Storm Warning

I don’t want to seem like the kind of person who only talks about the weather and whines about the rain. But! In the eleven months I have lived in the Canterbury district the monthly rainfall record has been broken three times! And according to my calculations this month is already on par with the current record for June. All of this rain, along with a little bit of me being man-baby about a sore throat, has made this long weekend a lot more damp and indoorsy than I wanted. We did make an awesome pumpkin soup today though, so there’s that. I actually tried to go for a walk at around sunset this evening but I was poured on. At first I enjoyed the rain, but then I turned skittish about my new phone suffering moisture damage. I wasn’t afraid of the phone being ruined as much as I was afraid of me being too much of a tightarse to have it repaired and deciding instead to use my broken Galaxy S for another two years until my contract expired again.

While I was out walking in my rain jacket my thoughts turned to what life would be like if rain was as ubiquitous as non-rain. What if rain fell almost all of the time, all year long. An inverse-weather parallel world. It would be like that secret, always raining planet in Attack of the Clones, right? I mean, shit! Why do I remember the most useless things from terrible movies... What I meant to meditate on is, what would an always raining planet have meant for humanity as a whole. Would we even be humans at all? Would we be some sort of weird frog people? Was there going to be any point to climbing from the ocean and growing legs if it was going to rain most of the time, and would the sometimes scattered and sometimes torrential beams of sunshine be as discouraging and picnic ruining as rain is to this universe’s humans?

Bear with me as I imagine what life would be like for the frog people. Things like building houses, and electronics, and basketball I think would be completely revolutionised. I’m pretty sure that the frog people’s instinct to watch short, amusing videos on their computers would have driven them to invent their own kind of internet at some point. I can even imagine regular frog persons posting their thoughts on their own kind of frog blog... I was going to write “frog journal” there but the phrase “frog blog” popped out like it might justify this entire entry... Once you moved past the major differences between the two societies I think there would actually be a lot of similarities between us. I’m sure in some dimension right now there’s a frog person updating their frog journal, writing things like “I don’t want to sound like the kind of amphibian who always talks about the weather, but seriously, it was sunny this entire weekend! I didn’t attend any picnics. Worse, I think I’ve caught a cold but I might just need to stop being a man-tadpole about it. Because it was sunny we stayed in all weekend and watched TV. Attack of the Clones was playing on Saturday night, ugh, what a terrible movie.”