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When I was a kid snow days were a welcome reprieve in my tedious reality. I was not much of an enthusiast for school. I didn’t like the structure it imposed on my time. I was only interested in about half of what I supposedly needed to learn in order to survive in the great wide world.

I remember telling my father after my first whole day of school in the first grade that “it was okay but I didn’t think I would be going back.” I don’t remember if he laughed about that, but I am sure he did.

School is not exactly the first instance of life being scheduled for you, but it is probably the first outside interference in a person’s life that has to be adjusted to somehow. I adjusted in typical passive-aggressive style by simply retreating into an endless stream of books and scribbling furiously in the spiral notebooks that I never seemed to be without. I always looked industrious. It’s hard to take a child to task for reading and writing in most instances.

It’s funny how habits like those will stick with you. I employ this same tricks today to a lesser extent in an ever more futitle attempt to keep myself from questioning my committment to my job too closely or too often.

So, the overnight blizzard has blessed me with a snow day today. a welcome escape from my job. Teaching. Irony abounds. But it’s not like when I was ten and the only thing I was concerned with on such a morning was getting outside to sled and build snow forts. My disoragnized life glares at me from mulitple cluttered surfaces and housework silently accuses me of sloth. The only thing that calls to me from the great outdoors is a shovel and an impassable driveway.

Passive-agression loses its appeal when you are you own victim.