Colder Days & Thursdays Get Me Down...

So today, it is officially cold outside. When I say cold I don’t mean like 60 degrees, I mean flurry advisory I can see smoke come out of my mouth even when I’m not outside chain smoking like a fiend, cold. This means only one thing: Good-bye joy.

The ushering in of the colder weather is making me feel like shit. It is a portent of things to come. A Bad Omen of sorts. It is the warden closing the door and effectively freezing it shut.

Things that the cold means:

#1 Freezing my ass off in an apartment that was designed for warmer climes, not for the great north woods.
#2 Not being able to flee Wausau due to snow drifts higher than my car.
#3 No one coming to visit me, not that people were pounding down my door.
#4 The holidays, ugg the holidays!
#5 Me, trapped by frigid circumstance, hearing things on the weather like it’ll be about minus 5 today, and thinking that this is a warming trend.

The cold is a harsh mistress who will tie me to my couch and force me to eat canned soup for 5 months. Canned soup? Well last winter it was all i could afford after my electric bills. Last winter I had a $140 electric bill for my 2 bedroom apartment. Yes, you read that right, $140 for a rinky dink apartment. It was this high with the heat in two rooms never being put above 50 degrees (and the rooms being closed off), the heat turned off in my bathroom, my computer being unplugged, as was every non-essential appliance, and my heat never set above 65 degrees. I spent last winter huddled in layers of clothing and under 2-3 blankets on my couch. Usually I was sporting a hoodie as well, with the hood precariously perched over my head. My cats would huddle beneath the blankets for warmth. When I took a shower my hands and feet burned in only the way that the frost bitten can. And I lived like this from November to April. At one point we had 30 below zero temperatures with wind chill of minus 50, it was so cold my patio door started growing a frost monster.

You are asking yourself why I don’t just move. It’s simple. No one in this god-forsaken town will give me anything under a 12 month lease. And only about a quarter of those fuckers will let me have my cats. I currently live in one of those fuckers buildings, which was advertised as super-duper deluxe apartment living (or something like that), but which I think would count as near to projects-style living anywhere else. My only choice was to not move out and switch to month to month leasing. BUT here’s the catch, I have to pay an extra $25 a month (which I don’t have at all) and I am locked into a 5 month lease cos we aren’t allowed to leave during the winter months (cos it's hard to get people to move in 30 below zero weather). It’s a lease, but I have to pay month to month rates. Make sense to you? Yeah me neither.

Why do I need month to month? So I can flee this god-forsaken shit hole as soon as is possible. I cannot emphasize enough how much it sucks to live up here. I never thought it would be this bad. I thought I would make new friends, I thought that my friends would visit me, I thought that I would find things to do (cos up here, this is the big city), I thought I would have more money, I thought I wouldn’t have to drive home to Milwaukee every weekend to keep myself from hanging myself in my walk-in closet. The contrary is the truth to all of these things.
This weather is making me depressed; it’s making me feel like shit. Already I want to stop going to Milwaukee cos it’s easier not to miss something when you removed it from your life rather than had it taken away. It’ll just be easier, so when I cannot drive down I won’t feel like running into traffic (or in front of a gigantic snowplow) in a manic fit, I will have already been planning my tango with the snowplow for months. It’ll be easier cos then when I don’t ever see my friends I won’t be bothered that they don’t visit. It’ll be easier cos when I am not even getting the remotest amount of sex I will go back to remembering what the chaste life was like and can put my mind back on important things like counted cross stitch and making the cats jewelry.

I can forget what intellectual discourse is, or what drinking for fun (not warmth) is like, or what leaving the house and seeing other people is like (trips to the Super-Walmart and grocery store do not count). I can reacquaint myself with my DVD player, and probably forgo my cell-phone cos if I’m not going anywhere I don’t really need it. Mostly I can forget about fun and laughter and getting into trouble. I can just forget about actually living like a 26 year old, and go back to my 80 year old spinster ways. Cos that’s really the only life I can have here anyways.

I hate the cold. I hate flurry advisories. I hate that I don’t have enough money to go down to Milwaukee every single weekend until I can no longer just so I can try to absorb as much fun and stimulation as possible so as to make my inevitable entrapment a little more tolerable. Mostly I just hate feeling like this. Global warming? Not here.