Canadians are like crack addicts about nice weather. You can’t really blame us. Our summers don’t hang around long enough for the novelty to wear off and our winters are the stuff of legend. That means we have to enjoy the little that we get to the absolute fullest or else take a vacation to somewhere warm, and I’m clearly far too Scottish for that (read: too cheap).
The GTA has been graced with a week of lovely, clear, warm weather (after a startlingly mild winter that was the meteorological equivalent of Robarts Library – not actually unbearable, just massive, grey, mediocre and butt-ugly) and it has turned my quad into a public sockhop.
Look at it. I mean, really LOOK at it. It is a fucking CHICKEN. WHY?! Why would anyone be compelled to put books into a chicken? And don't give me any on that 'it is a regal peacock' shit, I know a book-chicken when I see one.
Every day about six of the common room couches, which feel a lot like church pews and invoke in me the same reaction of nonspecific guilt and shame, are dragged onto the grass by midmorning. By noon the guitars are out, there are at least three games of football going on, somebody is playing fetch with a large dog and/or small child, and there are several people in the sycamore tree beside my window.
A brief tangent: Sycamores are not common in Canada, to the point where I’d never seen one before I noticed the maples with the curiously mottled, impressionist-painting-esque green bark in Central Park on my first NYC trip. The really weird thing about sycamores, besides the bark, is that in late fall they produce hundreds what looks like a conker with an attitude problem:
These little dudes stay on the tree all winter, dangling alarmingly over your head but just far enough out of reach that you can’t get a good look at them. Sort of like the sword of Damocles, but fuzzier. So anyway, the nice weather and the people and stuff.
There is a holiday feel to it, as if it’s already summer, and all of us dream of warm, humid afternoons outside, talking aimlessly, measuring time by nothing but the passage of the sun. The only shitty part is that it isn’t summer yet, and I still have hours of reading and a formal lab report to do before I even begin studying for exams. It’s cruel, I tell you. And nothing rubs salt in the wounds like watching other people enjoy it. I find myself sort of hoping the novelty will wear off soon and everyone will go away. And that’s… sad, somehow. I never really wanted to be one of those people who’d wish apathy on anyone. But hey, combine that with a BSc and I might make a good supervillain.
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