I am of average height for a man. Of course, I’m a woman. I realize that still doesn’t exactly make me a giant or anything, but I have what you might call “gangle,” and when it comes to my extremities… well, they are indeed extreme. I mention it because it’s been just extraordinarily damn cold outside this past week or so, and when it gets cold outside, my body suddenly has to carefully reevaluate the allocation of certain valuable resources. Like blood. The ghettos of my body are the first to feel the strain, of course, and suddenly my poor, marginalized hands, finding themselves outcasts, become charming little five-legged icemonsters who, in their desperate struggle for survival, make no distinction between friend and foe. Frantically they roam their surroundings in search of heat, falling upon and consuming all that they discover, sucking the very lifefire from any body foolish enough to come within grasp. Since my particular body is tethered to these fiends by 2 ½ foot meat-ropes, it is particularly difficult for me to avoid them. Especially in bed. Have you ever awoken in the night, every muscle already tensed with that terrible apprehension that has managed to infiltrated your sleeping mind, the sick sense of dread that there is something unwelcome, even malicious, in the room with you? Nay, something in the BED with you!

And the hands aren’t even the worst of the bedfellows. At least they are contented to burrow under a pillow. But if my heart thought my hands were far away, imagine, if you will, how much farther the feet! How remote! How desolate! These hopeless heatsinks, each the other’s only unkind neighbor in the frozen southern wasteland. These sluggish lumps emit no signs of life, indeed palling to a gruesome purple. Feebly they attempt to nestle against each other’s calves and are cruelly rebuffed again and again. Because, ew.

“Pajamas?” you might be asking. HA! Pajamas are no match for these wretched varmints! Even through flannel, even long johns, they draw the heat from flesh and bone, never growing warmer themselves, but only spreading their endless, hopeless chill… No, pajamas can’t help me. The sad fact is that I cannot generate body heat. I have no choice but to steal it.