Into the Polar Vortex

So I arrived between ice blasts. I’m now 4000 miles from Birmingham with no Green Card (it’s on it’s way), no job, no driving license (and no car, so it hardly matters), and no home until next Friday. I’m not quite as ill-prepared as Christopher McCandless  but the Polar Vortex that has been engulfing the States this year has been a learning curve for the ten days I’ve been here.

IT’S SO COLD THAT…

• You can throw a pot of boiling water into the air outside and create instant snow.
• Many people have been hurt doing this – they didn’t check which direction the wind was blowing.
• Whenever I stepped outside the first week, I’d say ‘Look! Fresh snow!’ with a sense of joy and wonder. Now, I say ‘Look… fresh snow’ with a growing sense of resentment at the inevitable daily car-scraping.
• You can’t do that trick where you pour warm water over the car windscreen here – it just freezes. Engine on and scraper-brush out. Here is where you start paying. In sweat.
• I now understand why there are so many massive gas-guzzling 4x4s over here – the weather is VERY cold every year, the terrain is harsh, and the people are determined to carry on as normal. You will not find any ‘leaves on the train line’ type excuses over here.
• I will never consider leather a legitimate upholstery choice for my car again.
• I have learned to click my heels like Dorothy Gale before stepping into any car – and yes, I do find myself thinking: ‘there’s no place like home…’
• Conversations and general breathing in our car results in so much vapour that I think I’m in Cold War Vienna.
• When taken out on a date by my husband, he wrapped me up so I looked like Randy from A Christmas Story. It wasn’t even Halloween.
• It is considered the height of bad manners here in Michigan to enter a house with out removing your shoes.
• The forced air system at our friend’s house where we are currently staying, dries out all the moisture from the air, which means I’ve had a 2-week nose bleed. Coupled with the flu, I look like Andrew WK (remember him children?). I bled into my cup of tea. It was gross.
• I coughed up blood last week. Blood and mucus.
• I’ve been told that to avoid winter nose-bleeds, everyone around here sleeps with vapourisers by their beds. Duly noted.

Yeah, 2001 was a good look for me.

• There is only so much chicken soup that one girl can take.
• I have eaten all my Tastes-Of-Home tuck supplies. Yes, that includes a huuuuge bar of Cadbury’s wholenut.
• I don’t go out. I just wait at home like a house-cat, awaiting my owner’s return. The term house-wife has taken on a new harder edge for me.
• I have started to read a lot more Sylvia Plath.

Stay tuned for further details of my unravelling…

Black Friday – A Most Unfortunate Import

There hasn’t been a good rant on this site for a while now, but yesterday something caught my eye that just made me soooo mad I had to vent (and it was writing about  this or bleaching the shower grouting).

Whilst trying to read the news online, one of those moveable pop-ups kept pestering me around the touch screen. ‘SOMEHING’ it flashed, ‘UNBELIEVABLE. IS HAPPENING. TOMORROW. TOMORROW. TOMORROW.’ Something annoying was happening right now though, and as the advertisers obviously had a huge deal with the online edition of this newspaper, it wasn’t about to subside anytime soon. ‘BLACK FRIDAY. BLACK FRIDAY. THIS FRIDAY. AT …’ (insert name of gigantic American owned superstore here. Other superstores are inevitably available).

Calm before the storm: Thanksgiving promotes a sense of peace and humanity.

  ‘Crap,’ I groaned. Black Friday has made it over here. For those of you unfamiliar with this ‘tradition’, let me enlighten you. The day after Thanksgiving in America (which always falls on the last Thursday in November) has been christened BLACK FRIDAY. Taking advantage of the good mood caused by the nationwide turkey roast and effects of umami the previous day, shops open up from midnight onward promising huge discounts on stock. Consumers turn up in droves, frequently in their PJs to dash around the stores and fight over this and that essential (ie: not really) item. It’s like the first day of the January sales on speed. Needless to say, the spirit of Thanksgiving is thrown out of the window so that shoppers can get ever closer to human sacrifice on the altar of mindless consumerism.

