How Cold Is
Too Cold For You?
The “polar vortex” has a lot of folks in North America dealing with a situation they aren’t used to–unusually cold weather. My Twitter feed is full of people making fun of Texans for their inability to deal with ice and other folks defending them because when you’ve never dealt with ice in your whole life, it can be just a little scary.
The thing about cold weather is that no one but a few contrarians really embrace it. It’s one of those things you just have to accept as being a part of life–like flat tires, pimples and Two and A Half Men reruns. But some of us definitely have to accept it more than others.
I was born, raised and currently live in Edmonton, North America’s northern-most city with a metropolitan-population of one million people. That means it can get really frickin’ cold here when it wants to. And as someone who has chosen to not drive a car, I can tell tales of walking blocks and blocks in waist-high snow to bus stops where the bus is unlikely to actually come anytime on schedule or of losing the feeling in my feet as the bus that’s supposed to arrive every 15 minutes pulls a no show for 45.
As a way to get just a tiny little bit of exercise, I like to walk as often as I can to the nearest supermarket (about a mile away), which can turn into an adventure at the kind of temperatures where celsius and fahrenheit cease to be different. It’s a strange sensation walking into a mall and feeling the ice crystals that accumulated in your facial hair begin to melt and drip down your face. Yet, I don’t let it deter me. Ultimately cold is something that can be pretty easily dealt with–just put on more clothes. It isn’t fun, but neither is sweating your ballsack off in a fourth-floor apartment that doesn’t have air-conditioning. There are only so many ice-cold showers you can take before you have to go outside and become a human sprinkler system.
So, my tolerance for cold is pretty high. I know I couldn’t handle arctic conditions, but I also know that whenever I see someone on my TL complain about 50 degree weather, I risk suffering from severe eye-roll strain.
Are you similarly blasé about the cold or is your hatred of it much more acute than my own?
On one hand, I am a Californian sissy: I do think anything below like 60 is kinda chilly, and under 40 is cold. The only people who are bigger sissies in this regard than Northern Californians, are Southern Californians. And if you have a Celtic (read: pale) complexion like I do, you burn if the sun looks at you funny: there’s no winning. On the other, as you said, when it’s cold, yeah it sucks but you can bundle up and get on with your life. When it’s really hot, you can only spend so many hours a day huddled… Read more »
I’m marginally suicidal at this point. I’m not depressed. I’m not quite stir-crazy or with cabin fever yet. But it’s so insanely cold in MN that I have briefly contemplated suicide. In a casual way… Like in an LL Bean way, like if you had to imagine someone in a cable-knit sweater and French sailor boat-neck shirt giving up… We started getting frigidly abnormally cold two days after Thanksgiving, so we’re two months into what I consider absolute “hell has frozen over.” Of course, cold is relative. And if we’d always had these types of winters, I would be bitching… Read more »