I Can't Stand The Cold; Where's The Kitchen?

I understand there is much I don't understand, but the main mystery I'm shaking my head at today is why, on a thirty-five degree, barely breezy (not even windy) day such as today, I am so cold when in two months an identical day like today will make me ready to dig out some shorts and start screaming "Play ball!" I was freezing today and it's not even at the freezing mark. I can't be any colder than this, I kept telling myself, trying not to think of the fact that in a couple weeks it will probably be at least twenty degrees colder, possibly for weeks on end. I know, I know, that everything is relative and we all adapt, and it's not as if I haven't survived a couple scores of winters, but my God am I cold today, and to think that it will be so much colder so soon doesn't make any sense. It can't be colder.

Now I'm on record as hating the heat, and I believe I'm on record as saying I'd rather be cold than hot, because the sensation of being warmed up is better than that of being cooled off, but still, heat seems to be a little more lenient than cold. 95 is horrendous (and about as bad as it gets around here--plus some killer humidity), but 75 is Heaven. Why then, when minus 5 is about as bad as we get here (plus some killer wind chill) is 15 so awful, let alone how horrible 35 was today? As awful as heat is, at least its window is pretty small (for my rather timid tastes, it's too hot at 86). But 40 or so degrees of cold cold cold? Seems patently unfair, in a kind of 1% wealth vs. 99% of the rest of us kind of way. Plus, there's hot and heat, an adjective and a noun, whereas there's only cold, both adjective and noun. Cold, the ultimate four-letter word, sums it all up, no spin-offs necessary. Those wise ancestral wordsmiths knew when they had hit perfection on the first swing--cold, nothing more needs to be said.

Now I don't want to launch into a litany of cold laments (there are four more months of blog posts to do that), though that awful getting into and starting a cold car is about the worst, but I will say how psychological it all gets: Yesterday, when I was complaining about all the rain we've been having, but then added, as a predictable end to a predictable conversation about the weather, "but at least it isn't snowing," my co-worker said, in all innocence, and maybe just trying to defend Mother Nature a bit, "Well, it's been a pretty moderate winter so far." Depressed we both were, a minute or two later, when it dawned on me and I reminded her that technically winter doesn't start for another couple weeks. You see what the cold does to our already fragile minds? Fittingly, a man named Blaze said it best: