Nothing I own is waterproof.

See, in California we have two seasons: hot and not-that-hot. Sometimes it rains, and when that happens you just wait until it stops to do anything.

But on the other side of the country - and I imagine anywhere outside of California, really - cold and rain and snow (which I have yet to experience) are integral to the seasonal rotation. This morning I got a brain freeze stepping out of my friend’s house with wet hair in DC. That doesn’t happen in California.

Actually there was one week two Decembers ago when I was living in Oakland that my heater broke sometime during the night and I woke up at 6 am, watching my breath hover above me and ice crystals had formed on the edge of my mirror. That was a strange week; people talked about it for some time after it passed. Once it rained for two consecutive days last year (appropriately deemed the #HellaStorm) and the entire city of San Francisco shut down. There was momentary hope that “so much rain” could alleviate a drought spent decades in the making, and that was before NASA swept Californians in a wave of alarm, broadcasting to the world that we have a year of water left.

Meanwhile, Palm Springs maintains their privately owned golf courses amid hundreds of miles of desolation. Government subsidized alfalfa produced in the Central Valley, California’s largest crop which consumes twenty percent of the Colorado River’s annual flow, is exported to China as livestock feed (while we use GMO corn to feed our own livestock). In LA, home to 92 of the top 100 residential water users, to stamp a price tag on a natural resource is ridiculous only to those who can’t afford it.