As I write this, we’re at 10 consecutive days at or over 100º and 19 total days in those temperatures so far this year. I haven’t seen a drop of rain in longer than I can remember. The poor squirrels that are usually hiding far away from where my dog might be able to reach them are spread-eagle as low as they can possibly be. I’ve started leaving water out for them because I can’t imagine living outside in this weather with fur.
It’s just miserable out there is what I’m saying.
I know that people further north get seasonal affective disorder during the winter because they don’t see the sun for something like six months at a time. As much as I love the (idea of) snow, I don’t think I could handle that; it’ll get cloudy for a week here during the winter or spring and that’s too much for me. I never thought the endless summer could provoke a similar reaction in me.
As a runner, I’m always acutely aware of the temperature and the dew point because that’s how I make decisions about when to run. In the winter, I’ll look for the warmest or sunniest point of the day if I can swing it. In the summer, I’m usually looking to see how early I have to get up or whether I need to plan my evening around doing a sunset run. Summer here in Texas is always pretty difficult for running, but I’ve never felt like it was impossible to train through. Plenty of folks do it, and when the fall comes, it pays off.
This year, though, it feels like someone turned the heat on sometime in May and just left the building. Pete Delkus, my meteorologist of choice, has explained that we have a high pressure cap over basically the whole state, and that’s causing the sustained, excessive heat, and the lack of rain.
When it’s this hot, I just don’t want to be outside. You sweat walking from the car into whichever haven from the heat you’re ducking into before you return to your home to hide from the sun again. Because of this, I find myself getting a kind of summer sadness. I want to go out and do things, but I don’t want to get out in the heat and Dallas doesn’t have a ton of indoor recreation spaces that aren’t bars or malls or movie theaters. And even the mall is setting the thermostat a few degrees higher than normal because our power grid is likely to fail us any day now!)
On top of all of the physical discomfort, this Groundhog Day from hell is psychically difficult because there’s literally nothing I can do to affect the temperatures. Sure, in the long term there are changes we can make to combat climate change, but there’s nothing I can do right this minute to cool this state down. That is difficult to deal with! That humans struggle with the idea that they can’t control everything in their lives is not a novel concept, but it’s something that I don’t often have to confront. I can set the thermostat indoors. I can choose which clothes I wear and which television shows I watch and what I eat and almost every other element of my immediate environment, but no amount of wanting or wishing or working on my part will change this miserable weather.
This weekend, I wanted to go do something. We had gone to meet my family for lunch and made two full laps of Northpark trying to think of anywhere else that we could go before we headed home for another inevitable afternoon of watching television and doing chores. Ben and I don’t get a ton of weekends together, so when we have them, we want to make the most of them. It feels like a waste to spend them indoors. The whole way home, I just felt utterly drained of happiness and hope, and the knowledge that I couldn’t do anything to change the weather situation or even know how long it was going to last just worsened my malaise.
In short, hot weather is a bummer, and extremely hot weather is an extreme bummer.
But it’s something that I do have to keep dealing with until the fall. And I’m lucky enough to have a working AC and a job that lets me work at home where I can adjust the thermostat and wear shorts. I don’t have to drive an Amazon truck around, sprinting up to people’s doors and then back to the truck. I don’t have to mow lawns or deliver mail or build roads. Comparison is most often the thief of joy, but sometimes it’s just what I need to put things into perspective. And a little perspective is what I needed to snap out of that funk.
I do loathe this weather, but I’m also not going to let it rule my life completely. I went on a solid bike ride on Monday morning and then even rode over to a friend’s house to watch Tour de France highlights later that day. I capped it off with a run in the evening. I took two showers and probably sweated out a gallon of water. I was exhausted by the end of the day. But I did the things I wanted to.
I still (obviously) have no power to change these conditions. I have no idea how long this extra hot weather is going to last, or if we might get some sort of reprieve in August. But I can reframe this miserable heat as a challenge, and I can control how I respond to the challenge. (I do love a good challenge.) Perhaps most crucially, I can retrain myself to avoid wasting thoughts on fretting about the things I can’t predict or control and focus on taking on each day on its own. Hopefully all of that combined can make me less of a grumpy Gus. If not, please send thoughts and prayers to my family, who will have to put up with me until September or October.