Moving to the South for college from Colorado, I expected to adjust to a lot of things. I was prepared for sweet tea to replace my water at the dinner table, to have “you guys” be transformed into “y’all” and for the mountains to be what I called hills back home. But humidity, the one thing I didn’t account for when I made the move across the country, has wreaked havoc on me ever since I reached North Carolina.
Stepping off the airplane just over a month ago in Raleigh, I was dressed in business casual attire for a dinner I was to attend an hour after landing. So, in my best tie and collared shirt, I stepped outside, raised my right arm to flag down a taxi, and to my utter surprise, noticed I was sporting sweaty pit stains for the first time in my life. “It must just be my nervousness showing,” I thought to myself as I shrugged it off. I had never been more wrong. Jumping into the cab, I was hit by a wall of heat.
“Sorry, A/C’s out. But luckily, it’s not too hot outside today,” the cabbie nonchalantly mentioned to me as I jumped into his car. And so, as he happily chatted and played Elvis on the radio, perfectly content with the temperature of the cab, my unadjusted, still-thinking-it-was-in-the-cold-mountain-air-of-Colorado body turned into a water fountain.
Spreading outward from my armpits, my sweat slowly started encroaching the rest of my body. Five minutes in and my shirt had become so saturated with sweat it had turned a darker shade of blue. Ten minutes in I had nicknamed the cab ride the devil’s furnace as my sweat continued to flow. Fifteen minutes in and I discovered, to my utter surprise, that even my elbows and kneecaps could sweat.
Finally, 20 minutes later, I exited the cab and sprinted for the nearest air-conditioned building. For the next hour before the dinner, I changed into a new dress shirt three times. Every time, I hoped the new shirt would hold up under my sweating body, but every time my hopes were cruelly cut down by the horror of humidity. And so, on my fourth and final dress shirt, I swallowed my pride and entered my first dinner on the NC State campus a sweaty mess.
In the weeks that followed, humidity continued to play cruel tricks on me as I attempted to adjust to it. My first homework assignment was ruined when I left it outside on a table. Slowly, as humidity took effect, its pages curled up, and the ink began to bleed. Again, humidity beat me when I reached for my water one night at dinner. Not yet aware that cold glasses sweat in humidity, the wet cup quickly slipped out of my unprepared hands and sent water spilling all over me.
For the past month, I’ve exchanged many blows with humidity, slowly learning its ways. I’ve discovered how important it is to always carry deodorant, to never run in a dress shirt and that wearing jeans in humidity is one of the most uncomfortable mistakes you will ever make in your life.
I’ve now come to accept that while I’ll never be able to deal with humidity as well as someone born in the South, I’m confident I’ll have fully adjusted to humidity just in time to fly back home to the cold, dry air of Colorado on winter break and be shocked all over again.
