what's french for "i'm freezing my ass off?"

seriously.

how does one say “i’m freezing my ass off” in french? i need to know this because this is the phrase i’m going to use for the next nine days.

it’s so cold that it took two hours for the lava lamp in the apartment to even think about starting to move again.

thank goodness i packed that superthin wool undershirt. and more than anything else, thank goodness i also packed those thermal pants.

perhaps what i’m really annoyed about is how soft i’ve evidently become.

if i recall correctly, i was born in michigan. i grew up in michigan. i walked through the snow to school, i waited for buses in freezing cold, and even went out to play in snow until we had thrown several snowmen’s worth at each other and were frostbitten from one extremity to the other.

even in college, i remember spending my four years there wearing nothing but a single pair of jeans. thermal pants? we didn’t have any sissy-ass thermal pants! hell, i didn’t even wear socks those days, so it was just me, a pair of jeans, and some converse classic chucks. not to mention that unfortunate fashion trend of cuffing your pants, thus ensuring that i always had about an inch of exposed ankle flesh open to the wind, rain, snow, and slush that i encountered every day in my travails.

alas, now a few minutes walking around in freezing temperatures sends me whimpering like a baby back into the bathroom, cowering next to the towel warmer rack, which remains the only reliable source of heat in all of paris.

that’s what california does. it makes you soft. that’s why new yorkers scoff at us, and parisians sneer. because of our squishy center.

Posted at March 3, 2005 3:17 PM