My head hurts. My eyes still ache from...wherever I was.

Henry's in the hospital. They said that they might have to amputate his arm. When they brought him into surgery, he begged me not to leave him alone, but I couldn't stay. I couldn't.

Holly's dead.

I don't understand. I don't understand what happened at all.

She told me everything she knew about it. About the Cold Boy. She said that we were going to take the fight to it. "How?" I asked.

"It has minions," she said. "They call themselves the Children of the Cold. They can't be hurt by bullets, but I know what probably will hurt them." She brought out bottles, half-filled with alcohol, the tops stuffed with rags. "Molotov cocktails," she said. "It's time to fight ice with fire."

And so we made a plan. And we waited. We waited for the enemy to appear. "I see one," Henry finally said. He had the binoculars, he was our lookout. They were coming for us, but we could see them when they did.

I don't even know his last name. They asked me at the hospital, but I didn't know. His arm looked pale and dead. "Advanced stages of frostbite," they said.

"I see one," Henry said. "It's time," Holly said. We packed our Molotov cocktails and the lighters Holly had handed out (mine was bright green) and stepped outside into the cold. Henry pointed and we saw him: a small child on the edge of the quad, kneeling down, his eyes staring at us. They were black.

"Now what?" I asked.

"We follow him," Holly said. "They'll lead us to more, perhaps a lair of some sort. And then we burn it down. We see how they like fire."

We followed the black-eyed child. I'm sure he knew we were following him. He didn't care. I swear I heard him laughing sometimes, laughing at our naivete. At our stupidity.

He was leading us to a trap. Of course he was. Perhaps Holly and Henry were so consumed with destroying the enemy that they didn't see it. Perhaps they saw it and decided to go anyway. (I don't know why they were so gung-ho about it, but Holly said that it was personal for Henry, that some member of his family had been taken by the Cold Boy. One of the black-eyed children might have been his.)

So we followed the child and he led us to a building on the edge of campus. We followed him like fools. Holly went first and then Henry and I was last, holding my Molotov cocktail out like it would protect me. Inside was a corridor and then a set of double doors. Holly and Henry pushed them open and walked through and I turned around to check behind me. Then I walked through the double doors.

And I found myself someplace cold and white. All around me was a blizzard and snow began to cover my feet and legs. I tried walking forward, but just moving was hard. I finally realized that I still had my Molotov cocktail in my hand, so I lit it and watched it burst into flames, then dropped it on the ground. It created a small fire that warmed me for a moment before the flames completely died. I tried looking around, but all I could see was whiteness. A blank white nothingness.

I closed my eyes and felt my heat seeping away from me. I opened them and found myself back in the corridor. Holly and Henry were gone. I ran forward looking for them.

I found them a few rooms later. Henry said that he had been waiting for them. I didn't have to ask who. The room was covered in a thin layer of frost. Holly was lying face down on the floor. I turned her over to see how she was, then backed away and vomited. Her eyes had been frozen solid, then shattered. Her mouth was frozen in a scream.

I called 911. Henry was crying in pain, his right arm motionless and pale. I couldn't look at Holly's body, so I looked around the room. There was a whiteboard on the wall. Someone had written on it. Someone had written:

JE T'ATTENDS DANS
LE COEUR D'HIVER
LA COUR D'HIVER

I erased it before the paramedics got there.

Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse, l'on y danse
Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse tous en rond

Les beaux messieurs font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse, l'on y danse
Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse tous en rond

Les belles dames font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça.

Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse, l'on y danse
Sur le pont d'Avignon
L'on y danse tous en rond

Les militaires font comme ça
Et puis encore comme ça

Je vous avais prévenu, John.

Je t'attends,

Claire de la Lune

What the hell, I'm in. I'll fight.

We need a cool name though. Like Coldfighters or Icebreakers. Wait, no, that sounds like a breath-freshening gum, never mind.

Out of Jail

I'm going to ignore the last post. I'm not going to wonder how Claire knew my password or hacked into my account. (Though I can probably stop keeping my name hidden - everyone who reads this now knows it's "John," but I guess that's fairly nondescript.)

Professor Holly Sachs drove me back to the college campus, then parked next to a darkened building. She got out and started walking towards the building. I figured I had to follow her. The man in the truck bed also got out - he looked like he was in his late thirties with dark blonde hair, his chin covered in stubble. He barely looked at me as he followed the Professor.

