those crazy Russian winters..

Remember the good old days, last year, when MAC overheated my apartment to the point of my donning boxers and tank tops and using a fan in mid-winter? Remember how quickly I'd shed my coat and boats for fear of sweating, and how cozy and nest-like our little apartment with its boho-sympathetic tendencies was?

We got our gas bill last week--it was ~$244.

Now... I don't consider myself to be an irrational person. But that is an absurd price. That is the price of a fancy new iPod. It's the price of a fancy new dress. It's the price of a plane ticket, all of my books for two quarters, one-quarter a month's rent.

I acknowledge that our apartment is extremely energy-inefficient. The "sun" room is lined with windows and sucks the heat out like a vacuum. My bedroom also has windows all along one side, and, in here, I almost never actually feel the heater's output. The building itself is an old Hyde Park apartment building with six apartments, two on each floor. It was probably built in 1940 or earlier, and the heating system is unlikely to have been updated recently. There are worn wooden floors in every room except the kitchen, which, while aesthetically pleasing, is not all that insulating. It may be like pouring heat into a strainer. So yes, People's Gas, I admit there is a problem with our apartment.

But I'm more than a little suspicious and angered for a number of reasons. For one thing, this bill was for the month of December, during which our apartment was only occupied for about two and a half weeks. It was completely empty by the middle of the month and I came back on the 26th. Additionally, the heat is turned off at night, and when no one is home, which is more than half of the 24-hour day. This means that the heat was actually in use for about one week of the month. Had we been here the whole month and continued turning off the heat during the night and when no one was home, we still would have gotten billed, it seems, around $500.

I understand that things cost money, even that things cost quite a bit of money (imported chocolate, for example). The difference is, I don't need imported chocolate and so I don't often buy it. U. and I do need heat. Paying my share of the bill, about $122, is almost my entire paycheck for a whole week working maximum hours (15). I work 14 hours, which is pretty decent on top of four courses and their homework. And I really don't want to see all of those hours going toward basic heat. Especially when I still need to feed myself and take care of other extraneous costs that jump out from behind the Trees of Adulthood. So far my bank account is taking heavy advantage of the up-to-$500 loan function, where you can dip into fake money as long as you pay it back in reasonable time. My parents are sending me emergency money, I owe U. for several things, and I don't get my first paycheck of the quarter until next Friday.

Despite all of this, I'm feeling zen enough. I have foregone buying books, and am using the library instead, hoping it comes through for me all quarter. I am now finally making money again and things will go back to equilibrium in a couple of weeks. But $122 is more than I am able or willing to pay each month for gas, and so we're now using it almost never, save for an hour or so in the morning and maybe for a short stint in the evening. Even so, we don't put it higher than 68.

U. and I got space heaters and we're becoming reliant on those instead. I double and triple-sock my feet, take hot baths, chain-drink hot tea. My one warm spot is in my bed, cocooned in blankets, with the space heater blowing on me. With this, and the incessant snow outside the window, and the Russian novels I'm reading for class, I get the sensation of either a Depression Era or Soviet Era hovel. I imagine myself as Kira Argounova in "We the Living", coming back to my cold little apartment out of the freezing and gusty Russian winter, taking comfort in a jacked-up social life as an escape from the bleak outside world. Well, okay, maybe not the last part.

We'll get by. We are the living, after all.