The other day, I talked to my landlady. The heater in our bedroom had been moody for the past couple of weeks, sometimes turning on, sometimes staying cold. No fun in this winter (we are in our third month of snow and ice). We held off with the call to the landlady until we really couldn’t fix it ourselves anymore, being all nice and trying to live up to “being the best tenants she’d ever had,” as she’d once told us.

When I finally called her to tell her about the heater, however, all she said was that this was going to be on our expense. I responded that I knew it was in fact her job as a landlady to fix the heating on her expense. She became all snappy, we hung up, and I turned to my husband.

“I can’t believe she just said that,” I said to him. “We try everything to make as little trouble as possible, even though this place needs fixing in so many places, and all she does is tell us we have to pay for it ourselves.”

I got all worked up about her not acknowledging our niceness, about her turning what had been her “best tenants ever“ into just another bunch of stupid idiots in only one second.

Then I took a deep breath. And I remembered a story my hubs had told me a couple of days earlier. He had talked to our landlady, and she had been all shaken up because one of her son’s friends had been found dead on the street, frozen to death. Her younger son apparently had lived with the guy, an alcohol addict, and his sister for a while. They had tried to help the brother, had offered him free lodging and assistance in becoming dry, but he’d rejected all of it, until one day he didn’t come back home anymore. He had lived on the street when this hard, hard winter hit. He was found only two streets away.

After another deep breath, I did the only thing I could think of: I called my landlady again, and apologized. We spoke about the tragic death, she began to cry, told me she had helped the sister choose a suit for her brother to wear in the coffin, and that she had given her money to transfer him back home to Poland. We talked about how close real poverty is to us, although we mostly choose to ignore it.

It was cleansing, like a deep breath. When we hung up, we both were happier than before.

I spent several years of my childhood in Green River, Wyoming, in the cold desert at least three hours any way from anything pretty. The temperatures dropped to negative 40 degrees in the winter-time. Snow fell infrequently but stayed on the ground, and the blustery wind created blizzards and ice frozen in mid-air. My sister and I looked like the kid from A Christmas Story every time we left the house, bundled up tightly. The wood stove in our basement was a Godsend. We had three months of summer, skipped fall and spring, and endured nine months of winter.

I’ve been in the Houston area for about ten years now. So help me, I love the crazy hot summers and don’t mind that “winter” is very short. I am incredibly cold-natured, so this is a good spot for me.

That is, until I moved into my current house. Our 1920s boarding house turned duplex is perhaps the most poorly insulated dwelling on the planet. The double-paned windows might as well be non-existent because the glass acts as some sort of odd conductor of cold. We live on the first floor, where the pier-and-beam foundation lets in drafts I’ve not felt anywhere else.

To top it off, we have no central heat. We have one window unit in the living room that allegedly has a heating function. Otherwise, it’s space heaters, which are not meant to heat entire rooms. Don’t worry, we have two fireplaces—that are both boarded up and non-functional.

Last night when we got home, our bedroom was 41 degrees. Inside the house. It was 35 degrees outside. This is the second winter in a row that it’s snowed in Houston, a city that snows almost never. I’m pretty sure global warming has conspired against us. It doesn’t really matter, though, because for about three months it will be cold in here, regardless of the temperature outside.

So here’s how we survive:

·       One hour prior to going to bed, we turn the electric blanket to high, the ceiling fan on low (circulating backwards), and the space heater to high.
·       Upon sleep, the electric blanket goes to 7, fleece pajamas and possibly socks are employed, and arms remain under the covers.
·       The morning is the worst, because the rest of the house is what my husband calls a barren tundra. Because I work at home until at least noon, I do my work under the electric blanket. He, on the other hand, has to get up. First, he turns on the one window unit with heat. Then he closes the bathroom door and turns on the space heater in there. Then he goes to the couch, turns on another electric blanket and space heater, and wears a snuggie to eat breakfast. Yes, a snuggie. If you’re judging us for owning and routinely using a snuggie, we’re too cold to care.
·       At night when I work late at my desk in the dining room, I have one heater pointed directly at my feet and another at my back. I also drink hot chocolate and periodically do short bursts of exercises to keep warm.

You would think Wyoming winters would have prepared me for this, but not so. We are experiencing very cold temperatures now, even in February in Houston. My latest solution for fighting the cold? Wearing fingerless gloves while typing. True story.

“You don’t get to dictate how someone else loves you, kiddo.” This unwelcome news came from an unlikely source: my favorite professor, a known curmudgeon who made copy-editors-in-training including me shrivel into little twitching piles of nerves. I had been expecting a withering invective, and his philosophical turn was frankly unnerving. “Either accept it or don’t, but you don’t get to choose what it looks like.”