Professor Sachs led me into a darkened auditorium, then flicked on the lights, illuminating everything. It looked sort of like the auditorium in my dreams, which kind of freaked me out.

"It's okay," Professor Sachs said, seeing the fear on my face. "They're not going to chase you here. They like to hunt their game slowly."

"Game?" I said. "Is that what I am?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm not going to sugarcoat anything. You are food for them. That's all. Anything they promised you, anything they said, it's a lie."

I looked at her and then at the blonde man. He was standing with folded arms behind her. "So what's going on? I mean, you obviously knew more than you were telling from before."

Professor Sachs sighed. "Yes," she said. "After Max...after Professor Gibbs was kicked out, some men came to the college. Men from the government. But they were from some agency I had never heard of, something that started with an S. They confiscated all of Max's research, even the notebook of drawings that had gotten him into trouble." She sat down and right then, I noticed she looked really tired. "Since there was obviously something about his research that was right, I decided to find him and talk to him. But when I found him...there were these kids following him. I thought they were hoodlums at first, like they were mugging him. But then I saw their eyes."

"They were black," I said. "They had black eyes?"

"Yes," she said. "Completely. And Max, well, he had obviously been prepared for them, because he pulled out a gun and shot a few of them. I drove away so quickly. But I called 911. Even if I had been hallucinating, I called 911. No bodies were found."

"Bullets don't kill them," I said.

"No," she said. "After that, well, I went through a lot of research. I found a lot of things that didn't make sense. I met Henry over there and he told me about some things. About what had happened to him and what he had seen. And then we began to get visits from them."

"The kids?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "They would show up outside class. We could always spot them, even when they didn't have black eyes. They never mingled with the other students. They wore jackets and hoods, even in warm weather. And they were cold to the touch." She paused and then went on. "One day, they attacked me. Luckily, Henry was there. They tried to bring me back to wherever they came from, but he knocked them back. That's when we decided to bring the fight to them."

I glanced at Henry. He looked like he could smash some heads. "And the fire hose?" I said, turning back to Professor Sachs.

"Got that at an auction," she said. "Bullets don't kill them. Don't know what does, actually. But they are cold and the thing they serve makes things freeze. So we shoot them with water and it slows them down at least. The hose gives the added element in that it'll knock them down." She paused again and looked at me. "So now we end of the Q&A part and come to the real question: what are you going to do now?"

"I..." I looked down at my hands. "I don't know."

"You could run," Professor Sachs said. "That doesn't always work, but it may. Or you could stay and help us." She held out her hand, much like Claire did before. "You could fight."

"You don't have to choose right away," she said, pulling her hand back. "But the longer you wait, the more likely it is you'll be taken by them. I don't know how many there are -- I've only seen about five at a time. But I know they don't stop. Not until you dead or one of them."

So there were my only choices: be like them or die, run or fight.

There is still time, John. There is still time for you to join us. You don't have to be alone.

There were ages when this world was covered by him. Ages and eras and epochs where his ice covered the world. He let the world go, though, because he wanted people. People to live and walk and breath and laugh. He didn't want to be alone, just like us.


The world will be his again, John. He can cover it and make it like it once was. He can make it like paradise for us.


I know what they call him. They call him the Cold Boy. As if he was a child. As if what he looked like mattered at all. He is not a boy. He never has been a boy. He is something beyond what anyone can imagine.


To others he is the Cold Boy. To us, he is the Absolute.


Come and join us, John.


I'll be waiting,


Claire de la Lune

It started to snow. Clumps of white snow covered the ground.

I was going for a walk, looking for a place to eat that was still open. I thought that I was going to have to finally resort to the old stereotype and eat Chinese food on Christmas Day.

And then it began to snow.

I looked behind me. No snow. I looked far ahead of me. The ground was devoid of anything resembling snow. It hadn't even been that cold. But now, right where I was standing, it was freezing. It was snowing.

I ran. And when I stopped, I looked behind me and the snow was melting. But then it began to snow where I was standing. So I ran again. And whenever I stopped, it started to snow.

An old joke that my grandfather had told rose unbidden in my mind: I've never seen snow, but I've seen snue. What's snue? I don't know, what's new with you?

What's new with me? Well, apparently, I'm being followed around by the embodiment of entropy and he looks like a little boy and he likes to sing songs and he's fucking around with by making it snow wherever I am. That's what's new.

