The Tyranny of Choice

—or—

Why I Love Crappy Weather


Anyone who’s known me for even a short amount of time knows that I love the kind of weather other people, bless their misguided little hearts, might call “crappy.” I can’t pinpoint a time when this started; I’ve loved rainy days for as long as I can remember. And until recently, I couldn’t pinpoint why. During the past few months, however, thanks to more down time at work than anyone with a paycheck as respectable as mine has any right to, I’ve been able to devote a healthy amount of time to pondering the answer.

I’ve come up with two reasons why I love dark clouds, thunder and lightning, and that most beautiful of sights, that harbinger of cold fronts, the squall line, where ominous, steel-colored thunderheads contrast so sharply with the innocent-looking sky in front of them. The first reason is simple and, if I do say so myself, almost anti-climactic. Why do I love crappy weather?

I just do.

Were you hoping for something more profound? Sorry. That’s all there is to it: I just do. Why do you like your favorite color? Maybe there’s some long, complicated story behind it, like your first memory as a child is of holding on to your dad’s leg while you tried to stand up and walk. He was wearing blue jeans, and forever after, blue was the only color for you. Maybe you believe in color as therapy, so you wear yellow to cheer yourself up when you’re depressed. Or maybe you just really, really love carrots, and your entire existence would be fundamentally altered without orange.

My guess, though, is that the reason you like your favorite color is, you just do.

I don’t just like stormy weather, though. I love it. I experience it. I invite it into my soul and serve it coffee and biscotti.

By “analyze,” I don’t mean that I see a cloud and then rush inside to consult the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to Weather, desperate to identify what I saw. Stratus? Cumulus? Cirrus? Altostratus? (I admit I do, in fact, own this book, but honestly, I bought it because I thought looking at the cool pictures would be a better way to pass my occasional boredom than lying in bed, feeling guilty for how rarely I blog. It was in no way an indication of some strange, deep obsession with weather. Trust me, if I was going to have a fetish, it would not involve cloud formations. Donuts come to mind, though, or possibly brownies. Or peanut butter. Okay, I’d better stop. This could get ugly...)

(But as long as we’re on a tangent anyway, let me say that I learned early on not to ask my father—a retired science teacher whose original goal was to be meteorologist—questions about weather. It’s not that he wouldn’t know the answer; he knows too much. You want the Wikipedia version, quick and easy to skim, and you’re willing to accept the risk that their fact checkers haven’t quite gotten around to every single entry. My father, however, wants to go up to the attic, hunt down the hard-bound Encyclopedia Britannica (yes, not the World Book, which was the “easy” encyclopedia we all used for research projects as kids, until we hit high school and that wouldn’t fly anymore, and we were forced to transition to the scary Britannica), blow the dust off the cover, and sit you down for an hour-long lecture on the subtle differences between altostratus clouds and altostratus undulatus. (My mother learned long ago that every question she asked my father needed to start with the words “In fifteen words or less…”)

Where was I? Oh, right…how I analyze weather.

I’ve never told this to anyone before, so you millions of people out there who are addicted to this blog should feel privileged to be the first to hear it. (But if you are addicted to this blog, first, that’s a shame, and second, considering the rate at which I seem to post new and interesting “essays,” it’s a good thing you don’t need this blog to sustain you, like food and water, because, let’s face it: you’d have shriveled up and died a long time ago.)

And it’s kind of embarrassing, so you should feel even more privileged to be getting the information you are about to receive.

I have a kind of “scale” I measure weather with in my mind. It’s not a 1-to-10 scale, or a 100-point system. To be honest, I don’t know what the criteria is. All I know is, it’s rare that a single element will rate over a three, but occasionally, in the cases of unimaginably cool storms, the clouds alone could go as high as four or five.

Overcast skies are nice, but for me, really hideous skies are where it’s at. In fact, if it’s genuinely “stormy,” that’s usually good for two or three points before I even start counting the individual elements.

What do I “grade” when I decide how high a day scores? I usually start with the sky itself. How does it look? Is it overcast? Is there a general grayness hanging low over everything? Probably good enough for a two, maybe a three, depending on whether it looks like there’s a silver-colored sheet spread out over the whole sky, or whether there are patches here and there that are darker, and whether the clouds are moving so fast I can actually see them changing shape against each other. The bottom line here: the darker, the better. Whitish-gray, good. Silvery-gray, better. Bluish-black, damn near perfect. Grayish-green? JACKPOT, BABY!

Green? A green sky? Yes. I hate to be a fan of such “ugly” skies, because they’re usually associated with tornados, and I am, of course, not a fan of the destruction they can bring. Still, we can’t help what we love, right? These skies are really a sight to behold. I’ve been living in Tornado Alley for about a year and a half, and I’ve had the privilege of seeing these skies in all their glory. To give Nature the reverence and respect she deserves, I do have to say, these skies are as scary as they are beautiful. (Kind of like a dozen donuts. Beautiful, but deadly. Best admired from afar.)

