Snowed In
Four walls. Flat and white. I’m getting tired of them.
It’s been a bit more than a week since the first storm. The storm cancelled a Super Bowl party I was supposed to go to, trapped my family in the house, and (thankfully) cancelled school for most of the week. Sure, I guess I’m grateful to Mother Nature for this convenient inconvenience, but why couldn’t we get some sort of weather that would let me get out of the house? I’m tired of my room and its accursed walls. The roads around here are awful, so I can leave the house only to shovel snow or go sledding. Both have gotten boring.
I suppose I never appreciated the power of boredom before this storm. But now it’s here—and boy do I appreciate it.
I look out the window right now and I see mounds of snow six to seven feet high piled up on either side of my driveway. They’re so large that children are sledding on them. Normally, such a sight would alarm me, but the past week has dulled my sense of wonder. I’m sick of snow and I’m sick of being indoors. I don’t want to say I have cabin fever, but during this Winter Break 2.0, I did many things that I normally wouldn’t see myself doing.
I became an advocate for organ donation through the Washington Regional Transplant Community. I raised awareness for Paul’s Ride for Life, a charity 35-mile bicycle ride on the W&OD Trail.
I listened to political podcasts. Something usually reserved for older generations, political podcasts are often eschewed by teenagers who don’t want to know about the goings-on of Washington. Well, as I approached a near-comatose state of boredom, I hopped on iTunes and decided to take a look at some of these podcasts. I got hooked. Initially planning to listen to a short two-minute clip, I regained consciousness hours later having jumped from interesting podcast to podcast.
I talked to my parents. This may have been the most momentous occasion of all. We weren’t at the dinner table, we weren’t at a religious service, we weren’t even doing one of my school projects—but we talked. As my father put it, it was a “Snowpocalypse miracle.” I came downstairs out of my bat cave under my own free will and had a nice, thirty-minute conversation with my parents in the sitting room.
Snowmageddon 2010 dumped ridiculous amounts of snow on the D.C. area, and may have driven me a little closer towards insanity. It has, though, shown me that I need to always keep myself engaged, or my mind will fall into chaos. So let’s see what else this “Winter of Epic Snowfall” has in store for us. Now I need to figure out how I’m going to get to my bus stop without breaking my leg…
