I am so full of frozen piss and vinegar

March 06, 2006 - 12:34 a.m.

Whether you believe this or not, I make it a high priority in my life not to complain about stupid shit. If I am failing miserably at this, please let me know and I will kill myself with the quickness.

No, but sheariously. I try to save up my complaining time for shit that is right deserving, things that perhaps 60% of all people would nod their head in agreement: “Yeah, that sucks.” I LOATHE complainers. I can’t be friends with them, I can’t work with them, and I am immediately rendered deaf when I hear a mere whisper of whining or pity-seeking. I pity no one. Except maybe babies or the elderly who get run over by buses. Or people born with hideous physical deformations, like that Mask guy. Everyone else can go to hell. Able-bodied complaining adults can go to hell. They’re like a ghost to me, a Casper, I hear the mouth start running and I walk right through them, oblivious to their existence.

[Trying not to be a hypocrite: I have a long history of complaining and being pissed of at the world. Praise the Lord that internet diaries did not exist when I was younger cuz my eyes would be bleeding right now if I had to think about all the innocent people I annoyed with my so-called revolutionary way of thinking i.e., “life sucks because it’s unfair.” This is precisely why whiners are like a hot match to my ass now, and I constantly monitor myself for unwarranted pity parties. Please, take my own hand slap me with it if I get out of control.]

Have you ever randomly surfed through blog directories, hoping to stumble upon some gem of a blog? And how long did it take for you to realize that all of the blogs are a bunch of whiners, and they’re bleedingly boring, and you got so fed up you just stopped looking? Like 45 seconds? Me too. It was just plain exhausting clicking through them when they all had the same name: Cry Baby, Stupid Baby, Lazy Baby, Spoiled Baby, Anorexic Baby, Too Much Time on Their Hands Baby, Lives in a Bubble Baby, and so on. Who keeps giving computers too all of these infants, moments after they just stepped out of a vagina?

If you’re going to complain, at least be able to make fun of yourself and be humorous about it. “Ha ha, look at me! My life is in the shitter and I want to die!” Yes. But if you start going on that maybe the world or “god” or fate is against you, or that your life is worse than everybody else’s, I will hate you and then you will become invisible to me. You’re a baby. People are worse off than you. Shut your mouth.

Back to my point. I save up my complaining time for when I really need it, sometimes skipping over things that are legitimately sucky, waiting for things that really chap my hide. I mean, I didn’t even tell you when my two front tires got slashed while my car was parked in the pilot’s driveway. Or that, because of my drugs, I’ve developed a chronic sweaty upper lip and it’s driving me to distraction. Or that I’ve been forced to spend the last month meeting with Beevertowne, because of an audit at my job. Or that, when I recently applied for an auto loan and was DENIED, I learned that my pristine credit has been ruined because some asshole somewhere made a big fucking mistake and I swear to god it isn’t my fault. Or that I hate everyone around me because they are all stupid and annoying with personality disorders that manifest themselves into compulsive habits, like chewing, crunching, clipping finger nails, scratching, laughing, stuttering, pacing, talking to me, creating inside jokes and repeating them excessively, and STARING AT MY MONITOR WHILE I TYPE THIS, DEATH TO YOU.

Calgon, take me fucking away! God. Damn! Autonomy now! Please stay outside the yellow line and do not come within eye or earshot of my personal space.

Anyway, here is my complaint:

It Is Winter And I Am Cold All The Fucking Time.

Right now my black turtleneck sweater is pulled over my face up to my eyeballs, like a ninja, because my nose is dripping icicles. My left hand is in my general crotch area because that’s the warmest place on my body. My right hand types this with stiff wooden fingers and bloody scabs due to the cracking open and bleeding all the time.

Are you aware that I ride my bicycle 365 days a year? And that I live where the average daily temperature in the wintertime is 20 degrees? And it rains and snows in my face all the time. And the time when it hailed, pounding my face and bouncing off my body and I wanted to just pull my bike over and cry on the sidewalk because the pain on my forehead was unbearable. But I am no hero, no bike activist or anything, though I do enjoy the fact that my daily commute is environmentally friendly. But I only do it because I have no other plausible choice. I could walk, but which is worse, walking in the elements for 20 minutes or riding a bike in it for 7? For me, it’s not the intensity of the pain and discomfort, it’s the duration that gets to me. I just want to get out of this shit as fast as I can.

I ride my bike to the train and park it in the station, then take the train to the loop and then walk a half mile to my job. Even on a nice day it kind of sucks to bike, train, and walk to work, because the potential for something to go wrong is very high. Like bomb threats and parades and snow. There was only one day last winter when I couldn’t ride my bike, and that is because the snow was too deep to maneuver in and I’d have been scooped up by the business end of a snow plow in no time.

Imagine leaving work late, late at night in the very dark winter and walking for what feels like a mile in the devil’s wind that pushes into you like a steel wall. It’s one of those nights where the temperature drops quickly, down below zero and the news is all: DANGER – TRY NOT TO DIE TONIGHT. You know you could take a cab home but you don’t like the idea of leaving your bike at the station all weekend, tempting some hipster slut on her way home drunk from a punk concert to steal your Dorothy basket (again). You get to the train and run down the subway stairs to juuuuust miss the train (of course). You try to block out the noise of the crazies, the suburbanites, and the teenagers, all of which are equally annoying.

