Exciting updates from the Great Unthawing

I got this post title from a group of men the BF and I saw walking down the street. We were going to the grocery store and passed a quartet of Young Men in Brooklyn, with their narrow trousers, fancy socks, and fedoras. We could barely wait until they were out of earshot before we judged them.

"They looked like an indie album cover," I said. "'Hi, we're just going to play one more for you. It's our song Tree Stump, from our album Unthawed.'" 

Readers outside New York should consult this diagram.

But unthawed we are in this fair city! I even have the window open right now. And it's a good thing, too, because I suffered this last winter. I was going through one of my paper journals and came across this gem from the depths of Snognarok:

"JUST FUCKING SNOW ALREADY! You know you want to, you miserably tenacious shitslipper of a season."

It's not for nothing that my coworker told me I have "the illest potty mouth."

Seriously, that was a bitch of a winter right there. I wore my fur coat more times this winter than my previous five winters in New York combined.

Here I am wearing it in the radio station, which has no heat, hence my pissy expression.

That fur coat is real fur--it was ripped from many small dead animals of indeterminate origin, and it feels sinfully good to touch. Also, I look fabulous in it. Though if you'll remember from my night at the opera last year, it also smells overwhelmingly of dead animals when it gets wet. Probably punishment for the animal cruelty.

The story of the coat goes all the way back to the summer of 2008, when I moved to New York from Honolulu. I was still living at 187. My upstairs neighbor Yarrow, who'd hooked me up with my roommates, called me up to the third floor and asked if I wanted her grandmother's fur coat, which was cool but took up too much room in her closet. I looked at the coat and thought, "It's 90 degrees in this apartment. When the hell am I ever going to need that?"

But I took it, cuz fur coat!

Six weeks later, I was sleeping underneath it because I couldn't figure out how to turn on the heat in my new apartment. I kept going to the thermostat and punching the "up" arrow, but nothing ever happened. I called the super and told him the heat was broken, and that's how I learned that some thermostats have an "on" switch that you have to press before the heat will come.

An addendum to that story: another time that winter, I was trying to get the plastic cover off the thermostat to turn the heat up (my roommates and I were in a constant struggle for how hot the apartment should be, because I wanted it to be tropical and they didn't want to pay for tropical). The plastic cover wouldn't come, so I wrapped my stumpy little fingers around the whole thing, and I swear the phrase "RACHEL SMASH!" popped into my head at the exact second that I ripped the thermostat off the wall. I was left holding a plastic box and a bunch of wires, which I crammed into the hole in the drywall I'd just created, thinking, "Maybe no one will notice."

I'd like to say that six winters later, I've gotten better at dealing with the cold. But my sister reminded me that every single year, she tells me to seal my windows, and every year I don't do it.

"I lived in old buildings on the mainland for ten years!" she said. "I know what I'm talking about. And I know I've told you this before."

I heard her husband in the background, "Yeah, you did, you told her last year."

Well, it's spring and I didn't seal my windows last winter. Maybe next year.

Also, I got a new computer last week! My college graduation gift laptop finally gave up the ghost, so I bought a new one with a much bigger screen. "Game of Thrones" is going to be so much more fun to watch now!