your polar vortex is invalid

I need to get my rant out because why not.

I am so tired--beyond words--not of Polar Vortex Marks I, II, and III (so far), but of people who mock the South's reaction to the truly radical weather change we're experiencing. Yes, it's a mistake to read comments on any article on a news website, but when someone from fucking Buffalo explains how people in Atlanta are just stupid if they're taking this cold thing badly because where they're from they don't even notice snow at six feet uphill both ways, something snaps. Advice from those who live in an area with regular, consistent subzero temperatures during winter is blessed--seriously, you people are wonderful--but those who seem to think it's just a matter of wearing a few extra layers and everything's fine, no, it's not.

Note: okay, I had no idea how much resentment I had built up to need this many words. Huh.



Years ago as a teen, I was an exchange student to Finland from August to January, which meant I left a Texas in the nineties and hundreds to go to a latitude that was technically higher than Moscow. If you ask me what the temperature was, I don't remember, but it was for me chilly and I was already pulling on a long t-shirt in the car ride to my host family while they comported themselves in shorts.

Here's what happened over the next week: I couldn't eat, I got very sick, and I wore three layers to go to the movies one night and slept in four layers under a heavy blanket. I wasn't just chilled--I was cold, all the time. The temperature during the day was possibly in the seventies (F)it wasn't bad, but my body read this as pre-winter, not summer, and was deeply confused. The happiest moments in my life that first month was when going to sauna: I had a religious experience with the stove, and when alone, would turn it up and pour water over the coals until I had a humidity level more appropriate for drowning in a lake. It was the only time I was warm. I fell in love with saunas. It was nice.

Here's where the story gets weird, at least for me: one, I lost weight, not much, but my jeans noticed, and then suddenly--and it happened very fast, because I was helping with the baking when I started getting tempted by the unbaked dough for bread--I went from normal meals to eating like it was my life's work.

I don't mean I ate a hefty helping or two three times a day at mealtimes. I mean I approached meals like I hadn't eaten in a month, and in between--about every three hours--I was starving all over again and had to eat something right now. And my host family had tea time, which was a meal in itself, so four meals plus snacks. The first month, I slept about ten to twelve to fourteen hours a day and woke up starving to death and moved from one to two helpings to two to three very large helpings plus snacks. The sleep problem tapered off about a month in, but the food didn't. During this time, I didn't gain any weight--remember, exchange student, I brought all my clothes with me and didn't do any shopping--but I did stop losing it.

By October at my language camp, I was up to a loaf of bread at breakfast--toasted with butter--and that's not actually an exaggeration, my hosts were staring at me like I was an alien (I was like, 125-135 pounds and five feet, nine inches tall; I think they were wondering if I had a tapeworm). I was a teenager and self-conscious as all fuck, plus I was shy, plus their English was much better than my Finnish and I still didn't stop eating. While they watched me consume an entire loaf of bread. And butter and jam and the rest of breakfast.

IF there's one defining characteristic of my life at that time, it was food, and within six weeks, I stopped being even marginally picky over what I was eating because food. Which is why I ended up with surprise!liver pudding and ate it all, every hideous bite of it and fish soup when I hate almost all the non-tuna or non-salmon fish. Intelligently, I dealt with this by never asking for the names of anything I was eating in English to spare myself the extra stress. I was going to eat it anyway, so why bother.

My host family had congenital high blood pressure, so all the meals were low fat, no grease, nothing fried, extremely healthy and delicious, dear God delicious; I suddenly quadrupled my milk and cheese intake. Again, this isn't an exaggeration here; the reason I remember is because it was that weird and I was a self-conscious teenage girl in a different country, and even seeing my host family look at me weird, it didn't stop me though I got into surreptitiously raiding the deep freeze for baked goods and extra bread to make lot of sandwiches between meals. My entire five months there I ate like that, and when it started snowing, I'd go out to play in the snow in the backyard while eating a sandwich and taking snack breaks.

