I'm getting tired of this thing coming up looking like a near-win on a slot machine. There's a typhoon in the air and the air is oppressively humid today. If you could see the water molecules hanging in the air, the world around you would be a nearly opaque cube and you'd be the fly stuck in the middle. When the weather is like this, it feels like the gravity has been turned up and you just don't want to move. It's depressingly gray and it causes one to have the tendency to be crabby for no explicable reason.
After days of rain predictions and holding back on washing clothes, I had to do some laundry and hang it inside today but it's not getting any drier. In fact, the carpet in the room that it's hanging in actually feels moist when I step on it. It is as if the added moisture released from the clothing has joined forces with the ambient humidity and actually caused it to finely rain on the floor. The room also has the type of smell you associate with a laundromat...as if the smell of clean but wet clothes being dried has permeated the air for so long that the scent has penetrated every wall and floor.
One of my students is off to Syria for a few weeks and he told me that he'd rather be there in dry over 100-degree heat than here in 80-degree weather because the moisture soup makes it incredibly uncomfortable here. This is a student who hates hot weather and comes to every lesson dripping with sweat. You know it's got to be bad when someone who loves the cold weather would rather be 20 degrees hotter and dry than endure this humidity.
I know they're an environmental scourge but I'm immensely grateful for air conditioning when it gets like this.
3 comments:
Hearing about that dreadful humidity makes me feel a little smug now that I'm in Las Vegas where it's been between 106-117F for several weeks, but DRY! Makes all the difference in the world! I loved Tokyo, but not in the summer.
It really is a nightmare in summer. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't drag on so long most of the time. Usually, there are at least 4 unpleasant months, sometimes more. What's more, it's all that much harder because there's little cooling off at night so it's relentless, unlike back home where it cools off in the evening even when it's stinking hot during the day.
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You might want to invest in a de-humidifier, especially if you are always at home. I've been planning to get one before the rainy season but still haven't gotten around to it yet. Some of the Japanese ones have special settings for drying laundry too, like this one (http://national.jp/product/air/dihumid/dihumid/f_yhc100/p1.html) although there are cheaper varieties that do that same thing.
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