Rain Gauge

Measuring change, making sense of identity. Again.

“Precipitation worsens expressed sentiment.”
—PLOS ONE Journal, “Weather Impacts Expressed Sentiment” April 2018.

You can order a Happy Light for $29.99 and have it shipped to your home in two days. Maybe you’ve heard of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder? When we contemplate how weather affects mood, this well-known seasonal depression is where the conversation tends to start—and end. Why go any further, after all? We can prescribe “light therapy” to carry SAD-sufferers through the Dark Months: problem, meet market-provided solution. Surprisingly, this is largely where scientists have stopped, too. Until recently, the majority of studies on weather’s impact on psychological state have focused on seasons, leaving the influence of daily weather variations less explored.

As a person who has historically been more preoccupied with the fluctuations of my own internal weather than meteorological conditions, I hadn’t assigned any real brain space to the weather’s influence on mood. Oh, I felt fleeting sympathy for loved ones struggling with SAD, sure. I knew they suffered, but I only knew it in the abstract. I didn’t really get it until this winter when, without warning, the sun transformed from a distant, benign force I barely thought about to my own personal Happy Light. And when it clicked off with endless rainfall or brooding clouds, I became a person who talked about the weather too much. I became a person who checked the forecast religiously. I became a person who begged please stop raining in an Instagram caption, prompting the person who’s known me the very longest in this world (my mother, obviously) to comment:

You used to love the rain.

Cue spiral.

Now, loving rain is not a personality type. Neither is black nail polish or wearing skinny jeans or watching foreign films or—let me get a little more current with my choices and thus, a little more uncomfortable—enjoying natural wine, feeling intensely opposed to Stanley Cup™ Culture, getting up at 5 am to run. These are preferences, not signifiers. Or at least, that is what I remind myself, although I do believe that taken together, these details, these choices, can reveal some of a person’s story. What we choose can have something to say about who we are. Writer Nora Ephron captured this insight in the memorable coffee order scene from You’ve Got Mail:

“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino."

We are all eager for something to hang our sense of self on. So, most of my life, I’ve liked rain. And I liked cold weather (even though I had zero long-term living experience in any kind of cold climate to back it up). The fact that my weather preference was in the minority only strengthened it. I was a person who liked rain and disliked summer! Yes! Eternal days of sunshine and heat, booooooring. Give me the drama of thunder, grey skies, clouds, long coats, splashy puddles. Rain didn’t make me sad like it made everyone else; it made me contemplative and dreamy, wistful, maybe even melancholy, but in a delicious way. It turned me into a main character (ugh); it gave space for the imagination.

Do you know where space for imagination goes when your three small children have been cooped up inside for rainy days on end?

Yeah okay, my season of life has changed since college. I can’t blame this recent shift in weather preference on parenting, though; I’ve been one for seven years and have done time indoors with tiny kids in bad weather. It feels more like a minor rewiring of who I am. What rain used to do for my mood, sunlight is doing now. There is absolutely nothing unique about this. Studies have shown that sunshine can positively influence stock markets, inspire more generous tipping, and boost the success rate of a flirtatious advance. The largest study ever conducted on the relationship between meteorological conditions and the sentiment of human expressions crawled 3.5 billion social media posts over 5 years to evaluate sentiment and found that “cold temperatures, hot temperatures, precipitation, narrower daily temperature ranges, humidity, and cloud cover are all associated with worsened expressions of sentiment, even when excluding weather-related posts.”

Perhaps an unrelated undergraduate research paper I stumbled across sums it up best: “However, sunshine was identified as the crucial factor for mood adjustment.”

Isn’t that the truth.

After days of rain or heavy, gray clouds sagging with the possibility of rain, the sun comes out. The ceiling of the sky, I swear, vaults—offering us a sweet, hypnotic relief of blue. Serotonin spikes. My problems are basically solved! I turn music up, smile more, sail forward in a brief flood of benevolence toward the world. And then I settle down and wonder uncomfortably how I became a cliché, wonder what it means that I’m changing. I’ve written about changing my mind before, struggling through some of the same questions. Somewhere along the way for me, integrity became synonymous with immovable.

The need to constantly define ourselves feels like a uniquely contemporary problem. Technology and the internet have reshaped connection and communication. As social media grants access to more lives and parts of lives (including our own) than we ever had before, we end up constantly performing who we are, measuring others and ourselves, adjusting in real-time. Online participation is expression. Logging on launches a flood of opportunities to make a choice about what we think, feel, and say. (Even silence via digital lurking is a statement.) Of course, “real life” presents the same opportunities to choose—what we wear to the party, how we respond to a tasteless joke, what we do upon hearing the bad news—but they unfold differently in the context of our small, personal lives. Online, the chances to express ourselves and define our point of view inundate us at a volume that no human can really manage.

The inane and highly-specific “POV” Reels Instagram keeps suggesting for me are just another annoying social media trend, but I think they do offer a glimpse of how desperately we’re all trying to say who we are and what it’s like to be us. It’s a big world. Crafting our unique identity is an understandable attempt to carve out our place in it. My resistance to even slight shifts in my identity is disappointing, but not surprising in our cultural moment. Just take a look at the state of society—fragmented by the surge of identity politics and culture wars. We’re so busy putting our POV out there we’ve become blind to the world viewed from any other angle.

If I can feel unsettled by a tiny change in my weather preferences, no wonder our common life is suffocating under polarization. It’s disorienting to feel differently than you always had or thought you should. How are we going to change our minds about issues that actually matter? How can we convince each other it’s safe to leave our identity cocoons and collaborate with those who think differently from us? I don’t know the answer to this challenge any more than I know why suddenly I want nothing to do with rain.

