Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m no sissy when it comes to East Coast winter weather. I recall temperatures well below zero when I weren’t nothing more than knee-high to a grasshopper, and snowdrifts taller than me when I was considerably beyond grasshopper-height. Maybe it’s just that last winter was such a wussy ripoff of a winter, more like an unusually chilly and interminably long fall than anything else, but honestly: this January has been particularly brutal. The last thing I want to hear from the friendly NPR weather man while I’m shivering from my shower and scrambling to put on all my heater-toasted clothes before they go all cold again is that at JFK it’s four degrees but feels like negative six with wind chill. And it’s not like ten blocks is so terribly far to walk but when it feels like negative six (with wind chill), it also feels like much, much longer than ten blocks, and my extremities are actually in pain with the cold by the time I make it to class in the morning, and I end up dropping my wallet at least once trying to get my ID out to show to the friendly security man because I can’t feel my fingers even a little bit.

Today was cold and tomorrow will also be cold, and my heat doesn’t work and I’m whining about it, but other than that, things are great.