I’m flying to London on Saturday. I’ve been there three times before, each marked by some slightly disembodying fever dreamish circumstance. The first time, I had mono – or glandular fever, since I was in the UK – and wasn’t supposed to travel, but I was 20 and couldn’t imagine forfeiting the money I’d spent on my flight. I remember lots of things about the trip: falling asleep in St. James Park. Stumbling through the Victoria and Albert with eyes… Read more »
Posts By: Claire
On My Mind
Do people ever cite “a record label turning down The Beatles” and “Michael Jordan not making his JV basketball team” as part of the same pep talk re: rejection and finding success afterward? I feel like they’re examples that might get conflated even though they have nothing in common outside of “first not success, then massive success.” That said, maybe placing them both in the same conversation is smart, rhetorically, because it broadens the circumstances/causes for “not success then success”… Read more »
Boulder
I’ve been whitewater rafting twice (the first time, in Gatlinburg when I was 11, was the more dramatic on its surface – people falling out of boats, people losing their swimsuits, etc – but the second, in the Tetons two years later, very clearly had much more force of nature behind it and beneath the rapids) and tubing once (on the Esopus Creek up in Phoenicia, NY). Last week I was in Boulder just 12 hours after “Tube to Work… Read more »
Books of 2019, Part 5
The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert: I held off reading this for a long time – not to bury my head in the sand about climate change, but to try to keep it from becoming the only thing that I think about all day, every day (when I’m not thinking about Sagan-adjacent meaning of life things). It was far less apocalyptic and depressing than I expected, without being overly optimistic. Panic in Level Four, by Richard Preston: Unfortunately, the primary… Read more »
Non-sequit(emp)ur(a)
Titled thus because I keep thinking of these as “brain fritters.” These are the digressions that I removed from an article I’m working on, because although deep fried, they’re also half baked. 1. When I was on vacation with my family in Hawaii in 1999, there was a feature on Heather Graham, who headlined whatever the positive version of their list was; a year or two later, she fell to their negative version with the sarcastic commentary, “What’s next? A… Read more »
Best to stay hydrated
I thought my days of not being able to open things were truly behind me. I know all the tricks – run the jar under hot water, use a towel for better grippage, puncture the lid’s seal with a can opener. But yesterday a bottle of seltzer had me thinking I might never experience the joy of bubbles on my tongue again. Never mind that I had only just returned from the store across the street where the seltzer was… Read more »
The Real Real
I’ve lately become especially attuned to and fascinated by the popularity of “behind the scenes” content – not the big-reveal-instagram-vs-reality flourish in which an influencer might show real life versus online projection, but the more straightforward “making of” (the podcast, the TV show, the writing process behind the essay…). The reasons for their popularity aren’t mystifying; people love to draw back the curtain and feel that they’re in on how the sausage is made. What intrigues me is the question… Read more »
Reduce, Reuse, Recital
Today I was in a recital for the first time since…probably age 18. I was in concerts/performances in college and I’ve played shows as an adult, but this was the first legitimate recital in quite some time. I did play harp on one piece during my cousin’s masters of music recital, but even that was more than a decade ago. And, actually, all of my recitals took place between the ages of 14 and 18, which meant I never experienced… Read more »
Not Zone (sorry)
I just finished watching The Hot Zone (obviously, I watched Outbreak back in the day – I think I’ve heard this referred to as a remake, which doesn’t make sense; it’s based on the same real events, yes, but they’re both fictionalized and thus don’t actually have the same plots, and this one is a miniseries rather than a movie). *ETA: Apparently it’s not a remake; there was supposed to be a movie based on The Hot Zone (the book… Read more »
Consider Yourself Spared of Nautical Puns
I went kayaking on Wednesday for the first time in a few years, and for the first time on a body of water more than three feet deep and on which I was not always traveling downstream. If I thought my arms were the weakest part of my body before, now I’m certain. The puniness of my arms forced all other sorts of body parts to take up for them: my back, my wrists, my neck. I don’t know how… Read more »
