The rain has slowed to a drizzle. I’m all dressed up with somewhere to go but no one to go out with. I’ve dialed all the numbers of my usual Thursday night partners in crime and received a similar response from each.
“I think I’m just going to stay in tonight” has become a common rainy-day refrain.
Southern California is known for its beautiful weather, but give us a week without our sun and we’ll act like it’s the apocalypse. The presence of a dark cloud can send half of UCLA’s student population back into bed.
Even lecture halls only reach half capacity on rainy days. Perhaps if we didn’t always have such perfect weather, a bit of drizzle wouldn’t feel like the end of the world.
Other places in the country frequently have far worse weather than us. I recently visited Evanston, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and got my first taste of a Midwestern winter. While I was there, the temperature averaged 7 degrees with a windchill factor even lower than that.
There, if I didn’t want to become a block of ice when I was outdoors, I had to fully suit up every time I left the house: a hat, two sweaters, a warm jacket, boots, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, long underwear. It takes half of a closet of clothes just to make it to the supermarket alive.
And yet the residents are not immobilized by some of the crummiest weather I have ever experienced. They can’t be. Their bad weather persists for more than half of the year.
“The weather will determine the mood for the day, but it won’t stop you from doing what you’d otherwise do,” said Loren Brindze, a second-year student at Northwestern University in Evanston.
That is unless it’s a particularly nasty rainy day, Brindze said, and in Evanston such a day would consist of a 36-degree temperature, sheets of icy rain, a frozen ground and bone-chilling wind, not to mention 5-inch puddles everywhere just waiting to give you wet socks.
“It just feels awful,” Brindze said.
And maybe on such a terrible day, the residents of Evanston would blow off a few items on their to-do lists. Maybe.
Yet here we are in Los Angeles, where the temperature is easily 30 degrees higher with no ice and no wind on even the most miserable of rainy days, complaining and huddling under blankets. All I can say is that Los Angeles’ winter gloom felt like summer after experiencing a real winter.
We’re spoiled here. We don’t have to take half an hour just to put on our outerwear, we don’t have to de-ice our cars, and we have the option of sporting a tank top most of the year. I think we can endure a few raindrops every now and then without restricting our Thursday nights to an at-home movie and a gallon of tea.
But we don’t. We take a rain check on our lives when the weather isn’t pristine because we’re afraid of ruining our perfectly straightened Southern California hair.
“L.A. isn’t built for bad weather,” said David Blumenfeld, a second-year electrical engineering student, justifying his choice to stay in on a rainy day. “I would be down to go out and stuff if there were things like subways and buses. It’s just a lot more of a (hassle) to get around.”
And the problem most students seem to have is walking around outside when it’s raining and getting wet.
“I hate rain,” said Niko Lazovich, a second-year cognitive science student. “I start off dry, and I end up wet. I mean my socks get wet, everything gets wet.”
And God forbid a human should ever get wet. You shower before you go out anyway, so what’s wrong with being freshened up by the rain? It’s all water. It’s not like we’re dealing with acid rain here.
But both Blumenfeld and Lazovich are Southern California natives, accustomed to 70-degree weather year-round.
“Rain screws up my Southern California style,” Lazovich said. “I would prefer perfect weather at all times.”
Well, so would the residents of Evanston, who tough it out through their prolonged winter just to have four to eight weeks of a Southern California spring. We get that beautiful weather almost year-round, and a little smattering of rain is only a minor imperfection on our otherwise flawless weather report.
Perhaps it would take a trip to the tundra to truly appreciate what we have and not be fazed by a little rain.
Or we could just throw on our raincoats, open our umbrellas and go out tonight whether we want to or not. It’s still 60 degrees outside, and in most parts of the world, that’s no reason to shiver.
Does the rain ruin your day? E-mail Hein at nhein@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.