Cloudy with a Chance of Existentialism: Taking the Weather Personally

         Spring has arrived and as usual, someone has forgotten to tell Minnesota. I came back from “spring” break to find a series of dark, cold days. Last Tuesday, I was sitting in my American Lit class, discussing representations of death and religion in Modernist poetry (yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life too). I was understandably exhausted, it being the first day of class after break, and began to zone out, focusing instead on the barren tree outside the window.

I realized it was one of those days where the sky appeared to be perpetually trapped between dark and light. Wind howled against the glass. The florescent lights inside put up minimal effort, leaving the corners of the room dark and students’ faces shaded. All form a rather oppressive environment to be discussing how God is dead and one day you will be to.

            J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Poets are always taking the weather so personally.” I think this sentiment can apply to all writers. When you begin to set up your life as scenes to be observed and recorded, every phenomenon is viewed as contributing to the overall mood of your environment. This may sound ridiculous, but see if this feeling is familiar to you: A suddenly sunny day makes you feel like your Calculus test might actually go okay. Rain on a morning where your car wouldn’t start seems like adding insult to injury. The weather can start to appear like it’s designed to heighten whatever emotion you’re already wrestling with.

            Of course, there are mental disorders where the season can actually affect someone’s mood, causing depression at the same time each year. I do not suffer from that illness. I’m just a college student occasionally bored in class. But my gloom got me thinking, what if we responded to the changes in weather like literary characters did?

            What if when the summer became sweltering hot, you just knew your neighbor was going to end up murdered in a pool? What if you saw a few strange lightning strikes and started killing everybody (actually, I’m seeing a pattern of using nature to justify violence, whoops)? This is a literary device called the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human qualities and emotions to inanimate objects of nature. Weather is another way to set the tone, to convey eeriness or rage without having to explicitly state, “it was tense.” But imagine if that magical meteorological power came over real life and weather reports started to read like horoscopes that were actually accurate. Sunny with a chance of lost tempers. Cloudy with a chance of existential crisis. It would be fascinating for about a day, and then we would have to figure out what to do with all the bodies.

Hello Chicago!

            My Creative Writing professor told the class that writers should always carry a notebook with them and write down at least six observations a day. One never knows which image drawn from their life can be tied into a novel or poem. But since leaving for Chicago for a spring break trip with my mother, progressively weirder events have been occurring around us, too weird to one day be used in even the most abstract of writing. I’m just going to list them off here because I can’t string them together into any sort of narrative for you.

1.    Before our plane even took off, the pilot had to return to the gate because directly behind my mother was what the flight attendants would later describe as an “unruly passenger.” Unruly, in this case, being he wanted to lie down upon the poor strangers next to him and literally stated, “Man, you don’t even know how crazy I am.” He left orderly with the airport security, but not before saying, “I’m not even drunk. This is just who I normally am.” I mean, at least he’s self-aware.

2.    We were grabbing a late lunch in an Italian bistro, when a lady walked in with a dog in a service harness. Hey, that’s her business, but the dog proceeded to set his nose upon our table and sniff at our food before being pulled away by his owner. I caught a glimpse of the brand name on the dog’s harness and googled it. Turns out, the harness is not distributed by any sort of licensed training organization, but can instead can be purchased on the internet for $50. Still, the situation could have been completely legitimate. But keep your dog away from the alfredo please.

3.    We walked into the lobby of our hotel to find a rather large man wearing a fez standing before the front desk. I don’t even know. Do with that information what you will.