It happens on a different day every year, but every year there comes a day when I stand at a crosswalk, hunched against the wind, shivering, my nose not merely running but sprinting on pace to break the world record, and think to myself, “Okay, today I have officially had it with winter.” Most years, I hit the wall on a morning when I’ve overslept and have therefore had to rush through my morning routine – no big deal during other seasons, but decidedly inconvenient during the winter, because I live in what you might optimistically call a “drafty” apartment, so I take certain heat-preservation measures in the morning. I warm up the shower for awhile before getting in; I stay in the shower for awhile to let the bathroom fog up; I select a toasty outfit and arrange it in order with all the zippers unzipped and folds unfolded, the faster to dash into it immediately after drying my hair. But if I oversleep, I don’t have time for these things. I don’t have time to dry my hair, much less to point the hair dryer at my deodorant and perfume to warm them up, and I don’t have time to choose what to wear in advance, and I have to brush my teeth by relying on the shivering action of my exposed forearm to loosen the plaque instead of the careful up-and-down strokes my dentist prefers, and I have to moisturize with lotion that has forsaken its original creamy texture in favor of a Slurpee-like consistency, and I have to don a pair of hose and a pair of leggings over that and a pair of pants over that, and a t-shirt, and a long-sleeved shirt, and a thin cardigan, and a bulky pullover, and socks and boots and coat and hat and scarf and mittens, and I have to remember to put everything I need in my pockets and bag first because I have so many layers on that I resemble the little brother in A Christmas Story after the mother stuffed him into that snowsuit and he could barely move, and then I have to wait for the elevator, interminably, sweating, and then it arrives and I kind of clomp into it like Mrs. Staypuft, and then I get out to the street and start walking across town towards my train, and no matter which direction you walk on 34th Street, you always walk into the wind, so I pull down my knitted hat a la Mushmouth and try to avoid crashing into people, all of whom jump out of my way because as far as they know, I can’t see and I can’t bend at the joints, and the only thing distinguishing me from a warmly-dressed robot prototype is the cloud of breath issuing from between the scarf and the pulled-down hat – and of course the little tufts of frozen hair peeking out randomly in the back.

I’ve tried to have fun with it. When it gets Arctic, I wrap so many layers around my ears that I can’t hear anything except my own breathing, so I stomp along inhaling and exhaling, “fffffff HAAAAAHH fffffff HAAAAAHH,” and making up stories in my head starring me, Scarf Vader, and wondering what would happen if I stomped up to that little kid at the bus stop and billowed out my pea coat like a cape and said, “Fffffff HAAAAAHH. Come to the scarf side, Luuuuuke. Fffffff HAAAAAHH.” But then I remember that even if the little kid recognizes the name “Darth Vader,” which he probably wouldn’t, the little kid’s mom would beat me senseless with her child’s Pokémon umbrella, so I try to make up a story starring me, Earmuff-zilla, instead but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it, and neither does “Mitten-ra.”

But living in Manhattan takes all the fun out of winter. Everything about city living makes cold weather that much more of a hassle. Let’s start with the fact that the same number of commuters must stuff themselves onto a subway train on a January day as on a comparable July day, except that in January, each commuter has forty more pounds of clothing on. Add to this the fact that flu season has arrived, which means that many commuters – this one included – have accessorized their looks with a snot-sicle under each nostril, but have failed to bring a Kleenex along on the commute, so when the snot-sicle melts . . . well, you get the idea. I won’t even get into the amount of croupy coughs and gusty sneezes flying around, except to observe that the tradition of covering one’s mouth has apparently gone the way of the finger bowl, because I cannot even count the number of times one of my fellow citizens has covered my sleeve or the side of my face in a fine tubercular mist. Gee, thanks, pal – because I just got over my last cold, and I didn’t want to get too used to the luxury of clear sinuses.

