TODAY'S FORECAST...

You sit down at twenty-five and stand up at sixty-five.

- Orson Welles on California



What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.

The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.

I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.

None of that stuff here.

Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.

A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.

Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.