I didn't gain weight, or at least not enough to have problems with my clothes, and context: I had a very, very high metabolism and was a high school athlete, but no one's metabolism needs a maintenance level that requires as much eating as I did. It was practically a hobby, and I got used to that, too, so much that my journal diary stopped having guilty entries about the my host mother having to buy milk every day.

October and the first snow, I wasn't cold anymore, and by the beginning of November, I biked to school in the next town--five miles, maybe--a few times a week and worked up a pretty good sweat on the uphills, enough to unbutton my coat and get some air. If it wasn't windy or snowing, I wouldn't even bother with my coat if I had to run outside for something, and I had no problem spending most of my weekends outside even when it was actively snowing.

The reason I'm hitting food on this one so hard was it was so goddamn ridic noticeable and even with a teenager's terror of being made fun of, I still ate as much as I could. One of the more pleasant memories is the day we went to harvest potoates--there was a machine involved that dug them up and we gathered them--and I got to eat roasted potatoes all day between meals while harvesting them. No butter, no peeling the fuckers, just carried them in my pockets and ate them as I worked. I loved harvesting potatoes.

So I returned to Texas in January, it was forty or fifty something, and i had to strip down in the airport waiting room, because holy shit it was hot. Within a week, maybe two, my appetite cut off so fast it surprised me, and eventually, I went back to a more normal way of eating food and got to reject fish again. I also slept with a fan on me for at least two weeks, and I never used a sweater , and the heaters at school and home made me sweat. It was annoying.





Within any three to five day span during the vortexes, Texas has gone from twenty degrees to seventy and then dropping again, with short bursts of thirty-forty to sixty. It's like being on a perpetual yo-yo, and for me, it means I'm always, without exception, cold, even wearing like five layers and my coat when I'm outside and an extra blanket in my cubicle even with the heater on because it takes a while for me to warm up. I also lost weight again--noticeably--and while I'm eating more, it's not enough because when it gets to above sixty, I actively dislike the sight of food. I'm also constantly--and I do mean constantly--falling asleep when I get home from work--five in the afternoon, people--and waking up abruptly for a few hours before going back to sleep maybe and getting tired at work. I have insomnia, I have for years, and my thyroid fucks with me at random, but this is just freaky.

Normally, this could be all put up to being me and I'm just a freak, except I'm not the only one. Other symptoms--two coworkers with excellent work ethics who rarely take sick days are having to call in for two or three days every two or three weeks for now fourth month running because they're suddenly sick, and while this isn't scientific here, it happens in the yo-yo space between the twenties and the seventies. Our leave calendar is a minefield now, because we have a new high of unexpected call-ins for being sick, and trust me, in program testing, you really, really notice when people are out when you suddenly get assigned a lot of tests because releases do not get sick days; they have to go out. And this is from people who do not do this. Some who used to complain about people who do just that.

Everyone is more tired--sometimes worryingly so--and complaining specifically about that, which trust me is unusual. At least a few dieting coworkers are very grim about their weight watcher points and they're very long term on weight maintenance--this is new to them. Again, this is the least scientific thing possible, but observation says we're all living a perpetual loop of my first week in Finland and first week home. It's not just that we're whiners not used to the cold who need to man up; we can't get used to it and it's physically fucking with us. The cold is a problem, but humans adapt to problems. The cold/warm/fucking seventy/wtf cold--that's a problem in the lack of ability to adapt.

Some people are fine and have no problems with dramatic thirty to fifty degree temperature changes happening what feels like once a week, yeah, but this is very much luck of the genetic draw.

It's not a human tragedy for the eons, no, and mostly, it's just annoying and inconvenient, but its' annoying and inconvenient on a massive city-wide, state-wide scale in areas that do not deal with subzero temperatures and everyone is going through it all at once, all the time, for four months, and the weather is changing fast--three days, twenty to sixty or seventy, remember?--and it's fucking with us badly, and it's been doing this to us since November. Our buildings here are optimized for air conditioning, not heating, and a lot of people's homes have fantastic air conditioners but shitty heaters because they're not in use that much and they dry out the air.

