Accidental Ambivalence

Why I Hate Autumn

Autumn is my least favorite season. Everyone fawns over the so-called pretty colors and crisp air, but I genuinely couldn’t care less. Besides, I live in Missouri—most of the leaves turn brown. Not only are the colors lacking in my part of the country, I’m missing the whole crisp air thing too. It rains in autumn where I am, and, frankly, that sucks.

I love rain when I’m curled up inside in comfy clothes with a cup of coffee and a good book, or when I’m tucked away in my bed, lulled to sleep by the sound of raindrops against my window. As long as I’m indoors, I love rain. Hell, I don’t even mind driving in the rain as long as the windshield wipers can keep up. I like walking outside in summer rain, when the cool drops cut through the humidity in the atmosphere. Rain can clear, clean, soothe. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing any of those things today.

First, a bit of background. I only live about three blocks from campus, but the wrong side of campus for my class buildings, meaning that I walk about half a mile to get there. To be perfectly honest, I’m lazy, so I have a parking pass, which allows me to drive to a parking lot that cuts my walk down to less than five minutes instead of the fifteen it is from my apartment. However, I do not have my parking pass right now,* which forces me to walk to class. When I woke up and saw that it was raining, I was less than pleased.

I dressed in what I thought were clothes appropriate for the weather (jeans, t-shirt, a lavender polar fleece jacket, running shoes), put my hair up, grabbed my umbrella, and left behind the dry, cozy warmth of my apartment. Another fun fact about Missouri: It’s windy almost all of the time.** Today was no exception. Thirteen minutes after leaving my apartment, I sat down in my first class. It wasn’t pouring outside, just steady rain, but I was still drenched. My jeans dragged the ground just enough that they had soaked water up to the back of my knees, the wind coming out of the north (yes, it was cold) had been at my rear and ensured that I was wet up to the middle of my back, and just enough water had gotten into my shoulder bag that the top of the papers in my notebook were wrinkling. The only parts of me that weren’t wet were my feet, my face, and my hair.

Two hours later, it was time to make the return trip home. The good news: I was fifteen minutes away from warmth and dry clothes. The bad news: The wind was blowing in my face and I swear it had gotten both windier and colder. By the time I got home, the front of my jeans was visibly wet, my sensitive ears were bright red, and I had the sniffles. I immediately dropped the umbrella in the bathtub (useless piece of junk) and removed all of my clothes—because everything was wet. I changed into sweats and a thermal shirt and drank a cup of coffee while warming some chicken noodle soup. I was still cold after the first bowl of soup, so I wrapped myself in a blanket and spent thirty minutes on my couch doing nothing but concentrating on being warm. It did work, eventually.

Is it any wonder that I fucking hate autumn?

*I would tell the story but it’s not very interesting and I come out of it looking like an ass.
**The exception: When it’s 96 degrees with 84% humidity in the middle of August and you would pay someone to blow cool air in your face because it’s so disgustingly hot.

Labels: weather

posted by nicalyse @ 11:08 PM