And The cold continues here. It's currently 38 degrees (feels like 29), and S and I are like, Finally! A reprieve from the bitter cold! The snow is slowly melting, but a fresh coat is in the forecast for later this afternoon, and if it comes, it will stick around a while, as tomorrow we are supposedly getting hit with an "arctic blast." It'll be lows in the single digits, highs in the low 20s for a few days. It won't be comfortable, but it is perfectly timed. It's a holiday, so we can stay inside, and it's Inauguration Day. All the "festivities" (I use quotes because for the vast majority of DC residents the mood will be much more somber -- or perhaps absurdist -- than festive) will be moved inside, which is great, because it means I won't have to look at it. Actually, I wouldn't have to look at it, anyway, because we're far enough north that downtown often feels like an entirely different city. But, nevertheless, I like the thought of MAGA not overtaking our National Mall and neighboring streets like it did before. Actually, If I recall correctly, it poured rain on Inauguration Day eight years ago, so maybe God is trying to tell us something. Although, four years ago, Biden didn't even have a proper inauguration, due to that whole pandemic thing. So, I think God's message is that he wants Obama back -- don't we all?
Another reason I don't mind the cold right now (or so I'm telling myself) is that it's supposed to be cold right now. It's winter in DC. It gets cold here. I'm simultaneously dismayed by and spoiled by climate change. I hate the fact that we frequently have temperatures here in the high-60s in early December, but I love being able to go for a walk then through the trails of Rock Creek without my face turning bright red and my toes going numb. And I've gotten used to it. So, now when I'm resentful that my weather app basically just has a middle finger emoji on it all the time, I have to remind myself It's good that it's cold here! It means we haven't completely cooked the earth... yet. (If, by some chance, you are reading this in LA right now, I completely understand how you might have a different take.)
Being out in this weather for a few hours yesterday at Lil' S2's flag football game got me remembering times in my life when I was really cold, and there are two in particular that came to mind. The first happened in 1999. The evening before spring trimester at Western Washington University, the city of Bellingham got hit with a fluke storm, blanketing the city with a horrendous wintery mix. It wasn't quite cold enough to snow, but it was too cold to rain, so we woke up to like a foot of Slurpee slush. At the time, I only had one pair of shoes because I saved money by maintaining a spartan lifestyle. They were running shoes, which I had Scotchgarded to make them practical in the rain. It worked quite well for the usual mist and drizzle of the shores of Puget Sound, but it completely failed for wading through an ankle-deep Icee. Just walking across campus from the bus stop to my first class completely drenched my feet with ice-cold wetness, and they didn't warm up the entire day. By the time I got home, many hours later, and had a chance to take off my shoes and socks, my feet were bright purple and completely numb.
That night I slept with my space heater on, which I didn't normally do (spartan lifestyle, remember), placing it on a box near the foot of my bed, so that it would be directly on my feet the entire night. Even when I woke up the next morning my feet still felt kinda cold, so I packed a bunch of extra pairs of thick socks to change into throughout the day, and eventually they felt normal again. Thinking back on this, I wonder if I was closer to serious repercussions than I realized at the time. You think of frostbite as something that happens to mountain climbers or cross-country skiers who get lost in the words (at least that's how I think of it), but there are stories of people losing fingers and toes just sitting in the stands at a sporting event. That's the crazy thing about being young: You do so main stupid things without even realizing how stupid they are, and then you think back on it like, How did I not cause myself serious bodily harm? Somehow you survive it -- well, most of us do, anyway.
The second time I remember being unbearably cold came during a trip to New York with my friend DK and his friend A (who became my friend for the trip also). It was probably the most uncomfortable weekend I've ever experienced. It was December of 2002. I was in the middle of my one year of grad school at The George Washington University in DC. DK and A had drove from Atlanta to visit, and then we took the bus to NYC. We stayed with one of A's friends in her tiny, shared apartment in Queens. All three of us slept on the wooden floor of this girl's room, while she slept on the bed (futon). It was that type of we're-all-broke-in-an-expensive-city trip. She also had a cat that crawled on and meowed at us all night. We joked that at no point throughout either of our two nights there were all three of us asleep at the same time. It was funny because it was true.
Needless to say, we didn't want to spend a lot of time hanging out there, so we would leave in the early morning and not come back until the late evening. New York is a great city for that, but it's a much less great city for that if: a) you have little money to spend; b) it's five degrees outside. We had to walk a lot, and for some reason the only pants I had were these thin hiking pants (the kind that can unzip into shorts), and the cold just cut through them like Aaron Donald through the Bengals' offensive line in Super LVI.* Other than doing an ice bath plunge at a spa in Iceland, it was the coldest I've even been. We would plan out our trip from tourist site A to tourist site B, and then we would inevitably stop in a dive bar along the way, because we couldn't stand the cold and needed to take a few minutes to warm up with some rail whiskey. (This is a tell we were all in our twenties. These days it would be a coffee at a cafe. Also, there would surely be warmer pants, a lot more Lyfts, and a hotel room.)
*Can you tell I've been watching the NFL playoffs? The Washington Commanders pulled off a huge upset last night, beating the one-seed Lions, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I'm conditioned to always root against the Washington football team; on the other, Dan Snyder is gone, and how glorious would it be to have the Commanders win the Super Bowl the year after he sells the team?
The big difference between my cold NYC experience and my cold campus experience, however, is that I didn't almost get frostbite in NYC (as cold as it was, no part of me was ever submerged in ice slush), and I actually remember it very fondly. In fact, the worst part came on the bus ride back when I made the ill-fated decision to sit right by the heater. It was too hot, and I had to do a bunch of complex analysis homework that was due the next morning. The combination of the direct heat, a weekend of whiskeys and little sleep, and reading a textbook, solving integrals while in a moving (bumpy) vehicle gave me motion sickness that was worse than the cold. Still, it didn't ruin the overall trip, and it's something DK and I still reminisce about from time-to-time whenever we see each other.
Alright, I think I've gone sufficiently far down Memory Lane today. Until next time...
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