I came to my apartment building. And outside, standing on the steps, was Claire.

"He's giving you a chance," she said. "He's showing you the signs."

"I don't want to be cold," I said, trying not to shiver.

"You already are," she said. "You are cold and alone. But you don't have to be alone." She held out her hand. "You can be like me. Be like us."

"Us?" I looked around and saw that the street was no longer empty of people. There were kids standing on the corner, standing in a circle. There were five of them, the youngest maybe eight, the oldest fourteen. They looked at me with black eyes.

"We are the Children of the Cold," Claire said. "With his touch, we were born again. We're never alone now. And we never will be. Join us."

It was so tempting. She was beautiful standing there in the snow. I wanted to take her hand. But there was something nagging at me. Nagging at my mind. I said, "Or what?"

Claire pulled back her hand. "He will take you no matter what. I was merely offering the easier solution. The one where you won't have to be alone. If you refuse this, he will take you and you will be alone forever. Alone and cold."

"Why?" I asked.

"It is what he is," Claire said. "No more questions. We need your answer. Will you come with us?"

I hesitated. If what she said was true, this was the better option. But I hated being forced to do anything. Dangle a carrot in front of me and I will turn the other way. Say "Do this or die" and I will refuse.

"No," I said.

Claire frowned. "I'm sorry you said that. I thought we would be together." She nodded her head and the black-eyed children started walking over. Some of them smiled and I saw that their teeth were white and sharp.

Then there was a loud screech and the bright light of headlights blinded me for a second before a voice yelled out my name. "Get it!" I looked behind me and there was a truck, a white truck with what looked like a fire hose in the back. A man was holding onto the fire hose. "Get it!" the voice shouted again.

The black-eyed children ran towards me. The man in the truck bed turned on the fire hose and it knocked them over like bowling pins. I ran towards the truck, but then felt someone grabbing my arm and turned. It was Claire. Her touch was colder than anything I've ever felt before. But then a hand grabbed by shirt collar and pulled me into the truck and Claire had to let go.

I turned to look at the driver and got another shock. It was Professor Holly Sachs. "Sorry I lied to you, kid," she said. "I had to make sure you weren't working with them."

"Them," I said and turned back. As we sped away, I could see Claire looking at me, her eyes as black as coal.

Santa's Beard

I went to my work's Christmas luncheon yesterday. I would have skipped it but if we go, we get the rest of the day off with pay. And I need money. I need money because I don't know what I'm going to do.

I haven't seen Claire since Thursday. I'm not sleeping that well. It gets so cold in my apartment and then I start thinking that it's because of, you know, him. The name that commenter said. The Cold Boy.

God, that sounds like a dumb name. I mean, when I think of some embodiment of cold and entropy, I think of, you know, ice giants and stuff from Norse mythology. Not a little boy. But maybe that's the point. Maybe it's a boy so we won't notice him, so we won't even look at him as he's looking at us.

At the Christmas luncheon, the heaters stopped working. It got real cold for everybody. It ended early because of that. My boss wished us all a Merry Christmas. "And a Happy Hanukkah," she said in my direction.

I don't have a menorah. I think even if I did, if I tried to lit the candles, they would swiftly go out.

It's too cold for candles.

She found me on my way home. I turned a corner and there she was. Claire. It was cold out, but she wasn't wearing a jacket. She smiled at me.

"You've been avoiding me," she said. "One day is fine. Two days is a coincidence. Three days is a pattern."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I've just had to work a lot and-"

"You know, don't you?" she asked. "You saw me. When I was shot. That's why you've been avoiding me. You saw me get shot." I couldn't say anything, so I just nodded nervously. "Do you want to see it?" she asked and unbuttoned the bottom of her shirt, displaying the skin of her stomach. There was a ragged hole near her belly button.

"Why..." I began, but she continued: "Why aren't I dead?" She lowered her shirt back. "He blessed me. He took away my pain and hurt. Now I don't feel any pain. He can take away your pain, too."

I backed away. "What are you?" I said.

"What I was is no more," Claire said walking closer. "Through him, I was reborn. He gave me a new life, a new name. Did you hear him sing? He sang to me. 'Oh Claire,' he sang. 'Oh Claire de la Lune!'" She stretched out her hand, offering it to me. "He can give you a new life as well. You won't have to be alone anymore."

I turned and ran.

