#79. Schlump
Apr 15th, 2008 by Tadhog
All you know is a lie. In kindergarten, we all learned there are four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. There’s a song you learn. There are happy cartoon pictures of each season on the walls of the room.
ALL LIES!!!
There are five seasons. But one so unspeakable, so awful, so foul, that you don’t learn about it in kindergarten. Just like you learn about Columbus and the Pilgrims without hearing awful words like “smallpox”, “blankets”, or “Puritanism”, this season is skipped over. But we all know it’s there (well, those of us located north enough to have Real Seasons). It’s called Schlump, and it sucks.
Schlump is the part of the year after winter has ended, but before spring has started. It is marked by the worst kind of weather possible. It’s not snow. It’s not rain. It’s not even ice, really. It’s this mushy crud that falls from the sky in slushy, icy, wet chunks. It makes travel impossible. It soaks straight through your shoes, exposing your poor toesies to 180 proof frostbite. The season is actually named for this satanically-spawned precipitation. “schlump-schlump-schlump” is the sound your soon-to-be-frostbitten and gangrenous feet make as you try to tramp through slushy crap. It is also the sound of your soul dying a little each day as you venture into the gray, damp, and supremely raw hell that is Schlump. It’s like you moved into a new apartment, and the deranged sadistic former tenant, Old Man Winter, decided to leave you a “housewarming present.”Nobody is happy, since Schlump comes at exactly the worst time. You’ve already been through months of winter. you’re sick of hiding and want to go outside wearing sneakers and a light jacket, but you can’t.
Now, you might be thinking “That sounds like winter to me.” No no no no no! Schlump is an entirely different beast. Winter has, at least, a few charms about it. There are pleasant, flaky snowfalls, ice skating, skiing, snow forts, sledding, dry air, reading next to a warm fire, and some awesome holidays.
Schlump has… President’s Day (disclaimer: your crappy Schlump holiday may vary by latitude). You get a day off to wander around town and admire the ugly, dirty-ass snowbanks everywhere. But you don’t even leave the house, because it’s dark, cold and shitty out. Instead, you just crawl deeper under your blankets and succumb to depression.
Nobody likes Schlump. If you live in it, it sucks. If you live in a warmer, happier place, like Southern California, you have probably noticed that trips to the Northeast are really cheap at this time of year. There is a reason for this.
If you live in Britain or Ireland, well, you’re probably OK with Schlump. I mean, it lasts about 6 months there, right?
FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.stuffnobodylikes.com/?p=52
As a women (although I guess men deal with this a bit as well), schlump is particularly annoying due to footwear. When it’s clearly winter, you’ve got the winter boots or crap waterproof shoes to wear outdoors. But by early March you’re pretty much done with the winter boots, so you convince yourself that you can wear your nice shoes out, until you show up at work and you notice the evil white line of salt on your nice black shoes. Dammit!
You need a new word. Schlump is already taken.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/schlump
It is also the name of an area and a underground station in the city of Hamurg, Germany. But since the weather there is almost always “schlump” it is likely, the name came from there…
Hmm. On the West Coast of Canada we only have two seasons: Summer and Not-Summer. Summer is a little less wet and slightly warmer than Not-Summer… oh, and the daylight starts at 6 a.m. and lasts until 10 p.m. Both seasons are as variable and unreliable as a weather forecast, so you actually have to step outside briefly to decide how to dress. As for New York, I lived there for most of 1996, beginning in February. A halcyon year! The week I arrived was bitterly cold — prairie cold. After a week, I had to return to the coast for a weekend. When I got back to NY, it was leave-your-jacket-at-home warm (this was February, remember). The next week it was bitterly cold, with great danger of slipping in the frozen dog piss. But the next week, a blend of late-Feb./early-Mar. was warm, and the temperatures never looked back. That was the wonderful year Donovan Baily beat your best sprinters for Olympic gold, then anchored our 400m relay team to a similar victory. It was also the year Clinton won his second term and, at this point, I had never heard of El Gran Estupido, GWB, who truly is the worst president ever. Boy, you know, 1996 was the BEST YEAR EVER for the United States.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that there were six seasons in the northeastern U.S.: Spring, summer, fall, locking, winter, and unlocking. Each is approximately two months long. “Locking” (November-December) is when things shut down — the picturesque “fall” is pretty much over by then. “Winter” proper is January and February, and “unlocking” describes March and April, the “schlumpy” months when flowers start popping out and there are occasional warm days heavily punctuated by freezing rain and wind that can knock over your car.
As a person whose nearly 52 years of life have been spent primarily in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, and western New York, I’d have to concur.