It's So Flipping Cold Out.

It's always around this time of year that I begin to hate winter. It's not entirely that I'm out of things to do. No, there's plenty to do. In fact, I've comprised a list of things that I could do:

-Cross country skiing.

-Snultimate

-Ice skating

-Walking around aimlessly and see how much feeling I can lose in my extremities

-Hibernating with cocoa

-Studying

-Leveling up in the Frostbite game.

Clearly, most of these, with the exception of four, five, six and seven, are extremely limited when it gets to, say, below ten degrees.

There are all of those great public service people who come onto the morning news to talk about children's health and how easy it is to find great outdoor exercise for your kids, even in the winter. They lie. Unless you want your kids leveling up in the Frostbite Game. With the windchill today, it is thirty below. Owie. My hands felt crystallized after less than a one-minute walk from the door of the car to the door of the school.

When I was in eighth grade, I walked to and from school. In the spring and fall, I would even rollerblade the few winding blocks between my house and the school. In the winter, I would trek through the snowbanks, but only when I couldn't beg a ride from my parents (who, according to legend, were forced to walk to school with bare feet, uphill both ways with all of the neighborhood children on their backs). One day, unexpectedly, I was without a ride home, and so resorted to walking. Unfortunately, by some stroke of a universal loathing, this also happened to be the coldest day of the year. Twenty five degrees below zero, with the blistering windchill. And unfortunately for me, I not only was without mittens or a hat, but I also had to carry one of those big, bulky, tri-fold posters home. The idiot in me refused the offers of mittens from concerned teachers, and I trotted off in the direction of home. Well, halfway down the first street, the skin on my fingers clutching the posterboard were aching and pinching with the awful frigidness of the day. For another street or so, I transferred my hands, one holding onto the poster while the other balled up to try and regain warmth. This stopped working after awhile, and halfway between the school and home, I began to get frantic. Remembering that the air from my mouth is obviously heated more than the air outside, I began alternately stuffing as many of my fingers in my mouth as I could while trooping on, every step surging with a pinch of pain, because, of course, I also had no boots. To make matters worse, I didn't realize that as I was sticking my fingers in my mouth, I was also getting them wet, causing the cells in my finger tips to freeze more quickly. And so, as I embarked onto my home street, the home stretch, the final leg, I began to cry, certain that I wouldn't make it. My legs were tired and tingled with the cold, my feet numb, my fingers on that painful verge of numb that haunts nightmares- except for my thumbs, which sent me over that crying edge, because I couldn't feel them at all. I considered more than once just throwing my posterboard into a snowbank and fleeing home, but it was a very important project, and I wasn't about to let it go to waste.

And so, I cannot imagine what my mother might have thought when I finally arrived home. Unable to move my fingers enough to manage the doorknob, and too frozen to knock without pain, I pounded my forehead against the pane of the door.

What I must have looked like to her, a little fourteen year-old girl in a skirted uniform, nose and ears bright red, snot and tears running in tracks down my face that made hair stick to my skin, and fingers immobile, clutching a posterboard with the title, "Forensic Entomology".

So now you see, unless I find some remarkable change in personality that causes me to crave another level-up in the Frostbite Game, I have no other option but to hibernate inside.

Forgive me Play 60. But there's no way in Hell that I'm going outside...to Hell.