Powdery snow blows in a steady stream off the tops of buildings, creating layers of mist that separate groupings of buildings at different distances like the misty mountains of Chinese landscape paintings.

I checked into Snowpocalypse 2010 on foursquare and was unexpectedly awarded what I presume to be a fairly rare badge: Super Duper Swarm. It's hard to imagine how over 500 foursquare users could check into a single location unless that location is defined as a ginormous weather system (or a foursquare mob). Having just earned the Mile High badge a few days ago for checking in from the plane, I seem to be doing well for just having an iPod touch 1G!

underwater

In the blizzard, Times Square looks as if it's underwater. Besides the whoa-I'm-in-Bladerunner feeling the place usually gives me, its air now glows dozens of stories into the air, asserting its palpability as it whooshes past radiant billboards. The limned currents sweeping around buildings are more visible than the currents of any river, seeming more rational for their visibility and more chaotic for their wildness.

On the walk home from the subway in LIC, every vicious needle of snow seems to pierce my skin. Cars whirr futilely on every corner, and I want to volunteer to push, but doubt that my 105 pounds of force would help. From the upper floors of my parents' apartment building, the blizzard looks like a pestilence of locusts, swarming and dissipating randomly, dimming the streetlights almost to darkness as thick clouds rush horizontally across the ground. The windows, not fully sealed against the outside, emit high-pitched whines. I wonder if snow is blasting horizontally past our window up some two dozen floors; there are no street lights to catch it in the act, but I see it billowing past another high rise some stories below.

Just for fun, I imagine that I'm in the great ancient city of Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, beset by an epochal sandstorm. But it's hard to believe it when the corners of the buildings haven't been worn down into curves by the slow but sure grinding wheel of flying sand. I have an easier time imagining the panorama of flickering streetlights as the flickering of celluloid. I'm glad to be a spectator inside, listening to the occasional creaking of the walls as air -- just thin air, but so powerful -- rages past.

Snow is pouring like heavy rain on pavement that was clear this morning and winter-sun-drenched yesterday. I could have been wearing sunglasses yesterday had my eyes not been raw from nonstop paper writing.

I suppose if I had a fireplace to cuddle beside reading a good book, and I could sustain this activity through the entire winter, the Rochester weather wouldn't seem so dismal to me. Alas, this is not so.