I’m a coastal city girl, so forgive me for offending you if you happen to be partial to the Plains, but the most impressive thing I’ve been able to identify about this part of the country is the sky before a storm. I’ll take an Omaha sky over an Omaha steak every time!

The good news is, you don’t have to live in this part of the country to experience the—forgive the triteness—awesome power of a good storm. A few years ago, I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I worked on the 47th floor of the tallest building in the city – high up enough to feel the building sway in really strong winds. It was from one of the office windows that I watched one of the most awesome storms I’ve ever have the privilege of seeing. In fact, this is where I came up with the idea of a sky so black it’s green—the standard against which I've come to judge all other skies. These green skies ruined it for the regular ol’ overcast ones. The workhorses. The old faithfuls. The ones who usually bring rain and wind, even if only in amounts that fail to break the threshold of breaking news updates and constant Doppler radar weather maps. You know the ones…the ones where the screen shows only green, the “light” weather, never approaching yellow, pink, or, dare to dream, the red “severe” zone.

Still, there’s something to be said for a simple rainy day, or even an overcast day with no rain at all. You get all the benefits of a more dangerous storm, with few to none of the real threats. You can still drive your car, use your computer, and not worry that the plants you worked so hard to re-pot and make pretty will be destroyed. You don’t have to search your house for a flash light, attempt to turn it on, and then proceed to search your house for some D-batteries. You don’t have to have candles at the ready. You don’t have to pull onto the shoulder of the road because you can’t see a bloomin’ thing and you can’t even follow the taillights of the guy in front of you, because from what you can tell, he just hydroplaned into the oncoming traffic.

So that was the sky. What else do I use to “grade” weather?

Rain.

Rain, rain, rain, and more rain.

Is it raining? Good for at least two points. (A light drizzle might be good for only one.) Is it pouring? Can I hear it coming down on the roof of my house? Good for three.

Is it foggy? And, by “foggy,” I don’t mean the chintzy-ass fog some places get in the early morning, only to have the sun burn it away half an hour later. I mean a heavy, lingering fog. A San Francisco fog. A Monterey fog. The fog of legend. The kind of fog that’s been immortalized in postcards. (“San Francisco on a Cloudy Day” – the postcard is basically blank. White. As if someone forgot to put the actual picture there. But then again, as long as we’re on the subject, I think in the case of SF, it’s more like smog, which is definitely not as cool as fog. As for Monterey, I’m pretty sure it’s far enough away from the big city pollution that it’s all legitimate fog.)

But I digress. (I know…big surprise.)

Is it foggy? Good for at least two points, although the Monterey fog went as high as four on a fairly regular basis.

How about the wind? Is there a breeze blowing at all? If I go outside, can I feel air circulating around me? Good for one. If I stay inside, can I hear it blowing through the trees? Can I hear the screens rattling against my windows? Good for two. Are car alarms going off? Are small children being swept off their feet and blown down the street? Are shingles ripping off the roof? Not so great. Insane winds scare me. No extra points for making me think my house is going to be torn off its foundation. (Plus, ever since I moved to Nebraska, where there are no tall buildings and no mountains to block the wind, strong winds do nothing but aggravate me, especially when I’m in uniform. You see, despite the fact that the U.S. military has some of the most advanced protective gear for chemical and biological warfare, someone has yet to invent a cap that WILL STAY ON YOUR GODDAMN HEAD WHEN IT’S WINDY.)

And now, at last, the smell. Oh, the smell. Come on, don’t look at me like that. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The air smells different when it’s stormy out. In fact, it smells different before, during and after a storm. My personal preference is the way the world smells before a storm. (After a storm, it sometimes smells like wet dog, which is definitely not worthy of any points.)

With all the writing tools I have at my disposal, all the similes, the metaphors, the alliteration, you would think I could come up with some way to describe the smell. But I can’t. All I can say is, for me, it’s the smell of glory. The smell that all is right with the world. The smell that everything’s going to turn out perfectly. (You’ll understand this much better after I get to the second, more complicated reason why I love stormy weather. Also, as long as we’re here, in case you’ve ever wondered if there was a word for the general category of things like similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, etc., there is. They’re tropes. My favorite, in case anyone cares, is zeugma—a way of connecting two or more things, usually some figurative and some literal. Examples: 1. Take your coat, and your attitude, and get out! 2. After their divorce, all they had between them were twenty years and two children. And, as always, since we’re so deeply entrenched in this tangent anyway, it pleases me to inform you that this train of thought has planted the seed for a future blog post. I’ll talk about tropes, and how they can be both a blessing and a curse for writers. [Or, at least, for “serious” writers, or writers who hope to one day be taken seriously, like me.] I’ll address the famous ones, such as simile and metaphor, but I’ll focus on the fun ones. The ones most people have probably never heard of: synecdoche, synesthesia, metonymy, etc.)


And now, for the second reason I prefer “bad weather.” The more complex reason. (Remember? Way back a few paragraphs ago, I said there were two reasons. The first was that I just do.) The second one goes much deeper than the feeling I get when I see gray clouds, feel the heaviness in the air, the foreboding.

