Dear Rosa: How do I remain productive during the Polar Vortex?

Your go-to Socialist advice column

Dear Rosa: My job sent me home this week due to the Polar Vortex. It’s currently negative 34 degrees outside and I’ve been trapped in my house for days. I am so bored and chilly. I keep obsessing about how this Arctic blast is probably somehow related to impending climate catastrophe. Any tips for how to stay warm and use my time productively during the vortex? I’m technically supposed to be working from home, but instead I’m just fretting about the apocalypse…

Signed, Vexed by the Vortex

DEAREST VEXED:

1. What is this “working from home” you speak of? A home is for love, making borscht, planning the Revolution — not your b.s. job. Only scabs work remotely on snow days.

2. To avoid creating surplus value for your boss on your day off, start day-drinking in the a.m. and binge watch Project Runway: All Stars. At some point in the season — as the designers are channeling exotic zoo creatures into killer runway looks — someone from work will email you asking where such and such report is. Don’t stress out. This report is not needed today or tomorrow, and probably not ever. Respond that you are “working on it now” and “will be in touch shortly.” Then close your laptop, return to your wine, and commit to not thinking about it again until Monday.

3. Once you’ve dispensed with your idiotic bourgeois work guilt, you’ll be free to pursue other frivolous tasks. Go on Twitter or Facebook to follow the drama unfolding over whether DSA should endorse Bernie Sanders now, wait until the National Convention in August, or arrest him for various crimes against the Left. As you will see, this is a vortex so much more powerful than the one you are currently experiencing, you’ll forget all about the cold.

4. Once you begin to understand the contours of this debate — but before thinking critically about any of the issues at stake — join a caucus. This will immediately cause you to start fighting online with strangers in the other 50 caucuses about “horizontalism.” Most of these factions will have dissolved by the time of the Convention, but the animosity generated in the meantime will keep you warm.

5. What were you whining about again? Unlike you, some people actually have to work during the Polar Vortex. You have a home, it’s heated — we should all be so lucky! Go to a DTE warming station and see what real hardship is like. My dachshunds have more fortitude than you — and they have to poop outside in this weather, naked.

6. You are probably one of those skinny Americans who complains about everything and knows nothing of sacrifice. As my grandmother used to say, skinny people are weak and could never survive the Revolution. So try and make yourself fat. The extra heft will keep you warm and cause you to appear less useless. Cook yourself at least six full meals per day. Here is a recipe for a hearty borscht since you probably don’t know your way around the kitchen.

7. I also recommend you bake a cake every night to honor the life of a fallen comrade. Start with one for Lenin that says “WITBD.” Dye the icing red with your own blood, or, if you have no revolutionary spirit, use leftover beet juice from the borscht.

8. While the cake is baking, the oven will warm up your kitchen enough for you to practice “hot yoga.” You can find some neat asanas here.

9. HAHA. Rosa is just kidding! If you want to do some exercises, try being useful and shoveling your elderly neighbor’s sidewalk. Then you’ll deserve that cake you baked. Eat it alone while singing the Internationale in Russian.

10. Pour yourself a tall glass of vodka and head to the couch. Turn on The Rachel Maddow Show and watch her connect the Polar Vortex to Russian meddling with red string. (This actually happened.)

11. You will start feeling deliriously warm from the vodka and the wild conspiracy theories. Now check your thermostat. If you have a gas furnace and your heat is set above 65 degrees, you are a bad person. Michigan is going to run out of gas reserves because of wasteful fools like you. So turn down that dial. When you can see your own breath as you speak, you’ll know the temperature in your home is just right.

12. It’s now bedtime. To wind down, try some light reading about climate change and the threat it poses to human civilization. Yes, as you feared, the Polar Vortex is the result of melting ice caps in the North Pole, which can no longer hold onto cold air flows. Translation: the Midwest will be Antarctica soon if we don’t do something about it.

13. You’ll know you understand the issues when you begin to shake uncontrollably with terror. At this exact moment, jump out of bed and start frantically calling your elected representatives to denounce the Polar Vortex and to demand a Green New Deal. Who knows — maybe receiving a series of deranged voicemail messages from drunk constituents at 3 a.m. will spur the cowards into action?

Besos!

ROSA

Disclaimer: Rosa’s advice is not based on facts, science, data, logic, or experience. You should follow it anyway.