Thursday, June 26, 2014

Hotter for others

I was very hot again today. I don't believe it even made it to 85 and yet I was not alone in my suffering. I heard several other of my ice bucket colleagues complain about the heat. Wary of how much I complain I devised some secret rules for how much complaining is allowable.  It's not just how much one doesn't complain during the winter that allows for summer complaining, it's a balance of not complaining when others are complaining versus complaining when others are extolling the weather. I, for instance, was very non complainy about the weather this past intense Winter, and lots of people around me complained. This earned me a lot of complaining credit, but, as you may be able to tell from my bitter posts about the 82 degree weather just a few days into summer, I am recklessly burning through my complaining stockpile.

All of this has made me more aware of how other people feel about the weather here, perhaps even in a way I haven't much noticed before. Having become, at least for the past year or so, a person for whom there is no level of cold that actually makes me unhappy, and for whom 78 starts to enter dangerous territory,  I have sussed out the not insignificant band of co-workers and people about town who feel the same way. I have noted the people I walked with out into the dark bitter winter nights who inhaled deeply, in a way that said "Refreshing! Bracing! Invigorating!"  And too I have seen who comes inside from these 83 degrees and sunny days and says "Echh! It's hot out there!"  I take a kind of comfort in these people. I am not a freak, I am merely Eskimo leaning.

And I have been so absorbed in my strange new temperature range, my expanded cold-heartiness and perhaps slightly reduced tolerance for heat, that I have not, until now, noticed that, up here in Minnesota I am by no means at the extreme. Just the other day we had a child over for dinner at my house, and while we were getting ready for ice cream a brief discussion about the weather and Summer came up.  The kid said emphatically "Anything over 50 degrees is too hot for me." 

What a statement! What a kid! Get that kid a dog sled. Stop global warming now!

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