6 posts tagged “weather”
It's a bit embarrassing how cheaply my good humor can be purchased by hot, sunny, summery weather, and being out in it. If you could see how sad I was on Monday (when it was cold and grey) and how happy I am today, you would laugh at me.
The facilities manager for the College tells me that the cooling system for the building where my office is located involves some enormous water "chiller" a block and a half away. From this chiller cold water is pumped through pipes (like the hot water that serves to heat things) in any number of buildings. In the ceilings of these buildings there are mysterious objects called mixing boxes that chug hot and cold together? in tandem? cold water from the chiller and hot air from somewhere else? somehow to produce air of the approximately right temperature and blat it out at you as your thermostat requests.
They don't fire up this chiller until a certain mysterious date. Then the cold water takes some time to make its way through the pipes, and I suppose once it's there, it displaces the hot water, or some of it, or something, so the whole system is rather inertial. This is all most fascinating and obscure.
In any event, however, the chiller is now GO and everything is VERY COLD. This is too bad because it makes me even less inclined to be a good little worker than I would normally be, which is extremely not very. I could in theory up and go home, but this would not produce any better results, and would make me feel that I had given up, which I have, but later I will feel the psychological effects of having given up less, I think, than if I do. Better, I think, to stay and suffer.
On the matter of the suffering: The skin on my hands, alarmed by these unfavorable conditions, has taken on a creepy waxy sort of appearance, which sets off my uneven, bluish fingernails very nicely. Now that I examine this situation a little more closely, I see that the waxiness is part and parcel with a general failure of elasticity. This is interesting because my typing is actually producing strange dents in each fingertip, and the dents don't immediately go away. If I hold up my hands, each finger looks to be its own specially malformed baby head, squashed by the birth canal. Sorry, fingers, but it's true.
This was right in the middle of those super low temperatures we had about a week ago. It was strange how everything else was frozen entirely solid, while the water gushed on.
This weather is bullshit. I know, I know: either you are experiencing pretty much the same bullshit weather yourself right now, in which case you don't need to be told about how objectionable it is, or else you are frolicking around in shorts and sandals, in which case I hate you and we can't be friends anymore. Whatever, I say it's bullshit, and I say to hell with it.
Sent off a batch of applications today. I wish it had been the last of them, but it wasn't. Someday. I am trying not to think too much about the daunting piles of other work that have been getting neglected in favor of the orgy of self-description. I worry, too, that if I do this too many more times I will lose all ability to distinguish between sense and nonsense, and will send off an application that is all deranged spliced-together fragments of previous letters and research statments, all adding up to utter babel.
This process is getting associated in my mind with sickly fluorescent light as the days get shorter and greyer and I have to turn on my office lights earlier and earlier.
The weather today has been truly vile, rain and sleet and pellets of snow coming down in sheets. On the way to the post office I saw a dead cat. It looked quite perfect, sad and damp and entirely dead, curled up next to a lamp post. Perhaps someone moved it there after it had been hit by a car? Hard to imagine that it would choose such a relatively exposed spot to crawl off and die on its own, and yet it seemed undamaged. I walked back on the other side of the street.
My fingertips are sweating. My ankles are sweating. The outside of my elbows are sweating.
