Wonder Woman and the snowy day
What’s the best thing about having the day off? A little late night television, what else?
I’m nearly halfway through my 30th year as a secondary ed. social studies teacher. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve seen it all, and for better or worse, I’ve probably heard it all as well. While some of the things one hears as a veteran teacher may wear on one’s nerves, one phrase I’ve yet to grow tired of is the one that goes as follows: “Snow Day!” Why does this little semi-expected treat still bring on such a sense of joy? It’s kind of sophomoric when one thinks about it. I mean, it’s not like I don’t get to enjoy a pretty hefty amount of paid time off, and it’s not as if I can’t deal with driving in the snow, I went to college in Oswego for goodness sake. Yet when that phone rings, and I’ve been told that school will be closed, the kid inside me can’t help but smile as if I’ve just been given a free dessert, or a ticket to baseball game. In other words, it’s a healthy dose of good fortune that just lands in your lap, and what could be wrong with that?
Yes that’s me whenever I hear my school is closed due to snow. Of course it’s really just an idealized version of me since the real me would be sitting on my leather chair with my feet up on the Ottoman contemplating the joys of nap time, but you get the drift. Get it…drift? (You Tube)
Now you don’t have to be a public sector employee to know what most people who labor in the private sector think about all of this. They say, “You mean having summers off, a break in the middle of February as well as the day before Thanksgiving, which appears to now be a holiday for some reason isn’t enough for you? You now get to sit around and pray for snow so you can stay in your pajamas all day like some sort of pathetic pre-teen?” Well, sort of, in fact, this reminds me of an old teacher’s joke. What are every teacher’s favorite two words? July and August. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be here all week…unless it snows.
As sorry as this all sounds, there are trade-offs. Yes teachers get a lot of time off, and we have relative job security thanks to tenure, but tenure is a two-way street. Once you’ve received tenure in a school district, it usually means you are going to start making a little bit of money along with the job security that comes with tenure. However, if you give that up, there’s no way to guarantee that another district will pay you what you were making in your old job, and you are vulnerable to being laid-off due to cutbacks since you are no longer tenured. In other words, tenure means it’s hard to just pick up and leave. Also, while teachers make a living, they don’t make nearly what individuals in the private sector with similar experience and education make, so like everything else in the world, there are pluses and minuses. Still, the snow day has its perks, and I’m by no means complaining, especially if my wife happens to stumble upon this, wonderful woman that she is, slaving away in that cold unfeeling private sector.
Let’s get real, you can’t expect a person to venture out in conditions like this. What are we..animals? “Oh, honey on the way home, could you stop at the store and pick up some of that good hot cocoa that I like. Thanks, love ya!” (Times Union)
Of course it’s not like the snow day is a non-stop party. There’s snow to remove, chores to be done, and sometimes you might even have to run out and do a few errands, and lets be honest, none of this sounds like that much of a marked improvement over going to work. This is where the great disconnect occurs. If you like what you do, which I do, you might ask why staying home and cleaning in between blowing snow off of my driveway is so superior to working that I feel celebratory once I’ve been made aware of the fact that school is closed due to weather? Well, you’ve obviously never been gainfully employed. You see, the thing about most jobs, even the ones you like is that the worst part is actually thinking about them. Once you’re there, it’s usually not bad at all. I know plenty of people who will tell you that a work day is over once they’ve woken up. Think about it, what’s the worst part of almost any day of work? It’s always when the alarm goes off, it’s not even close. What’s the second worst part of any work day? Realising that you have to go to sleep before you really want to, and why? Because you have to get up in the morning.
Which brings me to “Wonder Woman.” Our superintendent did a wonderful thing this past Sunday. Instead of waiting until Monday morning to make the decision on whether to close or delay school, he let us know on Sunday evening that we weren’t going to have school on Monday. This allows for parents, teachers, and staff to plan accordingly for the next day, and to not have to worry about driving in the bad weather or how they were going to have do deal with the snow in their own yards when they arrive back home. However, as any teacher will tell you, it’s so much more than that. In the summer, while it’s nice to be home and do my thing, the best part of the summer is knowing that I can go to sleep when I want to, and then when I get up, I can do what I feel like as opposed to what I have to do. Even if I like what I have to do, it still has the word “have” in it. Want in this case is better than “have.” Snow days not unlike days in the summer have a lot more “want” than “have.”
