A snow day for the majority of students means sleeping until the early afternoon, and then shuffling to the dining hall in pajamas and slippers. For a slightly smaller number of young scholars, it means not having to board that bus or start up that car, enjoying the company of one's roommates, and perhaps cooking an egg or two on that shabby apartment stove. Either way, it's a cozy scene.
For me, this particular snow day meant waking up mid-morning, abusing my alarm clock, bundling up like the little brother from A Christmas Story (I can't put my arms down!), and walking 20 minutes to Stillings Dining Commons, where I spent a few hours serving pungent, poorly prepared, dried out edibles to the lazy masses, as they filtered in still clad in fleeces, hoodies, and sweatpants.
Now, I'm by no means Saint fucking Peter, and I will admit, I got rather jealous, but the overall morning wasn't bad. The rest of the drastically older and clearly much more miserable Dining Hall staff took it very easy on me, and I barely had to lift a finger throughout the entirety of my stay. When the clock struck 3, I left, still in relatively high spirits. My day didn't seem to be going so badly.
Turns out it was going fucking god-awful.
I returned home to find none other than Kinger spread out on the loveseat, decked out in the royal bathrobe (which is, no lie, royal blue), with his eyes glued to the television set. In the small amount of time I had spent earning a few measly grocery dollars, his highness had taken it upon himself to get several additional hours of sleep. Not only this, but after he saw it fit to arise, he cultured himself with three hours of Telemundo network programming over a hearty, home-cooked breakfast. Ever-resourceful, he had managed to use this experience to completely master the art of Spanish dialogue. By the time I was able to sit down, he had already moved on to the Spongebog Squarepants movie, which I'm sure provided bountiful amounts of pop-culture analysis for our dear Timothy.
So, let's tally this up. In approximately 5 hours, the Kinger properly re-energized, got a taste of foreign culture, mastered a foreign language, and tickled his intellect and funny bone. He was also 3/4 naked and comfortable as fuck-all. In the same 5 hours, I unplugged an alarm clock, took a lukewarm shower, risked frostbite, comingled with unhappy middle-aged women, spilled cheese and broccoli scramble on myself, and watched people happier than me eat. I did all this in a rough, scratchy UNH Dining t-shirt and three-day-old jeans. Using careful analytic and evaluational methods, I have concluded that our separate day scores look as such:
Kinger: 5,000,000
Me: 5
Needless to say, I was upset. However, I thought, if I knew anything about Kinger, there would be a lesson for me betwixt all of this. I wracked my brain for hours, pacing my room, staring blankly at my computer screen, vainly attempting to sleep. What could it all mean?
Then it hit me.
The lesson wasn't something I had to think about. It was all very simple. I'm a piece of shit for getting up and going to my job today. Snow days are Dionysian by design, and I was seriously twisting nature's arm. We were not put on this Earth to work and toil for minimum wage. We were put on this Earth to laugh and wonder, wrap ourselves in the finest and fuzziest of vestments, and soak up everything we can about the world around us, much like the animated sponge that danced across the Kinger's eyesight all afternoon. Sloth is not a sin, but a right of passage. The powers that be saw it fit to give us the day off, and who am I to deny the forces that rule over the very planet I owe my existence to? I will never show such hubris against Mother Nature again. Thank you Kinger, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
this is a picture of what I think God looks like now.
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