And I thought I was ready for this...

I'm cold, and I just had a moment of panic at the prospect of not being able to get warm again for eight months. "Wear more clothes," people say. "Pile on more blankets," "wrap a scarf around your neck." But the cold is so pervasive. My core can be nice and toasty, but I will still feel it in my extremities - my fingers, my toes, my nose. It's inescapable.

I don't begrudge the weather, just the length of it. In fact, yesterday it was kind of nice to wear my first scarf of the season in the dusky light and cool breeze that seemed more fitting of late October than mid September. Fall is sort of refreshing. And it's cozy, too. On Tuesday night when my inner introvert rebelled against four days in a row of social activity and late bedtimes, I enjoyed skipping Institute (in spite of all my best intentions for the new school year) in favor of curling up in warm pajamas, with a quilt on my lap and a book in my hands. I think I could handle this for a couple of months, and then enjoy some Christmastime snow. But in my personal universe, spring would begin in January, and summer in March.

I sometimes wonder if talking about how much I despise the cold just makes it worse. "I haven't always been this way," I think to myself. But then if I really think about it, I'm not sure that's true. When I was young I would camp out on the heating vent in our house almost any time the heat was running because when temperatures were chilly (and yes, this was Southern California chilly) it was the only way I could really get warm. It's not that I hate the cold less, or get cold more easily. It's that I've become more self-aware. Maybe.

But I have also been thinking lately about the power of, well, thinking. And talking. Sometimes I think that if I talk/write/think about something enough, I can convince myself of almost anything I want to. At several points over the last year I have talked to people about things that frustrate me about graduate school, about my doubts, my insecurities, my frustrations. Some of these can be attributed to emotion, but I have also come to the conclusion that a great many of them are perfectly valid outside of irrational emotional considerations. And yet I am also very capable of telling people how great the program is, how much I'm learning, how excited I am about what I can do and learn. All I have to do is leave out the bad, slightly exaggerate the good, and if I do it long enough I can manage to convince even myself, temporarily. So how can I say that one is more right than the other? How can I know whether I hate graduate school or love it if I'm just playing a game of persuasion with myself? (And for the record, "Just convince yourself that you love it if you're so persuasive" works a lot better in theory than in practice.)

So I sometimes wonder if I could convince myself that I actually like cold weather by just not complaining anymore. Or by stepping outside on the first day we dip below freezing, taking a deep breath, and telling myself, "wow, that cold air feels so refreshing!" Or by thinking, "gosh, it's going to be a cold run this morning - won't it be nice not to have sweat dripping off my face for a change?"

"Embrace the cold," a friend told me once. "Let yourself be cold, and enjoy it." I know there are people out there who do like cold weather. I have, in fact, met quite a few of them in the last year or so, and so I figure it must be possible to change my attitude, to become more tolerant. It's just that I've spent so much of the last eight years or so convincing myself that I really, genuinely don't like the cold. And I am awfully convincing.