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 half open. Curling up for hours each afternoon in my friend’s dorm bed.

The second time I ran into a smidge of trouble at customs because I didn’t actually know what hotel I was staying at and the customs officer was not thrilled by my stammering. I hadn’t traveled internationally in a few years, so I was rusty.

The third time was last summer, when I taught an SAT/ACT class for a week. I was so well prepared – I knew the hotel name and address, I had no communicable diseases – until my flight was delayed and I ended up stuck in Toronto overnight. I landed at Gatwick a full 24 hours after I was due, meaning that instead of spending my first day adjusting to jet lag, prepping materials, and going to bed early, I went straight from the airport to the classroom (fortunately, I had a co-teacher).

This time I have a direct flight, so I’m hoping the fourth visit to London will be the most awake ever. But I’m prepared to bravely drink as much coffee as necessary. I’ll be teaching the same SAT/ACT class and tutoring via Skype in the evenings afterward, so I may just try to titrate until I’m 80% caffeine.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

1. 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” rather than providing two of-a-piece examples. I will hazard a guess that the Beatles scenario is far more common than the case of someone being anti-precocious before coming into tremendous ability.
2. I’ve been thinking about how successful erecting low-grade barriers (both literal and figurative) can be, even when it would be easy for the person/thing behind the barrier to cross it. Things like putting your belongings in a closed locker at a gym or yoga studio even if you don’t lock it, or having a sticker on your window that says you have a security system, or looping your arm through your purse handle on the subway (not that I think that’s generally necessary, but what if you fall asleep?). I didn’t want all of those scenarios to have to do with theft, but that’s what’s coming to mind. I’m also thinking about the elephant reserve I visited once where the elephants’ area had an ankle-high wooden rail around it, though I think that was more a signal to the elephants about where they were supposed to stay, not something intended to pose even a minor inconvenience if they didn’t desire to stay. Beatles, Michael Jordan, etc.
3. I can think of three married couples whose last names are nearly identical. In all of the cases, I find myself wishing that instead of each partner keeping their own name or both hyphenating, they would just merge them. None would lose any letters! Granted, in one of the cases one name would be completely subsumed by the other, but the other two work pretty perfectly. I’ve never had a relationship with this sort of last name kismet, so I find it oddly captivating. In one case the last names are both from the same area of origin and may already be variations of the same original name, but not the other two. And for a complementary situation, since three is a pattern? I don’t know anyone who’s done this personally (or I may know one couple, but if I remember correctly they chose a completely new last name to use when they got married), but couples with disparate names could mash them together. Like…ah! Wait, no. I was going to say “When Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom were married…” but that would be a name best fitted to straight hyphenation. Kerr-bloom! Okay…how about the old days of Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt dating, and the potential we had for a Pittrow union? Sigh, what could have been.

And those are three thoughts that have been bumping up against one another in my gumball machine brain.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 Day” ended. Such terrible timing! The creek that runs through Boulder is open for tubing all of the summer months (unless there’s extremely high water), but that was the final 98-degree day before a return to normal summer temperatures, and it was the only day that there were more than one or two people floating downstream over the course of the day. Alas.

I’m fairly certain but not positive that I’ve never been to Colorado until this trip. My family drove through a large number of states on our way to Yellowstone when I was a child – a memorable trip with my best friend’s family that included recreating my dad’s childhood road trip to the corn palace and other tourist attractions, my friend’s little sister having a tantrum that involved shouting, “I HATE the Saturn! It’s a STUPID CAR!” which led a passerby to interject, “You know, you really should consult the child before purchasing a vehicle,” and a state trooper looking at my parents as if they’d failed my friend and I drastically after we exclaimed, “Livestock – YAY!!” in response to his caution that there would be some loose livestock on the road ahead. The Tetons portion of the trip also involved our parents going out to dinner, leaving my friend and I in charge of her sister, a make-believe game in which bunk beds were a boat and my friend a hijacker who’d taken us hostage, and our parents returning home right at the moment her little sister burst into tears because my friend had clicked a mechanical pen dramatically and said, “I just shot your mom!”

