Hello, precious readers! Take a look at this week’s column.
“Dear Katherine,
Do you have any advice on how to keep your spirits up during a long winter in Maine?
Sincerely,
Chilly in Chambo”
Chilly, it’s coming for all of us. The first warning sign was on November 1 when daylight savings time ended and all of our lives got a little bit sadder. The next sign came last week, when I walked home in the dark at 4 p.m., entered my living room and found my housemate Jamie purposefully searching Amazon.
“What if we buy a house sun lamp?” he said. “Or, I don’t know, a tanning booth.”
The tanning booth idea sounded to me—well—a little bit insane. What, I wondered as Jamie perused a user review of an in-home tanning booth, do other people do to keep their spirits up in the winter? Do they deal with it like reasonable humans? I decided, Chilly, to ask around for you while I was in Smith Union yesterday.
First, I ran into Hannah. “How do you cope with the winter?” I asked her as she sat opening a package.
“I wake up and I cry,” Hannah said. “Once it started snowing and I cried in the middle of class.” As she spoke, she waved around a half a mounted taxidermy squirrel she’d received in the mail.
When I asked how Skye would get through the winter, she got a frenetic look in her eye. “I’ve planned it all out. I’m never leaving the tower. I can eat there, I can shower there, I can exercise there—stairs!” she said.
Chilly—these anecdotes evidence that winter is coming and that, one way or another, it’s going to be ugly. And while the coping mechanisms described by the people I talked to are perfectly legitimate, I, your dear advice columnist, am going to recommend what I hope will be some slightly less desperate tactics:
1. Do not cry. If you do, your tears will freeze to your cheeks or perhaps even in your eyeballs.
2. Have a friendly snowball fight.
3. Learn some variety of winter sport. The outing club has Nordic skis, telemark skis and snowshoes. Go forth and get endorphin-high on exercise.
4. Remember that if we didn’t have winter, we wouldn’t have babies in snowsuits, and babies in snowsuits are the cutest thing on the entire planet.
5. Put on your vodka jacket. And your mulled wine jacket. Also put on your regular jacket, the one that is made of actual fabric and not just your impaired sensory capacities.
6. Eat foods with astronomical levels of carbs and fats in order to develop winter blubber. When in doubt, do as the artic mammals.
7. Look to the dead polar bear in that weird little hallway behind the gym for inspiration.
8. Then visit the artic museum. Stare at the portraits of Donald B. MacMillan, another artic mammal. Think, “how can I become more like this famed polar bear murder?”
10. Layer. Wear every sweater you have when you leave the house. Steal your roommates’ sweaters and wear them as well. Collect sweaters from the gym and put them on too. Try to acquire all the sweaters. Soon, you will be the most powerful—soon you will rule them all.
11. Take stock of yourself. Wonder if you have perhaps started to go a little bit insane.
12. Count down the days until Ivies.
Happy winter!
Out,
Katherine