UPDATE: SNOWMAGEDDON!

By Audra Foster

I have a few theories about this snow, because there’s no way it’s natural. There’s a higher power at work here. There has to be. This is Pennsylvania, people, not Michigan. Not Massachusetts or Maine or Minnesota or any other state beginning with the letter ‘M’ where it typically snows a lot during the winter months. Pennsylvania begins with a ‘P,’ for Please Stop With the Fucking Snow Already. We are too close to the Mason-Dixon line for this kind of weather to be acceptable, which also seems to be why no one knows how to deal with it. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe none of these theories are probable. But how sure can you be?

THEORY #1: God’s Will

I found this little passage lying around in a cryptic old tome called “The Bible:”

“In the beginning, God created Gettysburg College. On the first day, God made the campus, the fields and lakes and grass and trees, and God saw that they were good. On the second day, God made the buildings, Servo and Breidenbaugh and Schmucker and Glatfelter, and He saw that they were good as well. On this day He also talked several alumni into paying for several more buildings because He ran out of money to build them Himself. On the third day, God hired people to work on the campus, to teach and maintain and facilitate to the best of their abilities. And God saw that this was very good. On the fourth day, God invited students to come and live at Gettysburg College, but they didn’t want to come. So, on the fifth day, God made the fraternities, and gave them lots of booze, so that the students would come to Gettysburg College. The students came to Gettysburg College, and they went to the fraternities, and they were happy, and God was happy, and everything was good. But on the sixth day, seeing the mess the students left behind, and having been up all night because of the drunk students, God saw that it was bad. He decided he’d have to get rid of Gettysburg College entirely.

Here’s where the story gets a little trickier. He tried to drown Gettysburg College with a flood first, but the students proved too resilient, and survived by building Snowah’s Ark. Since He was also getting really sick of everyone blathering on about global warming anyway, God decided to make it snow. And it snowed. And snowed. And snowed. And snowed. And too quickly Gettysburg College was buried in snow. The fields and the grass and trees and lakes were frozen. The buildings lost power and began to leak and creak from the sheer amount of snow. The fraternities were so covered in snow that God couldn’t hear the pounding music and violent shrieking of the inhabitants anymore. The students either froze solid or entered a semi-permanent state of hibernation.

And God saw that it was good, and He was pleased.”

THEORY #2: SNOWPOCALYPSE

The world is supposed to end in 2012 anyway, right? So the weather’s a little ahead of schedule. Maybe this is just the beginning. But it’s entirely likely that, contrary to popular belief that the globe is heating up due to the destruction of the ozone layer, we’re all going to slowly freeze into oblivion. As the poet Robert Frost put it,

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. “

Suffice it to say, the day after tomorrow could be our last, thanks to all this fucking snow.

THEORY #3: “Always winter but never Christmas”

The White Witch, Queen Jadis, from the T.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia somehow found her way onto this plane of existence and has trapped our world in an everlasting winter. Except the bitch, besides having no reason to keep us in this seasonal stasis, keeps throwing out sunny days, with temperatures in the high 60s and even 70s, allowing the timid plants to put forth weak sprouts and blossoms, and the pale, debilitated students to put on shorts and t-shirts, before plunging everything back into this winter fucking wonderland.

THEORY #4: Freak Accident

When the snow first started, it was so mild and cute that I instantly assumed it wasn’t real snow at all, but an accident with a washing machine or several that culminated in an explosion of soap powder that coated the entire campus. It was sweet and pretty, like frosting. Maybe it was frosting, and the accident didn’t occur in the laundry room but in the kitchen. The giant tub of frosting that we all know they keep in the back could have leaked out overnight and oozed out all over Gettysburg. Either way, it happened in either the laundry room or the kitchen, so we know it had to be a woman’s fault.

THEORY #5: The Snow Gods Are PISSED

Somehow, we pissed off Jack Frost, and this is his revenge. Only solution? Sacrifice some virgins. Guess we’re fucked.