White as Snow?

Well, I've once again gone far too long without posting, and once again I have no better excuses to offer than multiple jobs, grad school, and a dependence on sleep that hasn't gone away despite my best efforts. Now, however, I'm in what I like to call "the calm after the storm." It's like the calm before the storm, only without the sense of impending doom, which ultimately undermines any comfort the calm provides. No, even though the calm before the storm is the one everyone talks about, the one after is clearly the better of the two.

This semester ended with a storm that was both figurative and literal, which was an interesting change. In California, I hadn't had a storm since I was in middle school. My reactions to the two different storms were vastly different. The literal storm had me giggling like a school girl after the teen heartthrob of the week caught her eye and gave her a wink. It was bad. I also immediately (and by immediately, I of course mean the next time I went outside, which was several hours later due to the figurative storm) made snowballs and hurled them at trees. I missed. It was also bad. But as much as the literal storm made me love life, the figurative storm made me hate it even more. There's something about locking yourself in a lab for hours and hours working on a "group" project that brings out the worst in me. I turn the rest of my group into scapegoats (surely I could never be the problem, right?), so it makes me a little anti-social. This leads to passive aggressive behavior, often in the form of deteriorating hygiene (it's not my fault I didn't shower, guys, I didn't have time because I was doing all this work). It spirals downhill until I start resembling something I swore to myself a hundred times I would never be. No offense, by the way, to any of you who choose to partake in that, but balance it with a normal life as well.

But that's really neither here nor there. What did I learn in all this? If you're guessing something about the value of working on a team, silver linings on every cloud, or the ridiculousness of passive aggressive behavior, then you have clearly never read an entry on this blog before. No, the lesson I learned was just how deceiving the phrase "white as snow" really is.

Now, the first night, the snow really was white. It was beautiful. A blanket of pure white draped over the city, as we all scurried inside to be warm next to our fireplaces (and by fireplaces, I mean heaters for everyone except the super rich). The next morning, however, it was a horse (or, I suppose, a blanket) of a different color. In the streets, there was chameleon snow that decided to turn itself the same gray color as the asphalt. On the sidewalks, it stayed relatively white, but with speckles of whatever people had dropped throughout. And then there was the blue snow. I honestly have no idea what in the world turned that snow blue, but there it was.

A couple of things came to mind when I looked out at this now fairly disgusting blanket: Snow (Hey Oh) by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Now, the Chili Peppers I'll forgive, because most of the time it seems like they're getting the lyrics by opening accounts on various websites and writing down the test words they enter to prove they're human; I don't expect them to make sense. With Snow White, on the other hand, I am beginning to wonder if it was intentional. Is there a dark side to Snow White that nobody knew about? Was she really the evil one, and we should have been rooting for the queen the whole time?

That's certainly something to think about, which is why I'm going to stop. It's the calm after the storm, after all, I don't want to spend it using my brain. That would be a waste.