Waking Up and Moving On

08 Feb, 2026

Well, friends, this weekend’s homework—which I’ll have to get back to after tapping out this little missive—has confirmed suspicions that have been growing over the past year: namely, that I’m not cut out to be an atmospheric scientist, or any variety of scientist at all. But “not cut out” is less a revelation about my brainpower, and more about stylistic affinity.

I’d already come to the obvious conclusion that so much involvement with screens—models, soundings, eye-straining marked-up surface maps—set me on edge. All the same, interpreting that digitally displayed data, discovering what it might tell you, was and is fascinating, a more adult-level version of cracking and talking in code. Maybe scanning the signs to bring forth a prognostication would balance out all the electronic fatigue.

That could have been the case, had that been all there was to it. But the research articles—good god, it’s rare that I see such a glut of turning—seemingly trying to turn—discussion of totally engrossing subject matter into a regulated substance-level soporific. There I was, eager to read about the intricacies and enigmas of hail formation, and found myself two minutes later wiping drool off my chin. What a teeth-pulling struggle it was to wade through all the passive constructions and stylistic knot-tying resulting from the research teams’ absolute terror of revealing that merely subjective beings were doing the best they could to remove all trace of humanity, well-informed or -reasoned or -calculated or not, from their investigation! As if refusing the reality that science is a practice created and sustained by embodied beings, usually for the ostensible benefit of embodied beings. All the madness of some poor particle or leaf speck getting sucked up into a storm’s updraft and getting recruited as the surface to which ice and/or liquid water will glom on, the insane shapes and sizes the hailstone assumes, the wonderment about its density not necessarily correlating with its potential to smash up whatever it hits when it heads out of a cloud: you can read through the dry lines (not meteorological dry lines!) of text and glimpse all the drama, but I, at least, was left wondering whether the authors of this article felt anything at all about what they were describing.

Of course, once you reach the level where you’re publishing in scientific research journals, you’ve been schooled in conforming yourself to the expected style; I don’t want to blame the authors for following guidelines that will allow them to keep doing what they love. And maybe by that point, it doesn’t feel as if your enthusiasm has been forcibly squeezed out of the proofs you’re elaborating or interpretations you’re trying to work through, expression of that ardor confined to field work or (one hopes) the classroom. I also understand how there could be a certain giddiness in knowing how to wield this genre’s sign and code systems, deciphering the excitement hiding behind a symbol or abbreviation or couple of lines of author-date references stuck in the middle of a sentence.

Could be. And I have a good grasp of how the most extreme versions of rationalism have seeped into many of the ways we view the world: it’s inconceivable to think you could argue with supposedly objective data, whether that’s to do with fluid dynamics or “metrics” that supposedly prove a nonprofit neighborhood art program for kids isn’t “effective.” But it’s an especially sad business to ponder how the often engaging writing of the big naturalists, Charles Darwin in particular, has mostly been preserved these days in the dread unserious realm of “popular science,” physics or anthropology lite.¹ I’ve frequently heard in my classes absolute puzzlement about the general public not understanding or taking seriously a variety of weather information. It’s no wonder, if researchers are using the same machine-talk with said public that they use with each other, and if TV meteorologists only have a couple of minutes to interpret the processes they’re seeing to distracted viewers—or are encouraged to take up the opposite side of the enthusiasm spectrum and hype up the drama when a storm looms somewhere, the windbreaker-clad correspondent struggling to maintain balance in a gale while stating the obvious: yep, things look pretty bad, and I’m an idiot for letting myself be forced to stand out here. Don’t do this, viewers. Even the National Weather Service’s forecast discussion section, glossary and all, is far too technical for the average citizen to make much sense of.

It’s here where I thought I might be of service in the grand realm of meteorology: science communication. After all, I’ve worked as a translator, even of legal and technical texts (and let me tell you, ball bearing installation manuals can be a surprising amount of fun). But when the translator herself is put to sleep by the materials in front of her, the process just isn’t going to work.

Back in a former life, I remember compiling texts to use for my doctoral exams, one of which was on Nietzsche. My advisor for that one agreed with my rationale for discarding one of the books. For in it, Friedrich friggin’ Nietzsche, mustachioed hiker and headache sufferer and early adopter of a weird typewriter, participant in a doomed ménage, philosophical rabble rouser and final and prolonged sufferer of catatonia while his sister used his texts for nefarious purposes, had been turned by the scholar from incomparable character into a systematized, supremely boring analytic thinker. Something fundamentally wrong had been done in that scholar’s writing; he may never have understood at all something very basic about his subject. My advisor and I would leave him to it without further engagement.

There’s nothing for me to do here within this particular science or its protocols; there’s no situation about the field itself that should be changed, if its practitioners are happy with it and it provides the information and solid interpretation it’s all meant to supply. The thing for me to do, rather, is maintain my interest in the phenomena themselves, while recognizing that my beating heart lives for the literary, and that it’s OK not to pursue the weather any further through official channels.

You’d better bet, though, that for as long as class lasts, I’ll keep throwing the wrench of warm-blooded poetic-descriptive language into the mix—while, imagine this, refraining from baseless speculation or error—and seeing if the spark manages to catch.

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