Nobody ever mentions the weather

Can make or break your day

- Oasis, “Hello”

Every morning when I wake up, I try to check the weather on my laptop, or, lately, my phone (I recently made the major leap to an iPhone from a t-phone, the t standing for “taped-together”). Every morning, I’m surprised how large an effect it has on my mood. 72 degrees makes me smile. 27 degrees makes me gird my loins and attempt to tap into my New England roots. A raincloud makes me angry that I have an irrational hatred of umbrellas.

Unless you’re boycotting CubMail, you probably received an email on Wednesday from Columbia Housing entitled, “Unseasonably High Temperatures.” This missive surely sparked some tired global warming jokes, and the line “Most university buildings are not able to supply both heating and cooling simultaneously” probably qualified as the understatement of the year for anyone who has lived in Columbia housing for more than three months.

For me, the humor of this email from Housing (beyond its roundabout recognition of our centuries-old temperature management system) came in its assumption that Columbia students needed to be reminded about the weather. And you know what? This assumption wasn’t entirely wrong.

As college students, we live an abnormal portion of our lives in our heads. Reading, writing, doing problem sets—all these are mental activities. It’s easy to neglect our bodies, but it’s impossible to ignore them. The weather is a sometimes gentle, sometimes cruel reminder of that. We have to go outside to get where we’re going. If it’s 72 degrees or 27 degrees, if it’s snowing or sunny, we’re going to have to reckon with the elements one way or the other.

Facing the weather lets us out of not only the bubble of our minds, but the Columbia bubble as well. Much as we like to think we’re the center of the universe, we do not, in fact, have our own climate.

The weather reminds us, too, that we can’t control everything. We all care too much about stupid things, things outside of our control. You or I might get mad when the subway is running slowly, when the line is too long at Joe, or when an elevator is out of service. We’re angrier or happier than we should be when we see the forecast on our screens each morning because we know we can do absolutely nothing about it.

The offhand comments we make about the weather as we walk across campus with friends or when we run into someone we haven’t seen in a while aren’t just conversation fillers or manifestations of a fear of silence. They’re also acknowledgments, in the midst of the narrow, control-obsessed environment of Columbia, that we’re all just pretty small in the end. Talking about the weather, much maligned by small talk haters everywhere, can be a nod toward humility in a place that is none too humble. And that never goes out of season.

Sam Klug is a senior majoring in History and is a bit of an old soul at 23. He even enjoys listening to old, soul music (Al Green, Diana Ross, etc.) on a regular basis.