Listen, the snow is falling

This Winter Term, a snowstorm passed through Oberlin. My roommates and I drove to the grocery store to stock up on food. I bought brown sugar and cranberries for oatmeal. One of my roommates bought gnocchi, and we decided to cook it up instead of venturing out through the cold to the dining hall, even though it’s only a five minute walk from where we live. Halfway through boiling the water, we realized we hadn’t bought any sauce, and the pesto in our fridge had expired. We called up one of our friends and asked if they had any red sauce. They said no, but they had a small amount of pesto, so we cooked it up with some cream and parmesan cheese.

By the time we were finished cooking, it was nine p.m. There was no reason for us to go outside, so we put a ten-hour-long video of a fire up on the TV, and we sat around watching the snow fall. It struck me then that the snow was glittery, more so than the lake-effect snow that usually falls in Oberlin. It reminded me of flakes of salt.

Watching the snow fall, it occurred to me that I did, actually, have a reason to go outside.

January 25, 2026; Oberlin, Ohio.

Winter Term lasts most of the month of January. Oberlin students complete three Winter Term projects throughout their time in college. A project can be almost anything you want it to be. Some people learn to drive for their Winter Term project. Some people do research, or take an internship in Cleveland.

This year, my friends and I recorded a D&D actual play show. This consisted of us playing Dungeons and Dragons in front of a camera in the college’s recording studio. Recording the show took about a week and a half. We spent the first week of Winter Term talking about what kind of characters we were going to play, getting together costumes, and so on. We also spent a day gathering old newspapers and clipping them up inside the recording studio (the game was 1920s-themed).

I fell into a routine while filming the show. I got up at 8:30 each day and put on my costume for that day of filming. Then I made the half-mile trek to the studio, which could take anywhere from ten to twenty minutes depending on how much snow had fallen the night before. We were done filming by 5:30 in the evening, counting a short lunch break. As soon as I had doffed my period-appropriate attire I had the rest of the day to myself.

When I wasn’t filming the show, I had plenty of other activities to keep me occupied. One of my friends decided to start a model UN, which pretty quickly devolved into us making threats of war against each other via flowery speeches. I went on runs. I found a treadmill in the gym that I really like. Even after seven semesters at Oberlin, I’m discovering new things about this college.

Oh, and I also worked on my musical. As I’ve written before, I wrote a musical for my Winter Term project last year, along with my friend Thorin Finch (who also blogs here and who was, incidentally, the DM for our Winter Term project this year). It’s going to get produced this semester by OMTA, the student musical theater organization on campus. I spent the last week of January, between the end of Winter Term and the start of the spring semester, finalizing the score to the musical. In its current incarnation, it is 132 pages long. I finished editing it on the Sunday before classes started, at 4:30 in the morning, sitting on the couch, ten-hour-long fire video up on the TV, watching the snow fall.