Turning down the volume knob on the entire world.
It didn't smell like snow, but there it was. Snow is usually a filter that sucks the foulness out of the air, covers up the roughness of the earth; you can smell good snow before you see it. It's like someone snapped a map of the Earth to shake the dust off. But the Earth wasn't hiding today, and the strange olfactory disconnect combined with the early-morning streetlights reflecting off the snow like stage-lighting to produce the curious sensation that I was walking through a diorama. Some third-grader's monstrous life-size creation; months worth of cardboard and icing sugar put on display in front of the class while he haltingly stammers out: "This is a human going to work. Humans spent a lot of time going to work, no-one is sure why. I think humans are neat because they are pink and eat everything." It was too early to start singing Broadway tunes, but I did eat a slice of pizza, just to make the third-grader happy. It was a day old and tasted like cardboard, but in a diorama, that makes a grim kind of sense.