Y. Ramanathan wrote in March, 1980 for Monthly Weather Review:
The large-scale forcing F(λ) is the increase of cloudwork function by large-scale processes:
Einstein wanted to see how God’s universe is put together. I heard that in some TV program when we had a sub in my chemistry class back when I was sixteen.
Once when I was in middle school I saw a sunbeam shine through a sky of grey clouds, dripping out gold into the trees outside the school window. I remember being astonished by the contrast between where the light shot through and where it simply couldn’t reach through the clouds. It was as if the sun had cracked them open, like the earth was an egg, finally hatching. Fifteen minutes later, it was raining and the sun was out of sight, out of middle-school mind. Y. Ramanathan was laughing. Einstein put his telescope away. I trudged through puddles, hating seventh grade.
My brother and I liked puzzles for about thirty minutes. On a rainy afternoon when I was seven and he was ten or eleven, we sat upstairs and worked on this 500-piece jigsaw for about two hours. After the first quarter we only worked because we felt that we owed it to ourselves. Thus, the last hour and a half was pure, meticulous childhood turmoil. We gave up when we realized there was just one piece missing, gone, forgotten somewhere in Georgia where our grandma had bought the puzzle for us. Thanks to some horrible fate, our cardboard bear would never have a face. Jake got up and I, lying on the ground, mutely swore I’d never like puzzles again.
contortionist [kuh n-tawr-shuh-nist]: noun
1. a person who performs gymnastic feats involving contorted postures.
2. a person who practices contortion.
The smooth, glazed cardboard, brown fur, bristly as the pine trees around it in the thirty minutes of half-assed entertainment; a fish jumping from some waterfall into a puzzle-piece-shaped hole in the water. A fish jumping into a hole where my fingertips first traced a cardboard cliff of what failed to be the unnamed fish’s destiny: flat, sloped loneliness felt for the first time in a life.
Einstein’s teachers thought he had a learning disability as a child. Did he like puzzles?
Dr. Salzburger was a nice man with two cotton puffs for hair, sandwiching his glistening, liver-spotted scalp. He asked me lots of questions behind half-moon glasses, as I shifted in a burgundy sofa that I hadn’t quite grown into yet. His pretty assistant glided in and out of the room. She gave me apple juice. In the chair, I knew I didn’t have a learning disability. I just knew I was smarter than my teacher, I was lonely, and I hated puzzles.
I have only ever slammed one door. It was in December when I was sixteen years old, to see if the wood could shout at my parents louder than they were at each other. All other doors have either whispered shut or slammed behind me, without my help. And none of them have been able to shout loud enough.
Even at seven, I was too big to fit into a puzzle-piece space. I walked away and looked out the window, to bland clouds, and wondered if I could hear God when he talked to me.
The door-slam was still echoing in the corners of my room. I could hear the word “divorce” like a bullet ricocheting off a metal wall, through the vent in the corner. Louder was the snow falling outside in the dark. I wanted to be as small as possible without making the ants in the kitchen suspicious.
Some contortionists have squeezed themselves so deep into their boxes that they cannot un-contort their ways out. Do they rot there? Do their bones stay in the same positions?
According to David G. Meyer in Psychology, 10th Edition:
Confirmation Bias is a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
The screaming eventually deafened the snow, which glittered like fireflies in streetlight lamps. My window said nothing would be all right. I could swear God heard me sigh. The box tightened around my shoulders, shrinking my breaths one by one. I nodded at my window, at the fireflies, and the streetlights. I wanted a divorce, too.
Y. Ramanathan and his stupid equation are still laughing at me twelve years later. It’s rained for the past two days. I swear that I don’t need him, him or his cloudwork functions. The rain keeps going, no matter how hard you ask it to stop; it doesn’t take research to know rain is incapable of speaking English.
In Georgia I crawl around Grandma’s house, looking for a bear’s head somewhere in the tan shag carpet. The longer it takes to find the piece, the farther away I feel from everything in the room: smell of oranges, translucent floral curtains, 1980s television set, sweat dripping off my upper lips, suspicious ants, skittering away to the sugar and refrigerator.
