2 April 1999: Snowy Scarlett

It snowed 4" last night--inches, not seconds--and this morning, accordingly, the bus was about 10'--minutes, not feet--late. I occupied myself making a snowperson, or attempting to. Spring snow is supposed to be wet snow, "wet" here being a relative term. Connecticut snow might happen infrequently (as does Denver snow) and it might get rained on almost immediately (as Denver snow does not), but while it does exist, it's useful. You can create snowfolk, squeeze snowballs, construct snowforts, sculpt, and play. The only thing you can do in Denver snow is ski, but you can't even do that because Denver is flat.

This morning I waxed Frankensteinian and tried to create a snowcritter. The usual method of rolling a snowball in more snow doesn't work. Colorado snow is very dry and requires a surprising lot of cubic volume to melt into not much water. Water molecules are sticky, as you remember from seventh grade science when you poured water into a cup gently and achieved the dome of liquid through surface tension. Less water in the snow means less sticky snow means you have to compact a snowball tightly just to make it ball up, not even to compact it into a weapon of proper iciness.

So I just swept snow together into a mound, giving up any aspirations to the usual three-sphere snowfolk anatomy. When I had an 18-inch mound, I placed a snowball on top. A bus regular snickered. I told her my snowperson had had a dreadful accident (the same thing that happened to the trapeze artist, which I didn't tell her, judging it to be too obscure a reference).

The ball-on-mound structure had a wasp neck, which gave me an idea. I carefully balanced a smaller ball on top--I couldn't squish it or it'd collapse--and pronounced it Scarlett O'Hara at the Twelve Oaks barbecue, which was not too obscure a reference. I accessorized her with snowballs, since I didn't have a leghorn hat, and decided snowballs were an excellent choice because isn't the snowball bush (genus Viburnum ) common in the South?

You might wonder if my despising pronouncing "comptroller" as it's spelled is a worthwhile expenditure of my energy. So do I.

A few hundred years ago some pretentious Brit adopted the French spelling because it looked Continental and elegant, but even that original Brit pronounced the word with an n, as the French did ("controller"), and that "comptroller" is just another crazy froggy spelling parallel to their spelling an aristocratic title equal to earl as "comte" but pronouncing it with an n, and that to pronounce the pretentious spelling as it is spelled would actually just make the original Brit snob snicker.

Merriam-Webster lists the n pronunciation first and two m variants second. Me, I spell it controller, I pronounce it controller, and I'm right.

My sister would call this another example of my holding people to impossibly exacting standards and then dismissing them if they fail. She considers this a personality flaw. I consider it a personality. If I can still loathe myself for not meeting my own standards and know people who exceed them whom I wish to befriend, then I think I have a lot of work to do on myself before I have to be exterminated with all the other subfolk.

So when I strike up a conversation with you and allude to Jane Austen, Maurice Sendak, Ovid, and Alexander Cockburn in the first ten minutes, I suggest you either act like you get it (and act well) or one-up me with whatever your own arcane field of knowledge is, so long as you can make it interesting. Interesting to me.

I guess I'm either over or in a lapse of my phase of wanting to project myself as a Nice Person. I aspire to be nicer to people but I simply don't think most people are worth my effort.