How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Snowpocalypse

Years from now, us Bostonians will be sitting our children down and telling them of the great blizzard of 2015. We’ll sing songs about how our public transit system, the MBTA, was finally defeated by piles of snow, and spin yarns of the daring multitudes who trekked for hours just to sit in an office before having to slush on home. But most of all, we’ll chuckle and recount how the city simply went crazy.

If you’re not in Boston/New Hoth now, let me regale you with the very stories I’ll narrate in the future, granted the term snowpocalypse doesn’t become all too literal.

According to coverage all over the net, most descriptively in a piece by Mashable, stir-crazy Bostonians upgraded shenanigans from building tunnels and igloos to literally hurling themselves off their homes and into waiting mountain ranges of snow. The mayor even had to make a public plea to the good folks of Boston to stop such dangerous, but admittedly awesome, activities. Instagram and other social media platforms exploded recently with photos, the best of which, again, appear in the above Mashable story, and videos of folks making the most of a really rough situation.

The Internet has responded to the madness in Boston with funny content ranging from Buzzfeed photo lists to an article in Wired explaining the dangers of jumping off things into snow with scientific numbers and whatnot. MIT in particular seems to have had a lot of fun with the apocalyptic snowfall – who doesn’t want to wake up one morning and have a new mountain range outside your dorm?

Truth be told, the snowpocalypse has been pretty brutal for Boston. The MBTA, an already fatigued public transit system, has been waging a losing war against the weather, the street level trains and trolleys pretty much unable to plow through the ziggurats of snow that may continue to grow. A recent article in The Boston Globe covering their crusade to reclaim fallen train lines in this wintery war said that a lot of effort is being put in, and commuters should look forward to some of the routes recovered, but this hinges a bit on there not being yet another heap of snow unceremoniously dumped from the frigid heavens.

If there’s anything that 96.3 inches of snow has taught Boston, and other parts of New England similarly buried, it’s that there’s no point giving in to apocalypse depression. Sure, transit is running slower, our feet will be damp until the Spring, some roofs have collapsed, and according to a work colleague there was that train that caught on fire – now that’s too much snow – but there’s also enough snow to do some truly crazy stuff.

A wintery apocalypse can be an amazingly good time with the right perception. Anyone who’s admitted defeat in their professional or educational endeavors and faced the snow with a parka and sled has the right idea. I’m not saying the snow should instill total anarchy, but it’s a reminder that sometimes, the Earth just doesn’t want us to go to work or sit in a classroom. Nature wouldn’t pummel certain parts of the planet with snow if human creatures didn’t require a little extreme insanity every so often; evolution requires that we launch ourselves from high places only to plow ourselves face first into snow, probably without anything more than gym shorts. I mean no disrespect to those hurt by the weather – these storms have done a number on many lives, even claiming some unfortunately – but shoveling and trudging through ice are sure fire ways into the abyss, especially seeing as the end of that particular road is probably a place humans don’t need to be every single day. Culture must change to accommodate such a snowpocalypse, because if grizzled people hollering on the streets have taught me anything, it’s that the end is nigh, and it’s gonna be the very whitest Christmas (or February, either way).

If we do make it to when there’s a whole new generation that makes the millennial look like a cappuccino slurping curmudgeon, hopefully we’ll be telling a fun story, and not one riddled with resentment toward a truly beautiful, albeit dangerous when tampered with, planetary phenomenon.

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