I’ve never really subscribed to the theory that bad-day karma clusters around Mondays. I mean, sure, irritating things tend to happen on Mondays, but irritating things tend to happen every day, and the fact that Garfield the cat obviously needs treatment for clinical depression doesn’t prove anything. Yes, it just so happens that I kicked off my Monday by getting out of bed, taking one tiny step, and falling onto the floor with seventeen nautical miles of flannel sheet tangled around my legs, but do I blame Monday for that? No, I do not. I blame the deeply disturbing dream I had about my wedding to J.K. Simmons that evidently caused me to twirl like a propeller in my bedding, and I blame what we might euphemistically call the “draftiness” of my apartment for the fact that said bedding currently consists of the aforementioned flannel sheets, a thin blanket, a thicker blanket, two even thicker blankets on top of that, a duvet, and the cats. Well, one cat. The other cat is currently employed as my hat. Yes, my hat just blinked. No, you may not pet my hat. If my hat is awakened, it will become very angry and run away, and I will have to lure the hat back up onto my head with sardines and wait for it to fall asleep again.

In other news, the crystals of ice forming in my brain have caused me to go completely mad. Thank you for reading.

All right, but seriously? It is COLD, folks. Right now, it is sixteen degrees, with a wind chill of two. AGAIN. Two degrees probably sounds like a walk in the park to the South Dakotans in the crowd, but please, South Dakotans — do NOT email me all “two’s practically a heat wave here, haw haw haw,” because, well, I don’t care. I do not live in South Dakota, you see. If I did live in South Dakota, I could accept sub-zero temperatures as part of life, but I live in New York City, and it’s just not supposed to get so cold here that I have to recycle my pets as outerwear. It’s just not supposed to get so cold that I have to skip to the bank to keep warm, much less skip and roll a hula hoop while singing “Camptown Races.” On my way to the post office today, I lost feeling in my face while waiting for the light to change. Fifteen seconds, no face. What, I live in the Yukon now? In the twenties? Enough already.

But the primary problem is that it’s not much better in my apartment than outside. It’s in the low to mid-fifties in here at the moment, and that’s with the space heater on — I cannot seem to find an effective way to seal the windows. I tried drapes, but the wind just blew right past them. I tried caulking, but as I stood there, hands on my hips, feeling immensely satisfied with my baby step in the direction of handiness around the house, the caulking went limp and peeled away from the window. I tried again, and again, the caulking stayed put just long enough for me to say to myself, “Well, that should do it.” Then it swooned again. I have an alternate plan which involves the microwave and three cases of Big League Chew, but the gum shipment won’t arrive for several days, so in the meantime, I’ve had to find creative ways to keep warm, especially without a boy in residence at the moment. No, it’s true — the local boy population is utterly uninterested in finding out more about that mysterious girl in the fetching cat-o’-shanter. I can’t quite believe it myself.

On the other hand, as I lay on the floor this morning, counting my unbroken ribs as a part-time hat stepped over me on its way to the kitchen, I felt pretty good about the lack of witnesses. I felt pretty good about it a few minutes later, too, as I stood in front of the toilet with my hairdryer pointed at the seat, warming it up enough to allow me to sit down without freezing the marrow of my pelvis, because I suspect that few sights lead to a court-ordered stay in a mental institution faster than that of a bed-headed woman blow-drying the throne while doing the pee-pee dance in baggy pajama pants, a hooded sweatshirt the size of a topsail, and a mismatched pair of slumpy grey socks.

And I felt just as good about it when I did the least sexy striptease in history before jumping into the shower. First of all, I had so many layers on that it took half an hour, and second of all…well, it takes a certain skill to slingshot a sock into a coffee cup, but it is not a skill that I intend to add to my online dating profile. Nor does anyone particularly need to see me jumping around like a rabid Super-Ball while brushing my teeth, fastening an afghan around my waist with a Hello Kitty belt, or putting my socks in the toaster oven while waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. Certainly nobody at Con Ed needs to know that I baked a batch of cookies one cookie at a time, the better to leave the oven on all afternoon.

You can only build so many Hoovervilles out of sofa cushions before you start to tire of the whole enterprise and consider checking into a hotel you can’t afford, though, and short of putting the space heater into my pants and cinching them up with a length of rebar, I’d tried just about everything to weather the cold except working out, a desperate last resort I’d hoped to postpone trying until at least February. It didn’t even work. I did break a sweat, the first one in recent memory, but the sweat turned immediately into shaved ice, and I couldn’t do a single stomach crunch, not because I have no stomach muscles — although that fact is not entirely irrelevant — but because I had so many shirts on that I could not bend my torso in any direction at all. When I finally managed to roll into an upright position and turn the exercise tape off, the accumulated static charge seared my eyebrows off.

And then I knew I’d hit bottom with the “cold snap” — and excuse me, but don’t most cold snaps eventually — I don’t know. Un-snap? De-snap? Go limp? Something? I don’t think we can keep calling it a cold “snap” when it’s lasted A MONTH and my kitchen windowsill looks like the Ice Palace in Superman II. “Cold clap”? “Cold air-horn bleat”? “Cold sonic boom”? What? Oh, so it’s not a clever idea just because I happen to have a domesticated companion animal on my head? Well, pardon me, but does your hat have a built-in chin strap? No, I see that it doesn’t, Little Miss My Little Bourgeois Knitted Hat And I Are So Much Better Than You. What’s that? Sorry, could you speak up a bit? No, I can’t hear you. An icy wind just blew directly into my ear, and I can’t hear a word through the waxsicle that seems to have formed in my…could I borrow your pen? Great. Let me just dig around in here for a sec and see if…hmm. No, I still can’t hear anything. Perhaps it’s the scarf I wrapped tourniquet-style around my — what’s that? “Your scarf just yawned”? Oh, I don’t think so. It’s just a regular striped…oh, shit. Yeah, it just ran under that table. Excuse me, sir? Hi. Could you just move your legs for a minute? I just need to get my…scarf. Oh no no no no no, please don’t, I can get it, don’t trouble yourse– excuse me? Sir, I think we both know perfectly well that scarves do not bite. Heh. Heh heh. I mean, really — the very idea. And besides, the scarf doesn’t know you, so you can’t just grab it by the…er, tassels, there. [cough] Heeeeere scarfy scarfy scarfy. Gooooood scarf.

Maybe you have a friend who lives in New York. Maybe that friend phoned you at some point in the last week with one of those “only in New York” stories that you swear she makes up half the time because real people do not behave that way, whether the city in which they live sleeps or not. Maybe that friend prefaced the latest story with “okay, check this one out,” and you tucked the receiver under your ear and began filing your nails while you watched BBC America, and you only half-listened to the story, which involved a round grey cat racing a hula hoop down the sidewalk and a woman with no eyebrows in a Sanrio-themed Michelin Man outfit lumbering after the cat while bellowing “STOP THAT SCARF” and waving a single-serving can of Chicken of the Sea. It’s a true story, that one.

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January 27, 2003

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