Warming

“A recent New York Times article has suggested that while in the past, women would have kept their personal meteorology to themselves, they are increasingly likely nowadays to refer
openly to it.”

I notice that I’ve been complaining a lot lately about the weather.  Over the past few years, it seems to me that the weather has gotten weirder and weirder: I’ll be sitting around my house freezing when all of a sudden, the room turns boiling hot, and instead of shivering, I’m in a pool of sweat.  I’ll go to bed wearing pajamas and socks, and in the middle of the night, I jump up and tear everything off.  That damn global warming, I’ll mutter as I rip off my jacket in the grocery store and head for the frozen food section.

Of course, as you’ve probably figured out by now, especially if you’re a woman of a certain age, a lot of this warming is not global at all but is simply, as I recently heard someone call it, my Private Summer.  Due to some recent physiological vicissitudes, my internal weather has begun to resemble that of south Florida or perhaps Haiti.

A recent New York Times article has suggested that while in the past, women would have kept their personal meteorology to themselves, they are increasingly likely nowadays to refer openly to it.   Its author recounts a story in which a woman was having a hot flash and mentioned it, and “the conversation lurched to a halt, followed by uneasy chuckling.”

I have to admit that until I read this article, it had not occurred to me that there was anything awkward about discussing hot flashes openly.  Perhaps this is because many years ago, I read the novel Hot Flashes by Barbara Raskin (mother of esteemed State Senator Jamie Raskin) which made menopause seem sexy and hip. 

And in any case, when one suddenly starts sweating copiously and ripping the clothes from one’s body when among friends, it seems positively disingenuous of one not to refer to it.

After I’d read that article, I stopped and made a mental list of all the people to whom I had inadvertently alluded to a hot flash in progress.  I was pretty sure I had never mentioned it to my students, though in any given session when I’m at the front of the classroom, I will have put on and removed my sweater approximately 73 times per hour, and since most of my adult students seem to be women, I’m sure they know why.  I mention my flashes periodically to my husband, who doesn’t seem to mind, but always looks puzzled, as if I’d just said I was attracting broadcasts from Mars with my fillings.

The Times article, far from giving me a sense of having been liberated from the silence of the “Silent Passage,” made me suddenly uncomfortable with myself, as if all this time, I had been traveling in a cloud of gaucherie of which I’d been mercifully unaware.  How many people had I inadvertently offended with my casual Menopause Chat?  I was working up a sweat about this when it occurred to me that this epiphany about my social cluelessness was probably somewhat like what Al Gore goes through: like me, he has spent years talking openly about warming and failing to realize that it just isn’t polite.  The planet could be standing in front of us shvitzing and everyone would simply pretend not to notice.  To bring it up was rude and uncalled for, and that was why Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 debates, even though nothing he said made sense or was true.

This analogy got me wondering: how many other things are we too polite to mention?  There’s that pesky war in Iraq, which drones on far away as we continue here without the slightest acknowledgement of its increasing human and economic cost.  There’s illegal wiretapping, the authorization of torture, the imprisonment and/or extradition of countless people without due process.  Signing statements.  Gonzalez and the U.S. Attorneys.  We may rant to our friends about these things privately, but in the public discourse, there is an uncomfortable silence, as if we all know that this administration is leading our country into ruin but, for whatever reason, it is just not nice to mention it.

In fact, to be perfectly honest, although I write about these issues just about every month, I don’t feel good about it.  I feel that it’s fundamentally rude of me to keep bringing these things up.  My voice sounds uncomfortably shrill to me, and though this column was originally meant to be moderately amusing, I think it’s apparent that I have lost my sense of humor about the state of the world.

I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing by placing myself briefly in his company, but this was Al Gore’s mistake, also.  If he had gone into those debates and been suave, witty, and urbane instead of sincere to the point of ponderousness, he would have been president and none of the nightmares of the last seven years would have taken place.  I’m not saying he would have been perfect, but he would definitely not have bankrupted our country and made us the object of scorn all over the world by dragging us into an insane and unnecessary war based on lies.  If Al Gore had been coached by Jon Stewart, he would have been declared the winner of those debates and won in such a landslide that it would then have been impossible to defraud him of the presidency.

As for me, I’d like to find a way to not feel compelled to talk about the war, or global warming, or the vanishing of our civil rights and the Geneva convention, etc., but every subject I think of invariably leads me to the elephant in our collective living room.  And call me old fashioned, or just hormonal, but the hilarious Daily Show notwithstanding, nothing about that elephant strikes me as funny.  Here we are, on the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, stuck in another endless, crazy war.  It’s just incredibly, incredibly sad, and it seems dishonest not to reflect that.

And come to think of it, when someone is a hot flash, I think she should say so.

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