I have exactly one person in my life with whom I can talk gymnastics (well, I have three if you count Jessica and Spencer of the Gymcastic podcast and Balance Beam Situation; I wrote them some fan mail once in which I stated that I wanted a Greek chorus to follow me around and narrate my life and that I wanted it to be entirely made up of SPENCER clones, and they wrote back, so…friends! They also once retweeted a… Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Booklist Part 2
Sunburn, by Laura Lippman: I’m nearly positive I’ve read everything Laura Lippman has ever written, which is rare for me to be able to claim for anyone with more than five books (Murakami–I think I’m missing one or two; Tana French–I think she just has five or six so far.) I would expect to have her mysteries figured out by now, but I never do, and they’re always great. The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller: I think I prefer my… Read more »
Book Shelf
The only places I’ve ever heard the names Deirdre and Daphne are in middle-grade fiction (at least until Frasier was on TV every day). As such, I never knew how to pronounce them and spent my childhood thinking it was “DEE-dree” and “dah-FEEN.” (The other word that I remember most prominently mispronouncing was “diabetes,” which I assumed was “DIE-uh-bates.”) I don’t know what my trouble with multisyllabic d-words was. And there were SO many girls and women in my middle… Read more »
Overheard part one million
On Amtrak (regrettably, not in the quiet car): One side of a conversation: Hiiiii. Where are you? I wanted to see you guys and say hi. There’s something in your butt? Yeah, we went shopping and she tried on a bunch of dresses but she really liked the third one. Stop scratching! Do you have lice? Anyway, the dress is really beautiful. (She got off the phone and said to her seatmate: You’re so cute that you don’t need exact… Read more »
Nostalgia Week, Part 3: Dave Grohl is the old Dave Grohl
Given that I had just spent three days going through old papers and photos and coming across items like my prom picture and handwritten mix-tape liner notes, it made sense that upon arriving back to my adult life in NYC I would see the Foo Fighters play for the first time since I was a month shy of both prom and 17 years old. (That was the only other time I’ve seen them. They co-headlined with the Red Hot Chili… Read more »
Nostalgia Week, Part 2: Hard drives are the new basements
By the end of my long weekend in Ohio I had reduced all of my preschool, grade school, high school, and college memories to two boxes–however, I also had half a box of essays and assignments (from high school and college–good god, the typed essays from middle school were in a font I’ve never seen since and on the kind of paper that’s attached at the short end into one long accordion of Apple 2E-produced large print) typed on standard… Read more »
Nostalgia Week, Part 1
Like shark week, but with slightly less blood! Last weekend I visited my parents, who are moving within the next six months, and was reasonably tasked with going through all of my old papers and possessions, which have been residing in their basement in Cincinnati. I was under the false impression that I’d done a good job of being ruthless (I was kind of a hoarder as a child) in previous sweeps…but it seems that I mostly just pared down… Read more »
Summer spread
What level of crime or misdemeanor against my roommates would it be for me to roast carrots in my apartment’s oven when it’s over 85 degrees out? Because I have these nice orange, yellow, and purple carrots that are not going to last much longer, and eating them raw hardly seems like it would be at all delightful. It’s not like we avoid using the dryer–which raises the humidity in our entryway about 50%–when it’s hot out, but if you… Read more »
The Three Body Problem
Today at my coffee shop the barista told me he’s reading a book called The Third Body Problem. I thought this was funny because recently I’ve been hearing stories about the two-body problem in academia–I think we used to call it something different in college, because I remember hearing that Judith Butler refused to go work for some university (maybe even Brown?) because they wouldn’t hire her partner for a professorship and I don’t remember the phrase “two-body problem”–and it seemed… Read more »
Lark, Lark, Owl
Is there a name for someone who’s an afternoon person? We have, per this article, morning larks and night owls, and I thought my rhetorical question – because I assume that no, we do not – was going to be made a failure when I saw reference to “hummingbirds” in another article, but it turns out a hummingbird is not an afternoon person, just someone who vacillates between the two major bird-classes of circadian rhythm. Could we have gone with ducks… Read more »
