Oscillation Overthruster

Tuesday night, I went over to a friend's apartment to help her put together her new Ikea bed. To be fair, she admitted after we had started that she had asked a boy first--and that when she told her neighbor she was going to assemble it, the friend asked if she had a boy to help her. However, it should come as no surprise that we totally rocked the Ikea bed assembly, by ourselves. We were able to admit our (few) mistakes and work collaboratively, even sharing my screwdriver until she found hers.

What did surprise me was how the event turned into a bizarre time-warp--not the sort of "How is it possible that we've been trying to put this bed together for five hours?" time warp that mechanical tasks sometimes involve, but a far more pleasant one.

When I entered her apartment building, it was clearly the middle of winter, with sheets of ice on the sidewalks where the snow had temporarily melted and then frozen solid when the temperatures dropped to the single digits that morning. But as we started assembling the bed, it somehow began to feel like summer. Her building has radiant heat, so she actually had her windows open to admit a cool breeze. I stripped off two of the three layers I'd been wearing under my big coat, wearing just a T-shirt for the first time since I was in California. As we worked harder, she even turned on her overhead fan. The smell and gentle stirring of the breeze, the faint street sounds, the bare arms, and the manual labor made the evening feel far more like one in the middle of summer than winter.

Between two days of hard winter schoolwork and teaching, it was a very pleasant vacation, even if illusory.