#snowledge

[irbcallmefynn]

Snails go to Snollege to get more Snowledge

Crazy how that works

[deedotcharles]

New Lens #snowledge 🏂🏂🏂

[yrfriendliz]

I haven't written about the South much here, or Southern culture in general, because I don't feel equipped to talk about it having only lived here for seven months. There's nothing worse than a tourist making value judgments about something they have no real understanding of. But that’s the thing about the South: I feel so out of place here, regularly, that I fear I will never have a real understanding of this region. 

Snow here is like nothing I've ever experienced. I cannot pinpoint what it does to people, but it's a very strong energy that makes some panic and some giddy. Everyone loses some grip on reality, though, like the delirious feeling that there's only one more day left til a long vacation. Some people have already checked out, eagerly looking out the window, and some people have the panicked expression of knowing, knowing that they can't possibly get it all done before end of day and fearing that they'll fail. 

The snow has been a very strange metaphor for all of the feelings of confusion and misunderstanding I've had since moving here. Watching this panic and the way infrastructure has failed people is making me angry. Let’s be clear here, this failure of infrastructure has nothing to do with plows and snow tires because you do not need them in this kind of snow. This failure of infrastructure is a failure to consider something outside of the scope of everyday. It just doesn't snow here that often so why should we bother having a plan, or thinking about the consequences of sending a million people out of a major city all at the same time? Traffic in Atlanta is objectively terrible on a normal day. The fact that city officials and business owners and school board presidents could not foresee the problems a mass exodus from this city would cause is just mind-bogglingly myopic (ETA: the Mayor knows it, too). If you know people are ill-equipped for snow and that people do not know how to drive in it, why cancel schools MIDDAY and send everyone on the road at the same time? This is not the snow's fault. This is a failure of awareness. And it's causing serious, very serious, outcomes for people. People are abandoned on highways and sleeping in Krogers over a few inches of snow. Of course this is not funny! It’s unacceptable and it makes me angry —not at the snow, but at the failure of people to do their jobs, to be aware, to stay off the roads and understand that the snow will melt! It's just so hard for me to empathize with ignorance toward something so profoundly banal and easy to prepare for. I know I'm being smug and I can't help it! The plight of the outsider in the South.

And maybe that's the ultimate problem. Southern culture permeates deeper than the culture of any other area of the country I've lived in. It's stronger even than New England's strange combination of quaint and harsh, it's harder to understand than the moodswings of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo —those fluctuations between pride and anger and a tinge of regret? — and it beats Colorado's Western "whatever" vibe to the ground. Southern culture is so different and isolated from other places of the country that it doesn't surprise me that there has been no effort to prepare for or understand weather that "isn't Southern."

As I consider it, my feelings toward Southerners discussing snow tires in a half inch of snow and yelling at the rest of the country for finding this situation laughable (we laugh when we’re too dumbfounded to cry, I think) center more on confusion than anger. And this is how I've felt nearly every day I've lived in Georgia. I've been the snow here. I've felt unwelcomed since I got here, except, of course, by the few who thought my strangeness was fun to play around with. I feel out of place here, I feel lost often. I don't talk the same way others do, of course, but I also don't have the same understanding of manners. I don't call my professors "sir" or "ma'am" and I was sure most of them wanted to be called by their first names (not, in fact, the case). I don't understand monograms, especially on cars and especially in curlz font. I don't understand tervis tumblers. I don't understand not saying what you think, or why you would bother pretending to like someone who you don't like. I don't have any concept of "bottling it in and smiling" because bottling it in hurts my gut. I don't understand the point of being indirect or the desire hurt someone's feelings in the most roundabout way possible. I don't understand small group. Or not expanding medicaid coverage. Or SEC football. There are unspoken ways of being here that I very clearly do not fit, no matter how hard I try to shut up and understand, and it's enough to drive you insane.

It takes time to get to know a place, some people say you can live places for years and never understand them. I fell in love with Georgia for its air and the feeling that there was so much living around me. The plants grow and there are tree frogs making such beautiful noises and magnolia trees smell so good and there is just so much good music and food. But the South is elusive to me. It is stubborn. It doesn't need me and it doesn't want me, but it is polite to me.

Passive aggression doesn’t get you out of a snowstorm though.