Humidity

I have lived most of my life in Syracuse, New York. I recently moved to Maine, but I am back in the 'Cuse for some vacationing.

Now, as anyone who lives in this area knows, Syracuse has a weather pattern entirely it's own. Winter begins in mid October, often causing Halloween to buried in a foot and a half of snow and tiny children dressed as fairies and pirates to all look like Eskimos. Winter ends sometime around graduation. It does not matter when your graduation is, that is when winter takes it's last bow, and shits all over everything. The alternative is that the snowfall ends on April 15th, and summer starts on the 16th. We literally had a weekend of spring a few years ago: we had a blizzard on Friday, it warmed up over the weekend, and by Monday, everything was in bloom and having sex with the air.

Summer lasts from the end of winter (there is no spring) to the beginning of October. Fall lasts about 2.5 weeks, and is cold as shit and precipitous. Then winter starts again.

The winter here is bad, but at least bearable. It can occasionally hit -20 degrees (without windchill - a lovely device that makes already cold weather REALLY FUCKING COLD) with lake-effect snowfalls of three feet a day. But that isn't the bad part of the year.

When summer hits, it doesn't just give Syracuse a little love tap - it punches it really hard in the gonads and stands there laughing, every once in a while throwing a brick at its head. It has, for instance, been in the mid nineties all week, with humidity well above 150 percent. How is that possible, you may ask. How can anything have more than 100 percent? Well, most places can't, and the humidity scale was constructed for normal places where humans can actually exist in comfort. Then Syracuse happened.
Another great thing about Syracuse is that, as the winter lasts 3/4 of the year, NO ONE has air conditioning. That's fine October-June, but what happens in between? Hell.

The humidity is like this:

• You need to take at least two showers a day to not smell like your pet Labrador
• These showers will be icy cold, in an attempt to lower your body temperature enough that you don't begin sweating again as you towel off
• When you open the freezer, vapor will come boiling out an cloud your vision, and while you wait for it to clear, you will get yelled at for wasting energy
• Toilet paper rolls become so damp that they bend and sag on their holders, making it impossible to unroll them without announcing to the rest of the house, via repeated clangs, that you are doing so
•  Every single window in the house is opened, and usually the doors as well, so there is a total lack of privacy and an inordinate number of insects flying, bumbling, biting and stinging their way around the house
• Becoming nocturnal does no good, as staying up until 6 am means you sleep past noon, and awake drenched in sweat and cranky as hell and hating life

No one in the world loves snow as much as someone who has to live through summers in Syracuse.