Baby It's Cold Outside

Before I begin the actual purpose, I just have to say that coming up with stupid titles is simultaneously fulfilling and depressing. Sometimes you go with what you write about; viz. the last few titles hereunder. Sometimes a beautifully silly title springs to mind, like the current little number. Usually, I have to think about it, and with my attention span being what it is, that means I don't think about what I'm writing and subsequently get bored and wander off. It ain't healthy, yo.

That said, it has finally gotten cold, no thanks to global warming, and we are once again in the season where people turn up the heat. I love the cold weather; give me a brisk cold day and I'm happy as a clam. I'm not crazy; I'm not going to go out in the snow and dance around in my underwear, but I do enjoy cold weather.

What I do not enjoy is the fact that people turn up the heat indoors. I don't enjoy this for several reasons. Firstly, people begin turning up the heat when the least acclimated person feels cold, which means that the person happiest with the cold gets it in the shorts. This situation is flip-flopped during the summer, when the person happiest with warm weather controls the thermostat. Fie on them. There are many things one can do to become warmer besides turning up the heat or turning down the air conditioning. Putting on more clothes is an obvious but often overlooked example. I cannot strip more clothes off, because at a certain point I'm wandering around naked and looking to shave all my hair off, and still it's too hot. Dilbert had a great cartoon on this subject.

Secondly, it's our patriotic duty to consume less fuel, so turning up the heat is un-American. If that logic doesn't work for you, it's also bad for the environment. And if neither works for you, it's more expensive. All hail the dollar, king of the world!

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it's unhealthy. The shock to your system when you go from 75 degrees to 20 degrees is significant. But the one which people consistently neglect to think about is the shock to your system when you go from 20 degrees to 75. Most people don't think they get sick from going in to a nice warm house after being outside, but it's a real problem.

The thing which gets me the most about this time of year is that people turn their thermostats to temperatures which are ridiculous. I'm not advocating turning your heat down to 40 degrees; like I said above, I'm not crazy (like that). Keeping your house at roughly 60 degrees year round seems like a good solution to me. But people turn their heat up to 70, 80, 90 degrees, and the colder it gets, the higher they turn up the heat. This is foolish. Whether it's 50 outside or -10, it's still the same temperature inside.

By increasing the heat inside the house as the cold outside increases (I realize that cold really can't increase, since it's just the absence of heat, but whatever) you increase the differences in temperature, creating worse shocks for the system whenever you pass from one extreme to the other. And people set their heat to temperatures which, if it were during the summer, they could never stand. In the summer, many people complain if the weather gets above 70 degrees, yet these same people are setting their heaters to 80 once the winter comes.

I suppose the lesson is that we should moderate our heating, in order to make lovers of cold happier, as well as keeping lovers of warmth happy. But compromises make everyone miserable, in real life. So the hell with making anyone else happy. I love the cold, and I want my living space to be cool year round.