I was so traumatized by the idea that we’d scarred a seven-year-old for life that I don’t even have the nerve to ask her, now, whether she’s scarred.

(Just kidding. She was way more scarred by having to ride in the Saturn.)

Anyway, now I’m recruiting for some upstate NY tubing before the weather runs out. I don’t think we rented helmets when we went on the Esopus, but the water wasn’t terribly high either. We did wear life jackets and sneakers. None of us fell out or were otherwise injury-adjacent (there were some fairly substantial rapids that crashed up against large rocks; I remember sticking my foot out to push off of it and briefly thinking “It this a terrible idea that’s going to lead to a broken leg?”), but the people who were ten minutes behind us emerged at the pickup point with abrasions and bruises. In Boulder helmets were required above a certain flow level. On our last two days there, I could have gone by myself, but that seemed logarithmically less fun. Moreover, I’ve seen enough people fall out of boats or lose their shorts and end up mooning the whole riverbed and all of its occupants. If that happened to me while tubing solo, no one would be there to fetch my bottoms. And that’s…bo(u)lder than I want to be.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 feeling I had while reading this collection of essays based on Preston’s work for the New Yorker and other publications was “I wish this was more about Ebola and less about everything else.” I have his newest book (which is, like The Hot Zone, about Ebola, but about 2014 instead of the early 90s) on hold, so I’m curious to see if it will sustain my interest or if his writing just isn’t for me (I never read The Hot Zone itself).

The Road to Jonestown, by Jeff Guinn: I read this, then listened to the podcast You’re Wrong About‘s Jonestown episode and felt like…they were just giving a summary of the book (I’ve listened to some of their other episodes and haven’t felt that way, but maybe I had an overall unrealistic expectation about the amount of original research they would be doing?). This is an incredibly comprehensive and detailed examination of Jim Jones and the events leading up to THE event that everyone remembers.

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D.T. Max: The thing about prions is that there are so (relatively) few clearly defined/understood prion diseases that a book about one prion disease (in this case, Fatal Familial Insomnia) inevitably becomes a book about all prion diseases. That’s not exactly a critique, but because I’ve read multiple prion-centric books there was a fair amount of repetition in this one. Everything about the family at the center of the book, though, was new. This came out in 2006, but it didn’t seem dated at all…which suggests that 13 years later we have very little new information or insight about prions (to continue the podcast theme, I immediately listened to the This Podcast Will Kill You prions episode).

Asperger’s Children, by Edith Sheffer: I’d read about Asperger himself only in the context of the broader history of autism, and had no idea that many of his ideas were so closely tied to/in service of Nazi ideals (it seems like another topic for the You’re Wrong About podcast). I’d heard about Asperger and his “little professors” and the shifting definition of Aspergers as it was included in the spectrum and then removed from the DMV, but I’m not even sure I realized what time period he was working in, much less that he was part of programs that euthanized “atypical” children (he not only developed the diagnostic criteria that could deem a child “unfit for the volk” but also personally diagnosed hundreds of children as unfit).

That was a serious run of nonfiction. I’ve started both The Castle and The Sellout but have had a hard time really getting into them, and I have Pachinko on my Kindle. In desperate need of some fiction.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 roller-skating nun?” Shortly thereafter, they switched to a single positive “It” list. I remember a quote from Graham – “I also like having big boobs, I must say,” and Google turns up the article I was thinking of – but it’s from People magazine, spring of 2000 (a year after I was in Hawaii supposedly reading it). Eventually I find it – or “It.” The magazine was EW, a feature called “The Fickle Finger of It” https://ew.com/article/2001/06/29/fickle-finger-it/, that contains the categories “Getting It,” “Getting It Back,” and “Losing It.” Their derisive comment was actually “Really stretching her legs, that Heather. May we suggest a roller-skating nun?” In their archives, I find that EW did also have the “It” list. Making my way back to June 25^th, 1999, I’m partially vindicated: Heather Graham was indeed their cover star that week, and she was on the It list. My mind had simply merged that article with her quote about her boobs.

