February 2011
Symptoms of a gradual acceptance
a) Minus seven Fahrenheit doesn’t seem too bad, actually.
It was minus seven this morning when I left the house. Fahrenheit. Snow everywhere. The moisture on the hair in my nostrils froze before I made the car. School opening, even here, was delayed for two hours.
But you know what? It truly wasn’t that bad when I left the house. Granted I was dressed in layers [t-shirt, dress shirt, fleecy sports vest, sports coat, and the heavy knee-length lamb’s wool coat I bought in Germany in 1998 and love so dearly. Hat, but no gloves], but it wasn’t cruel to the naked skin.
And once I was in the car I immediately took several of those layers off, because another Symptom of Gradual Acceptance is the automatic starter Laura bought me for Christmas. It is now a part of my ritual of winter arrival to crank the heat and fan up as far as they’ll go and in the morning to use the car’s remote starter from the side window of our house fifteen minutes before I leave for work.
Seven years ago when I was back at school (Uni) for teacher training I needed to park off campus and cross a highway overpass in order to get to class. It was so damn freezing one morning that I simultaneously cried and laughed and unleashed a barbaric yawp at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The wind had thoroughly violated me.
But not this morning. Locals commented on how brutally cold it was outside but I really hadn’t felt it.
Note the fact that I used the term ‘Minus seven Fahrenheit’. In the same ballpark of my use of that phrase is the fact that I actually could not be bothered translating [for myself] what -7F is into Celsius. Sure I’d translate it if I thought The Voice’s general readership required it, but I reckon you’re all smart enough.
If you don’t know enough to make a rough stab at it then you’re probably young enough to possess those dismal abilities in the field of mental arithmetic that’d make my feeding you the formula a redundancy.
Go diddle around the internet, kids.
That’ll do the trick.
[Do I sound just a little sarcastic / caustic here? Yes? Good. Useless little buggers].
Actually, that phrase ‘in the same ballpark’ [four paragraphs up] bespeaks a gradual Yankification of the lingo that I’ve given up resisting. Sorry about that. Kinda. But seriously, what am I supposed to do? Rage, rage against the dying of the light?
Pedantic heaven help me if ever I turn into a linguistic purist.
b) I’m anticipating the 2011 Superbowl more than I did last year’s NRL Grand Final – even though my ‘local’ Buffalo Bills are nowhere to be seen and my ‘local’ St George – Illawarra Dragons won the 2010 Premiership.
[Mildly Embarrassing Full Disclosure – I actually needed Wikipedia to confirm that the Dragons’ did indeed win.]
What can I say? I live here. I don’t live there. It is not as if I’ve chucked a Patty Hearst to the United States’ Symbionese Liberation Army. The football’s on the television. My students talk about it. It’s in the paper. It’s what people around here talk about on a Monday morning.
I spent six hours pouring beers behind the bar at my local pub on Sunday afternoon. One of the final two playoff games was on (Green Bay Packers v Chicago Bears) and I waited back half an hour after my shift was done to catch the end of it. I understand the game a bit now, and this game was a good one. I’d love to see Green Bay win. They are what we call a ‘small market team’, meaning they are from a smaller city with a theoretically smaller fan base, or market. Local residents actually own shares in the team so it cannot be packed up and sold to another city fat with more cash.
I like the idea of the Packers.
If they win on February 6 I will remember it not just this year, but for many more to come.
c) I am more interested, in the short term, in seeing North and South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Iowa than South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
These are the states I need to visit in order to have seen all 50 US States and all six Australian States and the Top End.
My growing family glutted ourselves on Australia last summer. Loved it. Got glutted. And so I’m in the mood for a couple of cheaper leisurely road trips this summer.
No planes. Less stress. Closer to home.
Maybe I’m getting older.
Maybe I just gave up. Kookaburra