05 January 2003

It's the first official day of school, at least for winter quarter, and I'm still in my pajamas. This has an interesting story behind it, but first, let me talk a bit about the pajamas...

The pajamas include:

*One red sweatshirt, which Mrs. Jensen gave me for Christmas (it should be noted that I hate wearing bright colors most of the time, but I'm a sucker for new sweatshirts)
* One pair of red sweatpants (also new)
* Very large, very warm socks
* Slippers (also bright red and hideously ugly, but they're soft and mushy and warm)
* The warmest bathrobe in the world (bright purple, but, again, it's warm)

Okay, so, this is stupid. This is OLYMPIA, for gahd's sake! What the fuck am I wearing all of this for? I wore all of it to bed, too, under no fewer than FOUR heavy blankets.

Well, for one, it's currently EIGHTEEN FUCKING DEGREES OUTSIDE.

For another, it's EIGHTEEN FUCKING DEGREES OUT...

Okay, wait... let me back up a second... In case you missed it the first time, THIS IS OLYMPIA. It hasn't been this cold since I moved here two years ago. Last night, the temperature dropped to ten; the record is from 1959, which was nine. That's the coldest it has EVER been in this town, ever, at least in recorded history. So what the hell? What's up with this shit?

It started snowing just before New Year's. Then it melted. Then it snowed again. And again. And then, instead of melting, the temperature decided to spontaneously drop twenty degrees, so that the entirety of the city is frozen. This isn't especially significant, except that THIS IS OLYMPIA, and it doesn't do this here.

Last year, there was no snow. Not one itty-bitty flake. I swear this. I have to swear it because, if I hadn't been here, I wouldn't have believed it myself. How cool is it that there's a place in the United States that neither gets blistering heat and humidity, nor snow? Here, snow stays where it's supposed to be: at the top of Mount Rainier.

Fine by me. I moved here to get away from snow.

A short anecdote: when I moved here, via Greyhound, my bus passed through Buffalo, New York. Buffalo had, two days earlier, surpassed the world record for snowfall: seven feet in two days. Think of the tallest man you know. Now imagine him under snow. That's what had fallen on Buffalo, in the course of two days. But you know, people in Buffalo just don't give a shit. They're used to it. When national news flew in to interview residents, the residents looked bewildered:

"So, sir? What do you think about all the snow?"
[The man looks at the lady with the microphone as though she's from another planet...]
"Sir? I guess this means a lot of hot cocoa and shoveling for you and your family!"
"Uh... yeah? What are you doing in my yard?"

When my bus passed through, the roads of Buffalo were perfectly clean. Not a flake on them. Out the side windows, I could see these unbelievable mounds of snow, nearly higher than the windows of the bus.

Later in the trip, the bus passed through Fargo, North Dakota, which was as cold as the name sounds. Then, Butte, Montana. Butte had temperatures in the single digits, and bus passengers who got out to smoke in Butte huddled together to keep warm.

...and on January 6th, my wonderful bus pulled into the Seattle station (easily the shittiest bus station I have seen in this entire nation). And it was fifty degrees. And a soft rain was falling. I took off my coat. And my sweatshirt. And my t'shirt. I danced around in a tank top on the sidewalk of Denny Way, grinning at people and celebrating the absolute blessing of fifty-degree weather in January.

That was when I was convinced: I was staying. Fuck this seven feet of snow and below-zero wind chill bullshit! I want tank top weather, year-round!!!

Right. So, why is it doing this shit now?

I'm not in school because, when it snowed, the roads weren't plowed. The snow just sat there and melted, and then it turned into ice. And now, the roads haven't been sanded to melt the ice.

Why, you ask, were the roads left unplowed? Why aren't they sanded?

Because! Olympia does not own a plow. Or a sanding truck.

And why is that?

BECAUSE IT DOESN'T DO THIS IN OLYMPIA!!!

* * * * * * * * * * *

Snow is good for some things. I don't hate it all the time.

