December, full of finals and holidays, is also the beginning of winter. This should not be news to most of you – but perhaps you, like me, aren’t really aware of winter until the spring semester starts in January. In December, winter’s ice and snow seem phantasmagoric – natural decoration provided for our holiday enjoyment. Winter is quaint in December, enjoyable even. But with the arrival of the new year, our foolish pretensions are stripped away and we’re left with the awareness that we aren’t cold-weather creatures and winter’s end is almost three months away. January is, both literally and psychologically, the most brutal of times.

Inauguration festivities notwithstanding, Washington doesn’t seem to handle January well. Our Chicagoan president made fun of his daughters’ school cancellation a few days ago (after snow turned to ice) and the Post leaped to the city’s defense, suggesting that even a little ice warrants extreme caution. Both sides have a legitimate argument… but the truth is that, compared to more northern cities, Washington in January is a ghost town. Bostonians and New Yorkers gamely brave the cold to go out on New Year’s – which, as you may know, was brutal this year – and Washingtonians hide indoors. They don’t come out for the month of January; even us cold-weather transients play along.

I’ll readily admit to not liking the cold. One of my top priorities in picking a college was climate: the school had to be in a city no colder than Boston and ideally much warmer. I’m perfectly capable of dealing with winter; my high school had multiple buildings, so at every class change I had to go outdoors and doing so never really bothered me. The difference between Boston in the winter and Washington in the winter – aside from a few degrees – is residents’ attitude towards the weather. Back home I’m surrounded by people who are used to cold and ice and snow, so what’s a few more inches, they’ll say? Here, by contrast, a little ice shuts the city down.

I don’t want to come down too hard on Washington … I just want to illuminate an attitudinal difference between D.C. and colder cities. Few people genuinely enjoy cold weather – I only know one – and, as I said, humans just aren’t built for the cold. Short of moving to someplace more equatorial, though, little can be done about the cold but deal with it. A lot of things are like that; as I get older it seems there are more and more. I’ve realized, belatedly, that I shouldn’t have majored in Finance and probably shouldn’t even be in MSB, but what can I do at this point? I could spend my last few months miserable, hating my Derivatives and Global Financial Markets classes, or I could just suck it up and power through. If I were spending all my time thinking about how much I hated finance or reflecting on the mistake I made, I might not notice that both of those classes are actually kind of interesting.

Life can be shitty sometimes – maybe even a lot of the time, if you’re an unlucky soul – but we only get one chance at it, and every second spent feeling lousy about something out of your control is a second you will not, under any circumstances, get back. So we can cower when winter deals us icy sidewalks and bitter nights, or power outages and frigid, glassy mornings. Or we can set forth, head bent against the fierce winds clawing at us, mustering all of our strength to claw back.