Summer Doldrums, Looking Up

It is August and I am in the doldrums of summer. Energy is at a minimum. The weather is particularly hot and still along the Costa Blanca. No evening breeze drifts in now when we open the windows, so we don't open them. I turn the bedroom air conditioner on for a few minutes before I retire for the night, then zap it off and rely on the always-on overhead fan to move the air just enough so that it doesn't settle heavily over my outstretched body. At some point in the night I usually wake up, fumble for the remote and turn the a/c on again for a few minutes, and then off, and that lasts until I regain consciousness--often stimulated by the aroma of coffee--again at 6:00 or so in the morning.

I stagger downstairs and fetch a cup of coffee and then retreat upstairs to lie abed with a book, an iPad, or a paper-based sudoku for an hour. Then back downstairs to make my breakfast, which I usually eat upstairs again, while in bed or at the computer for another hour. It is only after checking email and the state of the world that I think about taking a shower and dressing. Getting up is a long affair--we don't usually leave the house for morning errands until at least 10:00, and now this summer it has more often been 11:00.

Errands--shopping, medical appointments, coffee out, and more shopping--are the height of the day's activity now. Most of the people with whom we share a face-to-face social life are away, back in the UK or Denmark or even the U.S. I received a dictum from the doctor that I should avoid the sun ("zero sol") pending a few weeks' treatment to clear up a potential trouble spot on my skin, so I skipped the weekly petanca game this past Tuesday and avoided the outdoor market this Sunday morning. Neither of my Spanish classes is meeting: the town-sponsored class won't start again until October, and even my private class teacher has decided to take August off.

If I didn't have the work and writing that I can do at the computer during the afternoons, in the quiet and comfort of my silent office air conditioning with overhead fan, and the frequent emails dropping into my inbox from numerous family members and friends far away, I would feel very despondent indeed. Work and people--responding to them, thinking about them, reaching out to them--provide the interest and internal activity that keep me active. Not focused, because the hodgepodge that draws my attention on any given day is anything but focused, but mentally active and outward-looking, making me suddenly wonder whether I am more extrovert than I had ever thought myself.

But this is not a permanent condition, I know. It is the summer doldrums and will be dispelled when normal life resumes. That was always after Labor Day when I was growing up, but it is somewhat later now. In the meantime, this mid-August Sunday morning in Spain, I decided to try to find out how to say "summer doldrums" in Spanish.

I went first to the Diccionario Cambridge Klett Compact that I keep on my main computer in my office and which is the CD-ROM version (yes, it's that old) of the paper companion that resides in the bedroom bookshelves and which is falling apart. These are my basic Spanish-English dictionaries, the ones I use as look-ups for all my Spanish homework and any word or phrase I find in a newspaper or other publication that I just have to look up. The CD-ROM version, of course, has more flexible searchability than the paper. It failed me this time, however. "Doldrums" does not appear as an entry or within any other entry.

Then I went to Merriam-Webster online and found an entry. I ignored the first meaning (zona, feminine, de las calmas ecuatoriales), which sounded like a real wild goose chase.  "To be in the doldrums," it said further on, was estar abatido (when talking about a person), or estar estancado (a business).  But then I looked up the verb abatir back in my Cambridge Klett to see what that said. It turns out to be one of those reflexive verbs (abatirse), which was given as a synonym for desanimarse. Yes, un-animated sounds right, but it was translated as "to become dejected," which sounds a little strong for the "disanimation" I am feeling.

That was nothing, though, in comparison to the first translation I got when I typed "I am in the summer doldrums" into Google Translate and clicked Spanish. I found out I was in the "crisis of summer"! I really didn't feel like this was a crisis! With Google Translate, of course, you can now click on a word and get shown alternative meanings, and then substitute one of those. I did that, and I found a milder word. I think it was a form of abatir, but I paged away from that translation before recording it. 

I went off to pursue Collins Spanish Idioms, a new phrase book of mine, and got lost for an hour in looking for and at various English (UK-style) and Spanish idioms. I could write more about that escapade, but I am running out of time before needing to go downstairs to make lunch. (Regular events for which you are responsible are important when you are in the middle of summer doldrums). 

While finishing up this description, however, I went back to Google Translate once more. Google claims that its Translate tool "learns" with input, and it appears that it had learned from its (or my) morning lesson. This time when I entered "I am in the summer doldrums" into the translate box, I got Yo estoy en la inactividad del verano in translation. The inactivity of summer. Yes, that is it.