I pay attention to the weather a lot. I always have. I like the weather, it's so unpredictable, yet nothing has more time spent on predicting it. I like that.
When I was younger I wanted to be a meteorologist, this would have been eighth grade. I decided against it when I figured out that there were very few jobs in the field (not the big detractor) and that many of those positions involved spending some time standing in front of a camera (that's the big deal). I think this was right after I decided against being a writer, for a living that is, because there was no point - all the good stories had already been told. I knew that all the forms of conflict had been known for millenia and was influenced by someone who said that all a writer could hope to do was to put a spin on a story that had already been told, because there were no untold stories left. I thought that if I couldn't come up with anything new because there was nothing, that I might as well become a weather prognosticator. It is no small coincidence that this coincided with taking Earth Sciences from Mr. Stark. He had me at the front table sitting right in front of Christy Crichlow, who was hands down my biggest rival. I don't mean nemesis or anything negative, just that we were rivals - if someone was going to score higher on a particular unit than had ever been scored before (or at least that's what we were told), who was going to be, Christy or me? With the true-sight of retrospection that decades gives a man, I think that competing with Christy academically was probably the only way I knew how to flirt with her. That's all I remember, Christy was cute and smart, and I could really get into this whole heavy math, fluid dynamics thing that Mr. Stark was talking about.
To show the influence that this particular teacher had over me that year, I also wanted to be a vulcanologist and geologist that year, and probably other things I've forgotten in the intermittent 25 years. Interestingly enough, I did not want to be a science teacher, or any other kind of teacher at that point. Even then I was gifted with brief moments of insight and knew that as good a student as I was, that I could still cause headaches, so what must it be like to have a classroom full of kids who didn't even care as much as I did. I think this was the first year that I really began to dislike some of my fellow students solely based on the fact that they were making it harder for me to get a good education.
Anyway, my goal when I started writing this was to mention that two years ago in Keizer it was 85 degrees at 7:45 am when I was on my 4th of July walk - this year, it was 53 degrees at 7:38 am here in Coquille. What a difference proximity to the ocean makes. Oh, and it was heavily foggy today, which is not something I expected to see on July 4th.