2. On the subject of Chernobyl, I was trying to remember why/where I’d heard of Jared Harris (who plays scientist Valery Legasov) before. I IMDB’d him with no luck, but finally recalled something that Lindsay Lohan said in a 2013 article about the making of The Canyons. That was literally the only place I’d ever heard of him. Good job, brain.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 procured or that my Fitbit would leap off of my wrist with joy if I made a second round trip. As the spot between my thumb and index finger reddened and little broken blood vessels started to pop up, I switched to scissors, jabbing them indiscriminately at the seam of the cap even as I thought to myself, “This is a bad idea.” Fortunately, they weren’t that sharp; unfortunately, the cap was somehow vacuum-sealed to the bottle in such a way that even fully separating it from the plastic ring at its bottom did nothing to make it turn more easily.

I knocked on my roommate’s door for reinforcements. While my legs are strong and capable (of carrying me across the street for replacement seltzer), my arms are weak and puny. I assumed that admission of said weakness would be the only toll required for admission into the land of the hydrated, but after donning rubber gloves and getting out all of our pliers, my roommate shrugged and said, “It’s really sealed on there!” He kindly noted that he had some seltzer in the fridge I could partake of (he also noted that they probably had surmountable bottles about 100 steps away from our apartment), but the desperation I had started to feel was not for seltzer but for conquest.

Recently, my small harp has developed a persistent and unbearable buzzing. It happens when I play the second-lowest E or D strings, but the actual buzz is located somewhere in the upper registers – it migrates. I’ve checked every eyelet, every tuning peg, the bolts on the harp’s feet, any metal object at all, and cannot find a single loose bit that would cause the drone. It buzzes regardless of where I sit in the room. It buzzes no matter what key I’m playing in. It feels like a punishment straight out of The Tell Tale Heart, without the murdery bits! Turning the harp upside down to inspect its hollow innards (it’s made of carbon fiber) hasn’t yielded anything. Every time I play, I’m reminded of my failure to fix this assault on my ears.

So the seltzer took on a heightened importance.

I’ve seen the videos of people “sabering” their bottles of champagne and briefly considered whether that might work on plastic, but I figured if I was going to do something ill-advised it should at least be with a reasonably blunt object. And a wine corker is…not blunt, but at least able to be used at a ninety degree angle instead of adjacent to one’s fingers. I wished I could have embedded the corkscrew into the cap and butterflied it off, but I settled for poking it hard, at which point seltzer began to spray all over the counter and me. “Calm down, calm down,” I muttered at it soothingly, because that’s how seltzer likes to be addressed. Once it had stopped panicking, I turned it upside down and milked it like a cow.

And that took about ten minutes, but it felt like triumph enough. Now if I could only figure out what isn’t bolted down properly on my tell-tale harp.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has 2 comments.

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 of iteration. When does it stop? A “Behind the Scenes” of a TV show is still content that has to be edited and produced, even if more lightly than the main, original product. Sometimes the “Making of” becomes more popular than the original – should it, then, get its own behind the scenes? Is it going to be The Burden of Dreams all the way down?

There are other categories of main-event-adjacent media and material: The Talking Dead, the after show paired with The Walking Dead on which a host interviewed fans, producers, and cast members about the episode. Good Mythical More, the daily follow-up to the YouTube series Good Mythical Morning, during which Rhett and Link discuss the events of the episode and complete an adjacent taste test or task. Discussion forums like those at Primetimer.com (nee Previously TV nee Television Without Pity) or on Reddit, both of which have participants whose primary reason for watching the show is to read the discussion afterward – and even those who forego watching the show entirely and gain all of their information secondhand from the forums. (This also happens with forums dedicated to snarking on bloggers/YouTubers/influencers, but that’s an entire post of its own.)

