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| Aleshia Haselden is a sophomore journalism education major and writes 'The Price of Tea in China' for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. |
All right, let's recap this weather situation, shall we?
First, it was Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow over in Pennsylvania. The population cursed the addition of six more bleepity-bleeping weeks of winter.
The population heard through the grapevine that meteorologists predict the snow might melt. The population did the intensely rehearsed Happy Dance.
It started to warm up and the population decided that it had been insurmountably na?ve and superstitious to base its seasonal happiness on the predictions of an animal that lives in a hole in the ground.
Then it was Valentine's Day. The population heard there was a winter weather advisory, but figured the very thought of such a thing was absurd because it was 30 degrees out, which, quite frankly, was such a relief from the usual weather that it almost inspired the population to break out ukuleles.
And besides, Mother Nature would never think of producing bad weather on Valentine's Day.
Meanwhile, while Mother Nature was using the restroom, her 3-year-old got ahold of the magic wand and giggled merrily while dumping approximately 400 feet of snow on Muncie, Ind.
The population got its cars stuck in snowdrifts the size of a mature water buffalo the following day.
I think we can all agree that we have a major problem on our hands, and all signs point to the bleepity-bleeping groundhog.
As the educated celebrator of insignificant holidays knows, if the groundhog sees its shadow on Feb. 2, he goes back into his winter quarters for the remainder of the season.
My theory on this phenomenon is that the groundhog is scared of his shadow because it symbolizes darkness and evil and six more weeks of winter -- things with which a noble creature such as the groundhog would never want to associate him/herself.
This year, however, I believe the shadow was numb to Phil's ways of avoidance and just followed him inside where it bound and gagged him and has since been inflicting on him some sort of small mammalian medieval fire ant torture. Thus, nature is thrown out of balance largely because all of the gargantuan piles of snow seem to have vehicles growing out of them.
Out of curiosity I visited Stormfax Weather Almanac's Web page about the origin of Groundhog Day. In addition to learning that Groundhog Day started because the Delaware Indians believed that the legendary "Wojak the groundhog" was their ancestral grandfather, we also find out Phil's weather forecasts are only correct 39 percent of the time.
So, perhaps there is hope for the population after all. Even though the poor driving conditions and snot-freezing cold tends to extraordinarily tick the population off, the population must keep its ukulele handy and constantly reach for the light at the end of the tunnel.
The light is not only a guide on the road to optimism; it is also the way out of the snowdrift.
Write to Aleshia at aahaselden@bsu.edu
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