I am not built for global warming

I made it out to the river in the early morning before the heat set in. The water is lower than I’ve ever seen it. Which is curious because the lake nearer to my house is much higher than I can recall seeing before.

I planned to take photos, but there wasn’t much going on. A few egrets and a heron off in the distance, fishing. A cormorant sunning himself on a sandbar. A catbird or two, along with a single warbler flitting about the brush by the shoreline.

I sat on a bench for a bit to fuss with my camera, becoming annoyed I couldn’t figure out how to configure my front command dial to control the ISO. I couldn’t find the correct menu if my life depended on it. It was infuriating.1

I gave up on adjusting configs in the field and walked around some more. The heat started picking up around 11 AM, so I headed home, cursing the sun the whole way. It’s not even that hot today — 26°C.

The whole thing is psychological at this point. It feels like the sunlight is pawing at me. Touch, touch, touch.

I’m irritable and anxious about nothing. I can hardly keep my eyes open in the afternoons, but I’m wide awake all evening, every evening. Cooling off in the air conditioning helps a lot. Almost immediately.

Maybe I have summer-pattern SAD, which I didn’t even know was a thing until today, when I looked it up to see if it’s a thing. Apparently, yes.

Footnotes

  1. SET UP → BUTTON/DIAL SETTING → COMMAND DIAL SETTING ↩