Tongs

hey, i didn’t say it, business week did.

apparently, the “depression rate” is calculated based on antidepressant sales. i can’t say i’m shocked that people are scarfing down the happy pills here. between the weather, the drowning-in-the-toilet economy, and the amount of douchebags from the east coast, there’s not a lot to discourage a person from making a final visit to one of the many tempting bridges in town.

those are my three key complaints, anyway – especially the weather. now, feel free to tell me i should’ve known what i was getting into on that front. no one who knows anything about and/or has spent any time in the pacific northwest is gonna try to get you to believe it’s dry up here. but i looked at all the climate graphs and related wiki articles and all that shit before we moved, and everything i saw indicated that the average total yearly precipitation of portland is comparable to the eastern cities i’ve lived in. this was (and continues to be) true. but the difference that gets swept under the rug – contributing in no small part, i imagine, to people getting duped into moving here – is how often it rains.

in the east and other temperate, forested parts of the country, the rain is sudden and powerful and it doesn’t stick around long. the significant snowfall accumulations contribute to total precipitation amounts as well, and i think even us native upstate new yorkers can agree that even in the moldering dead of our mega-winters, it doesn’t snow every day all day for weeks at a time. instead, we get one or two big blizzards that last for a day and dick up the roads for a few days after. in portland, from what i’ve observed, it rains five or six (or seven) days a week. every week. it doesn’t last all day, and it’s not a torrential downpour, but it’s enough to significantly dampen just about everything you do, especially if you’re unlucky enough to not have a car.

i really cannot over-exaggerate this. i started keeping a count of sunny days. as those are effectively mythical during this time of year, i expanded my count to include the dry-but-overcast days. there were five completely dry days between mid-january, february, march, and the first week of april. as a person who is dependent on biking and walking for transportation, believe me, i kept a careful count.

if you yourself happen to give a fuck about the ability to simultaneously be dry and outdoors, and you think portland’s weather sounds appealing compared to a snowy winter, allow me to direct you to the straight talk express. don’t be taken in by the bullshit average highs you see on weather.com. the only reason why the graph doesn’t say it’s 45-55 year-round except in the two-month-long summer is because every three weeks or so, there’s a day or two of freakish, unseasonably warm weather. below, we have a chart of april’s observed daily temperatures:

OF COURSE the declared average high temperature for april is going to be skewed and completely not indicative of reality when it’s in the mid-50s every day except for that one record-high-breaking weekend. it’s like the slacker who bombs every test in class except for the one or two he bothers to study for, and those stray As salvage his grade.

i guess for some portlanders, these sunny oases do the same; the tiny spatters of nice weather keep them from plunging headlong into the willamette. as i promised yesterday, i’m not about to shit on everything, and even i can admit that when it’s warm here, it’s stunning: minimally humid and pleasantly breezy, with plenty of shade around to boot. but is one weekend a month enough to get by on until the fabled first-week-of-july onset of portland’s brief summer? not for me. i’d rather shovel snow until april fool’s day than slog through nine and a half months of guaranteed constant rain.

well, i’d really rather do neither. so, i’ll see you in three months to the day, austin.