How did I turn out this way, you ask? I ask myself that question every time I try opening a jar of maraschino cherries or undertake even the most basic of home improvement tasks. I tried installing a curtain rod with a power drill by myself and somehow bored five holes in the drywall before I got exactly the right spot. And that’s a wall! A completely motionless target! You think I chose to be this inept? No. It was bred into me.

I come from a long line of unabashed weaklings, incubating for decades in the comfort and safety of midwestern middle-class suburbia. My father, who could have spent his time teaching me to hunt venison and identify nonpoisonous berries, spent the lion’s share of his spare energy collecting antique clocks. Hundreds of them. You don’t learn real-world skills from a guy who collects antique clocks. I mean, sure, he could barter the hell out of a cuckoo clock at the flea market, but that’s not gonna save us from roving bands of postapocalyptic motorcycle-riding cannibals. And my mother, finding everything to be a danger, left us ill-prepared for greater threats. When you grow up thinking a mouse is the most dangerous thing in the world, what happens when you encounter a guy with a baseball bat covered in barbed wire?

Case in point: Chicago, winter 1999, one of the worst winter storms to hit the city in recorded history. In the course of a day, almost three feet of snow fell on Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, and in the days after, temperatures reached lows of minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit, which the National Weather Service categorized as “extremely fucking cold.” It was one of those storms where the weatherman goes outside with a bucket of boiling water, throws it at the sky, and watches as it freezes before it hits the ground. It’s a fun little way of saying, “We’re all going to fucking freeze to death, but at least our bodies will be well preserved.”

As is often the case when a storm of this magnitude hits, power and phone lines were downed and we lost electricity. As was not often the case, we lost power for not just a few hours, but five entire days. That’s five whole days with no heat, no lights, no telephone, no hot water, no microwave, and no access to my AOL account. We lived on a dead-end street, which meant no snowplows could forge a path to set us free, although that didn’t matter much because every car on the block was almost entirely encased, and the front and back doors of our house were snowed shut. We were, quite literally, buried alive. The only way we could let out the dog to pee was by opening a window and slowly lowering her to the ground with a leash and harness.