Sorting through your laundry, which is incidentally overflowing from your hamper all over your bedroom floor as though a lab-generated toxic sludge, you begin to realize you have absolutely no clean clothes. Briefly entertaining the idea of dousing one of the better (or lesser?) smelling articles with one of those nostril-scalding perfumes your grandma gifted you for Christmas, you instantly shrug it off.
Opting to wear your Monday best— the clothes you slept in— you step foot outside, knowing that you got at least one clothing article right: Your coat. Y’know, the kind that’s segmented like a rolly polly and has a hood which makes you feel like you’re cosplaying a baby kangaroo in its mama’s pouch? Yeah, that’s the one.
As soon as your also prudently worn snow boots hit the ground, you start to feel a tinge of warmth. “Hmm, that’s odd,” you think. Thinking no more, you keep advancing, ascribing the inexplicable phenomenon to Monday jitters. Beads of sweat begin to form on your face, and worse, well in your armpits.
Still thinking it odd, you continue forth. Pretty soon, you come across other people out and about. The first person you pass by is wearing booty shorts and a sports bra. The second person is wearing a tank top and thwacking the ground with flip flops, unabashedly showing off their dogs. “Woof,” you instinctively let out, now realizing what’s going on. Just because it was snowing so much that they almost cancelled school yesterday, you thought it was going to be cold again today? HA! How could you fall for the oldest trick in the book?
You’re not even a student from California, blamelessly unaware of the vagaries of Wisconsin weather. You have resided here your entire life, rolling cornfields and bring-your-tractors-to-school-day and all. You have no excuse. Your coat is now completely sodden with sweat, and as you settle in class, you make sure this won’t happen again. Looking around, everybody else somehow got the memo and appears as though the only elements they’re missing from their outfit are sunglasses and a beverage being luxuriously sipped out of a hollowed out pineapple.
Getting home, your gait matches that of the trundling, fee fi fo fum steps of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. You have become tremendously slowed down due to having to tie your swaddling coat around your waist.
As soon as you reach your room, you throw down one of the numerous plastic bins you acquired from the Hilldale Target many eons ago. Breaking it open as though cracking open an ancient text, you cast the lid aside and stuff your damned puffy coat into it. Slamming the lid back on it and then dropping down onto it with a diving elbow drop good enough to be considered for WWE, you salute it off till next year. The sweat will have somehow been done away with by next winter … right?
It is the next day, and even though your seemingly sentient heap of laundry is still occupying the vast majority of your floor, you know you are in the clear. You shan’t be fooled today, no, no! In fact, the clothes you need for today’s weather are clean in abundance.
Managing to pry the drawer loose, an overstuffed boon of short and not-so-modest clothing awaits you. Pulling out some nice denim shorts and a tank top- taking notes from yesterday’s canvasing of what others were wearing- you jump into an outfit which will redemptively speak for you: “I know it’s hot out, guys, I checked the weather app before I went outside. I’m prepared. I know what I’m doing.”
Your backpack already beginning to wear red marks onto your exposed shoulder flesh, you take off into the balmy day which is before you. As soon as you start walking outside, you take in what others are wearing. One is wearing a parka and a ski mask … The other one? It’s so cold out that Uber shut down for the day and they are now taking a reindeer sled to Science Hall.
Breaking out of the ice block that instantaneously formed around you, you take your sorry behind right back into your house to palpate in the semi-gloom of your closet for that bin from Target.
