Brrrr....(or what my lips would do if they could move)

Dear Readers or, I should say, Reader

It's been a while since I posted anything and I'm sorry. I was lost in the wilderness of hangovers and apathy and generally wondering if the whole thing isn't just a pointless exercise in narcissism. But I'm cold and this is the only way to make sure that I still have some semblance of life in my extremities (weeell, I could go to a doctor, but that would be a level of self-harm that I'm not currently capable of and the medical system here is best left for another post).

Every Winter, no matter where you are, Facebook and the like are inundated with moanings and groanings about the cold and it irritates me as much as a bad lunch that you are forced to relive with multiple burps. If you're over the age of five, the ensuing frostiness should no longer come as a surprise. Unless you were dropped on your head as a child and have a glitchy memory. Then go ahead and reap the benefits that most of us spend a lot of our hard earned (or not) money at bars to enjoy. So. Yes. Where was I? Oh, yes, it irritates me to no end. Thank you for your bland remarks. I was in need of someone stating the obvious. Suck it up. It'll be over soon.

That is why it is with complete and utter tautology - no! that's not what I was going to write!... with complete and utter self-loathing that I even dare to write about how much this sucks. Weeell, not sucks exactly because I like the coziness it induces - the craving for hot chocolate and snuggly clothes and blankets, blankets, BLANKETS! And, it must be said, that the cold IS a unifier. Everyone feels it. Everyone deals with it. Everyone hates it - except the Canadians who are still walking around in flip flops. We may go home to ineffective heaters and five layers of clothing, but, on the street, we are one with the hobos.

However, I don't think my comrades back home have any idea of what kind of beast we're battling here. When you talk about the cold and the snow, they imagine toasty, centrally heated rooms, into which you emerge rosy cheeked and dusted with frost, rip-roaring ready for a night of passionate love-making on a bear skin rug.

Alas, Japan has not embraced the barbaric, unhygienic ways of the dairy-stenched West. We survive with kerosene heaters. People have been getting high off gas fumes for decades and so will we. Or, you can huddle under the kotatsu - a low table thingy with a heating element that you cover with a blankety thing and never emerge from again.

I had fully planned a productive evening of walking and cleaning my house. However, I made the fatal mistake of switching on my heater and getting under the kotatsu.

If you do not hear from me in four months or so, you know where to look.

A note on the photos: the table is the kotatsu (duh). Not the best photo, but I was trying to hide the rest of my ransacked apartment.

My heater isn't actually a kerosene heater, but a gas heater that's been around since World War Two and the temperature setting panel is as honest as the setting on your toaster (and, yes, for that is indeed a copy of Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World"! Thank you for wasting the time to notice. I put it there especially to show you how clever I am).