Texas is still a drought state, let me be clear on this; we've had below optimal rain and ridiculously high extended three digit temperatures from May to as late as September this year. Consistently. We're under wildfire watch all of summer, and in case anyone thought the thing in Bastrop was the only time, it was only the worst time. Wildfires happen every summer, more of them every year.

To give you some context, my utility bill was 880 for July, 990 for the month of August, 870 for September, 750 for October. November, it dropped to 320. We use electricity for everything but the heater and water heater. Gas, a separate bill, tripled starting in November. I bet using that you can guess how much air conditioning costs per month. That is how hard and fast it hit us.

Seriously, if at random, every three to five days, you're magically transported from Minnesota to Puerto Vallarta and three to five days later back again, over and over for almost four months straight, I might consider your opinion on our wussiness valid about how we're not dealing with it well. Might, but probably not, since it's sixty-four right now with a high in the seventies for the next five days and last Friday, it was twenty-seven with a high just above freezing and I really don't care.

Comments

[out_there]

*pets* I've got to say, a shift of 25C (yay google for translating costs for me) is a heck of a physical change to have to deal with. Judging by the clothes worno n Friday Night Lights, Texas looks hot all year round. It's winters seem to involve adding a cardigan and summers look like t-shirt, shorts and swelter. People aren't used to cold and they're not prepared for it -- and that's not taking into account the ridiculous weather changes happening.

Mind you, this is making me remember going over to England when I was 13. it was a family trip and they had an unseasonably warm -- at least back then it was unseasonably warm, these days everyone's weather is more extreme -- and relatives were dying in the 27C/80F warm days. While we came from a country where summer maximums were usually 35C/95F so for us, it was beautiful. (I will always remember that year of summer - UK summer - summer. If I was rich, I would never live through winter.)

[seperis]

Friday Night Lights is fairly accurate there. I mean, it can get cold--I'm saying forties F (4 C) on average, with regular ten degree ups and downs, but it's consistent and in November and January is the cool-down and warm-up periods. Now is just--gah.

[out_there]

I've been entertaining myself looking at Texas weather averages compared to here. (Basically, your winters look like ours, but your summers look hotter. I also suspect you have a much higher humidity because the air here is actually dry and cool -- the sunshine is scorching hot, but it's a rare summer day when the air is warm and muggy.)

We tend to be fairly changeable -- I actually like that you don't tend to get more than three days in a row of 35C+ summer -- but we feel it when the maximums change 15C within a day. It's tiring.

[sage]

Yeah. Just, yeah. It's gone from the 20s to the 80s (with a high over 90 the other day) here for the last four or five weeks, what with these cold fronts interrupted by warm fronts, and what the haters don't get is that warm weather states do not possess the infrastructure to deal with this shit. Our houses have single paned windows and crappy weather stripping. Austin, when I lived there, only owned four sand trucks for de-icing bridges and overpasses because that's all it needed. There are no snowplows. There are no snow tires. There are no heavy parkas or snow pants or boots. No one knows how to drive in this shit, and also, freezing precip in the south most often means freezing rain and ice storms. It doesn't generally mean snow.

Also, the utility companies give bulk rate discounts in the summer time for AC use, but there are no discounts in the winter, so winter heating bills are higher, per minutes of power used, than summer cooling bills. My current power bill (electric heating) is about $20 higher than my worst summer power bill, and that's with all the heavy drapes and draft-stoppers in place.

Last year we had three weeks between the last freeze and sustained highs in the 90s. Three weeks, and most of what I planted either froze or burned to a crisp on the vine. Fucking climate change.

[seperis]

Yes yes yes yes yes. ALL OF THIS.

[lilacsigil]

Thanks you for explaining this! We have similar massive temperature shifts in many parts of Australia and I agree that it's very tiring. In the last year we have had both the first appearance of black ice in my town (my workmate's husband was seriously injured) and the hottest January on record.

