Author: Graeme McMillan

As I type this, I have just realized that the tingling I’ve had in my fingers since this morning, when I ventured out into a blizzard to get weekend snacks — don’t ask, it wasn’t my idea — is, in fact, more than likely frostbite.

It’s an odd realization, not least of all because there’s a significant portion of my brain that’s arguing against the idea for all manner of reasons: I wasn’t outside for that long and It wasn’t really that cold, surely and As soon as I got home, even though I’d lost the feeling in my fingers, I ran them under hot water, so why shouldn’t they be okay, or even But my right hand is fine, why is my left hand still feeling a little numb and tingly, that’s ridiculous that it’s only one hand?

The real reason I think part of my brain refuses to accept it is far less logical than even those (admittedly, very illogical) thoughts: simply, part of my brain refuses to believe that frostbite is real, in some very basic way. It’s like scurvy, something else that I know objectively is real, but somehow still feel as if it’s an entirely fictional thing, made up by people who wanted to make both history and pirates seem more interesting by implication.

As a result, me having frostbite just feels… almost impossible? Or, at least, severely unlikely; it’s as if I’d have caught the Black Plague or some science-fiction ailment that the real world has yet to encounter. Never mind the tingling in the fingers, or the idea that I should probably put my hand in warm water for 15 minutes every now and then to try and raise the temperature periodically for the next day or so. Simply the very idea that I could have frostbite at all feels so ridiculous as to be unworthy of further consideration.

If and when I lose my fingers to this, I’ll keep you posted on how extensive my disbelief continues to be.

I was thinking, recently, about how voracious my sketchbook-keeping was when I was younger. There were multiple reasons why that would have been the case — the primary being that I was in art school and, you know, sketchbooks are kind of important for that whole kind of thing — but nonetheless, I would eagerly, happily, endlessly work in my sketchbooks, keeping multiple at any one time and having different purposes for each of them: one was a mark-making sketchbook, one was a diary of sorts (one that turned into a diary comic, once the influence of Eddie Campbell had settled in fully), and so on. This was my primary way of passing the time, for a number of years: just… recording the world in some inexplicable, unconscious manner.

(It helped that, very early in my art school career, I came across books in the library that explored in detail the sketchbooks of Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt, who in a very real way were as influential to me because of their sketchbook approach than for the “finished art” they produced that is more familiar and celebrated.)

When I was having this train of thought, I marveled at my productivity of the era with no small amount of jealousy: where did this energy come from, I asked myself, and where did it go? Is it really just that I’m three decades older? And then I realized: all of this was in the pre-Internet era, a thought that made me impossibly glad that I’d gone to school when I had. I know myself too well to pretend that I wouldn’t have found excuses to spend far too much time fucking around online if I’d had the chance back in the day. If I’d had the internet available to me when I was a student — with all its rabbit holes and dark alleys and all of its everything right there at the touch of a button — I can’t imagine I would have gotten anything of any note done at all.

It’s a strange thought to think of so much of my life being, essentially, “pre-internet,” given how ubiquitous it is today, but… half of my life was spent that way, and it might have been so much better because of that. What a weird, sobering thought to start the year I turn 50 with.

Like, I suspect, many people of my generation, I’ve had many email addresses in my time; I’ve gone from Hotmail to Yahoo to Gmail, with stops at other destinations in between for any number of reasons. (Not least of which being different jobs asking me to use their domain-centric addresses; I’m pretty sure all but my current one is defunct by now, which is something that I think about from time to time: addresses that just cease to exist, routes to communicate that are just destroyed entirely.)

I was thinking about these past email addresses the other day, and specifically the fact that I purposefully didn’t use my actual name in any of the addresses for a number of years; I used nicknames, or arcane alternate identifiers that seemed witty in the short term. “LegionOfGrim” went one, which sounds all so goth when looking back but was, originally, intended as a reference to the Legion of Super-Heroes and the fact that I had the nickname “Grim,” because of a friend’s girlfriend and her inability to pronounce my name any other way. “FanboyRampage” went another, named after my blog of the period.

Is this an artifact of a bygone age, when we were all exploring the internet for the first time and trying to figure out what the rules were? It feels like that, but maybe I’m misremembering, or being too kind to myself to spare the blushes of a pretentious former art student who knew no better. Was there really an era when we didn’t want to put our true selves out there so nakedly, in case we revealed too much by accident?

Almost all of those early email accounts are, I suspect, all lost to the ages now; I haven’t checked them in years (decades!) and I’m not sure I could even access them if I wanted to. I like the idea that some still exist, though; time capsules of the me that I was at that point, and all the friends and relationships I had at the time.

Every year, it surprises me how quickly the holidays end. It’s an American thing, really; the idea that you do New Year’s Day and then, bam, you’re back to work immediately afterwards. I grew up in a country where we had the good manners and laziness to agree that you need at least a day after that to get used to the idea of getting back to normal, and preferably even more time if the New Year falls anywhere close to a weekend. “The holidays” when I was a wee kid were a two week period surrounding Christmas and New Year, and that’s just stuck in my brain as the accepted period ever since. Of course it’s two weeks: one for each of the holidays. Obviously.

It was, I think, my… first US holiday season that I realized things worked differently here. Either the first or second year after I got married, I remember we spent Christmas with her family and New Year back at home. I was back in the office on January 2, and I thought it was an unusual thing, something I commented on to other people in the office: can you believe that we have to work on the second day of the year I asked, and every single person said, “Yes, I can, that’s what we do here, what is wrong with you?” or some variation.

It was maybe the year after that when I had to work the day after Christmas and that just felt wrong on a molecular level. That’s still a holiday! It’s Boxing Day! It’s a thing, I believed (and still believe). Again, the rest of the United States didn’t share my outrage.

Maybe this is best; maybe it’s good that we move on so quickly, and don’t dwell on the fact that we’re still in the official 12 Days of Christmas. (They last until January 4, because they start on Christmas Eve, in case you didn’t know.) It’s a new year, after all, and a new beginning for those who like to think that way. Let the holidays fade into the background quickly while we all turn our attentions to what’s next. Well, except for those of us who’re grumbling about the fact that we’ve not even taken the tree down yet and what the fuck.