"Ay, chingao, I hate summer." The seasons and the highly sensitive.

Yesterday, basking in my lounge chair in the yard in the deliciousness of a Southern CA day that was 80 degrees in February, I exclaimed to my husband, "It's like summer!" and the above title of this posting was his reply. Well, I figured, when you are a quirky person, you marry a quirky person, and sometimes they say things that nobody else says. I mean, who hates summer?

But then I began to think back to when I had unmedicated anxiety and OCD. At that time, I preferred cloudy days because I found them calming. The sun was just too much. Too bright, too in-my-face. And of course, many a bibliophile loves a rainy day by the fire to curl up with hot cocoa. So, instead of assuming I had seasonal affective disorder in reverse, I figured people who like cloudy, drizzly cold aren't that weird after all.

I even wonder if Europeans developed a written culture earlier than some warmer, nicer places that stuck with an oral culture because there's something conducive about cold, wet weather that helps with the kind of focused work introverts and reading/writing-centric cultures privilege, while maybe nice warm weather that gets people outside and around one another fosters interaction and extroversion, which would require more of an oral culture.