EXTRA-CURRICULARS: Snow Days are Worse Than Puberty

When you were thirteen (or 8, or a 23 year old super-duper-senior) there was nothing better than a snow day. It was a get-out-of-jail (or worse, tests) free card. It was an opportunity to watch all the daytime television your mother didn't bother to ban because when would you be home to see that? If you were really lucky, and your school was administered by pussies, the kind of weak-spined folks who would cry "snow!" the night before, so they wouldn't have to wake up early and look out the window, you might even get to play light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board at Katie's house because her mom was SO cool and totally let her have impromptu sleepovers.

That's when you were thirteen.

When you're no longer a tax write-off, all a snow day means is feet soaked through with salty, brown sidewalk slush, a commute that takes twice as long, is crowded, and which smells more like wet dogs than usual, a crappy vending-machine lunch, since you don't feel like walking down the street to the café.

Sure, you can take a "grown-up" snow-day. Call in and let your boss know that you definitely would come in, but the governor came on the news and urged folks not to drive if they could help it, and that the plow blocked in your driveway, and that by the time you get in you'll have to leave anyway. And s/he'll pleasantly respond that of course you can take a snow day – it will count as one of your "personal" allotments, of course, and it goes without saying that you'll come in early and stay late the rest of the week, and possibly Saturday morning, too, to make sure all your projects get done on schedule. You'll be able to hear his/her smile over the phone, though, which will make you really ENJOY the time off.

The fact that a few years can turn something beautiful and precious into something hideous, something to be shunned, something that you avert your eyes from so that it won't sear itself into your brain any more permanently than it already has is truly tragic. Why did the gods need to take snow days – wasn't Michael Jackson's face enough?

-Posted by Jilly