Weekly Skylights: The Tripod Looks to the Clouds (Mar. 2)

Joey Cifelli ’23

A&E Editor

Welcome back everyone, it’s good to see all of you. I hope your time away from school was restful, and also, using a new word of the week, restorative. I wonder if anyone expected anything other than a gray, blustery day today. Last semester, I might have said this would be an omen of terrible things to come. Well, sorry, but this column’s going to be an absolute font of positivity this time around. At least to the extent that it doesn’t become overwhelmingly gauche. 

Anyway, here’s something to appreciate about the bitter cold. If nothing else, simply walking outside grants you the same level of wakefulness as several cups of morning brew. And for those who prefer to bask in the sunnier side of the weather, your week is looking up.  8.6/10.

I’d like to tell you a little story about curtains. As a child I was completely enamored with a set of blue curtains my family purchased randomly one day. Thinking back on it, we probably needed curtains. It is difficult at that age to make oneself care enough to notice things like that.

I remember their softness well. I liked to bundle myself up in them and fall asleep behind the couch in the family room. If I was quiet while I enacted this scheme no one would be able to find me back there, which I enjoyed. There was only so much slack to the curtains, however, before I would begin yanking on the pole they attached themselves to. I tried to avoid doing this, but clearly I didn’t try hard enough because one day I yanked too hard and the entire apparatus came crashing down. I don’t know if I ever learned my lesson. If there was one. 7.6/10. 

My brother told me a tall tale once about why the ocean was salty. I’m reminded of it now as I look at the sky today and think of those crystalline, flaky clouds. A long time ago, there was a man who, through some way or another, saved the life of a powerful genie. In return, the genie granted the man one wish. Now, in this time and place, salt was a treasure more valuable than gold. The man wished for a device which could make as much salt as he wanted, forever. The genie granted his wish, and as you can imagine the man’s life became filled with riches and finery beyond imagination. For a time. 8.2/10.

As his wealth increased, so did his paranoia. The man became convinced that someone would try to steal away his magic salt-making machine. He grew so anxious that in everyone he saw there hid a thief, waiting for that moment when he let down his guard. One day the man snapped. He carried his machine onto a small rowboat and sailed far away from land, where no one could sneak up on him. At last, he could relax. He smiled and turned on his machine, sifting through the salt like grains of sand. So obsessed was he that he paid no mind to the storm rapidly approaching from the horizon. By the time the man noticed his boat rocking up and down in the large swells, it was too late. Despite his frantic scrambling and yelling, the rowboat soon capsized. The man sank to the bottom of the ocean clutching his magic machine, which he had never turned off. The machine lies there to this day, sunken in a forgotten crevice on the seafloor, salt spewing from it endlessly. 8.8/10.