It is a Sunday and I am stuck in my house due to inclement weather. The streets of my subdivision are pretty much solid sheets of ice after below-freezing temperatures and a heavy dose of rain and then sleet overnight. I live in Texas so this doesn’t happen often and in the annals of recent memory, this isn’t even particularly bad - there aren’t reports of widespread power outages or anything like that, and the ice hasn’t been heavy enough to bring down tree branches or power lines. Texas usually gets this kind of weather for a day or two every year - it’s what constitutes “winter” in this parts.
To be fair, I don’t really have much to complain about being stuck inside for the last 48 hours. I probably could have gotten out and about yesterday, if I’m being completely truthful, and if the weather forecast is accurate by any accounts, this mess should be mostly gone by tomorrow.
“Snow days” are interesting for me as someone who grew up in the northern Midwest where they were far more common than they are down South here where I have ended up. I have food to eat, power, heat, and running water so I can be quite cozy here inside my castle and the knowledge that most other people are in the same boat kinda assuages some of my internal guilt over “doing nothing” while I’m stuck here inside. The thing is, I do enjoy this feeling of being all cozy and warm inside while the weather turns bad outside, watching TV/movies, reading books, and farting around on the computer. It’s nice to have the excuse/rationale for just staying inside all day and “doing nothing”.
But when this happens on a weekend — which is my time — my emotions and desires go to war with one another in a back-and-forth tug of war regarding my momentary happiness. The fun of snow days is that it gets you out of doing things you normally would have to do like going in to work or having a weeknight evening suddenly free up from other obligations. I’m finding that there has always been a deep-seated and hidden expectation that I’ve subconsciously held that one is supposed to get something from a snow day and when this happens on a weekend, it just feels like something (the ability to go wherever I want) is being taken away. Of course, with remote work in the mix, a snow day no longer means getting the day off of work (unless the weather is causing havoc that makes it impossible to get online, in which case that’s not a “fun” day off because that means that there are other problems happening at home), but at least it does provide an opportunity for excuses for some longer-than-usual absences from the keyboard.
I didn’t go out yesterday because somebody (the weather service) told me that I shouldn’t, and that just made me want to go out even more. I went walkabout in my subdivision to see how bad it really was out there even though I had no need to go anywhere, just to see if I could. It’s like someone telling me that I can’t do something just makes me want to do it more. Logical me knows that it would be silly to try in the first place, because even if I did take the risk and tried to go somewhere that I wanted to go, there’s no guarantee that the place would even be open anyway if the business was responsible enough to tell their employees to stay home for their own safety. My brain is dumb like that sometimes. I get more caught up in the selfish thoughts of what I’m prevented from doing rather than enjoying the time that I’ve been given to just do things here at home.
There’s only one thing I would have done differently than what I did this weekend had things been “normal”, and it’s certainly not something that just cannot wait. But rather than simply burrowing in for 2-3 days and enjoying the coziness, my emotional state just kept flip-flopping every so often into the I can’t believe I’m stuck here! mode which makes no rational sense, and it robbed me of some of the joy that I could have had about doing things here at home.
Snow days sure hit different when one is an adult. They’re not nearly as fun as I remember them being. Bah, humbug!
