Meeting my mother's demands...

My mother sent me the following in an email this week, "A suggestion for your blog. Why don't you tell us how you are coping with the cold. Do you have a hot shower? How do you deal with that. If you wear your overclothes long enough, do they need to be washed? How do you get thta done if you need to wear them all the time? Do you wear your blanket while you ride your motorcycle? Remember Larry and the bicycle if you do!!!" While I'm not sure why it needed three exclaimation points to end with, I will gladly use it since I lack anything better to say this week.

Over here it has been getting down around 50 degrees F most nights lately and some nights it has even dipped into the upper 40's. In the States I would think nothing of this, here it becomes miserably cold for me. It's not bad at all while you are sleeping at night, we do have nice heavy blankets that keep you toasty at night. What gets to you is that once you are out from under the covers, you are almost always touching wood, plastic, or concrete, all of which are things that never warm up. Materials in this country are made to be as cool as possible because for 9 months of the year that is important here. I deal with this by wearing all of the following while I work at my desk: undershirt, long-sleeve shirt, hoodie, coat, shawl, and sock cap. I find myself wishing dearly that I had thermal underwear for under my pants but I didn't anticipate that need and by the time someone could get them to me here winter would already be over so I just tough out having cold legs. I also wear socks and shoes during the winter which is something I don't normally do in Bangladesh. I don't have gloves but that has lead me to recognize something.

I've been badly wanting gloves for about a month now. This is especially the case on mornings when I ride motorcycle to work. On those days I get to work and my hands are just beet red from the cold winds. The sad thing is that they have gloves in the marketplace here and I've known that this entire time. I was reflecting upon the fact that I haven't gone and gotten them the other day when I had an epiphany. I realized that I had been saying for weeks that I would go get them after work but when it came time every day I wouldn't go after all which lead me to recognize that I have a fair bit of the mentality I picked up as a child still in me. It seems to me that growing up that there were always a bunch of tasks that needed done around the farm. More importantly, any number of those tasks might require the expense of money. Those kind of tasks normally get pushed aside (if they aren't desperate needs) until such a time when they become more or less important in the bigger scheme of things. This makes total sense when you are a poor farmer but not so much when gloves cost 45 cents. Anyways, after further reflection I decided not to buy gloves after all. I figure it's bound to warm up someday soon and it hasn't killed me yet to not have them. The moral of this story is that we often have learned ways of approaching things that we don't even notice we have most of the time.

Back to the story... I do have a hot water heater. This is not always the case though. Many houses still don't have this feature and so they have to heat water up on the stove top. That I have it is more as a result of me living with Nate than anything else. Nate weighs about 125lbs. which means he has very little to keep him warm and he thus values a hot shower very highly. He says that a hot shower is the last creature comfort he would be willing to give up. Speaking of showers, this also reminds me of my epiphany of the morning which was a rather odd one.

I normally take a shower in the morning. I've come to believe that this is another farming thing. It comes from the concept that when you go off the farm to someplace where you don't want to stink like farm, you take a shower right before you go. Growing up it didn't make sense to take a shower in the evening and then have to take another one in the morning after chores so I just developed the habit of showering in the morning. You may be wondering where this is going at this point and I'll tell you in a second. I had just finished taking my shower this morning and as I walked back into my room this morning, I noticed my bed. This jumped my thoughts to a lament of mine and an argument for taking a shower in the evening. If you take your shower in the morning your bed gets much dirtier much faster than if you take showers in the evening. That's about the time it hit me. If I ever get married I'll probably have to change my habits. It seems to me that not too many women like a man with a full day's stink built up or dirty beds for that matter. I imagine if I had a girlfriend I'd be forced to think more about this, but I don't, so I didn't.

Speaking of stinking, I have no clue how to respond to my mother's question about whether my coat starts smelling and needs washed. I work in an office where everyone goes out to work with farmers on a fairly regular basis. As a result, no one is going to care or notice smells. The only time I really notice if I smell or not is when I'm in the Dhaka office and that's because it is air conditioned.

I don't wear my blanket while riding motorcycle. I'm going to assume you are referring to my shawl. The shawl is a wool shawl which means it is super warm but not air tight at all which makes it super useless on a motorcycle. For those of you who don't know, Larry is my cousin who tried to ride a bicycle while carrying trash bags only to get them caught up in the tires and give himself a concussion. That made for an interesting family get together but is not all that likely to happen to me.

I think I've covered all the bases now and probably managed to throw in a pitcher's mound to boot. Hope this satisfies your curiosity and provides you with some amusement this week. Feel free to send other questions to me. I can't promise that they'll be used or have such odd tangents but I'll see what I can do.