Driving back home to Virginia I dream in the backseat of fish flying into my mouth. With each one I swallow, two more fly up out of some black hole at my feet. It’s shaped like a puzzle-piece. I ask for chicken nuggets instead of fish sticks when we stop for dinner.
No historical accounts of contortionists report the performers’ bones staying upright within their boxes. Even if they rot there, they can’t stay that way forever.
The screaming stopped and my door stayed closed until 4 a.m. I woke up thirsty, with my light still on and wearing my shoes and jeans. No divorce, but a few years later I’ll look up and thank God. He’ll hear me.
Clouds, especially storm clouds, are notorious not for blocking out the sun’s light, but actually blocking that of the distant stars. This is why it took Einstein decades to fully test his theories of relativity.
Job 36:28—“Which the clouds pour down, they drip upon man abundantly.”
The headless bear in the puzzle waits for his fish patiently under pale blue skies, no clouds. Somewhere in the pine trees, Einstein looks for a clearing, telescope in hand. Somewhere in Georgia, I look for a bear-headed puzzle piece. Somewhere in Indiana I’m sixteen and I fruitlessly look for stars, past glistening snow and past black night clouds. Somewhere it’s raining and to God, I am louder than his thunder and brighter than his lightning. Somewhere today I sip coffee, cookie crumbs sticking in my mustache, a bear’s head that grew tired of waiting and found another puzzle, one just as incomplete but wholly more beautiful than my first few. Perhaps I’m starting to like puzzles again.
I used to think I was something like Job, but today, writing this, I learned that to be a bear is to be much more enlightened. Plus, missing out on a fish is far better than being covered in boils and cursing God.
Somewhere in time, Y. Ramanathan watches a sunbeam shine through a crack in some storm clouds. He knows God’s architectural secrets and has even penned them down, but he doesn’t know the eventual joy of being a bear’s head, drinking coffee, finally sliding into place.
What you just read was a piece I put together for Brian Morrison's intro to creative writing class. It's the first memoir I've ever put together, and I'll hopefully be posting more soon!
The large-scale forcing F(λ) is the increase of cloudwork function by large-scale processes:
Einstein wanted to see how God’s universe is put together. I heard that in some TV program when we had a sub in my chemistry class back when I was sixteen.
Once when I was in middle school I saw a sunbeam shine through a sky of grey clouds, dripping out gold into the trees outside the school window. I remember being astonished by the contrast between where the light shot through and where it simply couldn’t reach through the clouds. It was as if the sun had cracked them open, like the earth was an egg, finally hatching. Fifteen minutes later, it was raining and the sun was out of sight, out of middle-school mind. Y. Ramanathan was laughing. Einstein put his telescope away. I trudged through puddles, hating seventh grade.
My brother and I liked puzzles for about thirty minutes. On a rainy afternoon when I was seven and he was ten or eleven, we sat upstairs and worked on this 500-piece jigsaw for about two hours. After the first quarter we only worked because we felt that we owed it to ourselves. Thus, the last hour and a half was pure, meticulous childhood turmoil. We gave up when we realized there was just one piece missing, gone, forgotten somewhere in Georgia where our grandma had bought the puzzle for us. Thanks to some horrible fate, our cardboard bear would never have a face. Jake got up and I, lying on the ground, mutely swore I’d never like puzzles again.
contortionist [kuh n-tawr-shuh-nist]: noun
1. a person who performs gymnastic feats involving contorted postures.
2. a person who practices contortion.
The smooth, glazed cardboard, brown fur, bristly as the pine trees around it in the thirty minutes of half-assed entertainment; a fish jumping from some waterfall into a puzzle-piece-shaped hole in the water. A fish jumping into a hole where my fingertips first traced a cardboard cliff of what failed to be the unnamed fish’s destiny: flat, sloped loneliness felt for the first time in a life.
Einstein’s teachers thought he had a learning disability as a child. Did he like puzzles?
