DMB Digest: A Cultural Oddity That Got Me Thinking
Or, What the frick are you thinking, people!?
As I fight the good fight against jet lag (having just returned from my jaunt to SE Asia), I find myself looping on one particularly befuddling cultural oddity. For years I thought the behavior of my eldest son along these lines to be an outlier. I simply chalked up his propensity to wear black hoodies all year long as acceptable quirkiness. The kid likes black. Nothing wrong with that. And everybody loves hoodies. But in 100 degree heat? Meh. I mean, Idaho is a dry heat. And lots of cultures have sweat lodges and stuff, right?
The last place my family and I visited on our travels was the city formerly known as Saigon. The daily temperature topped out at around 97 degrees Fahrenheit while we were there. It was hot. I grew up in Texas, and this was hot. It was muggy and oppressive between the hours of 10:00am and 4:00pm. Strangely, after 4:00pm a breeze would transform everything quite pleasantly in contrast.
Anywho, even the most cursory observations proved my son’s black hoodie propensity was not a statistical outlier. After a few days of close inspection, my anecdotal evidence revealed the Vietnamese people to be evenly split between short sleeves and full on black hoodies. But in the name of all things holy, why?
It’s friggin’ hot in (the city formerly known as) Saigon. These hoodie wearing freaks can’t possibly be cold, not even while riding a scooter at 6am. It’s still 80 degrees. It can’t be due to some trending style either. I mean, black hoodies have been around since the first monk accidentally stained his brown cloak black. And how is it that my adopted son, even when raised halfway around the world, still has it embedded in his DNA to wear two layers of black all summer long!?
The question haunted me so thoroughly (for something like twenty minutes) that I felt compelled to Google it. And you know what? It turns out, nobody really has a clue. Once again, science has failed us. I read some article about infrared, space blankets, and the chimney effect just to have the author conclude that the matter is complicated and perhaps a solid topic for a school science fair. Seriously. That was the best modern, pseudo-science had to offer me: “Like, dude, the Bedouins wear black in the desert, right? So there’s gotta be something to it.”
People are idiots all the time. How is that a convincing argument!? Okay, I apologize. I gotta bring it down a notch. That’s the jet lag typing. Still, I find the matter perplexing. So much so that I think I’m gonna have to undergo my own personal experiment this summer. I recently purchased a super-fancy black hoodie via Kickstarter. (The wife refers to it as my midlife crisis hoodie.) As the temperatures here in Idaho creep northward of 50 degrees, I’m gonna hold fast to my fancy hoodie. It kept me warm in temps down to freezing this winter. We’ll see if can keep me cool in the summer heat. One way or another, I’m gonna find out if there is something to this whole black hoodie in the heat thing. Or at least, I’m gonna sweat my butt off trying.
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