Here Comes Science

I faked being sick at work and left early. Then I drove over to the local college where Prof. Maxwell Gibbs used to work. After talking to the receptionist in the main building (I told her I was a reporter for the college newspaper doing a report on previous faculty members), I was forwarded to the receptionist in the Science Building. They pointed me to a completely different building (apparently, it was the Science/Liberal Arts building or something). And there I finally found someone who knew Maxwell Gibbs.

Their name was Professor Holly Sachs, a former colleague of Professor Gibbs. I said I was doing an article on Gibbs and mentioned that he recently died (without mentioning how).

"That makes me sad," she said, "but it's not surprising. Last I had heard, he was living in some cheap motel after losing his home."

I asked her why he had left the college. "He didn't leave," she said. "I probably shouldn't tell you this and I hope you won't use my name, but he was forced out. Towards the end of his tenure here, his ideas became sort of...radical."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "he started talking about reversible entropy." My blank face apparently gave her reason to tell me what that meant. "Entropy is the breakdown of a system from order to chaos. From signal to noise." She sighed. "It's hard to explain. Think of an ice cube. In the heat, an ice cub melts. It goes from ordered to chaotic. This is entropy. But you can't reverse entropy. You can't go from chaotic to orderly. You can't unmelt an ice cube."

"Can't you just freeze the water again?" I asked.

"That's not reversing entropy," she said. "That's using entropy in a different system. An ice cube surrounded by heat will increase in entropy, while the surroundings will decrease in entropy - it will become colder around the ice as it melts. In a freezer, however, the warmth is replaced by coldness, so the entropy of an ice cube will remain the same. The entropy of a cup of water, however, will increase, since the water is a different temperature than the surroundings. Once the water and the surroundings are the same temperature - that's when the entropy stops." She shook her head. "But Gibbs wasn't talking about refreezing ice cubes. He was talking about unmelting them. Reversing entropy in a system that was already chaotic." She looked depressed.

"So they kicked him out for that?" I asked.

"No," she said. "No, they kicked him out for something else. That was just the tip of the iceberg, if you'll pardon the pun. His ideas after that became...well, outlandish. He said that there was an anthropomorphic personification of entropy, that he had seen it." She sighed again. "Finally, the last straw came when a student of his found one of his notebooks. It was filled with drawing after drawing of little boys. Nothing indecent, but the college didn't want to take any chances. They kicked him out and that was that."

I thanked her for her candid answers. "Not a problem," she said. "I always felt sorry for what happened to him. I mean, it was obvious that he had mental problems, but he never went to anyone for help and he didn't have anyone to help him. He just all alone."

I Can't Hide From My Mind

I'm avoiding Claire. I didn't go to Starbucks for lunch today. I stayed in the lunch room at my work. Didn't leave the office at all until the end of work. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm just being paranoid.

I called the police and asked about the homeless man. I asked if they caught him yet. They said I shouldn't be worried and that they had found him. Specifically, the found him in an alleyway, dead of hypothermia. I asked how that was possible - it couldn't have been that cold, even at night. The policeman on the found sounded like he didn't care.

Finally, I asked who the homeless man was. What his name was. The policeman on the other end (who sounded, quite frankly, bored) told me the man did have a college ID on him: his name was Professor Maxwell Gibbs. I Googled the name. He apparently used to teach a class on "Entropy and the Arrow of Time" at the local college. But he wasn't listed as a faculty member after 2008.

Perhaps it's time for a field trip.

Thermostat

Met Claire for lunch again today. But I was...curious. Weirded out about the homeless guy yesterday. And curious about why he did it. About why he kept pouring liquid on the ground.

So I got a bottle of water from Starbucks. And I poured some on the ground outside. Then I went inside and waited for Claire.

We talked. We talked about what happened yesterday. She said all she remembered was the gunshot, but she didn't feel anything. She just felt dizzy and fainted. Like in a movie. When she came to, I was standing over her, alone. I tried to see if she remembered anything else, but she didn't want to talk about it anymore.

My lunch time came to an end and I said goodbye. She kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were still cold.

As I walked outside into the sunny afternoon, I nearly slipped and fell. I looked down and saw that there was a patch of ice in the exact spot I spilled the water.

I don't know what happened. I don't. I can't.

We went to the movie. We saw Hugo. We looked silly in our 3D glasses. We laughed and went outside. It was dark.