20 minutes later the train comes and your car smells like so many things you can’t begin to identify. (In the wintertime, homeless people ride the trains all night so as not to freeze to death out on the streets. They leave behind smells, and sometimes a steaming pile of poop in the corner. More often pee, though). As you sit on the train, you begin to identify the smells…beer…fast food….armpits. Then it gets worse…ass…feet…and as soon as you get to “balls” and “yeast infection” you’re about to go batty but luckily your stop is next.

You get off, run to the bike rack and see this:

Even though you parked “inside”, under cover, the snow blew in sideways.

Uh…no big deal. You’ve ridden home in this shit before, just brush it off…

But your lock is frozen shut. Because now it’s about -20 degrees with high humidity and wind and the lock isn’t budging until April. You spend 15 minutes trying to jam your key into the hole until you give up. So you “didn’t take a cab home” for no reason at all.

Just then you hear the unmistakable sound of a city bus, moaning and wheezing up the street. Yes! You’ve never bothered to take the bus before, because it just never comes, but maybe tonight it will save you from this cold!

So you dart out of the station and see the bus resting at a stoplight/bus stop a half a block away. You start running and you can see that the cross traffic has a green light and you’re going to make it! The bus is sitting there, and the speed your legs are traveling times the distance needed to travel before the light turns green = SUCCESS! Thank god, for once, something can go right in your mangled, abusive, one-sided relationship with the Chicago Transit Authority!

You start imagining the warm fluorescent glow inside the bus, the weirdo riders welcoming you, and the fact that you will be home in minutes, and you can forget that this miserable cold day ever existed. You take your final leap and land directly in front of the bus doors, a smile wide across your face, ready to greet the driver and make some awkward exclamation about how they’re your knight in shining armor, and right then the bus RUNS A RED LIGHT to escape you. That’s right. The cross traffic still had the green, the bus driver took one look at you, then looked both ways and proceeded to FLOOR IT and PEEL THE FUCK outta there. Away from you. While you stand there, knowing that you rightfully won the fight, you caught the bus, you deserved to be on the bus, and the bus FUCKED YOU ONCE AGAIN.

Bitch! You stand there on the verge of having an intense HISSY FIT, wanting to scream WHY WHY WHY and begging Jesus, please, please I want OUT, make it so, I want to break up with the CTA!

But you know on Monday morning you’re going to take its limp, shriveled cock into your mouth all over again.

Needless to say…that night that the bus risked life and limb to get away from me, I ended up walking home. And even though I was dressed ridiculously warm, in that kind of cold you may as well be naked because you can feel it in every pore anyway. Halfway home the pain of the frigid air went away, because my legs were literally numb and couldn’t feel anything. When I got home I peeled off my clothes and looked at my skin and it was a most unhealthy shade of purple. I dug my fingernails into my thighs and couldn’t feel anything.

My second complaint is the cost of heating a home because the price of natural gas is so high. My apartment is heated by radiators and the cost is included in my rent. The thermostat is controlled by the building owner, but since I am on the first floor it is very warm, all the time. The average is probably 75 degrees but it can be as high as 85 and I sit around in my underwear and sweat. I love every minute of it. And I know that I am getting about $1,000 worth of heat in my crib every month and I don’t take that for granted for a second.

Everyone else though, that has gas forced heat, is shit out of luck. My boyfriend’s house is a lot bigger than mine and of course he pays for his heat. If he were to keep his house at a normal temperature, like 66-68 degrees, it would easily cost $800 or more a month. That seems kind of obscene to pay that much to heat a house doesn’t it? So he keeps his thermostat very low, and even lower at night and when he goes to work.

I go over there and shiver constantly, muscles clenched, hair raised, brrr brrrr. We turn on the space heater and the fireplace, I wear a sweater and fuzzy bear slippers and still have icicle fingers and can hardly turn the pages of the newspaper. One day he noticed my ice face and said, “Oh, honey! Go turn up the heat!” (Yay me!)

“What should I set it to?”

“Knock it up three degrees.”

I went to the thermostat and it read: 55 degrees.

Holy Shit.

“My god, it’s only on 55!”

“I know, hon, turn it up to 58!”

Wow. And I thought that all that time I was being a baby about the cold, but I think we can all agree that 55 is cold, right? And even at 55, his gas bill for that month was $250. I want to know, what the hell are poor people doing right now? Are they living at 40 degrees? Hello? Poor Pople? Are you there? Is everyone dead?

When I sleep at my boyfriend’s house, sometimes the heat doesn’t even turn on all night. We sleep under a 12-inch thick down comforter with another comforter on top of that and four pillows to hide my head under. The sheets are cold to the touch.

He says, “It’s just like camping!”

You can say that again! And I like camping, but if I’m gonna freeze I want to wake up and find a mountain outside of my tent.

In the morning, I wake up and the goose down and his body heat have done their job and my body is warm. But my head feels like it spent the night hanging in a meat locker. The skin is not cool…it’s frozen stiff. But my legs are steaming hot, and soaked with sweat. This is one of the more uncomfortable positions to be in, and it makes me want to have a hissy fit and thrash about. Half too hot and half too cold and nowhere just right. I am Goldilocks, perpetually caught in the land of small chairs, hard beds and cold porridge. God help me. This winter is on my last fucking nerve, and me and Jack Frost are going to come to blows. Oh wait, I am Jack Frost, with icicles dangling off my nose and elbows.

I am Jack’s shriveld gray body, with ice in my veins.

I am Jack’s complete lack of enthusiasm at living in the fucking Midwest.

I am Jack’s utter willingness to suck your dick of you’ll take me somewhere warm. Pleeeze, take me to a warm place!

*frozen frowny face*

Previous - Next

The Latest Babel

The Fast, Days 1-6
January 28, 2007