💦

the rain in LA this past year has been a gift. like all good gifts, it is occasional and well-timed, mostly doing its business overnight so that by the time we awaken, we are greeted by a layer of pristine sheen on the ground, sunlight bouncing off of it as the clouds dissipate. i’m not a fan of surprises, so i never made friends with DC’s rain, as hard as i tried.

maybe one day i’ll appreciate those mornings when i took my bike out for a balmy commute down 15th toward the smithsonian, when suddenly thunder boomed and unleashed an instant, district-wide ice bucket challenge. i cursed the perpetually-inaccurate meteorologists as i showed up at my important meetings late, with socks soaking, scalp reeking from a helmet that had gone stale holding the water from previous storms.

sometimes i’d enter the metro station after work, excited to catch the last hour of sunshine that i had been fomo-ing from my office all day, only to resurface seven minutes later to a hurricane. i’d find a spot to stand amongst the other staffers from various departments, eyes heavy from the day, lanyards wilted over chests, waiting for the sun to come like a night bus.

it strikes me as odd that DC was chosen, with its wildly unpredictable weather, as the place for government to establish routine systems and processes. it’s as if all this bureaucracy was established in contempt of a city whose climate forces people to break out their galoshes in the middle of july. in the summer of 2013 while moving into our DC apartment, we rented a car to pick up our first nice furniture – a non-ikea dining table with a polished wood surface. i stepped out into the sweltering heat to let the guys at the store know we had arrived, but in the middle of lugging the table over to the car a torrent of rain befell us. after stuffing the soaked box into the trunk, i collapsed my drenched self into the driver’s seat and started crying hard. i don’t even know why i was moved to tears like that, it just seemed appropriate for the weather. by the time i left DC, i had curated my wardrobe with exclusively waterproof clothes.

so it seems growing up in california’s endless drought never taught me to appreciate the rain like i should. don’t get me wrong – i love walking through fields of dewy plantlife. i love the sound of droplets ricocheting off my window as i fall into a warm, cozy slumber. i miss the days of being in honolulu and singapore, where tropical thunderstorms drop in for a minute or two to spritz the day. and i love DC, even if i don’t miss the celestial uncertainty. there’s something so endearingly-DC about sitting in a meeting on a rainy day, everyone in soggy suits and wet hair, trying to keep it together and go about business as if everything is fine, even though it’s not, because in the bigger scheme of things, it actually is.