Last week the Cincinnati area had way too much snow and not nearly enough school days in session. Our apartment management team did a great job of clearing the streets and a kind neighbor even dug my car out for me, so I didn't have to lift a finger for snow removal! But it did make me think of something I learned shoveling the driveway a few years ago in Bloomington.

It was one of those storms where an inch or more of snow fell every hour. At some point someone (a neighbor, perhaps) suggested that I go ahead and shovel what was in the driveway, even though it was still snowing heavily. I went out and started clearing a path for the car to get out. The few inches of powder easily gave way to my shovel and I went back inside shortly after.

Sure enough, maybe 90 minutes later, you couldn't tell that I had shoveled at all. It was still snowing and I hesitated to go back out since my earlier handiwork had been so easily erased. But I shuffled outside anyway. I think I did this at least three times before the storm finally ended.

When I went to clear off the front steps, which I had not pre-cleared, I realized something:

Clearing eight inches of snow all at once is actually way harder than clearing two inches of snow, four times.

Snow compresses under its own weight gets icier, harder to break through. A shovel's width of 8 inches of snow weighs A LOT MORE than a shovel's width of 2 inches. Even wading out into the driveway in the first place is more difficult.

When you clear away the first two inches of snow, you at least have a relatively clean slate to start with when it’s time to shovel the next two inches. And if you're lucky, you learn some tricks that make it easier the next time.

When facing a challenge like healing deep-ass emotional wounds, rebuilding a life that looks different from what I imagined, the most academically challenging (I HOPE?!) semester of grad school, another Trump national nightmare…I’m tempted to wait until it stops snowing completely. It’s cold out there and getting suited up is a chore and boy, is the couch comfortable.

But honestly?

I don’t fucking know when it’s going to stop snowing. (Maybe never? IT FEELS LIKE NEVER.)

I do know that processing trauma, learning new ways to be in the world, learning inborn errors of metabolism and cancer genomics and writing a thesis and seeing patients without panicking (GRAD SCHOOL IS GREAT I SWEAR), and activist parenting is easier in little, consistent-ish pieces than in giant blocks.

I do know that if I wait for the hard part to be over, for the strength and bandwidth to move a giant block of ice...I'm going to be waiting a long time. And the snow may well just keep falling in the meantime.

So whatever snowstorm you’re in right now, I encourage you to clear whatever little spot you can. It does matter, I promise.

This Week/Month/Whatever

I started drafting in Just One Date again over break, and I'm still going! We will see how long it lasts once the semester really gets up to speed, but it's a nice way to use my brain differently. I am also lifting the terrible dating profiles Annie encounters directly from my screenshots folder. If I've said it once, I've said it 46,000 times: if they didn't want me to write about them, they should have behaved differently.

I have no other goals at the moment besides survival. Thinking this semester might be a "what if I just didn't" semester.

RFS (Request for Suggestions) Unsolicited Advice

I bought a windshield frost guard from Facebook marketplace for $10 and I will not shut up about it. If you live where it gets below freezing, you need one. There is nothing quite as satisfying as just peeling a piece of fabric off the windshield instead of scraping off a layer of frost/ice.

What I'm Reading

Let's be friends on Storygraph, the non-Amazon version of Goodreads that comes WITH CHARTS ABOUT BOOKS!

I just, uh, heavily skimmed / lightly read Democracy in Retrograde. I really wanted to dig into this over break when I had the brain capacity to actually do the reflections and activities, but alas. Maybe I'll try to attend some school board meetings. (Then again...what if I just didn't LOL) I do recommend it for anyone who wants to build their civic engagement in a sustainable way!

I also read and recommend A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers if anyone wants some relatively cozy queer sci-fi. (I say relatively cozy because there are no major explosions.) It reads more "traditional" sci-fi, which I use in air quotes because I don't read a lot of sci-fi canon so I'm not sure if that's actually true.