Rain, Rain, F*ck You

The upside of a liberal arts education is that is broadens your horizons by introducing you to varied factual information. (The down side of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you for absolutely nothing useful, but we won’t consider that here). For instance, in my Biological Anthropology class, I learned that apes (specifically, chimps and bonobos) fashion rain hats or umbrellas out of leaves to shield themselves from the weather. This is exciting to people who like to spend their lives with apes (versus people) because it means that our closest ancestors are using tools, and THIS is exciting for reasons that have slipped my mind. It’s a good thing though, because it proves something very important about humans being created in God’s image and there not being any dinosaurs.

What’s interesting to me (caveat: as a liberally educated woman, whatever I find interesting is definitely NOT useful) is that chimps (and bonobos) have managed to manipulate their environment in a very sophisticated way, without relying on Totes. Roughly 6% of the DC human population, on a rainy, horrid Monday, can’t manage to do as much and we have the advantages of bipedalism AND Totes. You’ll see from the graph below that an equal percent of the DC population, this time huge rats, has no need for umbrellas because they don’t have opposable thumbs and just drown and float by (Please please please, see the Wikipedia entry for “thumbs” and ask yourself “why…”).

I would be remiss if I did not call out the assholes who have gone overboard with the environment manipulation in the form of a golf umbrella. If you have ever walked on a sidewalk in the U Street/Adams Morgan area, you know that it is approximately 10 inches wide. Try walking it with an umbrella with a 6 foot wingspan, and you are bound to run into problems. So are the other people with normal Totes umbrellas who have to climb a wall to get out of the path of the gargantuan parapluie charging toward them. Of course, if you have a normal one-person sized umbrella and you clamp it down over your face, you’re likely to run into problem as well. And by run into problems, I mean, cause problems for people who like to see where they are going, even during low pressure systems.

In the end, like so many things, it just doesn’t matter. Despite my modestly-sized umbrella and over-the-head carrying technique, my pants are soaked from the knee down. The only solution I can see is to move somewhere where it never rains. Like the sun. My liberal arts education tells me this should be possible.