Snow cred

The blizzards here have divided the campus along Snow-State and Non-Snow-State lines. There are those who wade through 4-foot drifts and say, "This is nothing," and then there are the folks shivering at the bus stop, either in head-to-toe winter sports gear or in inappropriate garb from previous, non-Chicago winters. Snow cred conveniently replaces street cred, the means by which students from urban areas scoff at kids who never before encountered the dangers (or the pleasures) of city life. Given my background, I suppose I have moderate amounts of both snow-cred and street-cred, though a mugging near-miss at my bus stop here, followed a week or so later by a tough climb over a mini-mountain of snow to get to that same bus stop, suggest that NYC did not, in fact, give me the cred I'd imagined.