It’s the season to be jolly

During my 4 years of stay in the U.S., I seem to have developed a love-hate relationship for winters. I can give you more reasons for hating winters than for liking winters. Winters in the U.S. are cold, damp, harsh, white, lifeless, leafless, rainy, and snowy. The trees have already shed their leaves and everything looks barren and lifeless. You can’t really go to a nearby beach without freezing blue, you cannot drive to a nearby national park. Forget national park, every driving to the nearest grocery story will take you a while because you need to warm up your car’s engine well enough, get rid of the sheen of ice that forms on the windshield, and all this while you freeze inside the car. Of course, it is different for people who live in Florida or Southern California, but most of the U.S. don’t get to live in Florida or Southern California. Be it Seattle or the east coast, you are stuck wherever you are, unable to see the sun for days.

I remember a side story as I type this. More than 4 years ago, I had received a couple of admits from different schools. Two of them happened to be very highly sought after schools in my field. However, I had no idea about those schools. I did an informal sample survey when most people told me place A rained a lot while place B snowed a lot. That is how I chose Seattle over Ann Arbor.

Anyway, I see people eagerly waiting for the winters, and I wonder why. For one, you are required to wear clothes than weigh more than you do. You need to make sure all your orifices are properly covered, ears, nose, even eyes. It feels horrible to go outside and feel chills and shivers. It’s a pity that the 3 most important holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years) come one after the other during the winters. Flight prices are so expensive, and the choices for sunny places are so less, you end up staying home although you have more vacation than you would at any other time. You freeze, your car freezes, your social life freezes, it is not really a happy situation. To make it worse, most of your better friends temporarily migrate to India for a few weeks, and here you are stranded in the middle of nowhere with all your friends gone. To make it worse, you sit at home getting updates on how these fair weather cold weather friends are having alu’r chop, beguni, and fuluri back in India. As a kid, I romanticized the fantasy settingofn many English novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights where everything was cold, white, and gloomy, where the protagonists drank soup and read story books by the fireplace. I romanticized the idea of walking in the snow, like they showed in Bollywood movies, hurling snow balls at others and singing and dancing. Sadly, I have matured, seen the world for myself, and no longer reflect the fantasies portrayed in English novels or Bollywood movies.

I hate winters for more reasons than I love winters. However, there are a handful of reasons why winters become not only bearable, but memorable too. I associate winters with piping hot chicken soup. Winter for me is sitting by the fireplace reading books and drinking hot cider. My friend Chirag introduced me to so many things that I love doing in winters. I love the culture of doing office work or school assignments in coffee shops, something I do in winters since there are not many places to go then. I love hot apple cider. I love gingersnap latte from Starbucks, something you get ONLY during the winter holiday season. I love the way homes are decorated, little lights flashing and telling me that someone had the enthusiasm to decorate their homes despite the cold. I love seeing decorated Christmas trees. I love Christmas cakes and cookies. I loved visiting Candy Cane Lane in Seattle during the holiday season. Every year, a winter trip to Leavenworth in the snow was a must. The first time it snowed every year, Chirag and I stopped at the nearby Starbucks for coffee, and drove around in unknown neighborhoods in the snow. While there are more options of activities in summer, winter limits those activities and ensures you spread your social radar wide and do more social things like chatting by the fireplace over cups of hot chocolate, meeting people in coffee shops, and go watch people decorate their homes during Christmas. Winter is the time when I thank God that I don’t live in permanently snowed in places like Chicago, Rochester, or Iowa. I buy a Santa cap every year and flaunt it and wear it everywhere. Somehow, I always manage to lose it or give it to someone at the end of the season. This has happened thrice in a row now.

I love to see the world go by dressed in red and black. Shopping malls are lit up and Santa Claus is found posing with the babies and the grown-up babies. Christmas carols are playing, and festivity is in the air. I usually sit at home and watch the South Park Christmas episodes, or movies like Serendipity and When Harry Met Sally during December. Bath & Body Works has a huge sale and I pamper myself buying more body care products than I need. I love to sit back and watch people in enthusiasm, little babies all dressed nice and pretty, happily playing in the snow and dancing around. Life becomes a carnival in motion. I miss driving to parks and traveling during the winters. I hate the cold and the dampness I feel. However, winter gives me a chance to sit back and watch other people in merrymaking. It also gives me a chance to wear those nice coats in red and black I have collected for myself all these years.

Happy brrrrr winters J

sunshine

White Winter

This year my winter is out of a Christmas greeting card. It has been snowing here non-stop, and I haven’t seen even one-tenth of this much snow the last 2 winters. In India, snow used to look very romantic in movies, with skinny women wearing flimsy clothes and jumping around. It looked so much fun making snowballs and hurling them at each other. But reality as always is far from the surreal. In reality, I haven’t seen myself wearing nice clothes and jumping around throwing snowballs at people and listening to Christmas carols while sipping coffee and eating chicken pakora in the evenings. Thanks to the snowstorm prediction before hand, I have brought tons of office work home, and am almost on the verge of having boils and sores in you-know-where, sitting on the couch all day and working on the laptop.

