The short answer:

Winter.

The long answer:

Of all the questions that people ask me, my least favorite to answer are those of the form, “What’s your favorite ______?” (Runners-up include “How are you?” and any question preceded by the phrase, “Tell me the truth.”) The reason is that I just don’t have a lot of favorite things. How am I supposed to pick out of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen the one that I think is better than all the others? Inevitably I just pick a random movie that I sort of liked, and then my interrogator will say, “Oh, I love that movie!” while secretly formulating a scathing critique of my artistic tastes and personality. Sometimes I’m tempted to say Legally Blonde just to see what happens.

When you’re in elementary school especially, I feel that they ask about your favorite things a lot. I don’t really see the point, since every kid’s favorite food is pizza, favorite class is recess, and favorite subatomic particle is the W- boson. I’m not sure what one’s supposed to infer from this, except that kids like to eat salty foods, they like running around, and they apparently have a precocious understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Likewise, every kid’s favorite season is summer because there’s no school, and for years, so has it been my favorite season. But now that I’m old enough that I’m expected to do work during the summer, I decided that perhaps it’s time to reevaluate my stance. Luckily, there are only four seasons, so this shouldn’t take very long.

A lot of people like summer, but I’ve started to become annoyed with it. Sure, the weather is nice, but so what? I don’t like being sweaty, and I don’t really see the appeal of sitting around on a beach. I’ve still not gotten used to being hot all the time, and the temperature doesn’t help. And even though summer has a lot of fans, it doesn’t have enough. Sure, some places have air conditioning, but I’d rather it needn’t be conditioned in the first place.

That’s why I’ve strayed away from summer and come to like winter. Even when I was a kid, it was my second favorite season. Part of this was because there was a winter break and there are a lot of good holidays in winter, but it had a lot of intrinsic value also. Sure, some people don’t like the cold, but give me a warm blanket and a cup of cocoa and I’m happy. I also love snow. I was never the type to build snowmen or make snow angels or have huge snowball fights; I was the type that could just sit by the window and watch it accumulate for hours. While some kids tromped through fresh snow, I never had the heart to ruin it… it’s just so white and peaceful and nice…. Also snow days were awesome.

Strangely, I also like winter because it can be so horrible. There are days that are so cold, wet, and miserable that you don’t even want to set foot outside. Everybody you run into is in a bad mood, and nobody asks you about your favorite anything. This sounds terrible, but it makes me feel better knowing that nobody is happy all the time. When you’re feeling depressed or mean in the summer, people have the tendency to think you’re somehow bad at living, but in the winter, you’re basically normal by comparison. Even if I’m feeling bad for some other reason, I can pretend that it’s because of the weather and nobody will feel the need to bother me about it. Life isn’t always sunny, and the weather shouldn’t be either. (This is also why I can never live in California.)

Autumn is okay I guess, but I can’t say I fall for it. (Pun!) It’s nice and cool and the trees are pretty, but there’s not much else to say about it. I don’t really like spring, but that’s because I don’t care for watching trees and flowers bloom, so I spend most of my time wishing it’d be summer already—or even better, winter, but that’s not how things tend to progress.

In summary, winter is the winner. (That wasn’t very summery at all.)

Cheers,
-qm