[green_grrl]

This is why I can't live anywhere with snow. Exactly why. You would never catch me in Finland outside May-October! My best friend whirled me away for a weekend in Santa Fe this last December, and it happened to be during the giant cold snap where the high was 20 and the low was 1. Previously the coldest weather I had ever been in in my life was a low of 20, and I had thought that was unlivable. Four days of below freezing was INHUMAN. I could barely walk two blocks, ate big with lots of heated cider, and slept like crazy. Gah.

Plus what Sage said about infrastructure. Northern cities have snowplows and tons of salt sitting around just waiting to be used. That does not happen where a half hour flurry of snow is a once-every-seven-years event—it would be fiscal malfeasance. But when real snow happens, it's a catastrophe; just ask Atlanta and North Carolina.

[ratcreature]

Quite frankly all the extreme temperatures sound horrid to me. I'm living in a temperate coastal climate with mild winters and cool summers, and I hate extremes when they happen, though the hot ones more than the cold (mostly because everyone here has heating but nobody has AC). But the "extremes" I'm talking about are like 30°C on hot days and -10°C on cold, so not objectively extreme, but they still suck for me. Having to deal with maniac switches between hot and cold would be even worse.

[inoru_no_hoshi]

I would not be liveable with if our temps were bouncing that badly - and we've been having an entertaining winter of shifts between normal cold rain (highs in 40s-50s, low 60s on a Really Warm Day For Winter Omg) and JFC COLD (highs in upper-20s to mid 30s), usually on a longer scale than one day and the next - most especially because I am not suited to cold weather. (I've taken to saying I'm actually a reptile, because it has to hit high-60s at least before I concede being "warm", but my ceiling for "augh hot" has been lowered by living here; it used to be mid-90s and now it's low-80s. Maybe I'm actually delicate greenhouse plant...)

I tend to consider snow a Good Excuse for it being JFC COLD but more than a dusting and everywhere goes bugfuck - western WA is almost as ill-prepared for snow as the south is. (Meanwhile, eastern WA watches and laughs because they regularly get a metric fuckton of snow every winter.)

TL;DR humans are beautifully adaptive! There needs to be time to adapt to things, though, with enough regularity of said things that makes it a survival trait. (Like, if yo-yoing temps were a constant thing, I don't doubt we'd evolve to be able to handle that, eventually. But even that would take long-scale time...)

TL;DR mk 2: This post is accurately accurate. >_>

[kass]

I hear you, and I empathize.

I've been worried about my aging parents, but they seem to be mostly ok. Mom's been sick a lot, though.

[seperis]

My grandmother got her yearly bronchitis a little longer than usual, and I ended up not going to the family Christmas party because I had a cold and worried she'd get it worse. *sends support*

[brownbetty]

This seems really familiar to me, not because I eat more in winter, but because during our teeny summer heat wave, I stop eating. I can eat a quarter cup of water melon and drink a cup of coffee, and be done for the day.

I wouldn't give advice, because I'm sure while in Finland you came up with some tactics, but you mentioned that tips were not unwelcome, so, have you tried hot water? I mean, by that, put it in a hot water bottle (the rubber drug store kind, if they're not all out, but just a nalgene bottle if not) and carry it around to keep your hands warm, put it in your lap to boost your core temp. If your work has a coffee machine with a tea tap, you can fill it from that.

Also, put hot water in you. Not as an alternative to eating, because clearly your body needs all those calories to keep you warm, but as an alternative to any cool or cold beverage, which your body will have to burn calories to bring up to 98 degrees. If you put hot things in you, it raises your core temp, and your body doesn't have to do that work. If you don't like tea you can just microwave hot water and drink that, and it helps keep you arm.

[via_ostiense]

Yeah, I second this advice. If you like tea, an herbal tea or something else decaf is a good option, because you can guzzle it all day long and keep yourself warm from the inside out without ending up too wired to sleep. Hot chocolate is also good, and with how crappy the weather is, you deserve the treat.

[brownbetty]

Also, with hot chocolate, you can throw a couple of little coffee creams in there, and get some super-dense calories!

[jesse_the_k]

Wonderful rant, horrible conditions that make it relevant.

The thing which really caught me eye was surprise!liver pudding. I actually like liver, and that sounds really nasty. Is it sweet like a dessert pudding?

