OPEN THREAD: How Do You Deal With A Frankenstorm?
I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but if you live on the East Coast I think you’re supposed to be panicking about A Really Serious Hurricane Sandy Storm Situation right about now. I know, I know — it’s supposed to be Halloweekend, you’ve got meetups to attend, cute grrrls to flirt with, and made-for-TV-movies to watch without worrying about losing your power or running out of drinking water or your no-batteries-eco-friendly vibrator letting you down later this evening. But hey, we can’t control Mother Nature, and while all these warnings may be (hopefully!) unnecessary, we’ve gotta hope for the best while we prepare for the worst. We’ve put together our thoughts and feelings on getting ready for Halloween 2012’s very own Frankenstorm, but feel free to let us know how you’re coping in the comments… until we all lose power and resort to sobbing quietly into our whiskey and/or chocolate milk.
How to properly prepare for a hurricane: put on pajama pants and a hoodie and refuse to change until the storm passes, light candles and sit in the dark before you even lose power, drink a lot of beer, watch a lot of apocalypse movies, force your roommates and girlfriend to pose for photos to accompany your autostraddle open thread
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Things to Do While Trapped Inside Waiting for the Hurricane
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1. Eat the leftover candy from your Halloween party
2. Drink the leftover beer from your Halloween party
3. Contemplate the bad decisions you or your friends made last night
4. Mourn for the meetup you had to cancel
5. Mourn for the haircut you have to postpone since Phresh Cutz was canceled
7. Board games. All The Board Games
8. Answer a billion texts from your friends and family out of state assuring them you’ll be fine
9. Anxiously await the official email that you don’t have work tomorrow — drink more when you don’t
10. Drink Dark and Stormies
11. Get in an epically bad fight with your ex about you being in their house followed by them texting you later to make sure you have safe place to go
12. Masturbate 8th-grade-style using old Playboys and a flashlight
13. Eat all of the ice cream in your freezer before it fully defrosts
14. Fill your bathtub with water in case the power goes out
15. Realize this is a perfect excuse to take a bath and take a bath
16. Clean out the punch bowl from your party last night and fill it with water, just in case
17. Study by candlelight
18. Get into wax play by candlelight
19. Buy enough liquor to get a small elephant drunk, then drink it in your living room at noon
20. Agonize about parking in a garage (underground) or in the street (trees + wind)
21. Download TV to watch so when the power goes out and you can’t stream anything else you are still okay
22. Have a Google hangout with everyone you wanted to see in person today but now can’t
23. Follow all the parody Hurricane Sandy twitter accounts, wonder when parody twitter accounts about natural disasters became a thing
24. Have long, adventurous, delicious sex
25. Finish a whole season of Buffy, then start another
26. Hit Whole Foods and buy nothing but canned olives
27. Buy three different kinds of peanut butter, just in case
28. Praise your sixth floor walkup apartment for the first time ever, because even if your building floods, you’re gonna be fine…unless the roof starts to leak
29. Flip flop about whether or not you should evacuate regardless of whether you’re in an evacuation area or not
30. Panic and drive home to your parents house despite them not being any better located
31. Evacuate to your girlfriend’s apartment because she lives in Mayor Bloomberg’s hood and always gets her power turned back on really fast
32. Bring the cat (he will not be happy with you)
33. Decide candles are not enough and venture out to buy a flashlight
34. Cry when you realize every store in Brooklyn sold out of flashlights yesterday
35. Wonder why they don’t make more flashlights
36. Wonder why you don’t already have a flashlight
37. Finally get around to reading that fisting article that everybody is talking about
38. Hold your pets while they shake and make several pitchers worth of coffee in case you lose power
39. Charge all your electronics frantically until you lose power
40. Lie to everyone that you’re prepared when in fact you actually are counting on using your ophthalmoscope as a flashlight and have a few bottles of Diet Coke and absolutely no bottled water
41. Refresh the weather report constantly, complain about how difficult it is to find an actual map of the storm
42. Flirt with people via email, Twitter, and Instagram
43. Make your roommates help you brainstorm things for the Autostraddle “How Do You Deal With A Frankenstorm?” post
44. Refresh Autostraddle constantly
45. Finally experience the power outage you’ve been prepping for, realize this means you’re without Autostraddle for an undefined amount of time, cry