Once you find out the night before that tomorrow there’ll be no school due to a snow storm, you become the master of your own domain. This handsome fellow pictured above is in my opinion, “over-achieving.” (Getty Images)
Thus, since I didn’t have to get up to go to work on Monday, on Sunday night I could enjoy a little bonus television time in bed. Now this is not as easy to negotiate as it may sound. My wife still has to get up and go to work, and even though she can fall asleep standing up in the middle of a marching band, she still needs a little unwind time in bed before she’s ready to start her week. This means that I have to be sensitive to her television needs before my non-stop television smorgasbord can begin. I have to act like that guy at the buffet who pretends he’s only going to have the soup and maybe a little salad when he first arrives. Of course within a few minutes, that same guy has picked up the pan with the crab legs and just brought them over to his table surrendering all pretense of actually acting like a gentleman.
Which once again brings me back to “Wonder Woman.” I patiently watched some sort of travel or home improvement show for the sake of my wife from 11:00 p.m. until approximately 11:18 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. However, around this time, my wife succumbed to the natural processes of sleep, and it was my time to do a little perusing. Unfortunately, the football game was over, John Oliver’s show is on hiatus, and for seemingly the only time all week, Modern Family reruns could not be located on any of the hundreds of channels that we are privy to. Yes I could have used the On Demand button, but that’s not the same. I wanted to stumble upon something wonderful, and it appeared as if that wasn’t going to happen, and yes, I know I could have read, but again I ask you, what am I…an animal?
My wife thinks I have a problem. Whenever she wakes up from sleeping I seem to be watching this program. Yes, it is a good show, but it’s not exactly Cheers or Seinfeld. Still, there’s something mindlessly relaxing about it, and it makes me forget for a few minutes that Trump is the president. (Getty Images)
Which brings me back to “Wonder Woman.” As I flipped through the myriad of useless channels at my disposal, I stumbled upon a station called Decades which specializes in television programming from the 1970s, good, bad, and unwatchable. As luck would have it, like a half-awake Jed Clampett, I happened upon a little “Texas tea.” There was a Wonder Woman mini marathon on Decades, and all of a sudden snow wasn’t the only blessing that the Heavens had sprinkled down upon me.
I’ve spoken before about my “appreciation” for the talents of Linda Carter, and how truly wondrous her performance in her costume was. There was a problem however. The show, meaning the plot, the effects, acting, music, and Linda Carter when she wasn’t dressed as “Wonder Woman,” were all of the quality that one might find in Cold War era Bulgarian television. Waiting for Linda Carter to spin into her “Wonder Woman” persona was a little like picking around the raisins and nuts in a carrot cake so one could gorge upon the cream cheese frosting. Empty calories? Yes. Embarrassingly glutenous? Most definitely. Something one doesn’t do in public? Oh hell yeah.
They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes because you’ll ultimately be disappointed. Oh lordy, let me be disappointed! (Getty Images)
The “plot” of the episode that I was trying to fight my way through involved some sort of conflict between two psychics and for some reason it took place in a disco. I’m not sure why somebody with the powers of “Wonder Woman” would be needed for something as inane as this, but as sure as God made little green apples, there she was. Complicating matters was the fact that my wife could have woken up any time, and I’m not sure I would have had a logical reason at hand for why I was watching such drivel. It was like when I used to watch it on our only color television in the den of my house growing up, and my parents would want to know what I was watching, and I would tell them in my most annoyed and snotty 14 year old manner, “Nothing!” I’m not sure they had an appreciation for the wonders of Wonder Woman, and I’m not sure I possessed the eloquence to explain it to them.
I tried to stay up for one more episode of Wonder Woman, but I barely made it through the first 15 minutes. This episode guest starred the “famous” mime team of “Shields and Yarnell,” and apparently they had the power to talk to ants, and they were commanding them to eat through factories that were producing pesticides and kill everybody in the factory. “Wonder Woman” was called in to investigate, but it seemed to me that all they really needed was a fat guy with a can of Raid. My wife began to stir, and I figured that this was a good time to turn the television off and go to sleep. After all, as I will soon discover, tomorrow is another snow day, and Wonder Woman isn’t going to watch itself.