Hot winter days
There’s something very not right about sweltering afternoons in January… even in Southern California. Bodies simply cannot regulate themselves under conditions such as these. Apartments, for the most part, hover around the freezing point until May or June. Mornings offer fresh chill and desert nights officially settle into place by 6pm. When the sun is gone, so is any relief provided by the wearing of a thin short-sleeved shirt. Headaches, fatigue, and supreme irritability ensue.
This is the case for me at least and because I’m underemployed (but still obsessive) I’ve decided to strive for seven(+) walking/running miles per day from now until the foreseeable future. I can accept five-ish miles on days when social engagements take priority — this has happened twice so far in 2026. I’ve also been booked on midday dog walks and morning/evening cat check-ins all week and it’s been a lot. The first day of this involved a morning so cold that I ventured out in the sweatpants + sweatshirt combo that I’d slept in… only to eventually find myself at Crossroads sometime around 2pm, rapidly selecting a cute/affordable enough t-shirt that would fit, sheepishly asking to change into it after the purchase was complete, then power walking out with my head down, telling myself that the interaction was short enough to not register with any of the effortlessly cool/hot people that work at the Crossroads on Hyperion. Then again, I managed to clock 7.4 miles, 50 flights of stairs, and 848 active calories that day. WORTH IT.
In between bouts of walking I’m playing with the cutest cats while simultaneously devouring Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 collection of loosely shared universe short stories, a book so dark and absorbing that it makes me wish I could remove and thoroughly rinse out my brain every time I reach a stopping point. In this reality, I would then leave my brain out to dry for a while in the dull heat of the low winter sun. Instead, the reading material alongside the fever-inducing feeling of wildly toggling temperatures add up to a larger sense that something has gone terribly, irreversibly, cosmically wrong. I started reading Rejection on Tuesday, I’ll be done reading it by the end of the long weekend. It’s the occasional segments that ring eerily familiar with my own inner monologue that are troubling me the most, because of course they are. I now fully understand why, when I asked my most well-read friend what she thought about it, she revealed that she was avoiding it at all costs. I’m glad that I’m engaging with it nonetheless. I’m equally glad for my therapist, my endless supply of animal interactions, and my steady intake of Vitamin D (even when atmosphere = endurance test).