Today I had to drive a snowmobile from
one of our remote sites,
only about 5 kilometers away. Yesterday it was -30 but the wind
was
still. Today, on the way back, there was a stiff wind right in
your face. Probably 50 kph. Luckily, the temperature was only
-20. If it had been -30 I don't know what would have happened.
My
eyes almost froze shut today, there was a thick crust of frost on
my scarf. I had icicles on my eyelashes, being so long as to have
them*. It was unreal. Supposed to really warm up in the next few
days to -5! The ice makers don't like it. It has to be -20 to
make
good ice.
* "Being so long
as to have them": my brother has unnaturally long
eyelashes because of a medication he takes.
Recently when visiting the blog
How to Learn Swedish in a Thousand Difficult Lessons, a question
popped into my head: "Just out of curiosity," I asked, " is the famous
Scandinavian depression during the long dark winters matched by euphoria
during the short bright summers?"
The first answer was a mild little
"Yes", but the second answer blew the question right out of the water.
Perhaps my soft-heartedness was not altruistic at
all. Perhaps I was just looking at my own future, and realizing that at
several key moments in my life I would suffer the bitter consequences of
insufficient coolness. The oaf / wimp combination might seem unusual, but
there's an explanation. In my early childhood I was a wimp and was bullied
by my oafish friends, but by the age of about fourteen, by dint of hard
work and determination, I had succeeded in meeting the minimum local oaf standard, and so when I went out into the great world,
an oaf was what I was
perceived to be.
As a boy I always
knew I was sort of odd, and so did everyone else in town, but in general
everyone took things in stride and we got along fine. It helped that my
father, who was one of the town’s most prominent citizens and who was
(with exceptions) liked and
admired, was also a little odd. Until I went to
college, though, I never knew that according to the national standard,
everyone I grew up with was pretty odd too.
My conclusion is that God always wanted me to be a
marginal R. Crumb / Charles Bukowski type, living in my crummy apartment,
being alienated and cursing a lot, and writing internet screeds that no
one will ever read. So may God's will be done. (And yes, I forgot to
mention it, but I do have some big-time disconnections with the Christian
Right too.)
4 generations, 23 people, no Jerry
Springer events. Genealogy studies find 3 murderers or accomplices on the
family tree, one of whom got off scot-free.
