If you know people who adore Florida weather, I guarantee you they either do not live here, or are residents so sick of the “weird Florida” meme that they’re now fighting against valid condemnations of this unbearable climate.
Florida is damn hot all the damn time and damn damp almost all the damn time. Nine months out of the year, it’s +80 degrees and +70% humidity. Doing yard work for 15 minutes leaves you with sweat pouring into your eyes and down your entire body. You feel like a boiled sponge. The effect is difficult to describe, but, picture this: take your favorite wool sweater and soak it in a tub of water. Then put it in the microwave for three minutes. Now wrap it around your whole head. Repeat until your body is covered. If possible, fill the sweaters with thousands of mosquitoes (which hatch nearly year-round). Now try to accomplish anything.
In Florida, the only reasonable response to the heat is to be naked all the time, which you can’t do because of freaking LAWS but also because your skin will turn into lava. Worse, you have to wear grownup clothes to work and flip a coin between “light enough to ruin via sweat stain” or “dark enough to harness the sun’s cruelty”. Also, ladies: enjoy having to put on a cardigan every time you walk into a public building because you’re tired of sweating into your bra and top, then walking into a deep-freeze office, restaurant or mall and having your chest be subject to the observations of penised wags.
And so you resign yourself to constantly sweating for three quarters of the year. And not just outside! Unless you love wasting money, you never air-condition your home as much as you want. This leads to Florida’s happiest phenomenon: exiting a lukewarm shower, then watching your forehead sweat while brushing your teeth. And then, you get to blow-dry your hair, which, even after applying anti-frizz products, takes three minutes to sweat into a full Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Ahhh, but the beaches! But. During summer months, many locals skip them after lunch because at any moment the customary afternoon thunderstorm might crash down. Rains slash diagonally and sideways, making umbrellas a joke, soaking pants and ruining shoes. Raincoats are useless for all but the bald. Instant flooding obscures lines on the road, and getting in and out of the car makes its inside wet enough to smell like sodden dog. Fat raindrops blatter down with such intensity that they bounce back halfway up the side of your house, meaning any part not regularly blanketed with sunlight will grow a layer of algae. Ditto a shaded front walk, which you can algae-slip-and-slide down in smooth-soled shoes. And pray the mail carrier doesn’t slip, break his or her back and sue you.
Then there are hurricanes: days of watching the Weather Channel cycle through the same “buy a Jazzy with Medicaid!” ads for seniors and flipping to CNN to see a national-news idiot in galoshes stand on a jetty, hold his hat to his head and look sad that the storm is passing by.
Of course, you must buy days of gas, bottled water and canned food to prepare for the worst, and then consume it at the end of hurricane season. If things become serious, evacuating a direct hit turns six-hour drives into 18-hour exoduses, and even if your house survives, you’re going to pay higher premiums thanks to jackass neighbors who tell insurance companies that power outages “destroyed $1,500 of ribeyes” in chest freezers that you knew to be filled with $250 of chicken wings and Don Miguel taquitos.
Finally, as respite for this, summer ends, to be replaced with... Not summer. When I moved here over 20 years ago, Florida still had three seasons. Now it has summer and two months of almost fall/spring with two weeks of “not winter”. It’s still damp, though, so open up your windows and let all your books fuse shut with mildew.
But, hey, why not leave the house! It’s nice out – the same “nice” that all the northerners rave about when they get sent to that convention in Orange County. Hell, take the kids to Disney World. And on the way home, get murdered on the interstate by a snowbird in a minivan, holding an iPhone in front of his face waiting for it to say which way “east” is.
With any luck, Siri will tell him, Continue past the flaming wreckage of someone who didn’t deserve this. Any of it.
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