But what can end up happening if you find that you prefer the making-of/behind-the-scenes/show-after-the-show is that the show itself becomes an obstacle to power through. It’s necessary; you can’t enjoy the thing you actually enjoy without it, but you wish you could. It would be a devious and clever method for production companies: create a moat around the desirable content, then profit off of making it necessary for consumers to swim across that moat. (Caveat: with something like Good Mythical More, there’s no real reason to watch the accompanying Good Mythical Morning first, the way there is for something that relies on plot like Talking Bad.) There’s also this: reality shows (of the celebrity variety, at least) used to present themselves as a sort of “behind the scenes of our lives,” but as audiences have become increasingly aware of how staged and edited they are, behind-the-scenes-of-the-reality-shows are starting to purport to be the real real.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 a casual recital or lack of pressure – the perfect and blissful overconfidence of a musician under the age of ten. Today, although the recital took place in a Brooklyn bar, I’m pretty confident no one else was older than 11 or 12, and as such, no one seemed a whit nervous. It was delightful. I want to give special mention to the girl of maybe eight who sang an original song while our teacher (my friend, a jack of many instruments, trumpeter by profession but drum teacher to me and keyboard/piano teacher to others) accompanied her. The lyrics consisted mainly of:

“If you’re ever bored, if you’re ever scared, I’ll be right there

If you’re ever scared, if you’re ever bored, I’ll be right there

and

If you go to the park, if you go to the stairs, I’ll be right there”

at the end of which my roommate leaned over and whispered, “That’s the first song I’ve heard told from the perspective of the cell phone!”

I initially thought she was singing “if you go to the bar, if you go to the stairs” which seemed incongruous, but then, we were in a bar as she sang. And since my songwriting achievements consist mainly of writing 101 verses to the diarrhea song with my best friend when I was 11, I was sincerely impressed.

And as for me, his oldest student – I think I acquitted myself well enough, even though the high hat was broken. And I didn’t bring drumsticks. Fortunately, there was another drum student. There were a few equipment malfunctions; an intrepid father of a bassist whose performance was delayed by a broken amp hookup (I think?) poked his head back into the room to query, “Does anyone have a lighter?” and then, a minute later, “Does anyone have any gum?” I don’t know what he did to the bass, but the kid was able to play given the instruction to stand up and stay very, very still as he did so.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 by Preston) back around the time of Outbreak, but it never happened. My parents would have rightfully not taken me, an obsessively 11-year-old with a disease fear, to see it in theaters, but I remember watching it on TV later.

Having so recently seen the Chernobyl miniseries, I was pretty struck by how well Chernobyl did at making the characters’ motivations understandable even when they were doing things that, in hindsight and sometimes in plain view to everyone around them at the time, were phenomenally reckless. I came away thinking, “Dyatlov is an asshole and the political culture and structure of the Soviet Union in 1986 created the perfect environment for this disaster,” not “No real human would make a decision that stupid,” which…I found myself thinking multiple times during The Hot Zone. Part of that can be explained by faithfulness to the source (that is, the real events that inspired the shows) – ultimately, the creators of Chernobyl were going for verisimilitude and accuracy, while The Hot Zone was much looser even though it was in part based on real events – but most of it had to do with the writing quality. Not, I don’t think, the acting, though maybe Jared Harris could have convinced me that a rational army colonel would have taken four dead monkeys from a lab unauthorized, put them in the trunk of a car, and driven an hour down the highway while blood dripped from chassis. But…that might be too big an ask even for him.

Also – and again, maybe this is credit due to Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard, but the exposition was handled so much better in Chernobyl. I understand that exposition is necessary for audience understanding when you’re dealing with the scientific details of nuclear reactions or hemorrhagic fevers. That said, it works more seamlessly when one character is a scientist who’s explaining a unique, terrible event to a politician who’s never encountered something like it before than it does when both characters are scientists, it’s still an ordinary day, and one scientist is explaining things in detail to the other scientist because…that was the day to do it?

