The Sargasso Sock


It is colder here than I can ever remember it being anywhere. Perhaps this is only because I bike to school now and can't wear a hat at the same time as I wear my bike helmet. I can't objectively compare the temperature here to the temperature anywhere else because I have no ability to remember numerical temperatures. I'm perfectly capable of watching a weather report and forgetting everything within thirty seconds. I know what warm, cool, cold, bitterly cold, and insanely frigid feel like, but I couldn't match them with numbers.

My theomostat claims that it's about 68 inside. When I keep it set there, I'm comfortable, so long as I wear two pairs of socks. I don't know if it's actually 68: with an analog slider for a control, the absolute temperature is much less important than my relative ability turn the heat up or turn it down. At night, I take it down to 55 or so, near the bottom end of the scale.

More importantly, due to the odd arrangement of my bedroom, the only place that the bed can possibly go is directly on top of the room's hot-air vent. Anywhere else would block access to the main room or to the bathroom. As a result, the bedroom is never warm. There are times when it is not cold, but it never crosses into actual warmth. At night, when the heat is effectively off, it becomes especially cold as the heat leaks out through the seven extra-tall windows.

In consequence, I wear my socks when I turn in for the night. Once I'm properly cocooned and the bed warms up, they're less necessary. I never consciously take them off, but I usually wake up to discover that I'm no longer wearing socks. Since I'm also usually tired and spacey when I awake, I don't bother finding them again, unless their location is obvious -- clutched tight, one in each fist, for example.

When I do laundry, then, one of the key requirements is that I scour the bed for socks. I found six today.