This winter, my first foray into the urban Canadian tundra, my eyeballs felt cold. Suddenly I became aware that eyeballs are tiny round balls of matter: flesh that could freeze into a sphere in your frigid eye socket. Blink and the membrane gets plastered with a thin, fresh layer of ice.

I grew up in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica actually, so this was a season of firsts. The first time you re-learn the process of getting dressed and undressed: please reserve exactly 34 minutes to sit on the floor and pull off your 15 lb snow-ready moonboots and remove clammy layer after clammy layer. Please be prepared to wear two pairs of leggings, 3.5 sweaters and one wool Hudson Bay blanket while lounging inside your own lofty (i.e. drafty) apartment. Please realize the kale smoothie revolution does not apply to you, because it is too fucking cold for smoothies. 

Some tips for survival:

Do not be alarmed as you watch snow blow horizontally at speeds that only Nanook of the North could survive, one week after the first day of spring. Adjust to the metric system; Celsius temperatures sound so much more hardcore. Learn to walk like you're an uptight 80-year old; ice will blanket entire sidewalks like the city is a giant ice luge of death and you will feel the cold in the depths of your joints and in the creaks of your prematurely aging knees. You may take refuge in Toronto's multicultural spas (thank you 24-hour mega-Korean jimjilbang) where you can do tiny shots of sweet yogurt and slough off months of dead winter skin. Be forewarned: you may mistake the scratchy sound of ice melting and falling outside your apartment window for rats scurrying up the inside of your wall. You are safe (relatively speaking). Practice the art of denial when your tanned Southern friends with their endearing accents and their overly sweetened tea gently remind you that they told you so. Secretly rejoice when your new Canadian friends and coworkers raise an angry fist to the sky and curse the weather gods. Take comfort when your 85-year-old father-in-law says this is the worst winter in almost 100 years, because if he can do it (and look stylish doing it), why can't you? 

This time around, the winter is still a novelty, something to laugh at, like watching a baby eat a lemon for the first time (YouTube it). I asked coworkers for advice on making it through and their responses uniformly positioned Tim Hortons (the Dunkin' Donuts of Canada) as the answer. Specifically, Canadians love Timbits (translation: donut holes) and a double-double (translation: coffee with two creams, two sugars). I'll take a quadruple-quadruple and the onset of spring, thanks.