Fall has always been my favorite time of year. I love when the leaves change color, I love taking my scarves out of hiding, I love seeing beanies being used for functionality and not fashionability. But living in LA, I haven't experienced any of these things! I've spent the last three years without seasonal change or any indication of the passage of time in general. I just didn't think fall existed here. I missed the crispness in the air and wanting to curl up next to a space heater and pray for summer. But this fall was different. This fall I learned. All I need to do to feel the LA fall is get up before the sun!
When I was a nanny and unemployed (my two previous careers), I didn't have to interact with the outdoors until early afternoon. I missed any night-to-day transitional temperatures and only ever knew the monotonous sunny, warm, cloudless weather that's made Southern California famous. But now that I'm a trainer and have clients at 6am, I wake up before the sun can warm everything around me to a delightful 65 degrees. I'm finally up early enough to experience the chill of winter creeping in. To feel the fall. To live the fall! And I hate it.
My main problem with LA fall is that it's a sneaks up on you. We're distracted from seasons with a beach and constant selling of flip flops for MONTHS and then it hits you, bam! And out of nowhere you're searching for all your tank tops to layer/wrap around yourself at various angles as an interim jacket. No one is prepared. I imagine the thermometers used at the local news stations in LA are measured with smiling suns, the sunglasses it wears grow darker as the temperature increases and below 65 degrees is just a big question mark.
What happened to you fall? I used to love you. I used to talk about you to all my friends. 'what are you being for halloween?', 'let's get HOT apple cider!', 'Brrr' and 'are we wearing socks now?' But now I'm too cold to care. Maybe three years of mild temperatures and never ending 'beach days' has made me a wimp, or maybe, just maybe, everything sucks. I might also have learned that changes in weather really affect my mood.
I've learned I have a hard time recovering from an overcast morning. I wonder why God has cursed me with a cloudy day when there was a cloudy day ONLY FOUR MONTHS AGO. If the sun is not in my face I don't know what day it is, or time it is, or where I is. And daylight savings, or as I like to call it, fall's devil sidekick, does not help my confusion. Mere weeks ago I would wake up at 5am, in the pit of night, to train clients and now that pit of night feels like 11am. But we humans adapt. So I adapted myself right into coffee addiction. Sure, I can't feel the difference between 8am and 2:30pm, but there is no such thing as 'feeling' when you have that brown goodness coursing through your veins.
This blog post is brought to you at a very interesting time in my life. We, ALL OF US AS A UNIT, are nineteen days away from me being cut off from my parent's health insurance and I could not be more excited because there is nothing more fun than searching for the health coverage plan that is right for you when you don't even fully understand multivitamins. To cope with impending adulthood I rang in my birthday with a visit from my two of my best friends from college. It was the best. We went to the CU/UCLA football game and won! Just kidding we lost. But I consider it a victory if we aren't confused for the pee-wee football half-time show. Oh, wait, I did that. But in my defense, they were really bad too. If I can spend one day a year like I spent my 26th birthday, with beer bongs, party buses and CU pride then I think I can handle aging. But can aging handle me?!? GO BUFFS!
