The Time and Living in Endless Summer

Somehow, inexplicably, the calendar rolled around to June this week. I'm sure it was just the beginning of May last week. This puts me only four months away from the end of my two year stay in Singapore. 

Here in the Little Red Dot, it's perpetually summer. There's no need to check the forecast. It will be mid-eighties to mid-nineties (30-35 C), sunny and humid. Or it will rain in the morning or afternoon or the middle of the night, followed by a brief period of temperatures in the high seventies (24-27 C) and a huge uptick in the humidity. The plants grow year round. There's always aircon in public places and everyone owns at least one fan. 

That probably sounds perfect when you are in the middle of a freezing winter and the third blizzard of the season is bearing down on your electricity-less house. However, you see, there are things no one tells you about living in endless summer. One among these many "unmentioned things" is that people sweat all the time when they are outside and that's probably why Singaporeans have such a love of malls. 

While sweating all the time is just annoying, the chief undisclosed issue is actually how time passes too quickly. With no external marking of the seasons, a day in December may look well like a day in May and your brain is none the wiser. In fact, I've occasionally found myself feeling a three month lag between what month I think I'm in and what month it is actually is. It's a danger because your whole life could ebb away. You might not even notice it until, like Rip Van Winkle, you wake up decades down the road wondering how you got so old, worked so hard, and look older than your incredibly svelte Asian co-worker (whom might I add, at nearly forty, still looks like she's twenty-one because she inherited good genes; thanks, mom). Oh, well, maybe I should go get a tan . . . it's sunny, after all.