At one point I was obsessed with the weather.  I had moved from California to study literature in Massachusetts, and I ignored everyone who told me it would be a rough transition.  I shouldn’t have.  Massachusetts stunned me with autumns that made trees sizzle with color, as though they were on fire; it caught me off guard with a summer sun that beat down on me with deadpan, relentless intensity.  It bewildered me with long, macabre winters that made me miss class because I hadn’t budgeted enough time to dig my car out of icy snowdrifts.

I started watching the weather every night.  I was addicted to it the way some people become addicted to soap operas.  It was grand entertainment.  How many ways can you say “Partly cloudy with chance of showers”?

You can say “Partly cloudy with a chance of showers.”

Or: “Partly cloudy with chance of showers.”

I began to wonder how difficult it would be to change careers.  I wanted to be a weatherman. Did you actually need to have some sort of background in science so you could track weather patterns and draw conclusions? Or could you just wear a tie and read text off a teleprompter that’s beamed to you from some all-purpose weather center?  I hoped for the second option.  I would simply ask to not wear a tie.  I hate ties.

Sometimes I practiced.  I said to someone I knew, “Tomorrow might very well be warmer.  There’s a thermal updrift in the equinox that may collide with a storm front.”

He replied, “I think it would be good if you didn’t talk to me for a while.”

Still, for the most part everyone humored me. After all, there was a more obvious reason to follow the weather obsessively: local weatherwoman Mish Michaels usually wore red and was always upbeat. Practically everyone I knew (including women) admitted, “Yeah, it’s good to watch the weather because you can watch Mish.”

I wasn’t fooling everyone, though.  At some point, during a lengthy rant about the weather, my friend interrupted: “Don’t you have a stack of papers to grade?  Stop procrastinating.”

It got worse.  I found myself in an IRC chat room devoted to local weather.  And you know who joined us?  Someone who claimed to be a local TV weatherperson.  In fact, he was chatting with us inbetween going on TV to do the weather segments.  Or so he claimed.  Someone typed, “Prove it.  Next time you go on, say that the Boston #weather channel rules!”

He replied “No, I can’t do that. But I can say that the storm will be crashing down, and I’ll put an emphasis on crashing so you know I’m on the level.”

I watched the local news intently.  A sandy haired, nerdy looking man stepped in front of the camera.  Why, it was none other than local weatherman Todd Gross.

Todd said, “Over the weekend, you’ll see that the storm will come crashing down.” He made a swooping gesture with his hands.

He finished the segment and came back online. I typed excitedly at him, “That was great!  How do you become a weatherman, anyway?”

He said, “Usually you need to be a meteorologist.  That gives you a background in science. so you can track weather patterns and draw conclusions.”

I said, “So Mish Michaels has all that?”

He said, “Well…some of them have the ‘look’ and don’t need to become a meteorologist.”

Okay.  So maybe I had some challenges there.  I could offer a kind of boyish charm, if you were drunk enough, but I sure as hell wasn’t Mish Michaels.  Still, my obsession with the weather continued undeterred.

None of this was about procrastinating my studies, my friend’s opinion notwithstanding.  I think it was more about trying to assert some kind of control over my existence.  I wanted to make myself feel better about the amorphous, logic-deprived environment of graduate school, where I was working long hours but had no idea if I’d ever get a job.  If I could control the mysterious East Coast weather, I could control my mysterious East Coast life.  I think this is how I felt, because I gradually got used to Boston and forgot about the weather—although I was glad to eventually return to California and begin a process of thawing out that ended sometime last month.

Still, yesterday I felt the faintest hint of my obsession return. I stepped outside and saw that it was pouring down rain.  In California.  In June.  I drove to work with torrents lashing my windshield.  Typically, all the other California drivers thought they were Aquaman and went speeding down the highway at 80 miles an hour.  I think I saw pedestrian body parts flying around. I thought, “Maybe it’s not too late to get that scientific background after all.  I can analyze patterns.  I can draw conclusions.  I can figure out how to look good in red.”

David Letterman started off as a weatherman.  I remember reading an interview with him in which he commiserated with his former colleagues, saying that being a weatherperson was a “dead end job.” I don’t believe him.  I bet when it’s late at night and everyone’s asleep, he pulls out the old weatherboard and stands in front of it and basks in that kind of control and power that even ratings and fame and millions of dollars can’t give him.

Partly cloudy with chance of rain.

Partly cloudy with chance of rain.

I’m still positive that I’d be a natural.