Why can't human beings control the weather?

People are always trying to control the weather, in their personal relationships, their work environment, or in the big-picture areas of human destiny. But this can’t be done, not reliably, not consistently, so wouldn’t we be happier, calmer, less driven and crazy, if we put less effort into trying to make everything turn out the way we wish it would?

WHY CAN’T HUMAN BEINGS CONTROL THE WEATHER? BY ELEANOR LERMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 46

And another thing. Why don’t we give dinner parties?

There were a lot of other things Nan’s boyfriend, Ryan, said to her after that but that was the one she focused on, because she had heard all the others before. He had been saying things like this to her for weeks, repeating and adding to a detailed list of her flaws, as he saw them. You don’t have any friends. All you do is work and watch tv. I mean, you’ve been really great to me but I can’t help how I feel—I’m bored.

Eventually, after the dinner party remark Nan had come up with an answer, but even she knew it would probably just make him angrier, since of course, serving fancy meals to invited guests was not the real subject of his complaint. Where would we have these dinner parties? she asked. The dining area in their small apartment was a small café table and two lattice-back metal chairs in an alcove.

Ryan left a couple of days later, ending their decade-long relationship by moving in with a friend who lived further out on Long Island. Nan wasn’t so much shocked by this—really, she knew it was coming—as she was left in a state of foggy depression, in part because she felt like she had been through this before, and failed the same way. She was now in her early fifties; in her thirties, she had lived for a long time with a woman named Sheila, an aspiring actress who had also told her, after a number of years together, that hey, she’d been great—helpful, supportive, all that—but Sheila wanted something else. Something more.