You know you're going crazy when...
So I'm standing in a parking lot, and it's getting a little nippy. It's probably somewhere around 5:30 AM: It's dark, but not for long. The snow on the ground is pretty and all, but is this really the right setting for Noder SnowTacular 2004? I didn't think so until I saw a 4x4 pull into the parking lot loaded with various forms of ice and compressed snow (the kind of snow you get when you spray a hose everywhere, melting the top third of the snow and making the bottom two-thirds solid). A girl pops out of the driver side (which is facing me), while a male proceeds to take his time coming out from behind the car. The girl gets straight to work.
There's a grass barrier covered with amorphous blobs of snow between me and the truck. I watch, as the girl grabs an armful of compressed snow from the trunk and drops it inartistically on the ground in front of me. She heads back for another load, and her male friend has decided to get to work to. I see them go back and forth to the truck a few times grabbing different forms of snow each time. I stand back as they drop it into strangely purposeful blobs on the side of the barrier.
"Is this supposed to be art?" I wonder out loud.
"Yeah, can't you see? It's gonna be a bus station." she informs me.
And sure enough, when I look back it is most definitely a bus station. The seemingly purposeless blobs were the walls of the station in between the gates. As more noders have been trickling in with the sun, the speed of construction has increased. Suddenly I can discern benches, doorways and two people (one opaque and one transparent). For amateur abstract snow art, it's damn impressive.
The sun is the process of rising to greet the noder crew while the crew is in the process of greeting itself. All sorts of friends are meeting and gabbing while I stand back and watch. A nerd walks up to me with his nerd friend in the distance serving as moral support.
"So you're pretty new around here, huh?" he asks in the most belittling way possible.
"Yeah. But I can still kick your ass."
He chuckles. "Look at this guy! He can kick my ass! You know, that's no way to go about making friends."
"I may rock the casbah, but I don't do politics."
He laughs. He turns back to his friend. "Hey, come see this guy," as he puts his arm around my shoulders. "We're gonna work real well together, aren't we?" We're suddenly walking on the sidewalk towards the grocery store.
He suddenly disappears and I find myself walking alongside a latino girl with a shopping cart. It's awkward.
Her friends show up and start rambling incessantly. From what I can tell, they're very excited to be going to the supermarket, and to have me with them. Who am I to let them down?
We walk into the whitewashed supermarket with a less-than-enthusiastic cashier. I find myself horribly disinterested, and wonder why I even bothered to exist, let alone go to the grocery store with a handful of vacuous females. I leave.
I see "Ol de" followed by a dictionary-like description of the etymology of the word olde. I don't have time to read it before my alarm goes off.