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So what now, then? All I really want is to crawl back into bed: the thermometer has barely risen above 20º all day. You can see your breath doesn’t begin to do it justice. You can feel your breath freezing while it’s still in your lungs. And I know I’m exaggerating, but really, not that much. Certainly, it isn’t the type of temperature at which people just up and die, not like in London’s story To Build A Fire, in which the arrogance of man – of a man – is suitably punished by nature, and he freezes to death because he thinks he doesn’t need to give her the proper respect.

I digress. It is cold here, but not that cold. Nonetheless, I’m a mere California thing, and this clear freezing of the desert takes me by continuous surprise. I end up trudging to school with long underwear on under my pants, hated turtlenecks under my t-shirts, stupid big puffy jackets and the gloves and scarves and who knows what-all else, two pairs of socks, the works. And then I’m three-quarters of my way to school, and the sun comes out from behind the hill or the building or whatever, and hits me square on the back and I’m too hot but still freezing, all sweaty and the sweat freezes on my skin and I think that this is why god invented cars. But I’m too good a hippie to drive to school, and besides, with the time it would take me to defrost my entire car enough to make it run, it just isn’t worth it.

But that means that every morning I’m faced with the knowledge that if I get up, I will, in fairly short measure, be required to either defrost the entire car, or walk to school. The walk isn’t so far, not more than a mile or so, but at 17º it seems like a pretty good ways. And that makes it a lot harder to get out of bed than I’d like. I end up laying there, debating, for a quarter of an hour or more, hoping that I’ll just fall asleep soundly and the decision will be taken out of my hands. At this point, the end of the semester is so near that I feel like I’ll miss something really important if I don’t go to class; this is rarely true, as I realize at the end of class when I’m trudging home.

Alas.

I do sometimes wish that I had a set of moral and personal values that allowed me to just blow things off more often. I’d like to be able to decide that today is too cold and too grey and too dreary for school, that I need to stay in bed and cuddle myself back into happiness or at least back to sleep. I suppose this might happen more often if there was somebody else I was cuddling as well; certainly that would make it even harder to get out of bed. Maybe it’s for the best that I’m alone here, for now: Otherwise, I might never get to class at all. I don’t think I could argue against a combination of bleak grey snowy stormy freezing cold sky, and warm soft sweet cuddly body next to me. No. I would probably spend all my time in bed. Definitely for the best.

At least this way, when I finally do force myself out of bed with the promise of oatmeal and tea and snuggly socks, I can make my bed and then make my oatmeal and then push myself out the door, backpack and little packed lunch in tow.

And I make my way down to class, hands shoved in my pockets, and I sit there in the classroom and I mostly pay attention, and I come home and most days I manage not to just crawl straight back into bed. Though today I didn’t do such a good job of that: I tried to lie down for a minute to read, and I fell asleep for two and a half hours. Oh well. Evidently that’s what my body needed: certainly, that’s what it demanded of me. Who am I to deny?

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