Caution: Snowmen Xing

It snowed for 24 hours straight in Burlington yesterday and I loved it. It’s not that I’m a snow connoisseur—I don’t ski or snowboard or enjoy stepping in slush puddles on the way to the bus—I just love emergencies. This isn’t the first time I’ve said it, either. I’ve admitted it for years.
Actually, I think almost everyone loves emergencies, but we don’t like to say it out loud. It seems mean-spirited to enjoy the panic of a snowstorm when you know someone is probably out there skidding into a telephone pole or worrying if their furnace will run out of fuel tonight. It’s not the pain and frustration that I like about emergencies, though. It’s the …(prepare yourself for gross, clichéd word)…freedom.
In everyday life, I’ve got about 5,000 activities going at once, and for the most part I’m just trying to do all of them well enough so that I don’t have to look at them ever again. I don’t go very far out of my way to help other people in normal life because I’ve got so much of my own jobs going on that I can’t be bothered with someone else’s. Also, on regular days, my “to do” list rules my life. If I’m not doing something productive, I start feeling guilty and force myself to do annoying and sometimes unnecessary work.
In emergencies, though, everything I do becomes more organic, and (for the most part) makes more sense. In out-of-the-ordinary days, I almost always naturally wake up early and have guilt-free time to sit in my bed staring at the wall for 20 minutes before I get up and have a bowl of cereal. (I have this sitting and staring into space problem that Allyson always makes fun of me about. I don’t notice that I do it, but apparently it happens a lot. I think it’s a writer thing.)
During emergencies, I can take the time help someone out, because the 5,000 “important” duties that I would normally have are cancelled or out of my control at the moment. From my window at Spinner I saw a woman offer to push some people out of their parking space because their Oldsmobile had gotten stuck in the snow, and the whole dilemma ended up taking about five minutes to fix (which I think is more time than the lady was bargaining for in her work clothes and ankle-deep slush) but she never let on that she was annoyed with these people for not getting their tires changed since 1981.
The best part about emergencies is that they’re really exciting, but also extremely boring at the same time. During my sophomore year of high school, someone called in a bomb threat every Wednesday morning for three months. We would all get shipped off to the Civic Center to wait for police to check the building, which meant that we had pretty much nothing to do for a few hours. The only way to know you have really, really bonded with people is to forced to be with them and have nothing do, but still have a hilarious time.
It finally stopped snowing this morning and everything seems to have gone back to normal. The only clues that yesterday had been out-of-the-ordinary were the four giant snowmen and one igloo that I saw from the bus on my way to class. It was good while it lasted. More snow this weekend?