Less than a week ago, it was in the 20s here (well below zero for you metric system folks).  Good, brisk weather that makes you remember just what time of year it is.  On Wednesday, I rode the autobike Maxine in to work (18km each way of ball-ascending cold.  I endured three full work weeks of this last winter, the wind chill factor cryogenically freezing my X and Y chromosomes until Busan’s humidity and heat rolled in late in the spring).  Thursday heard me say to hell with that because, when walking to the gym, the wind sliced through my clothing with—here comes the literary and cliché panache—the aplomb of a cold-blooded swordsman.  I took the bus and enjoyed two and half hours of warmth and catch-up reading.

There is no winter session for me this year; not only are there not enough classes compared to the number of people who want to work but also there is just no way I could endure 3 weeks, and 270 km (167.770 miles, for you American folks).  I will still be headed out Maxine autobiking throughout the remaining weeks here.  Why, you ask?  Well, I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.  Let’s just say for legal and monetary reasons (and for the purposes of high drama) that I am a secret agent who has to visit informers (informees?) at Russian teahouses throughout the city (never mind that there really are no Russian teahouses, and teahouses double as Starbuck’s here).

What ever you believe of the double-speak here, believe this: it was fucking cold last week.  However, yesterday saw a balmy 55 in the evening (you metric-users can do your own damned conversions), and this morning its 47 before the sun even rises.  Global warming is a serious problem; for example, my people say it’s going to rain for ten days straight back in CA.  I do not think it has ever rained on Jesus/my birthday week when I was living there.  Some of you may also say, well, Nick, you’re from California; isn’t it always sunny and warm there?  (These are the same people who don’t know that some of the best skiing in the country is in CA; these are the same people who think everyone from CA—all 37 million—were born with surfboards in his hands.)  No, in fact.  This time of year in my hometown in central CA was typically socked in with tule fog and the temperatures in the upper 20s to mid 30s.

The point is this: global warming could negatively affect my writing habit.  It is generally known to people named Nicholas Andrew Holmberg the First (autobike-riding secret agent of Russian teahouses in greater Busan area) that seasons influence the productivity and texture of his writing (yes, he just referred to himself in the third person).  Fall is for writing.  Winter is for editing.  Spring is for the birds and the bees.  Summer is for waiting for fall to arrive.

So what will happen to him on the SE Asian swing, where summer will be in full swing, the beaches and sand warm, the jungles steamy?  What will become of the secret agent whose notebook’s pages may warp with condensation on sweaty hands?  whose pen may slip out of his hand?  whose attention may shift frequently to his wife’s ever-darkening bikini’d body?  whose biorhythms of creativity will be inversed with summer in Thai February, then slapped backwards by Nepalese spring?