Emma Philbrook: STUDENT LIFE

Washington, What a State!

Jeff Foxworthy is best known for his “Redneck” jokes, but he actually wrote several “Washington” jokes as well. One of them was:

“If you sometimes switch the thermostat from ‘Heat’ to ‘AC’ and back again on the same day, you live in Washington.”

This is accurate.

I’m one of those naturally cold-blooded people. My baseline temperature is closer to hypothermia than it is to the standard 98.6 degrees. I am somewhat notorious in the Waitsburg school system for wearing a large silver coat every day between the start of October and the end of March.

“It’s not that cold,” people will say.

“Isn’t it?” I reply.

Of course, you can never trust a high-schooler to accurately gauge temperature. High-school boys will wear shorts and tank tops even when it’s barely above freezing, and girls, who are usually more sensible, are still not above wearing short dresses on nippy days for the sake of appearances. So sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m the only seasonably dressed person in the building.

But as I happen to live in Washington, what qualifies as “seasonably dressed” one morning could very well qualify as an invitation for heat stroke that afternoon.

Take last Friday. I was rather cold that morning, so I put on thick fleece pants and a fuzzy, long-sleeved shirt even after being warned that it would reach eighty that afternoon. Let’s just say I spent Friday evening lying spread-eagle on my bed with the ceiling fan on full blast.

I’m not sure what it is with Washington State. Maybe it has something against cold-blooded people. Maybe it thinks shivering is funny.

In any case, as I type this, I am wearing a long-sleeved shirt and gray sweatpants. My lower half is securely swaddled in a blanket. For the sake of typing efficiency, the blanket only goes up to the middle of my torso, so the upper third of my body is pretty chilly right now. Meanwhile, the swaddled portion is getting somewhat overheated, but I’m pretty sure I’ll freeze to death if I remove the blanket. So I’m leaving it in place and pretending that the temperature extremes cancel each other out, even though it’s not working out quite like that.

Hey, it’s almost April. I think I might wear a lighter jacket to school. Today seems like one of those days that was just made for a boiled-wool pea coat.

There is a cat on the bed next to this computer. He is asleep in the faint bit of morning light seeping through a nearby window. I am intensely jealous that he is allowed to sleep in, but perhaps even more jealous that he doesn’t have to worry much about regulating his body temperature. He grows extra hair in the winter and sheds it in the summer. In fact, I think he may be getting a head start on his sheading, because I am finding cat hair just about everywhere these days.

Ah, Washington. What a state. A beautiful state, an excellent state, but couldn’t you be just a bit more decisive about your climate? Is it too much trouble to pick “hot” or “cold” or “balmy” or “nippy” and stick with it for 12 hours? (Oh, it is? Drat.)