My Dearest California
Imagine no severe weather events; it's easy if you try. So long as you're in California.
When God invented California, he proclaimed, "Let there be fent, but also, let there be perfect weather all day every day all year." I always took the weather app as a piece of convenience rather than a necessity. Amid the rainier winter seasons, at least in the multi-trillion dollar AI-driven Silicon Valley region, precipitation is almost never constant and instead falls in brief light drizzles. One could reliably deduce that, even on "stormy" days, it would roughly be 60°F (15.6°C) and the largest possible inconvenience would be blindly stepping into puddles and soaking one's shoes and socks. Regardless, year-long shorts and short-sleeves are commonplace, because dedicated seasonal attire simply isn't necessary. A jacket or sweater I suppose is nice, but certainly not mandatory.
A year prior, I departed California for my studies in the Midwest. While I can go on and on about the dull, flat, low-industry, impoverished third world country of Indiana, the only state that I wholeheartedly believe has worse drivers (on average) than California, at least etiquette-wise, the weather by far is the most disastrous aspect.
California has its hot days, more often than radically colder periods, but the heat in the Midwest can (and does) reach drastically higher averages with significantly greater humidity (similar to levels near the equator) and simultaneously, somehow, the most extreme thunderstorms imaginable. Indiana summers mirror those of many tropical areas, except with 10x the extremities. At least with summers, however, AC and pools are available options.
Spring and autumn, though brief, are fine in large and probably the most reasonable seasons the Midwest has to offer.
Winters are brutal. As a Californian, winter has for the longest time been my favorite season, (1) because coastal California doesn't really see true winters at all, and (2) because I love skiing. For this reason, most of my winter experiences have been on ski trips in Utah, British Columbia, and on occasion, Tahoe. Midwest winters: different story. The temperature differences between western North American winters and the eastern half are drastic to put it lightly. During January, I recall a week being -10°F (-23.3°C) on average (and no, class wasn't cancelled), though locals have reported periods with lows as cold as -40°F (-40°C).
Being that I largely enjoy colder weather, I never anticipated for Midwestern winters to be the most brutal portion of my first year. It's fairly common knowledge that eastern US winters are cold, but my mindset was always, "Oh alright, so it's like Whistler except a bit colder." No LOL, no, not at all. The temperature in conjunction with the inherently windier weather of the Midwest and a significantly drier winter climate create a raw sense of discomfort that I find difficult to describe in words. I've never had the displeasure of experiencing dry eyelids anywhere in the world, not even in the desert climates of Nevada or Utah, but a single Indiana winter succeeded. CeraVe and Cetaphil stood no chance, though Vaseline did a fair job at preventing things from worsening.
Even worse: sidewalks. Midwestern snow, unlike that of the western half of North America, is heavy and sticky. Over just a single day/night cycle, people walk in it and consequently form an unstable crud, and then it freezes. Local cities also don't tend to maintain sidewalks well, and with the exception of university-maintained campus areas, walking and biking become drastically more difficult (sometimes impossible in some areas). If you live off campus like I do, good luck. In fact, I purchased a shovel and ice chopper set from Home Depot for this exact purpose. During future winters, starting with this coming fall semester, I intend to do the sidewalk snow management myself, shoveling everything out as soon as possible prior to the freezing events. The problem is I've left the shovel and ice chopper on my balcony for the longest time at this point, so they've been exposed to the Midwestern elements all throughout the winter, spring, and summer (thus far), and knowing how extreme things can get, they could very well break into sand like those old Disney cartoons the second I touch them. We'll see this coming winter. Might need to purchase a new set.
Even worse than even worse: exhaustion. Most layers (at least mine) aren't fully adequate for college students. I'm sure most locals are fine being that they don't walk far distances given the weather conditions, but trekking across campus is a killer in cold Midwestern weather. Being that it's ridiculously cold, your body will do everything it can to keep warm, so it'll produce as much heat as it can. Unfortunately, creating and losing heat at a very fast rate burns quite a bit of energy, and once you finally get into a warm lecture hall, the energy loss causes significant exhaustion. For this reason alone, it's been extremely difficult for me to productively complete work during the winters, on top of my already poor procrastination habits.
Even worse than even worse than even worse: frostbite—fingers, ears, and toes. To be fair, it's my fault for using my bicycle and scooter during super cold weather, but it remains the fastest and easiest way I can get around a two-thousand acre campus. The consequence is risking frostbite, being that the windchill becomes drastically worse. Not cycling/scootering during the winter certainly helps a lot, but regardless, the cold remains a persistent issue.
