Welcome back from Spring Break, everyone!
It’s time to put up the booze — well, until next Sunday, at least — put on our study hats and prepare for the long slog towards the finish line.
I hope everyone had fun and got out of Gainesville because it was cold here!
On Monday, the temperature in my house didn’t get above 50 the entire day. My roommate and I kept drinking coffee to keep our internal organs functioning. We would’ve turned on the heat, but we’re cheapskates.
But it got me thinking.
See, I used to live in Colorado, and I wore shorts year-round. I didn’t even own a pair of long pants. It would be 12 under and snowing, and I’d be walking the two miles from the bus stop to my house happy as a polar bear. I didn’t care! The cold didn’t bother me then.
Now, I shiver wearing a sweatshirt and jacket in 43 degrees. What the hell happened to me?
Fortunately, my life’s mission statement is “Find a patsy.”
Whenever something happens that I might be to blame for, I find somebody else to blame instead. It works occasionally, although usually I forget what the problem was in the first place and go play guitar. This time I couldn’t do that.
My fingers were too stiff to play guitar. So I thought long and hard — for about 20 minutes before “Family Guy” came on TBS — and came up with several possible culprits.
First, I thought of the humidity.
I’ve been told before — or maybe I made it up. I don’t really remember — that cold feels colder when it’s really humid. It cuts straight through to your bones. I’m not sure how that works, but I’d be prepared to believe it.
But then I used my pocket psychrometer to measure the humidity and found out there was zero humidity in my house.
My roommate told me this was because my pocket psychrometer was actually just a shard of glass with a zero painted on it, but I didn’t believe him because, hey, science.
I continued my search for a scapegoat.
I thought about blaming Gainesville Regional Utilities.
“Yeah,” I thought. “They’re the ones that made it so expensive to heat my house.”
But then I remembered the times we have turned on the heat. It doesn’t turn off, and it only makes the house incrementally warmer. That’s because there are cracks in the house.
There are places where you look at the wall and can see the outside light.
We have high ceilings — “vaulted” ceilings, as the leasing company calls them — which do not help with the problem at all. Right above the high ceilings is an attic whose holes are not a flaw but a design feature. Those holes release heat (because heat rises), and I’m pretty sure they’re the reason the bats are up there. And the pig ghost who makes noises in our walls every night.
I decided it wasn’t GRU I had to blame for being cold. It was my house. I started to bemoan my fate.
How could I have gotten into such a situation in life? How did I end up living in such a cold house? I thought back. I remembered.
That house costs me peanuts in rent. I’m poor and cheap. I’d rather pay peanuts in rent than be warm.
It dawned on me: I’m the one to blame for me being cold! I found my scapegoat: me!
Wait, dammit, that’s what I was trying to avoid.
The moral I’m trying to expound is this: There are some situations in life when you can find someone else to blame, but usually, if you trace it back far enough, you’ll find it was really you who made your problems.
Instead, don’t worry about blame, and just live your life. It’s easier that way.
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column runs on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