Maybe you think that last remark was a tad over the top. Sadly not. The first time I was in the US for Thanksgiving, I had a lovely time going to see the Detroit Lions lose (yep, they were giving away home tickets that season), meeting my in-laws for the first time, cheering my boyfriend on at the Turkey Trot 5K (from the warmth of his apartment) and generally learning what a delightful seasonal event this is. The day afterwards, I elected to stay home and steadily some alarming news reports came in. A security guard with a leg broken in a department store stampede, children sent to the Emergency Room, and most tragic of all, a pregnant woman crushed causing a miscarriage and an employee stamped on and killed at a Black Friday event in a Walmart sore.

Black Friday, the reality: in 2008 I heard news reports of fights, shootings, miscarriages and death by stampede.

This alone should raise alarms about the necessity of Black Friday crossing the pond, but also there is no logic behind this very American day in our admittedly crappy consumer culture. Black Friday heralds the beginning of the Christmas season in America, trees can now be put up, lights can be strung across the neighbourhoods, department store Santas can start freaking out little kids. But not over here. We don’t have Thanksgiving. Mostly because we have the good old Sunday Roast/ Friday Night Dinner every week. Black Friday in the UK is using multiculturalism in the most cynical way possible. We have never had this so-called tradition is the UK; there is no ethnic, cultural or religious demand for it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it features in an upcoming episode of Mr Selfridge. I bet the discounts won’t even be any good (are they ever?).  The best thing to do is boycott it and send the multinational conglomerates a clear message before they start making it an essential British seasonal ‘tradition’.

In which we have a power cut and I feel sad…

Last night we had a temporary blackout. Just our block.

There is work going on down the road and the workmen must have accidentally cut the electric line. The workmen told us the power would be back on in 20 minutes. The husband typically got a bit panicky whereas I was content to sit in a candlelit flat. He told me tales of the great Northeast Blackout of ’03; how everyone calmly directed the traffic home and of the impromptu party he threw to get rid of all the food quickly defrosting in his freezer.

Then, on the 20 minute dot, the power came back on. The lights flickered, the phone chimed, the boiler roared, the printed whirred, the garden fountain restarted and every single alarm in the building went off (except ours but that’s another story). The constant hum of modern life resumed as gradually the alarms abated, all except one.

There was still one alarm screaming. At first it seemed as if it was coming from the closet in our hallway but it must have been in the closet in the flat directly above ours. Because of said other story, my husband knew how to disable the alarm. So he went upstairs and knocked politely on their door. No answer.

We tried to get to sleep but it was difficult. We put a fan on full power to drown out the alarm which just made the overall noise level higher. It went on all night. By noon today I was getting concerned. We tried the door again. No answer. No one from the flats adjacent seemed to have done anything (they allegedly haven’t had the same problems with noise and the constant smell of weed from our downstairs neighbours either). But surely they weren’t just ignoring it?

I rang the building maintenance company. ‘Sorry’, they said. ‘We don’t have the details for who owns that flat.’ That didn’t strike true. Even after I had a name to give them. They said the alarm was not their juristiction.

I rang the police. What if someone was in the flat and no one was bothering to check on them? They seemed shocked that the alarm had not worn out yet and said it didn’t seem worrying enough. I was passed around and finally to told to contact Environmental Health. At which point the alarm miraculously was silenced.

Still, in that moment I felt incredibly sad. That neighbours don’t check on each other anymore, that the police don’t check on people anymore, that everyone thinks problems are something for somebody else to deal with. We hardly ever talk to other people in the building. Sometimes, I’ve heard people run from the hallway to the front door so they don’t have to cross paths with anyone else. Sometimes our neighbours will return our ‘hellos’ and other times these same people walk on past us with a steely glint.

It just makes me sad, that’s all.