I'm dreaming of what?

Due to uncertainty in my work schedule and lack of planning ahead on plane ticket prices, I'm not going back east for Christmas this year. It's not a big deal, I guess. I was in France last year and I was in the South on tour the year before that. To be honest, I'm really not that big on Christmas to begin with; I think Thanksgiving is the best American holiday and Halloween is a distant second. But I have to say that I was looking forward to the snow. It's almost like the cold and the snow are a part of me, as much an aspect of my culture as local art or music. I feel like My People are, by default, dressed in layers ranging from hoodies to parkas, all the way from October to April. My People spend three months out of the year subsisting on hot chocolate and maybe warm apple cider. My People know how to drive in slippery conditions and know how to properly use the windshield defogger. Though My People are not necessarily MountainDewXtreme enough to go snowboarding, they all know at least three good spots to go sledding. My People love snow days. So I feel a little lost without any snow in the foreseeable future.

Come to think of it, I got just a taste of it in August, actually, up in Lake Tahoe.
...though maybe mountain snow is cheating.

Anyway, it's definitely the time of year when you know, beyond all possible doubt, that every reasonable person working in a retail store somewhere is already sick of Christmas music. Candy Canes abound. But it's still... Los Angeles. Do you have any idea how silly Christmas lights look on palm trees?

This time last year I was in Brittany, where it pours incredibly cold rain in the winter, but rarely snows. The science there escapes me, to be honest. In early December, when Emily and Jerome were still around, we went up to the coast near Plouha, stood huddled up on the rocky cliffs and peered over the sides at the thrashing water below while the winter wind combed through the long tufts of grass that grow there.

Later Emily went back to the States and winter vacation started and I was the only one left on the school campus. From the refectory to the dorms, all the classroom buildings and offices, everyone was gone for the break. And I was the only one without anywhere to go, the only one passing through that big metal gate at night, around the dark corners in the half-light. So they turned off the institutional oil heat and supplied me with a small electric heater, which worked out alright. I turned it off when I went out during the day, to the market or the library, so my room was always frigid when I returned. (Why is Inside-Cold so much colder than Outside-Cold?) Those twenty minutes waiting for the heater to warm up the room were always 'fun' in that at-least-it's-never-dull kind of way.
I spent a lot of time under blankets that winter. Under blankets, watching VHS movies (WTF, PAL speed-up?) from the local library with the amazing AV section, taking days to binge on one director at a time, Hitchcock (subtitled), Truffaut, Woody Allen (subtitled, poorly), Polanksi (st), Besson, Godard, Jarmusch (st, p), Tarkovsky(st), blah blah.
The school has these energy-saving light switches in the hallways that all run on a timer. There is a round button, illuminated by a thin orange circle, and when you push it, a soft grinding sound starts, and you get about two minutes to get where you're going, and then it turns off again, to prevent it being left on unnecessarily. A good idea for an institution. Hell, a good idea in general. But it does mean that at night, the hallway is always really dark in the time it takes to get from your room (or the kitchen, or wherever) to that little orange circle. That, combined with the fact that I was all alone in this big building, combined with the creaky, smooth hardwood floors, and the five-hundred-year-old stone stairs, so well-used that there is a scoop worn out of the center of them, made it pretty eerie to watch Hitchcock up in the living room and then creep back to my bedroom, dashing around corners to the next little button to illuminate the next (creaky) segment of the walk.

Actually, now that I think of it, one of the lights in the bathroom was on the same setup, so a couple of times I was surprised, two minutes into a shower (after manually turning on the electric water heater, also turned off during break) when I was left in darkness. Showering in the dark is actually kind of nice, it turns out.

Maybe it's just that I'm never satisfied. Always longing after whatever season it isn't. After winter break, in the middle of that winter that was heavy and dark, without giving the satisfaction of snow, I drove a borrowed car on the weekends to other places on the coast, mostly the beaches, bundled up against the wind and the rain, looking longingly at the sand and the waves crashing against rocks and even the German bunkers from the war. I remember picturing those same beaches in the summer, and picturing myself returning there, thinking, "Five months and forty degrees from now." I wanted to go and sit by myself on the beach and get sand in between the pages of all my favorite drunk authors, maybe make some new friendships that would only last twenty minutes, absorb a little sun, lie there and think about things. I remember thinking how much I wanted to eat summer food, bread and fruit, let the juice get all over my fingers and leave me sticky and preoccupied about it until I rinsed them off in the sea. Maybe that would leave them all salty, but that's probably better, anyway.

So maybe I always displace myself a few months or a few thousand miles ahead. In the meantime, there's good news: I just found out where to ice skate in Los Angeles. And I can drink warm apple cider even if it's not that cold out.