If I get a doctor’s note, am I going to have to go to a dermatologist? Do I need a referral from my primary care physician? Shit, do I have to get dressed again? I can’t get a grip on the day, I’m just, I can’t get my shit figured out.

I always get anxiety when I think about summer being over

Summer went by way too fast. It always does. This is what summer feels like, like it’s over, like it never really had a chance to get going. When I’m freezing my ass off in February or early March, I imagine what May is going to feel like, those first full days of warm weather. And then I blink and it’s late August, it’s September, it’s right now.

I was standing around talking to someone about the weather, about the change of seasons. Lately I’ve been seeing all of the school buses out during midday, I guess doing their practice runs or whatever they do to ensure a smooth first day of classes. And even though I don’t go to school anymore, I still have those sense memories, like something is ending and something else is right around the corner.

“I can’t believe summer’s over already,” I say it and I’m already tired of saying it. It’s unoriginal. There’s nothing that I’m adding to any conversation. It’s kind of like I’m just throwing these words at people, hoping that someone might make something with them that I can’t. Before I even give the other person a chance to respond, I’m already spitting out more, “But I love the fall. I just love the fall. Yep. Fall. What a great season.”

This one guy said to me, “Yeah, I guess fall’s OK. But I always have such anxiety about the summer actually being over.” And that was already better articulated than anything I could have hoped to have said. I keep having to remind myself that we still nice weather, summer weather, and yet I’m already writing it off as if it doesn’t exist. I don’t want to see the summer go, so I pretend like it’s already gone, like what I’m actually wanting is to be somewhere else.

But I heard this other person tell me about his reservations, and it cut through whatever it was that I was telling myself to make me feel better about the passing of time, the changing of the seasons, the inevitable drop in temperature followed by holidays followed by a long winter followed by, what, another August?

And while, yes, there is something real to the seasons, a lot of what we’ve constructed as these four periods of equal time is artificial, just another way that we try with varying degrees of success to force the natural world to fit into our preconceived notions of how things should be. Maybe it’ll be hot until November. It’s not totally out of the question to have a really warm stretch of weather lasting all the way until the beginning of winter.

I can’t talk about the weather anymore. But I do have a definite anxiety about the end of summer. Once it’s fall, once I have my feet firmly planted in September, October, or November, I know that I’ll be OK. With summer in the rearview mirror, I’ll be free to really enjoy the colder weather, and when that weather gets to be too much, once that winter chill finally works its way deep into my bones, I’ll be able to start longing for the warmer temperatures of spring.

But whenever I think about the summer, whenever I try to take stock of my existence in any of these seasons, it’s never June or July, it’s always late August. The good months fly by without so much as a blip on my consciousness, but the final weeks stretch out forever, all characterized by that anxiety, the stress of losing something that’s not really there in the first place. Because what is an ideal summer day? Is it really just the temperature or my own physical comfort? Or am I longing for something else, being together with friends and family, maybe just slowing down a good moment for a while, delaying the inevitable end. In constantly skipping ahead, I’m losing track of what I’m enjoying right now. I’ve got to stop prematurely mourning what I haven’t yet lost.