Overcast tease

[pseydtonne]

On Thursday and Friday I awakened to an overcast, gloomy sky. If I were still in Boston, I would have assume it was going to rain soon. I'd feel the rain in my psyche and get ready to hate the lack of sun.

However in Los Angeles, this only means there was leftover humidity that the sun would dry out by noon. We've had some version of the same thing most mornings of the five weeks I've been here, but the last couple had been the most... promising.

I want it to rain. I want to see the soot on the ground. I want to hear the accidents during those first twenty minutes of oily residue on the roads. I want a cataclysm because it's something different.

Instead the sky is merely teasing me. "You want rain, like it'll cure you? Fool."

Friday was the weirdest day so far. The sky neither cleared up nor rained, staying the same level of overcast all day. Then Saturday and Sunday were lovely.

I'm brewing a theory about Angelinos and their wussiness about temperature. (I also think it should be "Angelinoi", as if the word were Greek.) it's not humid, so a hot day isn't as hot and most days are in the 70s.

We leave our windows open for days on end, until the groundskeepers show up and spray water wantonly (which I've now learned that happens on Mondays). It's slightly cooler but not cold at night. You can get away with wearing bed clothes all day, outside and in. Every apartment becomes a Florida room.

Thus Angeloids lose any sense of body temperature perspective. A change of thirty degrees is radical instead of expected. The body feels cold over minor drops.

People talk a lot about the weather here. They're hoping it'll hear them and give them something different.

Comments

[bluepapercup]

Sometime in November or early December, you'll feel a change in the air. It will smell different, look different. The wind will have a different note in it. Sometime in the month after that, it will rain. By that point, you'll be longing for it so badly that when it first rains all you'll be capable of feeling is tearful joy.

East coasters do get soft after about half a decade here. When I first moved to northern California I marveled that people wore winter coats when it was 45 degrees out. Now after six years I find myself putting on sweaters and a hat when it's 60 degrees. I still can handle the cold fine when I go back east, but my relative temperature sense when I'm here is different now.

[lightcastle.livejournal.com]

But honestly, that level of adaptiveness doesn't even take long. Come to Montreal in April and October. Roughly the same temperature, but in April people are dressed as if it is 5 degrees hotter, because in one direction we're going from warm to cold, and the other from cold to warm.