Suck it Up

So here's the deal in these parts, as of today, Saturday, 2/3/07, and extending through some time on Monday:

It's butt-assed cold.



Now, being an expatriated Californian, "cold" used to mean something entirely different. It meant, oh, 50 degrees, a bit cloudy, and maybe a few gusts of wind to blow a little pollen around so my sinuses would get allergically clogged. And I thought that was the depths of sheer misery.

Oh, how wrong I was. So very, very wrong.

Feeling a need for "change," (perhaps this is more a personality flaw, as I am seeing it now--or at least this weekend--rather than a healthy exploration of boundaries and a need for growth and psychic expansion and coming into myself and all that shit), I willingly--and, if I remember correctly, completely CONSCIOUSLY, because there were no drugs involved, no downing of copious amounts of alcohol, no gun-to-the-temple type of coercion around this decision, nothing of the sort--picked up and left the "temperate" Pacific Northwest where I had previously been living (ah, that word is right up there with "tropical" in my mind!) for the FREEZING Midwest.



My mother is a permanently, happily, fixedly expatriated Chicagoan, living in California (since her teens), and when she got wind of my plan to escape to the nation's midsection, she was, frankly, agog.

"You've never felt a winter like THAT," she assured me. "I remember the wind from Lake Michigan. It was bitterly cold. You've never really experienced weather like that before."

Now, I am known for stubbornness and, since she is a parent, I, of course, thought she was merely raining on my parade and decided she was merely embellishing things in a last-ditch attempt to keep me from moving so far away, so naturally I ignored her warning and split. I mean, millions of people live here and stay here and work here and gobble hot dish here. Even other expatriated Californians. How bad could it be?

"Okay," she'd say, one eyebrow arched skeptically, her voice rising markedly on the second syllable to denote my utter foolishness, "but I think you'll be sorry."



Of course, on THIS end of things, most of the natives I encounter--when I begin to bitch and moan about the weather--fold their arms and turn away from me ever so slightly, cheeks tinged pink with the flush of some flavor of Scandinavian heritage and, eyes squinting suspiciously at this sputtering, fuming West Coast Creature-Like Thing in front them, ask, "How long have you been here?" When I reply, "Five years," they throw up their arms and smirk and say, "Oh, well. WEEELLLL. YOU haven't experienced a 'REAL' winter at ALL. This is nothing."

Nothing? I'd say the mercury plummeting to below zero is not "nothing." It's past "nothing," as a matter of fact, slipping right down there into the negative digits.

So I've discovered it's best to simply shut up about it, because there is no mercy here among the natives when it comes to winter weather.

I somewhat recently heard the phrase, "Suck it up, candy-ass," (however NOT directed at me) and that's pretty much the inference when I begin to groan. So I am doing the only thing I can, faced with three days of howlingly freezing winter weather: I am attempting to put a positive spin on things. I'm making pancakes. I'm drinking a strong, dark mug of Peet's (probably the West Coast's finest, dark coffee); I'm sitting in my flannel robe; I'm going to read, watch my netflix DVD, and tap around on the laptop. And I'm telling myself this whole thing, the sound of the wind occasionally throwing a burst of ice against my window, the plummeted mercury, the flannel-wearing, is "cozy."



And I am trying--trying very hard--to suck it up.