Skip to main content

Lies the Sun Told Us

Northern Scotland missed the section in Genesis where God appointed the sun to rule over the day. Or at least that's what it has felt like for the last week here.

We arrived on a Tuesday, just prior to New Year's Eve and the world was relatively sunny. Sure, Scotland only has roughly 6 hours of sunlight at this time of the year, but at 11 am we could see the sun peeking out behind the clouds.

And then it went away.

Since then our brief days have been filled with an almost consistent rain (varying from indiscernible to the eye mist to proper and hard rain), borderline freezing temperatures, and gale force winds. There's a gnawing sadness and inability to feel warm or awake permeating the world.

I don't mind the short days, but I need it to be day. I need the sun to shine periodically. My days and nights are all mixed up. The sun lied when it said it would shine. I've stopped checking the weather forecasts because their gloominess is only adding to mine.

The outside world looks like how depression feels. The gray stretches on infinitely into the gray horizon, punctuated only by darker grays heralding more rain. The cold rain numbs the skin, working like an anesthetic against any attempts to be warm and dry. The howling wind blurs all other sounds until all you can hear is its drowning roar. We're torn between wanting to stay asleep all day and wanting to see people, often with the sleep winning.

I want the sun back. I need the sun back, even if for a little bit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Syllabus for the Next 18 Months

I decided at some point in the last week that I wanted to make a checklist of 30 things to do before I turned 30. Creating a list of 30 things is harder than I imagined it would be. But, to quote Julie Andrews (which I suppose is actually quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein), "let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start." There's nothing magical about turning thirty. I imagine that on July 2, 2015, when I wake up, my eyes will still be blue, my fingers will still number ten, my instant desire will be to go back to sleep. That said, it is one of those watershed points in life. The idea of approaching thirty is both reassuring and daunting. At least I'm theoretically past the point of having a quarter-life crisis. What I want to do is be able to look back at my 20s and tell my future kids about all the adventures their parents had before they were thirty. Creating this list isn't going to create those adventures. We've already had s...
7 comments
Read more

Work-Life Balance, the Protestant Work Ethic, and Cross-Cultural Expressions of Worth

The United States and the United Kingdom are not the same place. Over the past 19 months, the differences have become apparent in some hilarious ways. For example, football means something dramatically different in Aberdeen than in Houston (and I use dramatically because both sports incite equal amounts of drama). I am fortunate in that I share a graduate student office with non-Americans. My department is overwhelmingly American and at times it can feel as though we aren't living in a foreign country, and to a larger extent a foreign culture. The realization of how vast these differences are appeared in an unusual manner this afternoon- the rights of postgraduate students to take personal time, or annual leave as its known here. The discussion emerged in response to a lovely blog by a postgraduate student elsewhere in the United Kingdom. At her university, the school requires their students to take annual leave, up to six weeks a year in that case. It seems that she isn'...
Post a Comment
Read more

the socially-acceptable salad

I didn't realize this when I was younger. I blame my friends from high school and college for not being people that perpetuated the social custom of women eating salads in public. We gorged on pizza or mexican food or some other delicious but less than healthy foods. It was glorious.  It was also terrible. It set me up to not fully exist in a society that expects (not an outright expectation, more like a clique that defines social norms) where I'm the odd duck out if I don't order a salad. I noticed this tonight at a board meeting at a restaurant. All of the women in attendance ordered salad. Would something have spontaneously erupted had someone ordered a sandwich instead? Doubt it, but by the third or fourth person had sat down with a salad a pattern had been established. Now I legitimately wanted a salad- I think. What I really wanted pizza or a hamburger. But I was coming from the gym and I felt like I would be doing a disservice to my aching bones and digestive sys...
2 comments
Read more