a tribute to the bad movies i've slept through

Winter Rants

Truth is, I do not entirely mind winter. My father likes to tell, in an only slightly moralizing context, his joke about the guy carrying a railroad crossbar. “Why are you carrying this?” asks his friend. “Because it feels so good when I put it down.” For a long time I thought that the crossbar is the really long rail part of the railroad, which if anything, only made the story more striking. But this is how I sometimes feel about winter.

There is a conversation I have been having almost every day lately. Somebody who does not know me well would make a comment about the cold, to which I would eventually reply, mostly in my head, you think this is cold? – I went to Colgate. I have seen cold. I don’t want to brag about it, although I should because this is all part of a skill that most other people’s colleges did not teach them, but I am familiar with the feeling of my eyeballs hurting from the cold and I know what it is like when, after a short walk, the hair around my face is whiter than Santa’s beard because my breath has frozen on it. And you know what: I probably hated it at the time but now I find out that I managed to keep good memories from the whole experience. So do you still want to talk to me about the cold?

posted by Dora @ 4:02 PM