Sometimes All You Need Is A Snow Day

A reader-fueled edition of the Friday Newsletter awaits

This past week didn’t start on a terrific note.

We’re at the point in the year where the newness and hope of January has worn off a little bit. The weather here in Louisville had been that kind of awful that mid-Southern winters excel at: less an icy wonderland and more a dull, crushing, damp grey. On top of all that, my wife was rear-ended by a teenage driver in the rain Monday evening, a minor, injury-less accident that nonetheless introduced the ripple effect of unwanted hassles that that sort of thing does. There were work frustrations, the ongoing agitations of Zoom school, and the feeling, as Counting Crows once sang, that it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls. We were quoting the 30 Rock “what a week / Lemon, it’s Wednesday” bit to each other by Tuesday morning.

One of the low-key drudges of the pandemic era has been the crushing sameness of it all, the feeling that tomorrow will be just like today which itself was just like yesterday. There’s no change to the scenery, no chan…