The massive eating/massive sleeping also accompanies SAD (seasonal affective depression) for some people, but Texans don't have to worry about sunlight.

100% wool socks make a huge difference for me: warm feet -> warm heart. And when it warms up, wool breathes well.

[seperis]

oh God, the liver. Okay,, funny story, and again, I'm from Texas: it looked like refried beans, and everyone covered it with the equivalent of what seemed to be saurkraut and berry syrup (with berries)! So I--just got some. It tasted evil, is what I'm saying, but the maybe-saurkraut and syrup helped. And I ate all of it, I was that desperate for food.

[silveraspen]

Yo-yo weather is hard on the body. It's hard on thermoregulation, it's harder because it happens so damn fast.

I'm sorry people are being such jerks. I live in Colorado now, but I grew up in the South, and it is SO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in terms of acclimatization and infrastructure, and that difference matters.

[exceptinsects]

Your utility bill was 990 *dollars*?! What all does that include? How big is your house? I live alone in a very very small house in a very very temperate climate, but still, my gas + electric is like $40 in December and $20 in August. (water is not included.) I have electric wall heaters, but no AC.

I don't mean this in a rude way *at all*--of course in Texas you have to have AC--I'm just floored that it's that expensive!

It makes me feel a lot better about the so-called "nice weather tax" (i.e. high property values) here. :-/

Also, you are totally right that the people from Buffalo can shut the hell up.

[ranalore]

Co-signed, and even places not getting the snow itself are getting unheard-of temperatures. In Jacksonville, there were temps in the freakin' 30s, and cold rain. That does not happen, and neither the city nor the residents are really prepared for it. Here in Southern California, it's yo-yoing from one extreme to the other, and it's so dry that we're all on high fire alert in what used to be the rainy season. I don't know how the crops are going to come out this year.

[applenym]

I'm so sorry; it sounds like you're having as horrible a winter as we are in Minnesota, with the added burden of not being used to this kind of crap and not having the infrastructure to deal with it. I really appreciate the detailed explanation.

I suspect it's easier to handle temperatures fluctuating between -45 degree wind chills and 30+ degrees, which is what we've been getting over the past couple months. Even though it's a big temperature difference, it mostly all just registers as really effing cold. As long as it's a day when the air doesn't hurt my bare face, I can deal with it. If we were bouncing between 70 degrees and 20, as you are, I would LOSE MY MIND. You have all my sympathy.

[pudacat]

I live in Wisconsin, and it's fluctuated between below zero and more fucking snow. I can't stop eating, at all, and yet have lost weight in the past month, despite being a sloth.

I want to call in sick to work, but since there are only 2 of us there, I drag myself in, mostly to prevent my boss from screwing up the schedule. Few patients in a day, I can hang on; a full day, I don't want to deal with the aftermath of not being there.

Believe me, there are plenty of us in cold areas who are being shell-shocked by the fucking polar vortex. You're not crazy, this sucks. I don't care how anyone else pretends this weather doesn't affect people. They're a bunch of lying liars who lie.

[petronia]

I've noticed it in the other direction: when I go to Shanghai (where it's hot and humid for most of the year) my appetite diminishes considerably.

Montreal actually swings by 25C regularly in the winter and always has -- it'll go up to just above zero Celsius, then down to minus 20-25C. Lowest it gets is minus 30-40C. Humidity/precipitation is also hugely variable... actually, as far as I can tell, the polar vortex stuff this year is the rest of North America getting the same weather we always get. We've been swinging at the same time the rest of the Northeast has, but if I didn't watch the news I'd think it was a normal-to-coldish winter.

Calgary and Winnepeg get colder for longer, but by many people's reckoning Montreal's winter is the most difficult in Canada because of the variations. (I have had Russian friends tell me it's tougher than Moscow's.)

[petronia]

This is not to say you guys should just suck up and deal; rather I've been living here for 20-odd years and have been completely done with this winter BS for about as long. (But then, I was born in Shanghai. I've noticed people who are born here basically don't seem to feel the cold.)