Even worse than even worse than even worse than even worse (okay maybe this one isn't the worst of all of them, but regardless): the winters are very depressing. Everything looks gray. The plants, grasses, and trees all sort of just die (or more technically speaking, they visually appear dead), and things overall just become significantly more dull. The one exception is the short transition period between autumn and winter, which is when I took the picture at the very top of this page, but this is a very brief period that looks fairly nice, before it departs just days later, seemingly forever, leaving only death behind. For the first time, I very well understood Finland's (historically speaking) and Greenland's suicide rates. Simultaneously, roughly 2,000 miles away at the west coast in Silicon Valley, the hills have just transitioned from golden yellow to a gorgeous healthy green from the rain, and the temperature is just a tad below room temperature. In SoCal, people are still jogging in summer attire. Even considering the colder portions of western North America: Whistler and Utah, in all their gorgeous mountainous glory, have likely just received dumps of fresh powder that I don't even have the opportunity to ski because of the restrictive schedule I'm on. Trapped in a brutal winter, can't get to a warmer climate, can't even get to the nicer winter areas. Funnily enough, I previously considered committing to CU Boulder because (1) they have a very solid engineering school (tied with USC) and (2) they're just a two-hour drive from nearby Colorado ski areas.
Another thing: the unpredictability of Midwestern weather. One day, there can be an ongoing arctic blizzard with 50 tornado warnings. The next day, it can be hot humid tropical weather, though not the friendly kind, and the one common denominator is that there's probably still 50 tornado warnings this day too. No exaggeration, this isn't hyperbole: I encountered a day when it was 72°F (22.2°C) in the morning, and then 27°F (-2.8°C) at night. We hopped two seasons down in a 24-hour time frame. I've attached the screenshot I took of this specific day on the weather app below this paragraph. Midwestern weather is very VERY unpredictable, so unlike checking the weather in California, which isn't really needed at all since the next day's probably gonna be pretty similar to the previous one, checking the weather in Indiana on the daily is absolutely a necessity, no matter how calm the previous day seemed.
As another point of inconvenience, colder weather implies lots of layers, and lots of layers imply, well, lots of layers. It's very difficult to find space to temporarily place extra clothes in packed lecture halls and labs. Again, just a minor inconvenience, though I think this sums things up pretty well. It's not exactly a couple hugely bad things, but rather a summation of an infinite number of smaller problems and annoyances that cumulatively contribute to the brutality of Midwestern winters.
During this first year of uni, I've met many locals who hate Indiana to its core and want to leave immediately, many for the same reasons I've observed (with weather playing a significant role). Simultaneously, I've met many others with no intention to ever leave the state for the remainder of their lives. Their reason: they have everything they need, and don't care to pursue more. They're a simple people, apathetic to the rest of the country, world, and current events, fully immersed in the isolated bubble that is Indiana. "Oh, we got a new president a year ago? Okay." In many ways, I admire their simpler ways, and more specifically I admire that they've survived this many years in these weather conditions, though I think they would feel equally depressed if they were ever to experience Californian weather. Ignorance is bliss. Interestingly, once again, Indiana is truly an isolated bubble of sorts. I felt that a lot of my regular persistent concerns and thoughts with current affairs simply melted away and didn't apply in the region. From what I've learned and experienced, the Midwest, perhaps excluding Chicago, is a simpler way to live, but I don't think it's for me. For the most part, people are also friendlier (except when they're on the road), so I suppose that's a solid tradeoff. Regardless, it's odd to not see billboards lining streets with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Apple, or Microsoft adverts. Strangely, I also missed the packed-to-the-brim Shake Shacks, Chick-fil-As, and In-N-Outs of high-density California, plus the lovely AI-startups (largely fraudulent ones, which is a part of the fun) led by brilliant visionaries, genius intellectuals, and innovators amongst the likes of Arjav Mehta, but more reasonably, I missed the greenery, the trees, the hills, the traffic lights attached to proper steel structures rather than crappy hanging cables, the nicer visual integration in urban design overall in contrast to Indiana's flat, soulless, dull, endless parking lots and cracked, broken asphalt. Indiana is a separate primitive world—its own ecosystem in many ways—but I don't see myself ever getting used to it.
For the longest time, I've wanted to leave California for a prolonged period to experience another region and to, well, get out of California (at least for a bit). I do still think that there could've been plenty of nicer regions (even with true weather events) that I probably would've enjoyed more, like Colorado as I had already mentioned, but ultimately Indiana and the Midwest stripped away the raw privilege of never worrying about weather that I had become so well acquainted with. I have (and continue to) take(n) issue with a multitude of California's problems, but weather isn't (and never was) one of them.
The lesson here: don't move out of California.