Sugar, we're going down swinging
Jun. 8th, 2005 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI'm writing a paper, and thus logically must post to complain about it. Though rejoice, everyone: after Thursday I won't be making any more of these complaints until October.
I was thinking about why I take such great joy out of summer finally arriving, far more than can be explained by simple preference, particularly since allergies should make me prefer winter, and I realized that it's not so much the temperature as it is the freedom. Summer opens the entire city to me, at all hours. In winter I have to parcel my time out to a few specific places: classrooms, dorms, the library, the student union. And though the lawns and streets and sidewalks are all still there, of course, there's something about a foot of snow and a wind chill below zero that makes them fairly useless for anything except crossing as quickly as possible. If I want to be alone, my best bet is trying to find a secluded corner in one of the nearby coffeeshops, and then I have to pay in drinks and food for the privilege of using the space. I don't have a car, so I have to walk everywhere I go, and that exacerbates the problem. Public transportation is so much less appealing when you have to stand half an hour in sideways-falling sleet for a bus to arrive.
I can't stand to be confined for long; it grates on me to spend months and months in so few spaces that I could count them on my fingers, and each new week is worse, because I'm that much more tired of the same walls and doors and furniture, and I start to feel trapped, wasting time to calculate elaborate constructions of where I can go next, where I can hide away someplace new.
But with summer, with temperatures that make being outside no longer a physical ache, there's suddenly all this new space. I have choices again. I can do what I want, and that's like a weight I'd ceased to notice being lifted. If I can't sleep, I can go outside and climb to the roof of the parking garage and watch the stars or the planes or the bright skyscrapers against the sky. If I can't concentrate on a paper, I can walk to Mirror Lake and put my feet in the icy water where it bubbles out of a marble well while the spray of the fountain shifts in the breeze. If I'm bored, I can wander across the grass and between the buildings and construction sites and find all those hidden, half-forgotten gardens lost in the rearranged plans of architects.
It's like getting over being sick; something between remembering and realizing. That feeling, when you've just gotten better, and it seems so wonderful and simple to just be able to breathe normally again, to not feel tired constantly, to not have to fight for every bit of concentration. That happy assurance that you're completely over it, because you fit in your body again and it does want you want so nicely, so quickly and well. And of course I can sprint up the four flights of stairs to my room without panting, how did I forget that from one cold? Of course I can fit curled up on our windowsill; my joints aren't supposed to ache all the time. Of course I have all this energy and strength and speed- it was just that I couldn't use it for a little while. But most of all, how easy everything is again.
That's what the start of summer feels like to me.
I was thinking about why I take such great joy out of summer finally arriving, far more than can be explained by simple preference, particularly since allergies should make me prefer winter, and I realized that it's not so much the temperature as it is the freedom. Summer opens the entire city to me, at all hours. In winter I have to parcel my time out to a few specific places: classrooms, dorms, the library, the student union. And though the lawns and streets and sidewalks are all still there, of course, there's something about a foot of snow and a wind chill below zero that makes them fairly useless for anything except crossing as quickly as possible. If I want to be alone, my best bet is trying to find a secluded corner in one of the nearby coffeeshops, and then I have to pay in drinks and food for the privilege of using the space. I don't have a car, so I have to walk everywhere I go, and that exacerbates the problem. Public transportation is so much less appealing when you have to stand half an hour in sideways-falling sleet for a bus to arrive.
I can't stand to be confined for long; it grates on me to spend months and months in so few spaces that I could count them on my fingers, and each new week is worse, because I'm that much more tired of the same walls and doors and furniture, and I start to feel trapped, wasting time to calculate elaborate constructions of where I can go next, where I can hide away someplace new.
But with summer, with temperatures that make being outside no longer a physical ache, there's suddenly all this new space. I have choices again. I can do what I want, and that's like a weight I'd ceased to notice being lifted. If I can't sleep, I can go outside and climb to the roof of the parking garage and watch the stars or the planes or the bright skyscrapers against the sky. If I can't concentrate on a paper, I can walk to Mirror Lake and put my feet in the icy water where it bubbles out of a marble well while the spray of the fountain shifts in the breeze. If I'm bored, I can wander across the grass and between the buildings and construction sites and find all those hidden, half-forgotten gardens lost in the rearranged plans of architects.
It's like getting over being sick; something between remembering and realizing. That feeling, when you've just gotten better, and it seems so wonderful and simple to just be able to breathe normally again, to not feel tired constantly, to not have to fight for every bit of concentration. That happy assurance that you're completely over it, because you fit in your body again and it does want you want so nicely, so quickly and well. And of course I can sprint up the four flights of stairs to my room without panting, how did I forget that from one cold? Of course I can fit curled up on our windowsill; my joints aren't supposed to ache all the time. Of course I have all this energy and strength and speed- it was just that I couldn't use it for a little while. But most of all, how easy everything is again.
That's what the start of summer feels like to me.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-11 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-11 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 05:18 pm (UTC)That's sort of the way I feel about winter, paradoxically. The season turns, and the planet stops being this deeply hostile environment that I can't be in without artificial support. The world opens up: I can take a walk without being sunburned within minutes, or bitten by mosquitoes, or feeling faint; I no longer measure the space around me in distances between patches of shadow and gaps between buildings with air conditioning. Freedom! You're right: it's a glorious feeling.
Maybe this summer I'll try pretending I'm you, and seeing whether channelling somebody else's experience of summer helps. She said, huddling in the basement because right now there's a big yellow hot thing in the sky, and it's pretty, but it burns.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-11 06:14 am (UTC)And I suppose I can see a bit of the attraction of winter, if it's the season of freedom for you. The challenge now is just keeping that in mind in six months, when I'm cursing the cold.