Frozen Inspiration

According to my Weather Channel feed, it feels like -8 degrees Fahrenheit outside my Minneapolis window at the moment. That seems a bit generous to me; I would have pegged the temperature around -40 or -50. Frankly, once it gets below zero, it’s all about the same. I don’t have the sensory resolution necessary to distinguish between “cold enough to kill you” and “cold enough to kill you and preserve your corpse for posterity.” In any case, the natives seem completely fine with it. On the bus they make the occasional smiling comment—”Pretty cold, isn’t it?”—as if this is something you should joke about. It is not. My sinuses have been bleeding for three days.

On the other hand, the brutal frigidity has been pretty good for my productivity. You can get a lot of work done when the very thought of leaving the building terrifies you. It makes me wonder about those composers who hail from forbidding climes like this one; Sibelius comes immediately to mind. Did he spend more time (in terms of hours per day) with each piece than his contemporaries abroad who could go outside sometimes? It must have been a real trial to work in San Diego during the Erickson-era heyday: So much inspiring stuff going on, but there’s also, like, a beach. You wonder how they got anything done.

Seriously, does anybody know how to avoid a nosebleed in weather like this? Should I wear something over my face when I leave the house? Should I warm my nose in some kind of nose-furnace? Can I get, like, a microchip implant of some sort? Help me out.