2 days back, we finally decided to get adventurous and venture to office, not just because we had work to bring home, but also because the weather seemed better. But this was 2 days back. On our way to office, we decided to stop at the nearby park and have some fun. Office was soon forgotten and we were jumping around and playing in the snow. Fresh snow being powdery, it is so much fun jumping on it, but equally painful and slippery to walk on it once it has melted and become sleet. And of course for all those people who always told me to learn to drive and buy a car, isn’t it great not having to clean up the car in the biting cold first thing in the morning?

Snow seemed fun and exciting initially, but now I am bored to death at home, working. I want to have a normal life again, be able to go out and meet people, walk around the streets, do grocery, have something other than chicken stew and hot chocolate, and finally, see something around me other than white. Yesterday I was looking out of my window, feeling low and depressed for some reason, and ironically craving for sunshine when I saw this very old couple holding hands and wading their way through the snow. I felt like an old person, sitting at home and watching the world go around me, too lazy and too cold to venture outside.

I think I have had enough of the snow. I have sent snow pictures home. I have stayed for days at home, wiling the snow to go away. I have had my share of white this year. And hence sunshine must set out, to California if nowhere else, just to get that sunshine and warmth again. I am done with my hibernation. I must set out to seek the sun.

sunshine

My Best Investment This Summer.

It was great to feel the breeze on my face and get my hair flying wildly in all directions after so many years. Just hope that the weather remains warm for some more time now.

sunshine.

Snow Is Not Fun.

Deceptive are the ways of Bollywood movies. Flimsy chiffon saree clad women dancing in the snow made snow look like a lot of fun. Love birds throwing snow balls at each other. It's winter here, and it's already snowing. I have never seen snow outside movies. And this sub-zero temperature is not really making it a very pleasant experience. Have you ever touched your face on a cold night to suddenly realize that you can't feel your nose? You move your fingers down to your lips, your cheeks, and you cannot feel them either. Trust me, it is not a very good feeling. I hate winters. This is the first time that I'm experiencing such extreme winters, and I am not happy. 

1. It snows here, a light rain of flakes for a couple of hours, and I keep praying- snow more, snow more. Yet it never snows enough to shut down school. No matter how cold it is, I have to go to school every morning. And you know how it feels walking in the snow? Try jutting your face inside the freezer (where you store meat and make ice). That is exactly what it feels like when you walk in the snow.
2. The tank tops, strapped tops, even the colorful sleeved tops and tee shirts and the open sandals and chappals are gone. It's been weeks since I've shown anything more than my eyes and my nose. Sometimes I wear so many layers of clothes and am bent down with weight (if not with age) that I wonder if I'll ever recognize myself in the mirror.
3. You don't really fancy attending 8:30 am classes three days a week. I have to burn the midnight oil at the library doing reference work, poring over books and journals. It usually gets late, and then, it's a nightmare walking up to the bus stop.
4. How would you feel if you thought that while you are walking, some weird force of nature is getting your clothes damp and wet (It rains nine months of the year here)? No matter how many layers of clothes you wear, you always have a feeling that your clothes are soaking damp.
5. I don't see faces on the streets anymore. All I can see are eyes and the nose.
6. These are winters minus the steaming hot coffee, pakoras, and khichuri mom made while you spent a lazy evening reading a book. Now, even if I need a glass of water, I have to fetch it myself. 
7. Do you know how many times I've tripped and slipped while walking in the snow? It's damp, it's slippery, and it's not that simple.
8. You wait for the bus on a cold night when you see a couple approaching, holding hands and kissing and talking in each other's ears, totally oblivious to the cold. And there you keep waiting for the bus, thinking, "I wish!". 
9. Cold or no cold, exams don't wait for anyone. Sun or no sun, I have to study, no matter how sleepy this weather makes me and how I long to get inside the blanket reading a novel. 
10. Taking a shower, cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, washing hands before eating, or anything that involves water becomes a painful chore. You try to remain as far from water as you can. You kinda become hydrophobic.

11. It's too much to go out and socialize with friends.
12. Most of your money is gone either buying winter clothes, or medicines for cold, cough, and fever. Not to mention the frozen fingers threatening to become gangrene infested, dry cheeks, and chapped lips.
13. No matter how much you love the butter pecan ice creams and the pina colada yogurt, you can't eat them anymore.
14. Every time you hit the chair, the car seat, or even the shit pot, you get microvolts of pulsating electricity passing through your frozen skin.
15. Gym and working out? Forget it if that requires going out in the cold. You are so sluggish, you sleep and eat all day at home, put on weight, and then the next year you get even more bankrupt spending more money getting bigger clothes. Not to mention how you want to die when you see a well-toned person running in the cold.
    Well, what to say, sunshine needs sun, and most of the time there is no sun. A few hours more, and I'd reach the North Pole. Whatever little sunshine you have barely touches your skin; it's colorless and frozen most of the time.
    Snow looks good only in on National Geographic and in movies. In real life, it is a pain.

Pic taken from my apartment window. 

sunshine.