Officemate at Nineteen Degrees

Living in the borderlands where people with different histories mix, sometimes RantWoman spends time disentangling which problems are one's heritage, which are geography, and which are skin-tone neutral failure to adapt. When RantWoman lived in the CD she had an officemate from Oakland who was getting a graduate degree in Seattle. Officemate is African-American and a time or two visited the CD looking for jazz at Thompson's Point of View, conveniently located near a bus stop RantWoman used often.

Officemate's father ran a laundry and somewhere in RantWoman's acquaintance with Officemate, the theme of laundry experiences wandered into conversation. RantWoman has much experience with the peculiar intimacy of public laundromats, and the one near 23rd and Union is prototypical: clumps of people flinging about undergarments and bedlinens like no one's business, staff who are not overly loquacious but who still have a steady supply of religious tracts. As RantWoman's officemate noted, laundry has its own cycles depending on when in the month one is washing and / or when households have money or are shaking loose quarters out of the kids' piggy banks.

Aside from the latest laundry chatter, in the category of safe office conversation topics, one would think the weather would qualify, though even that is not to be assumed. For example, RantWoman knows many Californians of multiple ethnic backgrounds who swear that Seattle's northwest climate is just too, too cold and dark and damp. Similarly, although RantWoman knows many African Americans who bear with fearsome cold as well as their more "pigment challenged" neighbors in places like Milwaukee or Buffalo, RantWoman has also heard many African Americans complain that they just do not have the right metabolism for cold or numerous variations on this form of "biology is destiny."

These two sets of suppositions play out with additional ornamentation in Seattle where everyone takes our supposedly endlessly mild weather for granted and is shocked, shocked, shocked and often chagrined when the weather takes one of its occasional severe turns.

One time during one of Seattle's very sporadic cold snaps, Officemate came in to work bareheaded, in his usual trim but short jacket. He was shivering. Between the rattles of his chattering teeth, he said "It's 19 degrees out there. That's the coldest I have ever been in my life. (and I got that cold just walking in from where I parked.)"

RantWoman did not say all of what she was thinking: "That's nothing. In MT it can be below zero in the daytime for weeks, and I had to walk to school in blizzards uphill both ways to boot." No, RantWoman simply offered her default lecture for the bareheaded in foul weather. "You should wear a hat. You lose 15% of your body heat radiated from your head. (And all the more if you are bald / shaved headed.)"

Officemate: "I'd look like a pimp."

RantWoman: "No you wouldn't (not unless you get a lot of bigass gold chains and a long leather coat with faux leopard trim which I DO NOT see happening.)" RantWoman then exhorted OfficeMate to pay a visit to her favorite haberdashery, Bernie Utz hats As reviewed on Yelp. Alas for the hat store, the weather shortly shifted back a few degrees warmer and Officemate felt he could get along without a hat.