What Happened To Winter?
By Thoughtis
Um, you guys, where’s winter? It’s March 1st already and we’ve only seen snow once (maybe twice if you count Halloween which was weird) in New York City. This will have been my fifth winter here and to say it’s been a mild one is an understatement. It doesn’t exist! Winter just decided to not show up this year. Maybe it couldn’t deal with New Yorkers and their incessant complaining, so it gave us a break. I mean, do you even remember last winter? I looked like the final shot of Jack Nicholson in The Shining for three months! As someone who grew up in a Southern California beach town practically licking the sun, it’s not easy for me to navigate cold weather. I always underdress (yes, I’m that fool wearing shorts in 60 degree weather and dining al fresco), my sexy psoriasis breaks out on my cheeks, and I never want to leave my apartment. What I loathe the most about winter actually is the constant undressing and redressing whenever you go somewhere. And hooking up with someone? Ha! Just give me thirty minutes to de-mummify myself. We’ll see where your erection is at after I spend ten minutes getting off my boots.
All of that being said, I’m sort of bummed that we didn’t get to have a winter this year. It felt unnatural not having to use my winter coats and trudge through the snow every day in perpetual fear of eating crap. I missed drinking whiskey and eating lots of soup to keep warm. I missed having an excuse to stay in with friends because the weather was terrifying. Most of all, I missed having an excuse to eat like Kirstie Alley for a few months. When the weather’s nice, there’s no reason you should be eating lasagna every night.
Honestly, I couldn’t even enjoy the nice weather without worrying about how we were going to eventually pay for it. Because trust me, we will. Climate change is here and it’s not screwing around. This winter exemplifies that. While everyone else was delighting in their good fortune of having a 60 degree day in the middle of February, I was FREAKING OUT about the implications. If the weather’s like this now, does that mean we’re going to be having random snowstorms in the middle of summer? We can’t just be getting out of a winter this year. It’s going to bite us in the ass at some point. It has to, right?
It’s not over yet. We still have a good six weeks left to get completely screwed by the weather gods. With my luck, it will start hailing the second I publish this post. Snow will drop like boulders and crush all of the skinny people on Bedford. It will be absolute chaos!
Or not. The weather could continue being inoffensive and shy. Then the season will officially change and our memories will turn into pudding. We’ll forget that New York could ever get so cold until next year rolls around and we find ourselves up shit creek without a paddle. Years later, we’ll be sitting in some restaurant uptown holding a dog for no reason and talking about That One Winter. That One Winter where nothing happened, nothing at all. And we’ll laugh until we start to wheeze and choke and possibly grab for an oxygen mask, and that will be that. Sigh.