I did just about die when Topher Grace’s character’s fiancee showed up and it was fully PAIGE FROM DEGRASSI, there to yell at him and then storm off!

And I was impressed by the makeup department, because they made Robert Sean Leonard and James D’Arcy look so plausibly old. Sometimes a young-ish actor is given the grey and wrinkled treatment and looks like he’s in costume. They just looked, well, sturdier and rougher than they did on House and Homeland. Granted, I’ve only seen season 1 of House and without Googling I don’t know how long ago that was, but damn they did a good job of aging James D’Arcy from the flashbacks to the present. Maybe there’s CGI involved, but when they CGI a young Anthony Hopkins on Westworld (which I started season 2 of with the HBO trial I got for Chernobyl, but couldn’t finish in the remaining days) it’s still pretty uncanny valley. Which is comforting, frankly, in the era of “deep fake” videos.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

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 red my face was (from exertion, not sunburn – I wore SPF 50 and reapplied to my nose constantly because it wouldn’t stop sweating) when I returned to my parents’ house, but my mom reacted in horror when she thought my shirt was soaked entirely from sweat (it was from the river water that rained down from the paddle after each stroke, which also got into my coffee thermos, hence why I drank all of my coffee during the first five minutes of the trip).

Although I’d kayaked before, I’m generally bad at doing things for the first time after a long lag, and in particular things where I’m going to have to make intuitive decisions while not feeling much at ease (this is why I worried so much throughout seventh and eighth grade that I was going to forget myself and put my hands on a boy’s waist instead of his shoulders). In this case, although I was low-grade concerned I was going to get into the kayak backwards, or drop the oar, or generally look foolish, this fear was mitigated by the fact that the guy showing me to the kayak had just walked into a table on our way to the dock.

I made my way towards the middle of the river from the dock, trying to find the right spot for my water bottle, coffee, and gloves. I was wearing a long-sleeved SPF 50 shirt on loan from my mom, with SPF 30 on underneath it, and a pair of shorts covered by a towel. I had to find a space in the boat for the gloves because it turned out that wearing long sleeves and, effectively, a blanket over my legs, was rather hot for Florida at 9 am. The spaces between my thumbs and index fingers threatened at blisters for the duration of the trip, but never did more than threaten. I met my dad – in his own, newly purchased kayak – at the first inlet past the bridge, after managing to navigate under the bridge without disturbing anyone’s fishing lines.

There are so many signs in the water. Do they go all the way down? The river was maybe eight feet deep in the very middle, so that wouldn’t have been impossible. Or were they attached to buoys just below the surface? Many of them cautioned “Slow Speed, Minimum Wake – Manatee Zone,” but I would have to wait until the next day, at an island slightly south, to see any. Birds, yes, and jumping fish, and a small flotilla of canoes. You know how when you have a sprain or a cut or a sore on one part of your body it’s impossible not to think “If only this pain wasn’t right here on my hand/mouth/ear it would be so much more bearable” even when you have historical evidence to the contrary? (I experienced this the majority of the time that I had braces). I felt like that when I saw the rowers, as if pulling with both of my arms in unison would somehow make me skim effortlessly across the water.

After a brief stop in a lagoon, my dad asked if I wanted to head back the way we’d come, on the main branch of the river, or push on farther before taking an alternate way back through the marina. “I can do it!” I said, which wasn’t technically false. I’m here, typing, not stuck in a mangrove in South Florida or shored up on a tiny pebble beach waiting for my limbs to recover. It counts. Even if every paddle stroke was accompanied by a new grimace for the final 500 yards. Even if I had red patches on my spine from bumping against the back of the kayak (in spite of my shirt and a seat cushion). Even if, when I returned to the dock, I got the boat slightly wedged behind a pylon and had to work myself up for ten more strokes with my dying arms to turn it around, to return to land and my far more capable legs.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.