HAY GUYZ, ITS SNOWING!!

Wut.

If you’re the sort of person who randomly shouts “It’s snowing!” to get people’s hopes up, I want you to punch yourself in the face right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Maybe do it twice, just to make sure you get all the stupid out. No, I’m kidding, stupid that severe can’t be removed by punching. But if you are the sort of person who does that, today would’ve been the one day you could’ve done it without being a complete attention whoring moron. You know, you should probably punch yourself again, just for good measure.

I woke up this morning to the sound of yelling outside my window, which is nothing new, because apparently the parking lot behind Hamilton Hall is the shizz as far as drunk shouting matches go. But this morning, instead of “I’M SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW” or “TRUMAN’S BLOG SUCKS”, I heard people just hooting and yelling for protracted periods. Pissed off that people should be drunk and yelling at 10:30 AM, I opened my blinds to see what all the fuss was about and found that, lord almighty, there was snow on the ground.

Being as half of my readers now hail from such exotic locations as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Switzerland, you’re probably looking at my picture and thinking, “Pah! Big deal! You posted a low res picture of the two inches of snow outside your dorm! I live in a freaking igloo, and that’s in the summer!” But the thing is, in Oregon it’s a big deal anytime it doesn’t rain. If the sun comes out, it’s a party. If the rain stops, it’s a party. If it rains scorpions and HIV positive blood, well, it might not be a party, but we’d still be secretly excited for a brief respite from water rain. And then, snow? Snow is the granddaddy of all great Oregon weather events, because it actually gives you cause to go outside and have some fun. You can’t go sledding in blood and scorpions, and you can’t have a blood and scorpion fight*, but snow pretty much makes everything a playground.

*This is untrue, because you totally can, and it’ll probably be the climax of the new Rambo movie, which I think is stupid, in case you’re wondering.

In elementary school I, like all other kids everywhere, was completely enamored of snow and would freak out whenever I saw it start to fall – this included when snowflakes would come down and then melt on the ground, which is the cruelest thing weather can do to an eight year old. When it would start to snow during school, all the kids in my class would instantly stop paying attention and stare out the window at it, trying to will the temperature down below freezing so we could all go and live out wild Calvin and Hobbes style sledding adventures. This was much to the chagrin of our teachers, many of whom were old enough to have been very accustomed to the snow in Missouri before getting on the wagons and coming out to the Oregon Territory. “When I was your age,” one jaded, angry witch of a substitute once told us, “I was so tired of snow by this time of year that I didn’t even care what it did.”* Screw you, lady! Just because you’re lame and boring doesn’t mean we have to be too.

*This was Mrs. Herella, who we all secretly called Herella DeVille. She wasn’t really mean, she was just… Annoying, and not a good teacher. One of my saddest memories from elementary school was when all 30 students in my 5th grade class clustered around the door to the classroom be let in at the beginning of the day, and it was Mrs. Herella who opened the door, and everybody started screaming when they saw her. That poor woman.

Snow at the University of Oregon has turned all the people who were once too cool to look like they were having a good time into 5th graders again. Most people at U of O either come from other places in the Willamette Valley, where snow is rare, or from California, where snow is just a synonym for cocaine and nothing more, so this is a pretty big moment for all of us. Already some guys have broken a window with a snowball, and a few dozen very anatomically correct snowmen are standing guard on the lawn outside my dorm.

There isn’t a moral to this blog for two reasons – 1) There isn’t a moral for snow, and 2) I’m bored and I freaking want to play in the snow. So all of you East Coast/Europe people who think snow is a boring, day-to-day occurrence, try to think of me with my friends, making an ice penis for our Oregon snow hippie. Hopefully it’ll make you smile.

Truman Capps wants the university to cancel classes tomorrow, and maybe for the rest of the term.