Cold


I am sitting here at my desk and I am cold. I am going to drive home to my house where I will likely also be cold. The only time that I will spend warm will be the time driving in my heated up spent-the-day-in-the-sun car oddly, a few weeks ago I saw it as a bad thing.

“Turn on the heat”, I can hear you saying. I do not control the heat in my office, I could turn on the heat at my house but I would hate to add to global warming. It seems to be doing fine without my assistants. Maybe, I’ll just burn cash for warmth too. I’m pretty sure if I turned on the heat in the house and then went outside and crouched in front of any of the windows, I would be just as warm as if I stayed on the inside. I live in a giant sieve. Not quite as sieve-y as my apartment in Dallas where the wind blew my shades and still not as bad as the dorm room I had where the windows regularly iced on the inside, but still, fairly sieve-y. The house is in its fifties and I think the windows are marginally older than I am. Neither of us are aging well.

It’s too early in the season for me to angsting about room tempreture. I haven’t even formally broken out my coats yet. I have several coats now, variations on a theme - a whole little coat wardrobe. I have a coat for not-so-cold days, I have a coat for a-little-cold-but-it-will-burn-off-by-lunch days, one for those damn-its-cold!-when-did-this-happen-why-doesn’t-The Daily Show-have-a-weather-segment days, and of course the GAWD-it’s-cold-don’t-look-at-me-that-way-at-least-I’m-warmer-than-you-maybe-you-should-explore-wearing-a-hood-yourself! Days.

I never had a coat wardrobe before. I had a coat, well, I also had a dress coat and a rain coat, but it wasn’t a multiple choice question when I opened the closet. If it was wet I wore the rain coat, if it was cold I wore the winter coat if it was cold and I was supposed to look nice, I wore the dress coat. It was easy. To be honest, if it was too cold I didn’t out go at all. Coat issue solved, if you really want to stay warm, stay in your bed.

The thing about being cold at home is that at home I have about thirty thousand blankets, throws and afghans – at work I have whatever I wore and my lives-at-work-sweater. I haven’t gotten to the point, as one of my co-workers has, to have along with her lives-at-work-sweater, a lives-at-work-blanket. I don’t want to get there. I think stalking up and down the hallway wrapped in an afghan sends a bad message. It says “I’m very uncomfortable and yet I am not bitching about this effectively enough to force them to correct this matter”. Frankly, it’s a little passive aggressive. I have found that making sure other people see me sitting at my desk, hunched over my keyboard trying to type while wearing gloves – is more effective, I don’t have to parade around in an afghan or leave my office. This behavior is also passive aggressive but it is my passive aggressive behavior and therefore I find it less objectionable.

But.

We haven’t got there yet. It’s early and we are allegedly not long for this wretched building and its inefficient furnace. This year may be the year that I only have to dress to be warm because it’s cold outside and in the winter people normally wear blazers and sweaters and long sleeved shirts – regardless of the temperature inside. Inside we take off our coats and gloves, because its warmer inside, theoretically.