Welcoming February

February is coming soon. I know this not because I look at my calendar a million times a day, or because I get those annoying coupons in the mail for a free birthday dinner at a restaurant I don’t even normally eat at. No, I know February is coming, because I feel tired all the time, everyone around me is completely sick, depressed, or talking about going to some tropical island, and I haven’t seen the sun since late October.

There are many positives to living in the Seattle area, but the weather in February isn’t one of them. By the beginning of February it has been dark, gloomy, and raining for nearly three months straight. It’s the time of the year when Prozac should be the flavor of Starbuck’s latte of the month.

I never knew what a “sunbreak” was until I moved to Seattle. For those of you who are non-Northwest natives, a “sunbreak” occurs when you see about five to ten minutes of blue sky after 20 straight days of rain. “Sunbreaks” are very fucking cruel; because they give you hope that maybe there might be at least one precious day of non-rain. Non-rain is when the sky is just a light gray and there’s more of a light drizzle rather than the pissing downpour that has been the precipitation du jour since bidding “farewell” to Halloween.

During “sunbreaks” people swarm out of their workplaces in droves trying to soak up every last nanosecond of bright light, and are always disappointed a few minutes later when their beautiful smidgen of blue sky is replaced by something more dour and familiar. When I first moved to Seattle, I was amused by these “sunbreak” addicts. Now I have become one of them, which are about as depressing as watching someone in California laugh about Seattle’s 27th day of straight rain. Just six more days of rain to go and we’ll break the record! Sure, half the population will be gone from jumping off of that weird blue building downtown that looks like the top of an old fashion, roll on antiperspirant, but we’ll have a new record.

This year has been particularly nasty, and the only reason there aren’t more Seattleites playing the part of Courtney’s late husband after they made the move to the ritzy Medina neighborhood is because hell froze over and the Seahawks actually made it to the Superbowl. Even the most cynical asshole, namely me, is mildly excited to watch the mass marketing frenzy that is the Superbowl. What other day of the year can you gorge yourself on beer and cocktail weenies, while watching some poor bastard run his ass off for five hours, only to glom onto his victory at the end like you had something to do with it. 32 years of living, and I still don’t get the sports thing.

If the Seahawks do end up choking the way most Seattle teams end up doing in the end when it really matters, then the gloom level in the Puget Sound is likely to hit an all-time high. We didn’t end up breaking the original 33 straight days of rain record at the beginning of January, because it stopped for a whole 25 hours. Big fucking deal! We are now in the midst of working on a new rain record, but thankfully the sun is now setting at 5:00 pm instead of 4:00 pm.

By the end of February, nearly the entire area is in counseling or on anti-depressants, the rich people on the Eastside are sending their pets to animal psychiatrists, and every flight to Mexico on Alaska Airlines is oversold. About the time we are all wishing for death to just finish the job and relieve us of this gruesome existence, the sun appears bright and beautiful in the sky. We all come out of our workplaces in swarms and bask in the loveliness that we have been yearning for since the moment the department stores put the Christmas decorations on display (which was around the beginning of November).

We give up our Prozac lattes and thank our therapists for the endearing sessions claiming that we now realize all of our problems are indeed due to our parents, and we all begin preparing for the happy face of spring. Joy fills the land, and Seattleites everywhere lose their skepticism until the very moment they realize that it’s getting a little hot, and they forgot to replace the fucking fan when it broke last year.