Canada is Cool: A Haiku

My nose hairs grow stiff

As I wait inside the car.

Please heat up faster.

I think my favorite thing about the cold is that it's so darn extreme. Sounds weird but it's true - life is much more exciting when you are living under pretty ridiculous circumstances, and a real feel temperature of minus twenty four degrees (about minus 31 C for my metric friends) is what I consider a pretty ridiculous circumstance. 

Sometimes when I tell people about how cold it gets here they get a horrified look on their face and say things like "How can you stand that?" and regard me in awe like I am some sort of medical freak who loves to roll around in the ice and eat fistfuls of snow. But the truth is, I'm outside every day for maybe a total of five minutes and the rest of the time I am indoors and wholly comfortable and usually nursing a hot beverage. Yeah it sucks to not be able to run outside or walk around with wet hair or open the sunroof of my rental car but life goes on and people find equally enjoyable things to do under a roof. Also we are less susceptible to skin cancer, hurrah!

I think that even though we all say we crave nice weather, our actual happiness is ultimately all relative to what we're used to. I'm sure Californians who wake up every day to balmy 73 degree weather get desensitized to beautiful weather and are always content with it whereas for me, a nice day is incredibly special and I experience a more concentrated spurt of happiness because I can appreciate it that much more. I think the ideal place weather-wise is somewhere that experiences all four seasons in moderate amounts - that way, life changes the most with each passing season and you get to really change things up, from what you do on the weekends to what color nail polish you wear :-)

Man, I can't believe I just wrote a whole entry and a poem about the weather. I am turning into an old geezer.