Still, the cold beats the summer weather, and at first, I get a perverse kick out of enduring the elements – sitting in a pillow fort with a mug of tea and a sleeping cat, or blowing through the door of a pub and seeing that my friends have already ordered me a pint – that probably derives from reading the Little House books once too many times and wishing I could fall into a crevasse and cool my heels in a pocket of snow for two days like Pa did. Eventually, though, it gets old, and it got old today. Today, I couldn’t tell that the newly-fallen snow at the corner masked a four-day-old puddle of grimy slush, and I sank into it up to mid-calf. Today, a bike messenger hit his brakes on black ice, nearly knocked me down, and called me a “stupid fucking bitch” for getting in his way, and I yelled, “I had the light, dicksmack,” and a wise-ass next to me felt compelled to point out that “‘dicksmack’ ain’t a word,” and I couldn’t think of a good comeback to that, and I would have mangled a good comeback anyway because my lips had gone numb, which chapped me. Today, I had the worst staticky head in the history of the bob haircut; I’ve had bad hair days before, and I’ve had hat-head before, but I’ve never considered running across the street to Columbia and bursting into the physics lab screaming, “I’m completely ionized – HELP MEEEE!” before. Today, I realized that I don’t have the kind of combination skin that makes parts of my face oily and other parts dry, but the kind of combination skin that makes my entire face oily and dry at the same time, and by “dry” I actually mean “scaly and disgusting,” and by “oily” I mean that I received a letter from Crisco, Inc. threatening to sue me for trademark infringement. Today, I stood in front of my closet and stared with utter loathing at my sweater shelf and said to my sweaters, “I hate you all, o itchy ones,” and I stared at my boots and muttered, “I hate you also.” I miss shorts. I miss sandals. I miss having to shave my legs.

Okay, so I don’t miss having to shave my legs, but never mind shaving my legs – I’ve had to wear so many layers on them for so long that I couldn’t pick my legs out of a line-up.

I know I won’t get much sympathy from folks who live in colder climes like Alaska or Buffalo, but then again, I don’t know that I want sympathy from anyone who voluntarily lives in Buffalo. I mean, no offense to Buffalonians, or Buffoons or Buffaluddites or whatever the citizens of Buffalo call themselves, but come on now, people – how many feet of lake-effect snow do you have to shovel out of your driveway before you figure out that you don’t like it there, or more accurately that “it there” really doesn’t like you? Can you legally get sick of winter if you knew you’d have nine months of it to deal with when you moved there? Of course, if I follow that reasoning, then I should move to Florida, but I don’t hate cold and snow – I just hate cold and snow in Manhattan. Snow here turns grey in about five minutes, and the yellow patches appear not long after that, and I don’t suppose I need to mention that dog owners with imperfect good-weather poop-scooping records abandon all pretense of cleaning up after their pets when it snows. My brother and I went out shopping last weekend in the East Village, and we could barely walk. The already narrow sidewalks had slimmed down to exactly the width of one shovel, nobody had bothered to put down salt on the packed snow, and we had to leapfrog back and forth over little mushroom colonies of dog poo and try not to wipe out on the ice, because if you think falling down hurts, try falling down on top of twelve-degrees-Kelvin dog crap. I just don’t get it – if you’ve already bundled yourself up and put your dog’s little sweater and booties on, why not go the distance and pick up the little logs? It takes six seconds! And it’s nice and warm! Warm is good! Baggies cost next to nothing, you have a mitten on – I don’t see a problem! Pick it up! Do you know how long it takes me to dig the frozen dookie out of my lug soles? An HOUR! It’s not warm anymore by then! It’s not nice either! Pick up the poo or move to Paris, your choice, but I’d rather not have to invest in a pogo stick just so I can go around the way for a cup of coffee on a winter afternoon without tracking repurposed Alpo all over my carpet when I get home. I mean, God.

And if I slip on one more frozen loogey, I don’t know what. I can live with most littering, I don’t care if people smoke bud on the street, and if you have to hurl or take a whiz on the sidewalk – hey, things happen. The men who hock loogs into the storm drains gross me out, but I kind of admire them also, because whenever I try to fire off a rocket, it ends up on the front of my coat, attached to my lower lip by a string of drool. But in the wintertime, the loogeys freeze, and I walk out of my building and look around and don’t see any ice or snow on the ground, and yet somehow my foot shoots out from under me and I wind up flailing around on the curb, all because the Prince Charming who delivers groceries in my neighborhood horked a nose-to-ground snot missile last night, and it froze, and my shoe hit that slick surface and went flying. Loog flingers of the world, I beg you: quit it. The first time, I laughed ruefully, like, oh ha ha, I wiped out on a hocker. But the novelty has now worn off.

The novelty of winter has worn off. I don’t want to drink any more hot tea. My nightly ritual of looking at my eyebrows, realizing that if I don’t wade in with a tweezer soon people will start mistaking me for Martin Scorsese, and deciding not to tweeze because I need them for warmth? Sick of it. The cat reacting to the slightest bend in my knee as the inevitable formation of a warm lap and leaping desperately at my thighs, claws extended? No longer cute. Emptying my bag of crumpled gucky Kleenex every night, outlining not just my lips but my entire lower jaw in Chapstick, using my laptop as a heating pad, begging the pizza guy to bring me cigarettes so I won’t have to leave the apartment – I’ve run out of patience with it. And yeah, I know I’ll miss it by Memorial Day.

Where art thou, spring?
Don’t ask.

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