Dr. Salzburger was a nice man with two cotton puffs for hair, sandwiching his glistening, liver-spotted scalp. He asked me lots of questions behind half-moon glasses, as I shifted in a burgundy sofa that I hadn’t quite grown into yet. His pretty assistant glided in and out of the room. She gave me apple juice. In the chair, I knew I didn’t have a learning disability. I just knew I was smarter than my teacher, I was lonely, and I hated puzzles.
I have only ever slammed one door. It was in December when I was sixteen years old, to see if the wood could shout at my parents louder than they were at each other. All other doors have either whispered shut or slammed behind me, without my help. And none of them have been able to shout loud enough.
Even at seven, I was too big to fit into a puzzle-piece space. I walked away and looked out the window, to bland clouds, and wondered if I could hear God when he talked to me.
The door-slam was still echoing in the corners of my room. I could hear the word “divorce” like a bullet ricocheting off a metal wall, through the vent in the corner. Louder was the snow falling outside in the dark. I wanted to be as small as possible without making the ants in the kitchen suspicious.
Some contortionists have squeezed themselves so deep into their boxes that they cannot un-contort their ways out. Do they rot there? Do their bones stay in the same positions?
According to David G. Meyer in Psychology, 10th Edition:
Confirmation Bias is a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
The screaming eventually deafened the snow, which glittered like fireflies in streetlight lamps. My window said nothing would be all right. I could swear God heard me sigh. The box tightened around my shoulders, shrinking my breaths one by one. I nodded at my window, at the fireflies, and the streetlights. I wanted a divorce, too.
Y. Ramanathan and his stupid equation are still laughing at me twelve years later. It’s rained for the past two days. I swear that I don’t need him, him or his cloudwork functions. The rain keeps going, no matter how hard you ask it to stop; it doesn’t take research to know rain is incapable of speaking English.
In Georgia I crawl around Grandma’s house, looking for a bear’s head somewhere in the tan shag carpet. The longer it takes to find the piece, the farther away I feel from everything in the room: smell of oranges, translucent floral curtains, 1980s television set, sweat dripping off my upper lips, suspicious ants, skittering away to the sugar and refrigerator.
Driving back home to Virginia I dream in the backseat of fish flying into my mouth. With each one I swallow, two more fly up out of some black hole at my feet. It’s shaped like a puzzle-piece. I ask for chicken nuggets instead of fish sticks when we stop for dinner.
No historical accounts of contortionists report the performers’ bones staying upright within their boxes. Even if they rot there, they can’t stay that way forever.
The screaming stopped and my door stayed closed until 4 a.m. I woke up thirsty, with my light still on and wearing my shoes and jeans. No divorce, but a few years later I’ll look up and thank God. He’ll hear me.
Clouds, especially storm clouds, are notorious not for blocking out the sun’s light, but actually blocking that of the distant stars. This is why it took Einstein decades to fully test his theories of relativity.
Job 36:28—“Which the clouds pour down, they drip upon man abundantly.”
The headless bear in the puzzle waits for his fish patiently under pale blue skies, no clouds. Somewhere in the pine trees, Einstein looks for a clearing, telescope in hand. Somewhere in Georgia, I look for a bear-headed puzzle piece. Somewhere in Indiana I’m sixteen and I fruitlessly look for stars, past glistening snow and past black night clouds. Somewhere it’s raining and to God, I am louder than his thunder and brighter than his lightning. Somewhere today I sip coffee, cookie crumbs sticking in my mustache, a bear’s head that grew tired of waiting and found another puzzle, one just as incomplete but wholly more beautiful than my first few. Perhaps I’m starting to like puzzles again.
I used to think I was something like Job, but today, writing this, I learned that to be a bear is to be much more enlightened. Plus, missing out on a fish is far better than being covered in boils and cursing God.
Somewhere in time, Y. Ramanathan watches a sunbeam shine through a crack in some storm clouds. He knows God’s architectural secrets and has even penned them down, but he doesn’t know the eventual joy of being a bear’s head, drinking coffee, finally sliding into place.
What you just read was a piece I put together for Brian Morrison's intro to creative writing class. It's the first memoir I've ever put together, and I'll hopefully be posting more soon!