Under the Weather

Caveman brain tries to make sense of why so much water fall from sky

It is February and there are rivers running down St. Augustine Street. It rained for 22 days in Dublin in January and it’s not showing any sign of letting up soon. You know when people say if the moon controls the tides and our bodies are made of so much water then why wouldn’t the full moon have an effect on people or whatever? Having a month’s worth of water dumped directly on our heads in 24 hours after basically a whole month of rain has to have some effect too. The rain is making everyone fucking crazy and I am not immune.

Certain types of twee Gilmore Girls fans might think that the inclement weather¹ would give me a good opportunity to curl up with a book listening to the rain against the windows. Wrong! If I don’t socialise as much as possible something inside me will snap. I literally can’t remember the last time I felt the sun. Remember standing in the sun? How it would feel warm on your skin, even burn it? I think I made that up because I have zero proof that it is possible.

Everyone is covered in a sheen of dry sweat and sticky rain. People arrive at functions red in the face and gasping for air like they’ve been under water, which I guess technically they have. They look for somewhere to put their breaking, soaking umbrellas, panting and desperate. Everyone does this weird jumpy Dune style sand-walk thing to avoid puddles. There is a specific smell that occurs when the plastic of your raincoat leeches some of its essence out because of the warmth of your body underneath it after you’ve walked quickly for fifteen minutes, eager to get out of the rain.² When you do get out,³ it’s not necessarily better. I can see my breath in front of me on the bus. My right sock keeps getting wet no matter what shoes I wear. On top of the rain, I keep randomly getting my period and there’s crazy condensation on my windows and I’m having nosebleeds, so my whole life feels like a futile struggle to keep various liquids at bay.

I understand that climate change means that Ireland is mostly going to keep getting hotter and wetter every summer forever and every winter is going to get shitter and crazier. I also understand that the problems I am discussing are stupid and not important and that other people have real ones. Did I not just tell you that the rain is making me crazy? That is my caveat.

Last night I stayed up too late reading a recipe for ginger garlic miso soup and an essay about identifying rapists. Parts of the essay were stupid and others were terrifying and the soup looked nice so today I went to Lidl to get ginger and stuff.

I hate seeing sexy people in Lidl because I am my worst self in that place. I walk around looking like, in the words of the Scissor Sisters, a drowned harassed rat. I catch a glimpse of myself in the CCTV and see a drawn, pallid stare. The two types of sexy people you see in Lidl are the men who are not wearing raincoats and are somehow bone dry, and the women in long suede and sheepskin coats who also seem to have teleported in from another planet where it is not fucking raining.⁴ Both kinds are addicted to making eye contact with me. I feel like I’m in John Carpenter’s They Live, like I’ve discovered some creatures clandestinely walking among us. How are they not wet? Why am I not like them? Should I join a run club? I picked up a hunk of ginger. It was from China. I wondered if it’s fucking raining there.

I have been listening to a lot of Magdalena Bay, mostly because I saw them in Vicar Street with my friends last night. We talked about trying to trick ourselves into looking forward to our jeans getting all wet on the way home from the gig because it meant that we would then get to take off our wet jeans, which is immensely satisfying. As I walked to Lidl, I misheard the Angel on a Satellite lyric “makes me think of summer winds” as “makes me think of summer rain” and laughed out loud, almost stepping in a pile of wet dog shit. The last time I saw them at Lollapalooza Berlin it started raining almost immediately after their set.

Anyway, I spent about twenty minutes looking for tahini in Lidl. The fluorescent lights and aisles upon aisles of food make me think of that bit towards the end of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver where they return to an American supermarket and are completely overwhelmed by the vast quantities of food, of products, just sitting there. Procuring food for most people throughout most of history was hard. So was staying warm and dry. I am wondering how long is normal to look for the tahini before asking someone where it is. I am often wondering something like this because I am often in the shop looking for one very specific ingredient due to my life lacking structure and routine. The recipe didn’t even call for tahini so I went to the checkout feeling stupid. My wet hair was already starting to dry funny.

I asked for cashback at the till, something I have started doing because I live in an area with a lot of people asking for change and I hate being someone who does not have it on them to give to my neighbours. Rain makes it especially hard to live when you are actively prevented from entering indoor spaces. Lidl does not offer cashback and I thought to myself that if there is a heaven for chain European supermarkets they will not be seeing it.

A gust of wind helped the sheets of rain smack me directly in the face on the way home. It got inside my hood. The groceries in my bag were kind of wet. In a video about the last of the cycling postmen in Cork that my friend Tom showed me, a cycling postman is asked what the worst part of his job is. He comes up with nothing, and the interviewer offers “the wind?” He replies “The wind and the rain.” I just need to get over it. I just need it to stop fucking raining.

1. No one ever says clement weather.

2. Commercial grade Gore-Tex isn’t even made with the same stuff anymore because of the forever chemicals, at least not in the EU.

3. And by “out” I mean inside. The classic Hiberno-English stylings of “come in out of there before you’re after getting wet.”

4. Can you be nonbinary in Lidl? Scientists everywhere are asking.