Circumstances Be Damned
On gaining a touch more autonomy over my state of mind.
The only thing anyone can talk about right now is how absolutely, face-meltingly cold it is in New York right now. The entire North Eastern part of the country is seeing record-breaking temperatures, the type that forces the evidence of last week’s snow storm to remain stacked in dog-pissed covered gray piles along the sidewalks for much longer than is typical. Will I ever be able to open my car door (which is currently buried up to the windows in dirty snow sludge) again? Only if I can finally find a strapping tween kid to dig me out in exchange for some cold hard cash.
So, imagine my shock and delight when I boarded a plane for a 36-hour work trip to LA last week, and exited LAX to balmy, 70-degree weather like it was no big deal. Oh yeah, I thought, not everyone is dealing with arctic tundra-level weather. I, along with my friends and neighbors, have been so entrenched in the ice box that is NYC, it feels incomprehensible to think that you can just… hop on a plane and escape for a little while. My heart, my mind, and my eczema patches were all very grateful.
It reminded me just how heads-down we tend to get this time of year, when the winter doldrums are in full effect. January feels like it’s 2957397 days long, and now we’re staring down the barrel of February, which, despite being (allegedly) the shortest month of the year, still feels like a exercise in survival. And frankly, after enjoying a brief, but glorious, respite from the cold, and realizing that all my fellow New Yorkers and I could not stop talking about it (and our subsequent seasonal depression) during the entire trip, I realized just how annoying it all was.
