I don't like January at all. I'm sure I've mentioned that here before. There are a few people with reasons to think positively about this calendar black hole, but I've discovered over the years that, in general, people tend to agree with me on this.
To help me purge through another cold and awful single-digit-temperature day, here are thirty-one things I came up with to prove why January is so awful -- one for each day of the stupid month. Yeah, a lot of them could apply to winter overall, but since January is the evil epicenter of everything wrong with winter, I think my list still works. By the way, it didn't take long to come up with this. I easily could have list one hundred if I thought anyone would have had the endurance to read them all.
1) Gusts of wind that feel like dozens or razor blades on your face,
2) when freezing rain covers everything with ice and doesn’t melt for days, turning the entire world into a frictionless death trap,
3) the way your body is immediately covered in sweat if you don’t go outside the very moment after you have all of your layers on,
4) being startled awake in the middle of the night by the concussive sounds of the cold slowly cracking the walls of your home apart,
5) when tears involuntarily rim your eyes in response to the extreme cold, then burn your skin like acid as they freeze,
6) three hours of quality daylight at the beginning of the month; three hours and twelve minutes by the end,
7) having to turn on every lamp in your house for 18 hours a day to fight back any tendencies toward seasonal depression,
8) how warm clothing just itches,
9) cars covered by sedimentary layers of salt, sand, and road chemicals,
10) surrendering to the idea that when you drive during a snowstorm you aren’t in complete control of which direction your car might travel at any given moment,
11) standing outside in a below zero windchill with a dog that won’t poop because it won't keep all four feet on the ground at the same time, so it just looks at you like the cold is somehow your fault,
12) anything enjoyable about the outdoors is put on hold; No, I’m not interested in hearing about your pond hockey tournaments or the nine layers you wear to run through life-threatening wind chills, because there’s nothing about those things that line up with a simple human survival instinct;
13) since everyone is inside all the time, so are the germs, and it’s so much easier to get sick,
14) the only way not to get sick is to constantly wash your hands, leaving your skin feeling like it’s made of thick tissue paper,
15) bloody noses at night that leave your pillow looking like a prop in a Tarantino movie,
16) the inescapable grit left behind by sand scattered on icy sidewalks; this stuff is harder to get rid of than sand from a day at the beach or leftover glitter from a classroom party,
17) knowing that the moment you complain about how short the days are someone is going to ask if you’re getting enough Vitamin D,
18) every time your furnace cycles down, you say a series of silent prayers for it to eventually come back on, then you carry a low-grade anxiety until you hear it start to spin back up,
19) when the local newscast devotes 40% of each broadcast to either professional or college hockey, because they’re trying to make everyone believe there’s anything about winter worth being excited about,
20) if you wear glasses and spend more than three minutes outside, you won’t be able to see for the first half hour after you go back in
21) the whole world is covered in the mechanical gray shade of petroleum-flavored Sno-Cones,
22) artery-severing paper cuts, because, once again, the skin on your hands is dried out like tissue paper,
23) having to endure the awful surprise of getting cold air blasted up your pants legs from the floor vents when you start your car after it’s been sitting outside for more than twenty minutes,
24) having to see people living in the South complain online about the thirty-degree temperatures and half-inch snowfalls they have to endure when January occasionally remembers they exist and throws a tiny bit of misery their way,
25) how new snowfalls stop being aesthetic novelties right around December 27th,
26) when the heating system at school only runs on three settings: noticeably chilly, blazing hot when the heat kicks in, and the nine total minutes of comfortable transition each day that exists between those extremes,
27) everything and anything that might be in your nostrils freezing solid,
28) trying to drive safely while wearing enormous boots,
29) no number of blankets on your bed being enough able to keep your feet warm,
30) the cold and the darkness draining away all of your reason and ambition,
31) knowing that February isn’t going to be all that much better.
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