writtensoul [dot] net

I personally think rain boots are possibly one of the smartest inventions ever for rainy weather.  Especially because even if you have the biggest umbrella in the world, your feet will still get wet and your pants, inevitably, will also get soaked in a thunderstorm. And at Vanderbilt, wearing rain boots all-day to class, work, and home is totally acceptable—perhaps, as long as you have the right name brand.

So, I was pretty used to wearing rain boots to class, since you have to walk to class in college. So, when I came to Yilan, the rainiest city in Taiwan (seriously) and possibly the rainiest city in the world (no joke), I knew I needed to get some rain boots.  Plus, we scooter around everywhere here. And if you don’t know what that equates to, it basically means if its raining, you get completely soaked unless you are wearing your rain gear.  Strangely enough, rain gear here does not equate to rain boots; just a gigantic rain jacket, gloves, and possibly rain pants. Anyway, I decided I didn’t care what other people were doing and heck I wanted to wear my rain boots and keep my feet dry and warm.

continue reading »

So, I’ve realized that despite the odds, the weather forecast always turns to rain and never the other way around.  The happy pretty “sunny” icons that smiled at me on Monday, predicting beautiful weather for the next week have so easily been replaced with this grimacing “chance of rain” icon in an effort to ruin my weekend.

But, I have realized that it’s never the other way around.  There’s never a week when I go to Weather Underground and the forecast says rain all week but then the next day it’s turned for the better and everything has cleared up.  No, Yilan is in a perpetual state of a chance of rain.  You might think that the sky is clear and it’s bright and sunny outside.  But, you would be mistaken.  Within a few short hours, the entire sky will have changed to clouds and rain and all your hopes and dreams of a happy scooter ride would be immediately squashed.

I think it’s funny how kids always sing that rhyme…
Rain, rain go away
Come again another day

But really, do I want the rain to come back another day? I think it has literally rained every other day in Boston during this entire summer. The humidity here is just ridiculous; maybe it’s the city pollution cloud that keeps all of the moisture from escaping so we just get thick humidity and rain all the time. But, it’s absolutely disgusting and upsetting.

I’m reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and the autistic narrator describes how his measure of a good or bad day is the number of cars of a certain color that pass while they are driving to school. So, three red cars in a row counts as a good day but three yellow cars in a row counts as a bad day. The longer the pattern, the more intense the feeling. He notes that other people think his method is silly, but he explains that it is as arbitrary as other people deciding their feelings based upon the weather.

But the rain really does make me sad and tired and lazy. It makes me just want to curl up with a book next to the air conditioner (since there’s only one in this entire house) and read all day long or take a nap in a couch and just sit and be. It’s actually quite a lot like pulling teeth to get me to go outside in the rain. And when we took some of the students out on a field trip to the aquarium when it was absolutely down pouring, it took an enormous amount of energy to try and keep positive for the kids.

I was soaking wet. And I was wearing jeans. The kind that start to weight 50 lbs after their weight. I was also wearing sneakers with holes and socks. Socks that just suck up the water and squish until you come home and your feet have pruned and smell nasty. Blah.

Go away rain, please.