There was a shot. It was so loud, it was deafening. Claire stopped and fell. You know how in movies the big dramatic moments come in slow motion? This wasn't in slow motion. In fact, it felt as if things sped up. If felt as if the world was moving so much faster.

The homeless guy. The homeless guy stepped out of the shadows. He had a revolver in his hand. He was pointing it at me. "If you knew what was after you," he said, "you'd consider this a blessing."

He pointed the gun at me. He pulled the trigger. I could see him. I wanted to close my eyes, but it was like they were frozen open, staring at him. The harmless homeless man. The man who killed Claire.

He pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun didn't go off again. It looked blue under the fluorescent lights.

And then there was a voice calling out. "Alouette, gentille Alouette." The voice was soft like a whisper and the homeless man looked unnerved. "Alouette, je te plumerai. Je te plumerai la tête. Je te plumerai la tête." The homeless man dropped the revolver to the ground and ran. He turned a corner into an alley and I heard a scream and then the voice. "Et la tête. Et la tête."

I looked down at Claire's body when suddenly she gasped and sat up. She hugged me and said he must have missed. We called the police and I reported the homeless man, but I didn't tell them about the voice. I just couldn't.

Claire was so scared, I escorted her all the way home. At her door, she kissed me.

Her kiss was cold.

I'm Having a Heart Attack

I called her today. I asked her to see a movie tomorrow. She said yes.

I'm trying very hard not to panic.

Everything Right Is Wrong Again

I had lunch with Claire again today. It was wonderful.

But then something else happened. After lunch, as I started walking back to work, I heard a voice. "Careful, kid." I turned around and saw that homeless guy from the bus stop. He was holding a cup of coffee and looking straight at me. "You stay away from that one," he said. "She's been with the cold, boy."

I turned around and ignored him. As I walked away, I looked back and saw him deliberately pouring his coffee on the ground.

She's An Angel

Sometimes idealism wins out over cynicism.

She came back. Today, Claire came back to Starbucks and sat down at my table and we talked again. I don't exactly remember what we talked about - I'm pretty sure we came around to the topic of Firefly which led to The Avengers which led to which was better Marvel or DC which led to...you know what, I'm not even going to say it all here. It was too awesome.

Needless to say, she is the perfect woman for me. And yet I couldn't bring myself to ask for her number. It's a crippling shyness I've been afflicted with since childhood. I talked to her about my comics collection, yet couldn't ask her out on a real date.

But sometimes idealism wins out over cynicism. Sometimes good things happen to good people, instead of just bad things.

As I got up to go back to work, she slipped me a piece of paper with her number.

I was smiling for the rest of the day.

I Found a New Friend

So I met a girl today. I know: shocker. What with my sunny disposition, I thought I would never meet anybody. And yet, I met a girl. She was pretty and nice, too!

So I was sitting at Starbucks reading during my lunch break and I hear someone say, "Excuse me." I look up from my book and there she is: a girl, early twenties, pale skin and jet black hair, and she's smiling. She's smiling at me. "Do you mind if I sit here?" she asks. "All the other tables are full." I can barely mumble "sure," but she sits down nonetheless.

Now, if this was the extent of the conversation, I would have been as happy as a clam. But no: as I went back to reading my book (The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson), she pulls out her book which just so happens to be written by the same author (Warbreaker). This segues into her asking me about my book and me recommending other books by Sanderson (she hadn't read the Mistborn trilogy yet) and then other fantasy books (she's a fan of Discworld!) and then we were deep in conversation about fantasy in television and film (she believes the Game of Thrones show is making a resurgence in fantasy television, while I'm still convinced only big budget movies like the Lord of the Rings can do them well) when I realized that my lunch break is almost over.

Finally, she holds out her hand and says, "I'm Claire, by the way." I shake her hand (and man, it must have been cold outside, because her hand was freezing) and tell her my name; then I rush back to work. And I realize that I never got her number.

Which probably means I will never ever see her again.

Great.

Au Contraire

I had a dream about French class today. Which is weird. I took four years of French and all I remember is how to say hello ("Bonjour"), where is the library ("Où est la bibliothèque"), and go to Hell ("Va a l'enfer!") (I remember that last one because I looked it up in frustration one day).

