Always bring the weather

It was really cold one morn­ing last week, and I mean, like 24 degrees cel­sius type of cold. The type that makes you want to head out to a cof­fee kiosk and have a com­fort­ing cuppa cof­fee and an equally com­fort­ing piece of con­fec­tion. Like a brownie or some­thing, because they were going for $1. And that’s cheap.

You know how it is when you wake up some morn­ings and the weather’s dreary, and you find your­self telling your­self, ‘Man, what a gloomy morn­ing, and man, do I feel gloomy too’?

Yah, so it was that kind of morn­ing, cold, 24 degrees, hands in pock­ets, shuf­fling to the cof­fee kiosk, hair tou­sled by a stiff breeze. I ordered a black cof­fee from the kiosk for sev­enty cents, and con­tem­plated buy­ing the dol­lar brownie. But three sips into my bev­er­age, a few beads of sweat formed on my nose, and it was no longer that kind of morn­ing, but warm, sti­fling and uncomfortable.

It gets warmer as the day goes on, and next thing you know, you’re com­plain­ing about the heat, and won­der­ing to your­self how peo­ple still order hot cof­fees and teas at the cof­fee stall across the street, and eat mee siam and mee rebus that you can no longer describe as steam­ing, because in this weather, if your bowl of noo­dles still steams, it’s gonna prob­a­bly melt the bowl.

Gloomy in the morn­ing, uncom­fort­able in the after­noon (or from late morn­ing onwards), wish­ing for a late after­noon shower. These are things that one shouldn’t feel, unless one were a farmer or some­thing and one really needed that thun­dery shower (isn’t that a great term for heavy rain?).

I mean, the weather really shouldn’t affect you oth­er­wise, unless it caused flash floods, like the time I had a class­mate in sec­ondary school arrive really really late for his ‘O’ Level Math­e­mat­ics paper, with still the best excuse ever: “I was swept into the Bukit Timah canal and had to walk back from Jalan Besar”.

Or like when my uni mates and I slept in fear of fur­ther hail­storms after the one that ripped through our sub­urb was clas­si­fied as the most expen­sive nat­ural dis­as­ter on record. Then again, that pro­vided more of a per­verse plea­sure than any gloomy dis­po­si­tion, with weeks of sto­ries that went like, ‘hey didja hear about that idiot Sin­ga­porean who went out with an umbrella because he hadn’t seen a hail­storm before and wanted to take a look?’ (he almost had parts of the umbrella embed­ded in his head, but was oth­er­wise unscathed save for some bruises).

Yah, that was fun. In fact, we had fur­ther fun off that, because all you needed to do to freak a car-owning uni mate out was to pour a bag of mar­bles out­side his apart­ment win­dow, and count how long before he rushed out to cover his car with a blan­ket to pro­tect it from the killer hailstones.

Yah.

OK, what was it I say­ing about the weather?

Tech­no­rati Tags: Sin­ga­pore