Snow reminds me of Norman. I don't know why, since I pretty much grew up in an igloo on top of a hill. When Norman and I lived together, it was downtown in the slush. I guess, though, the igloo didn't require much time outside. There, I got to rely on cars, and I didn't have to go to work or buy groceries. Or cigarettes. Norman and I, to my memory, did not bicker over who would go to buy cigarettes, but we probably should have. The gas station was practically next door, but it meant donning a heavy coat, two pairs of socks, heavy boots, and something to wear on one's head. (Norman was in favor of winding handy articles of clothing around his head, which, oddly enough, I've started to pick up here in the Northwest.) Then we'd trudge outside, whichever one of us had elected to go. We'd kick at six inches or so of powder on the porch steps, and we'd slide all the way down to the gas station. It's not that far -- practically next-door -- until you're falling on your ass, which has frozen off.

It was best to just stay in.

On one such afternoon, I looked up from my book and asked, "does it do this in Seattle a lot?"

Norman said it didn't do this in Seattle at all.

I refused to believe it. In Binghamton, snow falls as early as Hallowe'en, and as late as Memorial Day. That's seven months of snow, which is not atypical. I said: "play me a song that sounds like Seattle." So, Norman put a CD in; a band called Orbital. I stared out the window. But the song sounded like snowflakes to me, falling dizzily all over the place. If someone were to ask me to play a song that sounds like Binghamton, I'd play that one. No snow is incomprehensible. No freezing is too.

Maybe it followed me here; it finally caught up. It's snowed six times this year already.

I'm not prepared for a life indoors here. The gas station here is maybe a half-mile away, and the nearest grocery store is at least a mile, probably more like two or three. My work and my school are about 20 miles away, and the roads are too icy for Jake's truck, as well as for busses. Besides, stupid me, I gave all my warm clothes away shortly after arriving in Seattle to fifty-degree temperatures.

I guess, though, I have music and I have books.

A day or two ago, I sat next to the second-floor window of the college's library building, and read for a couple of hours. There's something perfect about flopping yourself on a couch, trying to figure out what the fuck "deontology" is, trying to remember the definition of "epistomology," and how it differs from "ontology," and what "ontology" has to do, if anything, with "deontology" -- and glancing, every so often, out the window, at dizzy snowflakes, just falling silently and ceaselessly.

It makes everything so laughable, yet so disastrously so. When the end of the world happens, you know there will be that one shit who complains endlessly about not having any orange marmalade for his morning toast, nevermind the fact that his entire planet has been nuked. You know? I consider snow like a sort of end to the world. I like sitting in the window and watching the flakes; it makes me feel like cities have toppled all around me, and I'm the only one left in the world, me and my damned pre-Socratics. Only, they're not really left, either: just books about them. I find this somehow laughable.

I think it's the silence. I don't know why snow makes everything so quiet, but it does. When the world ends, it won't be with a bang, or a whimper. It'll just be quiet, like snowfall. The only other time I ever heard such silence was on September 11th, 2001.

It shouldn't be doing this in Olympia.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Really, though, there's another fun part about snow, and cold, and that's Jake.

Jake mock-kicks me sometimes when I call him a Southern boy, but on the world-map on our wall, the red pins (his) are all over the South, and the green (mine), are much more North. Jake has always been too close to the Equator (or the Pacific Ocean, like, you know, here...) to see much snow or cold. He has never been sledding, or skiing. He thought a "snowdrift" was when you're driving in snow, and your car sort of drifts off the road. He has never leaped off a twelve-foot high balcony railing into a three-foot snowbank. I can almost guarantee he's never owned snowpants, or snowboots. Maybe he's never seen a plow. Probably he has no conception of the unpleasant associations I have of them (i.e., if the plows are out working in the rural areas, there will be school in the morning).

Of course, I can't say as I blame him, and in fact I envy that sort of ignorance. I suspect I would have a much less cynical perspective on life if I had grown up someplace warm.

But you know, if I have to learn the meaning of "dat-gum yahoo" (there is no northern translation of this; one must understand it on an intuitive level) to understand the Jensen family, they've got to learn to walk to the mailbox on the icy driveway to understand me.

I'm having fun watching the learning process.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I have to go to the bathroom now. Be warm.

~Helena*