Snow Job

Oy, who asked for this?

I'm so accustomed to hearing TV weather nitwits scream about the next ice age that I tend to tune out the word "blizzard" whenever I hear it.

Well, the bastards fooled me today and actually got this one right. We're up to keesters in snow in the Big Apple here, folks, and if you're reading this in a warm, sunny place, I hate your guts.

Oh, of course I don't hate you, I'm just ribbing you a little. With all that damn sunshine you're getting you should be able to take a joke.


This being Sunday, I don't have to go anywhere, except to my boxing class, and I decided to skip that today, which is not easy when you're a gym junkie, but I've got to shovel my sidewalk yet again today.

I did it once this morning and my nice clear pathway got covered over in about an hour. Nuts...

I've been running around a bit for the last day or two.

Mary, my dad's homecare aid, called me Saturday morning to say her daughter's water broke, so she couldn't come in. She was able to find a substitute, God bless her, so I could go to my film class in peace. (And, by the way, it's a boy, 9 pounds and change. Going to be a big guy.)

We were learning how to edit video on the MacIntosh. Once you learn what all the buttons mean, it's incredibly easy.

Slash and Burn

I have dim memories of cutting and taping Super-8 film in high school film classes and there is just no comparison. If you don't like something you did on the Mac, hell, you can do it all over again. And you don't have to worry about losing anything, because if you saved it, you still got it.

I was nervous, but I volunteered to use the thing first. I kept asking questions until I got what I wanted and I turned a pretty decent bit of work, if I say so myself.

I was editing the work of a classmate who was out sick and, since I was the star of his film, I got to look at my own mug for 30 minutes straight on the monitor. I usually cringe when I see myself, but I kind of liked how I looked on Saturday.

This fellow had gone a little crazy with the zoom lens, like some old 60's movie rendition of an LSD trip. It's tough on the eyes and it distracts from the story, and I as tried to edit around these telescoping shots, I got a new respect for the film editor's job. You can only do so much with raw footage.

As I was wrapping up, another classmate pointed to the window.

"It's snowing," she said.

I went down to the subway at Union Square and waited for the R train. I was in the perfect middle spot of the platform, where at one end, a young African-American man was beating on a set of plastic paint cans with a professional drummer's speed and ferocity, while at the other end, an elderly man with an accordion was slowly cranking out a rendition of "Somewhere My Love." You've got to love this town.

I almost stayed in on Saturday night, looking for any excuse to sit at home and watch DVD's--the snow being a great excuse--but I know I'm not going to meet anybody that way.

I had signed up for a get-together being thrown by this Brooklyn residents group, so I hopped back on the R train, took the F over to Smith Street and hung out for a while in a cool saloon with a bunch of nice people.

The snow was still falling when I got home and I crashed in front of the TV to watch a movie called "Mimic" where these giant insects roam the subways munching on homeless people and anyone who gets too close to their nests. It looked like it was filmed on a soundstage in Canada.

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

I kind of like being buried like this. Even a hyperactive, non-stop city like New York has to to slow down when it gets hit with a blizzard.

People seem a little more neighborly and we could always use more of that. And the city looks nicer too, all white and glistening. A few days from now it will be sooty and disgusting, but let's not think about that just yet.

Snow was always great when I was kid. It often meant a day off from school and hours of frantic playtime. One time we were having a snowball fight with some of the kids on the block and we all took garbage lids to use as shields, like Roman soldiers.

One guy hurled a snowball at me and I picked it right off with my garbage can lid, though I felt the vibrations down to my ankles. I recall one massive snowball fight we had when one of the opposing players rushed our and camp and began destroying our stockpile of snowballs.

My brother responded by putting him in headlock and burying him neck-deep in those shattered snowballs.

"Here," my brother taunted the hapless fellow, "you like snow? Here you go!"

One year after a blizzard, a bunch of us went to the O'Neil brothers' backyard with our G.I. Joes and created this massive fortress out of a snowpile. In my memory, it was a fabulous beehive of tunnels and traps, an engineering marvel from which our soldiers (don't dare call them dolls!) could wage war on somebody.

Fighting Man From Head to Toe

Being kids, of course, we destroyed the thing at the end of the day, gleefully stomping on every inch of that fort and crushing a day's worth of work. But children have this need to break things, and we also had an excuse to dive back into the snow and rescue our G.I. Joes.

I have been threatening to move to a warmer climate pretty much from childbirth and yet I am still here in Brooklyn. I hate the bitter cold, I hate the short, dark days, and I hate bundling up in 12 layers of clothing. But I do love a good blizzard and I'd say we're in the middle of one right now.

I better get out there for a re-shovel. I've got pick up to my dad's lunch, do a ton of laundry and find a dish for my alley cat buddies, as their usual food dish is buried under a snow drift.

There's a great movie called "The Long Day Closes" that traces the life of an English family in the Fifties. It's more of a moving photo album, then a film. There's no forced plot, no cardboard villians, just stories from people's lives.

I always get teary-eyed when I see the Christmas scene. The family is home after going out for the holiday. It's night and snow is falling, and the mother's voice is heard on the soundtrack saying, "My God bless anyone who doesn't have a home to go tonight."

And I heartily agree.