Thoughts from Sibor Space: Snowpocalypse Now

Fact: it has snowed a lot this winter. As someone who lives in a city but relies on a car to get himself to work, I have found this situation to be decidedly inconvenient. The snow itself is annoying enough, given how difficult it makes it to get anywhere. I realize that this point, nor its impact on my life, reflects any sort of unique experience. However, in the last couple weeks I have found a far worse consequence to this constant barrage than mere traffic. This particular winter’s batch of snow has made most people even more insufferable than usual.
The go-to move for anyone ever trapped in a conversation with someone to whom he or she either A) doesn’t want to talk, or B) has nothing to say, has always been to talk about the weather.

This subject, of course, is almost universally regarded as hollow and meaningless, except by meteorologists. There has always been a sort of pre-existing, mutual agreement within these conversations that neither party actually cares what is being said; they both simply fill up the air with idle, time-killing nothingness. I imagine this has stretched back through time since the beginning of language. Cavemen were probably grunting their inane observations about how warm the day was as they tried to figure out the intricacies of the wheel.
We’ve undergone a dramatic shift this winter, however. People now seem to think that the snow is not only grounds for a legitimate, thought-provoking discussion, but indeed a compelling and unique aspect of the speaker's life that warrants long-form dialogue in a public forum. Here’s a newsflash: nobody cares that you had to shovel your driveway for an hour and a half yesterday. So did five million other people. Oh? You sat in traffic on your way home for an hour? That sounds so much different than what happened to everyone else. How can it be that we have to turn everything back on our own experiences? Have we really become this selfish, this disinterested in what everyone else has to say?
Somehow, any topic will come back to snow; it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Celtics 3-1 west coast road trip they just finished (did you here they had to wait an extra 12 hours to come back because of all the snow?) or the crisis in Egypt (they government shut off their internet, they're rioting in the streets, and they're killing innocent people, but at least they don’t have to shovel!). All snow, all the time. It’s almost as if we have developed some sort of sick, twisted dependency on it to keep our social interactions going. Have we really fallen this far that beyond making observations about things that are already abundantly clear to anyone with one functioning eyeball, we have nothing left to say to one another?

True story: between the hours of 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM on Tuesday, the most compelling conversation I had was with my roommate about the cost of bologna compared to other sliced deli meats. The rest of my day was filled first with talk of the impending snow storm, then with observations about how hard it was falling, and finally, when it would end.
Reader, I implore you: from now on, really consider what you talk about with others. There is nothing new or unique that can be said about snow, no new take that is going to make everyone stop and say “Wow, I never thought of it like that!” If you need to get anywhere during the winter, snow sucks. That’s really all that need be said. You can spare everyone the details of the ice dams in your roof or how hard it is to see turning out of your driveway. We get it.