A lot happened over winter break. There was extreme weather. There was Bridgegate. Tina Fey burned Leonardo Dicaprio at the Golden Globes. Barry Mills released a video, a tragically unseasonal—yet totally lovely—holiday card.
When I showed Barry’s card to my parents—this was strategically timed—they were in the midst of paying Spring Semester’s tuition.
They oohed and ahhed and pulled out the last holiday card of our family, circa 2001, to compare the two.
Our card, referred to as the fRed Letter in honor of my father’s name and his communist tendencies, showcased a picture of me and my younger brother. I appeared with the bowl cut I rocked from the third through the ninth grade, he with the wide-rimmed, green glow-in-the-dark glasses he sported until middle school.
Inside, the card wished our friends luck in the new millennium. It also called for peace, love, and socialism.
Seeing the holiday card again made me think. Not about peace, love, and socialism, or the fact that my mother had inflicted serious emotional harm upon me by allowing me to keep an upside down mushroom on my head a la Lena Dunham for six years, but about differences. You know, between West Coast and East; New Jersey and New York (holler at that George Washington Bridge); socialist and not socialist, etc.
As a Californian, I feel that winter break exacerbates the geographic differences already felt on Bowdoin’s campus. For one thing, it does not snow in much of the state, so my ChrismaHanuKwanzaakah was not white. While staying at home, I found that the only thing better than reading about the polar vortex was reading about other people reading about the polar vortex.
Rush Limbaugh’s reaction was one of my favorites. He said the left had fabricated the vortex as a way to advertise global warming. “We are having a record-breaking cold snap,” Limbaugh announced on his radio show, “and right on schedule, the media have to come up with a way…to attach this to the global warming agenda.” Jon Stewart had a field day, too, or maybe a field week. Sorry, Midwesterners.
The best commentaries, however, came from Californians mocking those stuck in the cold: the tweets and Facebook posts complaining about 68-degree weather, the worries over whether a long sleeve shirt was needed for a morning jog, and the dilemma about whether to wear a sweater or not on a balmy day.
The only suffering the vortex personally caused me was a string of complaints from a friend on a mandatory family ice fishing trip in northern Indiana. But I like to think everything happens for a reason, and therefore the vortex, her ice fishing, and the collective Midwestern bitching about the weather, all had positive outcomes.
I, for one, discovered that people are different, something I should’ve guessed years ago when I noted that some people had bowl cuts and some people didn’t, and I should have realized this again when I went through the liberal arts college application process. It’s a realization I didn’t make fully until this winter break while watching an ice dancing romantic comedy on my sunny porch while getting snapchats of bundled-up school friends captioned “Negative 50 degrees” or “So cold, please help.”
That’s when I had my slightly belated epiphany—watching “The Cutting Edge” in early January. Bowdoin stresses that differences come from class, race and political or religious upbringings, but that these differences can be overcome and even celebrated. I agree. But I now know that there is one truly divisive difference that can never be conquered: the weather. I guess the moral here is that California wins, everyone else loses, and Maine may not be the best place to lick our wounds (especially since no one wants to expose their tongue to the elements). Here’s hoping for a really, really short winter.