POSITIVE THINKING: #2

The second installment in the POSITIVE THINKING series comes from JK. JK needs no introduction -- he's one of the three surly proprietors of this blog. That being said, these sentences basically constitute an introduction, so we may as well tell you what he'll be writing about: he's chosen to focus on an idea briefly raised in POSITIVE THINKING: #1: our crisp Albertan climate.

A lot of people, even the most loyal and proud of Albertans, loathe the weather here, which is pretty easy to understand. It's friggin' freezing for a good four months and kind of freezing for another four, which leaves only about a third of the year for cutoff jean shorts. Most people like cutoff jeans shorts and nobody -- me included -- likes freezing, but I nonetheless find many charms within a climate that to all outward impressions is horrible.

There are a lot of stupid reasons I like our climate. For example, it's conducive to sweater-wearing and I happen to be a guy who likes to wear sweaters, and in weather with any amount of humidity I quickly develop what some would call a "gross sweating problem." These, though, are obviously fairly superficial reasons, and carry about the same weight, I think, as liking a climate simply because "it's hot."

The crux of what I like about our weather is that it is one of the things that define us as Albertans. I like the weather because it's a challenge, and I think challenges like weather -- which doesn't recognize the generally trivial things like socioeconomic status or political affiliation that us humans tend to use as an excuse to ignore one another -- bring us together in some way. Inevitably, during a stretch of really miserable weather, I'll find myself talking to people I would have never talked to simply because we're both sharing something, and I really think that's worth something.

I definitely lament certain aspects of the weather here, an example being our almost complete lack of autumn. I lived in New England for a while, and I remember during my first fall there the leaves turning colour and staying on the trees for, like, two months. Around week six I was just looking at the trees thinking "are you kidding me?" Some part of me wishes we had longer autumns, but I'm ultimately glad that they're 2 weeks long because they are something that make us unique. I love that the leaves staying on the trees for so long was the primary focus of numerous conversations I had with people back home during the fall I mention above -- it's something that only a relatively small portion of people on our continent would get, and it's part of what makes us us.

There are a lot of images that people from the rest of Canada see when they think about Albertans, some of which I like and most of which I don't. One that makes me happy and also strikes me as accurate is the notion of the people here being friendly and unpretentious. It would be simplistic to attribute this to entirely to weather -- really, other parts of Canada have crappy weather, too -- but I nonetheless think that our climate has in some way played a role in this, maybe because it's exceptionally crappy. Experiences like getting pushed out of a ditch by a stranger or even just talking to a stranger simply because you're sharing the unpleasant experience of slowly developing frostbite while waiting for a crossing signal to change are things that I think subtlety shape us as Albertans. Ultimately, they're a part of what makes us unique in the country and the world.