This particular lesson had come from a nasty breakup on the staff of the university’s newspaper that forced a change in the schedule of copy editors. As one of the copy chiefs, I had disagreed with any changes until one night, when all work on the desk skidded, crumbled and flumped to a standstill after the him in the story looked at the her with an emotion she interpreted as hatred. Both spent the rest of the evening sobbing in their respective bathrooms. Work did not go well. I had been summoned to his office to shed some light on the debacle.

That little bit of wisdom he gave me about love has stuck with me, and I usually have to haul it out, dust it off and tack it up on my mental wall during and after all relationships. And, of course, never more than during the month of February.

Being in the service industry, there’s no avoiding Valentine’s Day, and it lasts the entire month. That’s the only interesting thing besides massive quantities of snow and cold weather happening in February in Colorado. So after a freezing, miserable January, we’re all happy to move on to February, even with the excessive amounts of hearts and love in the air.

My entire night staff is single. I had recently, unexpectedly and unwillingly been returned to the singles pool, so the mood was grim as we discussed the holiday month. A black cloud descended onto the waitress station. The stories of breakups, cheating, fights, missed communication and bungled planning piled up. Finally, a dishwasher unloading clean glasses broke the thick crust of our collective bad mood.

“That’s such bullshit,” he said, standing up and drying his hands on his apron. “I’m going to get those little cartoon cardboard cards with the stupid sayings and the ‘To’ and ‘From’ on them and matching envelopes, and I’m going to fill them with those little word hearts and Red Hots, so you all better be ready to receive ‘em. I’m thinking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
“It’s only as bad as you’re going to make it,” he said, heading off to the kitchen.

Stunned that we failed to suck him into our black hole of Valentine’s Day-infused misery, we actually shut up for a few minutes, and the cloud dissipated somewhat. Stories of grade-school Valentine’s Days, when things were fun and silly, when the number of candies in your envelope told how much you were liked, and everyone got a Valentine came out. Things came back into perspective.

I got to thinking about how many people have done things for me in this past year to show how they love me in their own (sometimes peculiar) ways, sans candy, cards and hot pink envelopes. People in my life are actually pretty demonstrative. It hit me that I’m the bad Valentine in most cases, with bad behavior including unreturned phone calls, forgotten thank-you notes, missed occasions and lack of even simple words of gratitude.

I don’t really deserve flowers.

My old professor was right: I don’t have any say so in how the people in my life love me, or how they express it, or even if it will be expressed, but I do have every choice in how I express my love for them. It won’t be in cartoon form, and probably not flowers, hearts or candies either, but in my own way, I’ll be spreading around some sunshine and warmth and yes, fine, even some love this month. I’ll be working on my Valentine skills.

It’s a cold month, our February, and to do anything less would be, quite frankly, bullshit.

I’m a big fan of sleep.  I like to get at least eight hours of sleep a night, especially during the long, cold winter months. Lately, sleep has not come easy for me.

I’ve just begun writing my critical thesis, one of the requirements of my Master of Fine Arts degree. I began to lose sleep over it before the semester even started, because the idea of having to come up with enough intelligent ideas to fill 35 pages scared the hell out of me.  I’d lie in bed writing my thesis statement over and over again.  It never seemed quite right.
When the semester finally did start, I stopped trying to get to bed before midnight. Sure, I was tired from chasing elementary school kids around all day, but working an eight hour day left only the night time hours to work on my dreaded thesis.  So I plugged away, researching my topic, reading every book I could get my hands on and trying to construct an outline for the first time in my life.

For the first time in my life, I overwhelmed myself with schoolwork.  It’s not that I never tried hard in school, I did, I just never let myself worry too much about it.  There were numerous sleepless nights during my undergraduate career at the University of Kansas, but they were always followed by a few days of doing nothing but sleep and watching TV.  This time I not only lacked free time to recover from sleepless nights, I had driven myself crazy with anxiety.  Sleep was not an option.

Luckily, I have an amazing support team.  My MFA classmates have continuously reached out and reminded me why I am putting myself through such hell.  My family helps out with anything they can in order to ease some of my worries, such as watching my dog for me while I spend the day at the library.

On the day of my first deadline, I woke up at 4:00 a.m.   I had a major panic attack that everything I had worked on for the first month of my semester was completely wrong.  I considered calling in sick to work and spending the day redoing everything.  Somehow, I managed to convince myself to click send and away went my first packet of work.

I wish I could say that I slept eight hours that night, but I didn’t.  I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I finally realized that night, that I could do it.  The next morning, I woke up feeling refreshed, even if I had only gotten five hours of sleep.

For now, I’m okay with the fact that I’m going to have to give up sleep for a while.  It’ll all be worth it in June, when I have a finished thesis and another semester of graduate school completed. And I know just how I will celebrate.