Snow Day

It's been a month, and I keep meaning to finish writing posts once I start them, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or at least unbought stuffed dogs. I also intend to continue in the Dramatis Personae series; I'm already giving them nicknames, so it's rather fun to think of the people in my life as characters in a play (no, I am not going to quote that Shakespearean cliché, apropos though it may be).

I’m going to be taking two classes at City College this coming term, and as a non-matriculating, non-degree student, I have last dibs at registration. That was supposed to happen today. Then nineteen inches of snow fell in Central Park.


The city isn’t crippled the way it was by the post-Christmas blizzard, but that’s because handling snow means things like suspending bus service so the plows can run. It’s frustrating, on a personal level, because classes are still starting tomorrow, and even though my first choice of a French section meets in the afternoon, I have no idea whether a I’ll have a spot in it by then or if I’ll have a spot in it at all.


When my friends and relatives in New York told me that they had snow days, I used to laugh and say I hated them, that I always got more snow and that I was always expected to trudge through it. But now that I’m back, I see how ill-equipped this major Northeastern city is for weather that is not—despite its volume—atypical of the region. And that’s frustrating not because it screws with my plans, but because it really illuminates the extent to which America’s unwillingness to invest in infrastructure is failing us all.