The time has come, the walrus said…

It’s another exciting column from me, that guy from Ohio. I first would like to wish everyone a happy Wednesday.

As I’m sure none of you are aware, my good old home land got absolutely pounded by that old jerk winter last weekend. Eighteen inches of snow fell on Cleveland Municipal Stadium, formerly the home of the mighty Cleveland Browns. And, it continues to snow.

This got me to thinking.

I can hardly wait for winter to wrap its evil claws around this campus and put everything into a deep freeze.

Every year I wonder why I chose to attend a university where they actually give you warnings to not go outside because of the immanent danger of frostbite instead of going to a school where I could bask in the sun and get a nice tan on the way to class.

But in my infinite wisdom, as with all of you, we decided to come here. Iowa, the land that doesn’t have a lot of trees because they all freeze and die off in the sub-arctic temperatures.

For all of you who have not experienced a good old Iowa winter, I pity you and can only give you these words of caution: forget it. You’re going to freeze.

The next four months will seem to last years. It is as if we are all condemned to purgatory, to live out our remaining days with frozen snot dripping from our noses and cracking skin.

The torture lasts into the next semester. In fact, it gets much worse. It becomes increasingly difficult to go to class. The wind, which seems to tear the skin off your face, tries to push you back into bed. It howls every morning as a warning that you should not even bother waking up.

For those of us that are lucky enough to make it to campus, it seems like a wasteland. It becomes a giant glacier. It looks like a scene out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, stark white that almost burns the eyeballs.

Campus now becomes a stage for comic errors made by the student who mistakenly walks across that patch of ice and ends up throwing his books up for grabs and comes crashing down to the ground. The student then looks around, gathers their belongings and tries to salvage their last bit of dignity.

As for the rest of us who witness the event of “Three Stooges” proportions, we cannot laugh. We know that if we laugh and that old bastard winter hears us, we will enjoy the same fate as the poor student who’s entire semester is strewn across Osborne Drive.

The people who manage to avoid the ice and the hills that you can’t climb without golf spikes stagger from building to building desperately trying to cover any exposed skin. (Except for that one guy who wears shorts.)

The only way to combat the cold is to breathe through your mittens in a last ditch effort to warm the air before you inhale it and it freezes your lungs.

Anytime they have to cancel class because of the “dangerous” wind chill there is something wrong. When the news tells me that exposed skin will freeze in under five minutes, the idea of transfer becomes more and more possible.

As the months drag on we begin to dream of beaches and sand and girls in bikinis or guys in Speedos.

And seemingly just in time, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Spring Break.

But it only lasts a week and we are thrown back into the jaws of winter to suffer for a few more weeks before…

Veishea.

Now we have another reason to miss class. Good-bye snow and negative temperatures. Hello parties, sun and more parties.

Oh the fantasy.

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J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.