| Rant : It's Raining, It's Pouring, and River Dawg Is Snoring ... Quite often, the state of the weather that greets you when you wake up in the morning (or in my case, the afternoon) will determine the suck-itude of the entire day ahead. I�m talking about rain. You have to understand that I live a decent distance away from where my lectures are held, where the libraries are located and where the cash machines are situated. In other words, I pretty much live in the middle of nowhere and the only claim to convenience I can crow to other people is the fact that I have a post office just over 200 metres from where I live. Which closes at noon on Saturdays, a day in which I usually wake up in time for a late lunch. So you can see how convenient that post office really is, from my point of view. Therefore, I usually go everywhere by bicycle. Apart from Saran-wrapping my entire body from head to toe, I have yet to find a means by which I can get to anywhere (apart from the post office which closes at noon on Saturdays) without getting wet when the skies decide to shed tears. This greatly explains why I am hardly seen at lectures on a rainy day. In fact, I am hardly seen anywhere on rainy days. I sleep in, like any sensible human being or river dawg might do. If given the choice. So imagine my misery when I found out in the news the other day that some silly groundhog they have in the United States has predicted a long winter. What the hell is wrong with these people? They have these so-called advanced instruments which can tell us to the nearest 0.01 degree Celsius how much the greenhouse effect is going to warm our earth by whatever year, but they rely on a silly animal that sleeps a lot to predict the length of the winter season? Why not just pay me to do it then? Anyway, annoying rodent aside, this term has been rather excruciating for me. It hasn�t been all that cold as previous years, and it hasn�t even been raining as much as last year, when some parts of the UK allegedly experienced floods not seen since dinosaurs walked the earth or something like that. It�s just that in the previous two years, I raised the white flag whenever it started to rain. If I woke up to a rainy day, back into bed I instantly plonk. But this year, I had resolved to be more hardworking, to get more out of my day, and yet, the forces of nature are against me, it seems. It has been raining in the UK for around a week now. You might think I�m exaggerating, but I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw a dry pavement. And the winds have been swirling around the country, lifting people off their feet and generally causing mayhem. Just imagine seeing someone getting blown off the ground, it�s easy to cause a 15-car pile-up like that. My calf muscles have firmed by about 12% the past week, doing all that cycling against the wind. No kidding. So what happens then? Because of my resolution for the new year, I have been forcing myself to get up early in the morning, pedal furiously down to the lecture venues come hail or high water, come rain or more rain, and sit attentively while the lecturer informs me that global warming is likely to cause a higher incidence of flooding and generally greater amounts of rainfall. Oh really? I hadn�t noticed that. The other day, I was cycling down for a tutorial and by the time I reached the class, most of my jeans were soaked through. Furthermore, while cycling through a pedal, I was sprayed on the face with some dirty water. Lovely. Great start at freaking nine o�clock in the morning. As the tutorial began, water droplets started dripping rhythmically from my hair onto my lecture pad, smudging everything possible. Halfway, I thought : why am I even bothering? I�m never even going to be able to read this. So today, I decided to do something new. I decided that I would walk instead. Now you have to understand that in order for me to walk and get to any civilised place (apart from that post office that closes at noon on Saturdays) on time, I�ll need at least a half-hour headstart, instead of the usual ten minutes that I take on the bicycle. But my calves were aching from having battled the wind for the past week, and I had run out of clean pairs of jeans already and was lazy to do my laundry. Come to think of it, it was mainly that last bit really. So I wore my waterproof jacket and walked everywhere today. And it was great. I didn�t get my jeans wet, I managed to run most of the errands I had set out to do, except the most crucial ones like shopping for food. I also like my funky maroon-coloured jacket, and wearing it made me feel like a king. I should also perhaps mention that as soon as I got halfway to my first destination, it actually stopped raining. Sure, it was still cloudy and all, but THE RAIN DECIDED TO STOP. And the wind? Basically slowed to a standstill, a breeze at best. Like I said earlier, the forces of nature are against me. Thus, I had to walk down to town, walk all around town, and walk back to where I stay in what was possibly the best weather we�d seen the past week. No, I don�t consider myself lucky. Life�s like that sometimes. The weather is so important to how we function, and we make split-second decisions that affect our mood for the entire day, purely based on what we see outside our window in the morning. I�ve gambled (and lost) enough already, though � the next time it rains in the morning, I�m diving straight back into bed. |