The Weather Column

A note to young writers: There is a generally accepted list of column topics and techniques that are considering axiomatically lame. It includes, but is not limited to, the weather, your exams, dining hall food, veiled references to your TFs, inside jokes, your grades, self-referential pats on the back, anything involving the word "post-modern," snipes at your blockmates, complaining about how miserable you are, the seasons, personal attacks against Supreme Court justices, complaining about your social life, prose obviously stolen from response papers in humanities classes, or anything involving the word "irony." Also strictly taboo is anything to do with Amtrak, airports, or wistful reflections on going home for break. Especially the last one. No one, and I mean no one, wants to read about that.

That said, Amtrak is rolling out its new Acela Regional service at South Station this weekend and I, for one, am pretty excited. The train should make the trip from here to New York, where there is not quite as much snow as there is here, about an hour faster than the current five-hour trek through New England. If I were going home for break, it would be a wonderful way to get there.

But I'm not going home for break. Instead, I'm staying in Cambridge. The Eliot House dining hall is going to be closed. I'll be forced to eat at Ma Soba instead.

The train might not run anyway, though, because the weather has been simply awful. Due to a bungled forecast, municipalities and airports were caught off guard by the largest snowstorm of the season so far. Many first-years from California have probably never experienced a real Nor'easter before and are finding their flimsy designer hats inadequate. But unlike me, they're probably going home for intersession.

This sort of weather has the tendency to bring out the worst in people. Especially for people who have to drive to work--like exam proctors--snow and ice are leading causes of cantankerousness and general irritability. For most television news stations, though, snowstorms are great: They're the perfect chance to try out new disaster-themed jingles. Too bad for me I'm at a newspaper. The Boston Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for photography for its coverage of the famous blizzard of 1978, but I don't know how to take pictures.

What's worse, Harvard is rumored to have never had a snow day, and its first certainly won't be during an exam period. I've always admired the facilities maintenance people who are out at 4 a.m. clearing the pathways around campus. Still, exams and snow can be a lethal combination for those with short tempers, I've been told. I'm glad I didn't have an exam yesterday.

Writing this column I have developed a newfound respect for former New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, whose final column before he was forced into retirement was an incoherent jumble of mostly unrelated sentence fragments. This is my last column. But it's mostly complete sentences.

I sometimes worry that the academic exercise of taking exams has slowly destroyed my ability to think in anything but hastily constructed, poorly connected paragraphs. There is a solid body of evidence from my TFs in a wide range of disciplines that this is, in fact, the case. I have never quite understood what, if any, useful intellectual purpose there is to exams. Most professors seem to give them out of pure laziness and pedagogical inertia rather than actually to test students' knowledge of the course material in any meaningful way. In the process, they force us to master a particular mode of communication--the exam answer--that is an ugly affront to written language.

Due to a significant extracurricular commitment, I'm not going to be able to leave Cambridge for awhile, probably not until after the next round of exams. I might never get to ride Acela Regional, which is actually only an interim service before new, tilting trainsets are put into service on the Northeast Corridor this summer. That would be a shame. From the train, the view of snowy fields is pretty nice.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. He recently sold for $6.66 on ebay.com.