I was happy and grateful that this Friday was an actual Friday for me: no work this weekend. I'm too stiff and sore, and I just want to be still and heal. I had no initial plan for this weekend except for destination hibernation, since this Saturday morning's temperature has plummeted down to -44 with the wind chill accounted for; it's senseless to wander too far from home. But sleep continues to elude me. Ella has crawled under my covers, curling up beside me and exploiting me for the extra heat in the bed, happily snoring like a buzz saw. I wish I were so comfortable; I just lie here envying her peace of mind to do that. My own mind has been stricken and mass attacked with too many other problems and concerns to think about, as I'm stuck here in bed, now two hours before sunrise. There seems to be no convenient, easy, or safe way to vent the stuff, and I have been letting these negative things fester in me and consume me.
Thus comes this exercise of trying rid these demons through writing. As cold as the bloody weather has been as of late, I at least know how to use self-discipline/persuasion, common sense, and logic to adapt to it. It's a whole other matter and issue when dealing with the cold-heartedness of other people.
The last paragraph seemed to serve me well enough to let me throw enough mental baggage on a shelf to allow me to catch another hour of sleep. It's now close to sun up. We only stuck our heads outside long enough for a brief relief constitutional for Ella's sake. To force myself to sit still and convalesce, I continue writing. Part of my soreness comes from something that I've been doing to lead people who have been watching me to question my sanity. I'm getting more mindful to stay in shape. I've been willingly choosing to walk to and from work on these colder days. Why do I do it? Apart from economy, for the following reasons:
- My own body is a far more reliable machine in this kind of frigid cold than any other kind of vehicle I've ever owned
- A longer bout of low impact exercise (walking) on a frigid cold day yields the same result (or greater) rather than running the same distance on a hot day; minus the sweat, and minus the risk of breaking bones if you attempt to run on ice.
- BAT (brown adipose tissue) is activated in cold weather, which in turn activates your metabolism to burn more regular adipose tissue, that your body uses as energy to heat it.
- Somehow my immune system improves; I get sick less. I'm giving my body a break from inhaling virus-laden indoor air, which I'd be sucking air if I was using a public fitness facility. The winter when I never got sick was the one when I walked outside most frequently.
I might as well admit another weird truth about me as I sit here writing on the subject of the frigid days of winter around here. As much as I've done my fair share of grumbling about the arrival of winter year after year; no matter how cold it becomes, I really don't find myself fantasizing about taking a tropical holiday anywhere. Seriously. If anything, I'd find that after dropping in for a brief two week sojourn at some beach resort like in Mexico or Cuba, only to be whooshed back and plunged into these friggin' freezing environs to endure the remaining couple of months of cold again, it would only serve to make me even more miserable about the season. It doesn't add up to a reasonable sum total for the expense of pursuing pleasure and warmth in my books. I'll be patient and wait for summer to come.* Perhaps I just think of it bitterly now because I have no one to really share such a holiday with. If I ever went anywhere for a winter holiday, it damn well better be for the entire duration of the season (which currently isn't really practical or sustainable for me).
At this time of the year, if I do dream about far away places, I tend to think more about the other peoples and cultures that live around this same latitude, and I wonder what they do differently than us to adapt, endure, and even somehow befriend this season. I think of people like the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, and the Russians: people who actually might have a sense of what it's like to live in a climate like this. They seem to deal with winter more positively than us in comparison. It's almost becoming second nature now for this time of the year to copy some of their habits. For instance, I recently learned some cuisine techniques from a Swedish chef (I said
a Swedish chef, not
the Swedish Chef)**. I'd be using the sauna downstairs today if I could (like the Finns would) if a Christmas party wasn't being set up in the neighbouring rec room right now. This is my second winter of Nordic skiing, inspired by the Norwegians. I'm getting more open-minded to allow myself to listen and relax to more classical music, like perhaps some Russian would, on cold days like this. My living space tends to shrink and get cozier and condensed with more cerebral activity; I retreat to my
four square meter kingdom. This is what I do more now in solitude to gain comfort, rather than hanging around and listening to the negative bitching and complaining other people do about weather that none of us have the power to control.
The social media network throughout this nation has made winter time seem even stranger, as we get less ignorant of our own regions, and peek more into those around other parts of the country. There are a lot of clashing perspectives in a nation as large as ours is of what a relatively cold day is***. My co-worker and I were laughing at her friends in Vancouver who were on Facebook describing the temperature lingering around zero degrees there recently as being something like "soul-crushing". What a bunch of goddamned pussies! People would be dancing out in the street here if the temperature even managed to climb up to minus five during this time of year. Sadly though, as more immigrants come here from warmer climates, and more urbanization happens, it appears that we as Canadians are becoming soft in attitude about adapting to winter. I miss the more rural attitude from my own upbringing that people had during wintertime. You just dealt with having to tramp out there each day to protect your livelihood no matter how cold it got; there was more resilience and a lot less drama about it, and yet we somehow lived through it all. Hell, we used to play outside as kids when it was 30 below, but now it's made to look like some sort of crime for allowing children to do that. With people becoming more urbanized and listening in to the status of the climate on a broader national level, which really hasn't changed much in intensity over the years season after season, the reports seem to be so much more dramatic and apocalyptic now. Now, it's some newscaster reporting on the weather network, who probably has never been out of Toronto their whole life, who's always looking freaked out when they start reporting on the weather conditions in the north, or here in the prairie provinces; making what has always normally happened each year look somehow dangerously unnatural and extreme.
Well, my soup is almost done, and it's time for lunch. Maybe, just for a hoot, I'll tune into a Vancouver stations and feeds to see what kind of havoc the dreadful "zero degree weather" has wrought over there.
*- Having lived in the tropics for half a year once, and comparing that to a nicer summer season here in Canada: Canadian summer has more tolerable heat extremes, longer daylight hours, potable tap water, more reliable infrastructure, sanitation, and civic services, less crime and poverty, much fewer people in street traffic leaning on car horns, and no disgusting lizards and cockroaches invading your dwelling, which perhaps have earlier on in the day, frolicked around in humid fermenting piles of garbage containing an abundance of discarded human-excrement-caked toilet tissue.
**- Those watching me operate in a kitchen might easily assume that my cooking inspiration and mentor is the Mr. Börk Börk Börk Swedish chef from The Muppet Show, but the actual person I'm referring to in this case is Magnus Nillson, who authored the book Fäviken. It is about his restaurant lodge somewhere in the Jämtland county in Sweden, which is currently considered one of the top 50 best restaurants in the world. What is incredible about his place is how relatively remote and isolated that this restaurant seems to be, leaning close to the Arctic Circle, and most of the dishes prepared there are made from what is farmed, hunted, and foraged within the immediate vicinity of the establishment. The book is an amazing compendium about self-sufficiency, and how to cook gourmet dishes with even the most rustic natural in-season regional ingredients. If it is an ambition of someone to have a 100 mile diet, eat with environmental consciousness, or eat as much locally produced food as possible, this book is a treasure-trove of ideas for proving that elegant abundance can be found anywhere.
*** - Addendum: My idea of when it gets extremely cold, or my where my personal limit begins when cold weather makes me want give up and scream "Uncle!" and I'm no longer willing to go outdoors, is when the temperature is at -40 or lower. It's a temperature reading that equally spells "BRRRR" on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales; it becomes troublesome to run anything mechanical outside, and that makes even those tougher folks living north of the 60th parallel start to wish for something warmer.
