After just two days of snow, what was open green space on Friday is now white fields of snowmen. Not to my surprise, Brandeis students from places that do not get snow were more than happy to see it, perhaps for the first time. They went outside and made snow angels and snowmen. They were very happy to experience their first snow, however as a native Massachusetts resident—or Masshole, as we call ourselves— I am more than acquainted with the snow. While everyone was praying for a snow day on Monday, I was, as usual, right with my perfect assumptions and knew classes would not be cancelled. 

The snow has been nothing but an enemy to me since I was little, and snow days were never fun. My father believes in hard labor and “earning that hot chocolate.” Seem messed up? Probably. Anyways, what that means is that my household does not own a snow blower, or leaf blower for that matter. As every season comes, so does a different form of cardio. Yeah, those were people that loved me that made me do their work for them. That means that instead of sleeping in on a snow day to Christmas music and hot drinks at 10 a.m. I was waking up at 6:30 a.m. to shovel our house out of the snow, so my parents could get to work on time. 

Shoveling has always been an activity I have despised, and, honestly, it’s not the exercise that I mind. It’s when winter drops a four-foot deep pile of snow on you in the middle of the night, and your school assumes it’ll blow over. So instead of having the day off and just having to shovel later in the day, you need to wake up at 4:30 a.m., shovel for two hours and then STILL go to school. Now perhaps I have anger issues, totally plausible, but what I am trying to say here is that the joy people experience with snow is ridiculous. Snow may be white and fluffy, but its ultimate goal is to ruin the lives of those it falls on. 

Now I will say this about snow. It can come in clutch and provide some good moments. My high school was, like Brandeis, built on a hill and walking from building to building allowed me to see all the freshman sliding down the hill on their butts because they slipped. It also provided me with some amazing moments with my roommate from Hawaii. On Monday night, he stood at the window, in his sopping wet clothes from the snowball fight he dragged me and his friends into and said, “I don’t know how people can hate the snow?” I immediately corrected him and told him it’s actually very easy to hate snow. But he had a counter argument I was not ready for. He looked out the window and said, “Brandeis has one the ugliest freaking campuses in America, yet the snow somehow makes it all beautiful.” I have to say he is right about that. Then on Tuesday morning, I set an alarm for 6 a.m., and when I saw that we had no morning classes, I woke him up and screamed the news into his dazed face. On instinct he responded with the best phrase ever: “Oh my god, Ron Liebodaddy came in clutch for us.” He then went right back to bed but ‘Ron Liebodaddy’ is a phrase that will live on.

Now if you are looking at the photo and wondering who that ugly little kid on the left is, that’s my younger brother when he was 10 and that cool dude on the right is me at age 12. One winter, we got so much snow our banks were measured at 14 feet high. Shoveling that amount of freaking snow sucked. So I hope from that visual, all of you people here at Brandeis are ready for what is to come in February and will finally be able to understand why every New Englander on campus has seasonal depression when winter comes around.  

Editor’s note: This is the third part of the series “Why am I Here?”