Monday, September 27, 2010

real, actual history was made today

so today . . . it was 113 degrees in downtown L.A.! yes, you read that right, 113 (sadly, there are no capitals for numbers) DEGREES!!!!!!

it was the hottest temperature EVER recorded in downtown L.A.-- not just for this date in history, but EVER. in the history of the world, there has never been a hotter day in L.A.

and i was here. i was a part of history. in the coming years, when people say, "do you remember that day that it was 113 DEGREES in L.A.?" (and they will say it with capital letters, because it was THAT hot,) i will be able to say, "yes, I WAS THERE!!"

(of course, by "there" i mean in my air-conditioned classroom, my air-conditioned car, and my air-conditioned house. stop rolling your eyes! i had to walk from the car to the classroom, and from the classroom back to the car... and THEN i had to get out of the car in my very NOT air-conditioned garage. i suffered, people!)

we are all complaining about the heat. well, except for that one tiny woman on the news who said, "it wasn't bad--just drink a lot of water!" i am guessing she spent the day inside an air-conditioned building. but the rest of us are complaining. i am 100 percent certain that everyone who is on twitter has tweeted about the weather at least once in the last couple of days...

yesterday i was complaining. loudly. yesterday it was about 105 degrees, and we had a commitment in the afternoon to attend a retirement ceremony. in a building with no air-conditioning. in our "church" clothes. i knew i was going to die. i knew i was going to be sick. i knew my feet and fingers were going to swell to heretofore unheard of dimensions.

i don't deal well with extreme heat.

for a place that really has no weather (southern california weather reporters are probably the most overpaid people in the country, considering that their job mostly consists of saying, "tomorrow the sun will shine and the temperature will be somewhere between 72 and 85 degrees." ) we spend a lot of time talking about it. i have written 27 weather blogs. today @briannaglenn tweeted, "every person in cal is tweeting about how hot it is. we do the same thing when it dips below 60. if it's not 75 and breezy, we aren't happy."

i think this is true--except for the breezy part. when you live in the shadow of hollywood, you come to expect perfection. i don't want to be cold, but i also don't want to be hot. i don't want to be wet, but i also don't want everything to dry out. i want it to be perfect. every day. and it is perfect often enough that i don't find that to be an unrealistic expectation. even if it is.

we are spoiled. that is why we complain on those rare days when it is too hot or too cold or too wet or too windy. that is why out of 534 blogs, only 27 have been about the weather--the other 507 days were perfect. or at least perfect enough. because you know, if they weren't, i would have been complaining about it. on my blog...

...where i can't actually SEE your eyes rolling...

1 comment:

mom said...

Your 113 degree day even made the news in our newspaper. I know that when it is hot, I wish it was cool. Then when it's cool, I wish it was hotter. No winners here.