Bad weather makes the world smaller. To understand why I see this is as positive thing, you first have to have understand something about me: I have trouble making choices. (Hence the title of this post.)

I’ve always been a pessimist. A glass-is-half-empty/grass-is-always-greener kind of person. I’m pleased to tell you that I feel I’m making pretty good strides toward changing this about myself, but my natural inclination is still toward the negative. (And maybe the gradual shift in my perspective will turn up sometime as yet another future blog post?)

I’m not sure where this attitude comes from, but it’s mine, and I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember. I haven’t studied psychology much, but as far as I can tell, the reason I have such a hard time making decisions—even seemingly insignificant ones—is that I’m afraid I’ll make the “wrong” choice. I’m afraid that whichever way I go, the other way would have been better.

This, of course, begs the question, what is “better?” On my rare (but increasingly more common) optimistic days, I take to heart the last few lines of the poem Summer Storm, by Dana Gioa. It appeared in Writer’s Digest, with an exact publication date of…a while back:


There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won't stay buried.
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
for places it never went
As if life would be better
just by being different.



Better for whom? And in what circumstances? Little details can change everything. If you were in a survival situation in the desert, which would you rather have: plain water or a margarita? Would your answer be different if you were in a survival situation at a wedding with an open bar? Details, people. Details.

Bottom line: I’m afraid I’ll regret whatever it is I chose, and wish I had tried the other path.

This is pretty understandable when it comes to big decisions. How would my life be different if I hadn’t enlisted in the military? How would my life be different if I had gone to Northwestern University, instead Carnegie Mellon? (Not that I regret these things. I’m just making the point.) How would things have turned out if I had slept with Andy Garcia instead of Jimmy Smits? (Oh, wait…that didn’t happen. [Yet…I’m still holding out hope. See what I mean about trying to be more positive?])

The funny thing is, my debilitating “decision disease” seeps into every aspect of my life. You should see me at the grocery store. Choosing a toothpaste should not become a twenty-minute ordeal, and yet, that’s what happens every time I’m faced with the big questions in life: baking soda or hydrogen peroxide? Whitening or extra whitening? Peppermint or spearmint? (And now, of course, the toothpaste manufacturers have gone and made my decision even more difficult, having added flavors like cinnamon mint, vanilla mint, citrus mint, and extreme herbal mint. *sigh.* A while back, Crest came out with a sampler pack that had baby sizes of all four of these. A dream come true!)

I used to be terrible in restaurants, too. Buffalo chicken sandwich or blackened catfish? What if I get the fettuccine alfredo, but wind up jealous of the delicious looking linguine with clam sauce the guy at the next table ordered? Thankfully, this problem has been greatly reduced, thanks to a mostly low-carb way of eating. I do “cheat” here and there, but in general, I’d say I consider about 85% of a typical restaurant menu off limits for me. Even for the dishes I can order, I still usually have to customize them: no potato, double broccoli; no rice, extra veggies. I’m nowhere near as bad as Meg Ryan’s Sally in When Harry Met Sally, but still. I make a small nuisance of myself. I don’t mind, though, and the wait staff never seems to, either.

So now you’re thinking, what on earth does this weird decision disease have to do with this weird girl’s weird love for crappy weather?

Simple: It makes the world smaller. You knew you were going to work out, but weren’t sure if you were going to jog on the trail near your house, or go to the gym. Good news—it’s raining. You’re not going to jog outside. Decision made.

You got home early from work. Are you going to catch your favorite cooking show on TV, or stay outside and clean out your car, which has somehow managed to accumulate more string cheese wrappers and empty Starbucks cups than you’re willing to admit to having put there? (Maybe that’s just me, though. Then again, if it’s not string cheese and coffee cups, I’m willing to bet all of you have some kind of junk in your car, and no clear idea of how it got there.) Guess what? It’s raining. No car cleaning for you. Cooking show it is.

This is only a small part of the deeper meaning crappy weather has for me. The larger part is that the world is so big. It’s so overwhelmingly enormous, and there are so many things I’d like to do. Never does the world seem so expansive as on a clear day. One of those days with no clouds, when the bright blue looks like it goes on forever. (The kind of sky pilots call “severe clear.”) As my perspective shifts toward more positive thinking, I have to admit, I enjoy sunny days much more than I used to. Nevertheless, I feel intimidated by the endlessness, by the infinite possibilities.

On the other hand, when the sky is overcast, visibility is reduced. You can’t see as far, so the world literally appears smaller. More manageable. This makes me feel like maybe I can do everything I need or want to do. Maybe the things I’m working toward will happen. Maybe I will be a famous novelist someday. Maybe I will have a flower garden someday. Maybe I will feel like I’m “earning my keep” in the universe. Maybe I will feel at home in my own skin someday. And if I don’t get started on those things right away, if I’m not plugging away at them constantly, every second of every day, maybe that’s all right, because maybe it’s raining, and it’s okay for me to make some hot chocolate and curl up on the couch with a good book.