I’m sitting by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, watching a distant airplane seam the sky, criscrossing fading contrails of other planes. I’m soaking up the sunlight like I’ve never seen it before. Outside, a crowd of little kids are playing in it, punctuating the air with happy shrieks. Somehow, I have to teach mine how to figure out who they are in an identity-obsessed world—and how to be okay when they evolve. How to understand that change is necessary for growth, just like sun and, of course, rain.

current status

reading :: Lost & Found (Kathryn Schulz) // This memoir by Pulitzer winner Kathryn Schulz is a beautiful meditation on grief and loss—but also love, particularly finding it for the first time. Schulz’s sentences are packed with insights that are both surprising and lovely; reading them gives the sensation of taking a sudden turn you didn’t see coming and stumbling upon a memorable view.

cooking :: Citrusy Cheesecake (Alison Roman) // Roman can light up a text thread of Millennial women like almost nothing else, but she can also produce annoyingly easy and delicious recipes like this very low-maintenance take on cheesecake (no water bath!)…so we all keep tuning in. My tip is to use Ritz crackers for the crust (as she suggests in her cookbook Nothing Fancy) to enjoy a perfect balance of sweet and salty.

loving :: 90-second rice // The truth is that I’m exceedingly grateful for these microwavable packs of rice lately. I know I could prep my own seasoned rice in advance, but that misses the point entirely, which is that they are EASY. I keep a few around for days when we need to stretch the leftovers to feed two adults lunch or whip up a super fast meal. We always have eggs, canned beans, and hot sauce on hand, which is enough to make a whole meal. Any extra greens or roasted veg kicking around in the fridge just level it up.

Winter in Southern Louisiana, Ellsworth Woodward, 1911.

reading :: Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman) // A book about time management is not one I’d normally put top of my stack, but this came highly recommended from Linsday DeLoach Jones. She was right! Burkeman’s sober yet lighthearted, honest, philosophical exploration of time, resources, and finitude have forced me to confront some illusions I didn’t realize I had about my time and talent. Maybe it’s the moment of life I’m reading it, but some of Burkeman’s advice has already proved immensely helpful for me in everything from my marriage to my Friday morning routine—equally inspiring me to do more and to do less.

listening :: In a real music rut since December, I’m mostly just antsy for my next discovery. Relived the sweatiest night of my entire life by listening to The Almost’s 2007 Southern Weather album and discovering it’s still great. / Spacey Jane dropped a new song with Benee and I’m into her dreamy vocals on it. / Spotify served me this 2001 Broken Social Scene instrumental track on an early morning drive with the sun casting the clouds briefly in rose gold and the moment felt hushed and monumental. / Lengthening days breathe a little possibility into the evening routine and wondering/wandering by kehlani is good for the post-bedtime kitchen groove.

drinking :: green colada // It’s a lot of protein shakes and smoothies for me right now, and I’m adding giant handfuls of spinach whenever I can to boost iron intake. The green colada is a nice change from my normal chocolate-cherry-almond routine. All you need is coconut milk, frozen pineapple, a banana, half an avocado, and lots of raw spinach — plus protein powder if that’s your jam.

Untitled (from The Kitchen Table series), 1990-2010, Carrie Mae Weems

loving :: delete the date // Stumbled upon this little data clean-up trick somewhere on the internet, and I have really been enjoying the practice. Essentially, every day, you type in that day’s date (not including the year) in your Photos app, sort through all the content that comes up, and delete what you no longer need. If you do it every day, it makes freeing up your phone storage significantly less overwhelming. For me, the immediate outcome is mostly floods of sentiment for days gone by, tinier babies, small forgotten joys. A good result either way.

reading :: “The Struggle to Be Human” (Ian Leslie) // I’ve read a lot of takes on Chat GPT, the AI-powered chatbot that produces human-sounding text, but this is a really interesting one. Leslie argues that the problem is not so much the advent of machines that can “think” like humans—but rather, that we’ve created a flattened, dulled world where humans aren’t really thinking like humans at all: “What I’m interested in is how humans have been laying the groundwork for bots to take over, even in areas where we are meant to be inimitable - in ideas, music, storytelling and democratic discourse. AI-generated culture and human-made culture are converging from both ends. As the machines learn how to emulate us, we are making it easier for them, by becoming more like the machines”

reading :: “Tipping Is Weird Now” (The Atlantic) // I’m always grateful when someone pins down a trend or phenomenon I’ve been sensing but hadn’t articulated, and Charlie Warzel does that for the new era of tipping. With modern point-of-sale technology, the option to tip is more prominent than ever before, creating an “inescapable culture of tipping.” My policy has always been that if I have money enough to purchase the good or service, I have money enough to tip generously—and we are all being prompted to tip more frequently and more broadly than ever before. Do you tip for a drip coffee? Do you tip for a cookie that was just bagged out of the pastry case and handed to you? Warzel does a good job of winding carefully through the nuances of a complex shift in cultural expectations and behavior.

sounds good

crunch of gravel underfoot / faintly musical clink of two pieces of sidewalk chalk hitting each other / “don’t stop” whispered in your ear / birdsong when it’s still dark outside / distant train whistle / buzz of neighbor’s lawnmower / sudden whoosh-swirl of immersion upon jumping into water / kid giggles / ragged rapid breath smoothing out after the hard part is over / all bodies of water in motion: hiss of wave, babble of brook, and so on / wind tossing trees heavy with summer leaves / crisp slap of a good high-five / hard thwack of tennis balls in play / emphatic zzzzzzt of opinionated zippers / piano in an otherwise silent room / loons calling over the lake / wood popping in the fire

last words from someone else

Until next time — enjoy a giant heap of the best french fries you can access, soak up every minute of sunshine you get, introduce yourself to grief bacon.