View from the North 40: It's a warm and fuzzy guilty feeling

Cognitive dissonance is just fancy talk for the brain hurt you get from thinking two conflicting thoughts at the same time.

I think by natural design I would have no problem with this occurring because A) I’m not that deep of a thinker and B) I am instinctively a self-centered person, so naturally the only thought I would have in my brain is about me and my needs. Of course, my parents had to mess that up.

Technically, I am well beyond the age that I should be affected by any damage my parents did to me in my formative years (and by “well beyond” I mean we’d need carbon-dating technology to figure out the years). Yet here I am with a brain strain because they constantly told me, “I know, honey, but think about how the other person feels.” Gah!

Can’t I just enjoy these unseasonably warm January days without worrying how the people in places called Yellowknife, Oymyakon, Ulaanbaatar and Yakutsk are holding up in the cold? I couldn’t even spell three of those city names before this week, even on a bet. And I certainly couldn’t point out any of them on a map, but they are the four coldest cities/inhabited settlements in the world, says the news website theguardian.com.

Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is the warmest of the four, It has a record low of only minus 60. Residents are so used to the winter cold that even the schools don’t shut down recess until the temperature gets below minus-22 degrees with windchill. Don’t worry about the kiddies, though, they’re probably inside a lot because the wind howls there so much their windchill factor added onto the sub-zero temps is the reason the city makes the list. And yet 20,000 people live there — 20,000, imagine.

Oymyakon, well, that Russian town has a recorded low temp of minus-88.6 degrees. Yes, you read that right and, yes, the point-6 is important, because fully minus-89 degrees sounds so much colder. The good news is that only 500 people are crazy enough to live there. Yes, 500 people. And they’re all still living.

Ulaanbaatar is Mongolia’s New York City and Washington, D.C., all rolled into one. The Guardian says their average low for January is minus 27 degrees, and yet 1.3 million people live there. Many of those people heat their homes with wood. Many of those homes are gers — formerly known as yurts — but either way, it's just a fancy tent by any old name you stick on it.

And then we have Yakutsk, Russia, where the average winter temp is minus-34 degrees. The ground is frozen there all year-round. This makes building difficult for the 300,000 people who live there. The heated structures thaw the ground, causing frost heaves that crumble the buildings, so in summer when we air-conditioner our homes, they “air-conditioner” the ground to keep it frozen. No kidding.

The warmest coat I wore in the past two weeks was a down vest.

So now instead of happily enjoying my balmy January as Mother Nature and my personal nature meant me to, I'm feeling guilty that I have it so good and the people in these places are not-so-much. Thanks, Guardian, for bringing that to my attention. And thanks, Mom and Dad, for ruining my warm, fuzzy feeling.

I love my parents, but I really hate how they ruined my brain. Love/hate, happy/guilty ... I can't take it.

(OK, cognitive dissonance is a little more complicated than that, but A) I’m not that deep of a thinker and B) I am instinctively a self-centered person, so today I don’t care. See what I did there at [email protected]?)