In the dream I had, though, I was in one of the big auditorium classrooms at college - you know, those huge ones that are in a large semi-circle with hundreds of seats. Everyone was sitting down looking at the teacher (my old French teacher) as she wrote something on the board. I couldn't read it, but everyone was looking at it intently. Finally, she stopped writing and turned around and said, "Le chat est sur la table." The entire class repeated her except for me. "Le chien est très proche." Again, the entire class repeated her. "L'enfant chante." The classed repeated her and then she stepped off the podium and walked to the door on her right. She smiled and opened the door and there was this blinding white light and she said, "La cour d'hiver!"

I thought the class would repeat her again, but they all started screaming, a weird low-pitched scream all at the same time. Then I realized it was my alarm clock and I woke up.

Hopeless Bleak Despair

You know what's really depressing? Riding the bus. You know what's more depressing than that? Riding the bus at night.

At the bus stop, a homeless guy looked me and started muttering, then got out two beers and proceeded to open them and spill them on the ground. He didn't even drink any. He just spilled them. And then left.

I try not to look at people on the bus, but it was hard since I had to stand up most of the way on the trip back. Once a seat became available, I sat down, then looked up to see the man who had left me the seat (and was about to leave) look at me. He was Hispanic and wore what looked like a stetson. And he only had one eye - the other was completely empty. He smiled and then the bus stopped and he got off.

The other weird thing was that when I got off the bus, there were a group of kids - none of them older than thirteen, I think - who were just huddling around the bus stop. They weren't waiting for the bus, because none of them got on when it stopped. But one of them looked at me and smiled. It was creepy.

Minimum Wage

Why do I work at my job? It's boring, it's tedious, it doesn't have any benefits, it doesn't pay a lot of money, and my boss sucks beyond the telling of it. So why do I stay? Why not quit and try to find a new job?

Well, aside from the fact that finding a new job in the current economy would be incredibly difficult and I am nothing if not lazy, there's the fact that I am lazy. I don't like going out and looking for new jobs; I don't like going on interviews and dressing in ties and being "presentable." I like watching television and reading books and going on the internet. I am a professional crastinator.

But I have to do it sometime, don't I? I have to get off my lazy ass and find someplace else. I can't keep working where I am. I'm alone in my little cubicle, a nondescript company calendar on the wall, and I stare at my computer for eight hours. When I get away with it, I surf the web, hurriedly closing my browsers whenever someone walks past (like they don't also surf - I've caught plenty of them checking out Amazon.com and other shopping sites). I get an hour for lunch, where I sit outside and read my book and eat a sandwich and soda alone. Why alone? How else am I going to read? I can't read if someone is jabbering away across the table from me, talking about their boring day and how they're going to get super drunk on the weekend and so on.

So instead I sit alone and eat and read and then I go back to my desk and work (I'll spare you the boring details on what I do and just reiterate that it's boring) and then go home.

And then the sun goes down and the night passes and the sun rises and I start all over again.

Hey Now, Everybody

In counterpoint to the previous post, tonight's Community was fucking hilarious.

Also: I am in love with Alison Brie.

Don't Let's Start (3)

My boss had everyone decorate the office today. There's so much red and white, it looks like someone just vomited Christmas everywhere. Then my boss asked if I was going to bring a Menorah.

I am Jewish. I do celebrate Hanukkah. Or Chanukah. Or however you want to spell it. However, this just means going to my parents' house and exchanging gifts for one day (eight days? ha!). My parents have a Menorah that they dig out every year and have to clean last year's candle wax out from, but I do not own a Menorah.

And if I did, I would not bring it to work. For the simple reason that having one lone Menorah surrounded by a plethora of Christmas decorations would look incredibly stupid.

God, I hate this time of year. Not just Christmas (although it's mostly that), but also the fact that it gets so cold and yet never snows (stupid Southern California).

As the saying goes: bah humbug.

Don't Let's Start (2)

Are you enjoying those Christmas carols stuck in your head? No? Well, too bad, because every single Starbucks will have the same five songs playing over and over until December 26 or until you shoot yourself, whichever one comes first.

Don't Let's Start (1)

I hate this time of year. Every store I enter has Christmas music playing. One more cover version of "Jingle Bells" and I'm going to strangle somebody.

Even worse is the weather. It's always so fucking cold and my apartment doesn't have heating. That's what I get for getting a cheap off-campus apartment.

Three more weeks of classes and then winter break. Where I'll be practically the only person left on campus. Joy.