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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1. I can’t write yet; I haven’t had coffee.
2. Ooh, look at what came in the mail. I better try it on!
3. I really need to take a shower before I get actual dressed for the day. If I write for an hour, I’ll let myself have another coffee.
4. First I just need to read everything that’s been posted on the Previously TV Chernobyl message board.
5. Okay, I’ve made a list of the three stories and three essays I want to finish this summer. Does that count as working?
6. Oops–it’s ten to the hour; I have to walk in circles around my living room to get my 250 steps so that Fitbit doesn’t yell at me.
7. There’s my harp in the living room. Practicing is also on my to do list, so maybe I should do that first. Surely writing will be easier once I gain a bit of momentum.
8. Oh, the Duolingo app. That’s also on my to do list. Better stop everything and do that now so the owl doesn’t yell at me.
9. I wonder if I’ll write better once I’m clean. Maybe showering comes next.
10. There’s a lot of dust in the entryway by the bathroom. Maybe I’ll write better once my apartment is clean.
11. I need to focus. Should I set my task for the day at 500 words, or one hour of dedicated work?
12. I’m good at checking off tasks without actually making progress. Maybe I should focus on results rather than process.
13. Maybe these aren’t the right three essays and three stories to finish this summer. I better look back at my folders to see if others are better options.
14. Oh yeah, I never finished deleting duplicate photos from my camera uploads…
15. It’s 1 pm. I’ve done nothing. I am adrift in a sea of inertia and failure.
16. Surely writing will be easiest if it’s the only thing left on my to do list.
17. And then I wrote this instead of working on one of my stories.
18. I still really want that coffee.

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Brain Bugs, by Dean Buonomano: I don’t usually have this specific a vision for the structure of a book, but I really think this one – which details some of the ways that [our brains evolving to function generally at their best] can lead to [unintended negative (or simply superfluous) consequences], e.g. optimizing for short term benefits (the way we might have needed to when our survival was much less certain) rather than long-term ones – would have benefited tremendously from a much clearer and more explicit layout. (To be fair, that sentence would have also…) Rather than having to rely on the chapter titles to illuminate the “bug” of each chapter, I would have welcomed a more formal explanation: here is the function and how it would have been useful in the past/how it’s still useful; here is the “bug” and how it relates/what havoc it causes. The book never did this explicitly, but as it progressed the relationship between function and bug seemed to get clearer, and it also got more interesting as he discussed questions of religion and politics and infused more of his own opinions.

Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado: Intense and amazing. Before reading it, I thought the Law and Order short story might be a few too many pages to devote to an episodic conceit, but then…did I really want it to end? I did not. Favorites were “The Resident” and “Eight Bites.” As a side note, I’ll read anything published by Greywolf (same goes for Two Dollar Radio).

The Woman Inside, by E.G. Scott: Meh. When books of this genre (that is, the “hoping to be the next Gone Girl or Girl on a Train” genre) are bad, they’re still relatively propulsive (AKA I finished it, though I’m not the best measuring stick since I have a hard time not finishing things)…but this is certainly no Gone Girl. There were some plot surprises, but I’m pretty easy to trick, and nothing felt particularly original. If the writing itself had held up, I would have been willing to accept a less-than-novel plot, but…now I’m wishing for another book that’s as original as Before I Go to Sleep (which, prior to some googling, I misremembered as Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (nope) and then Before I Wake (also no)).

Severance, by Ling Ma: I was on the waiting list for this at the library for what felt like forever, and when it arrived it was longer than I expected, on a rainy day when I wanted nothing more than to lie in bed and read. It felt of a piece with what I would call…low grade epidemic novels? There isn’t any danger from the “infected,” not even transmission of the disease, but the world has fundamentally changed. I’m trying to build a list of other low-grade epidemic novels, because I’m sure there are more out there, but so far I’m thinking mostly of The Dreamers. Transmission of the “disease” in that novel is also murky – it’s never figured out, whereas in Severance there’s definitively no person-to-person transmission.

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Philips: Julia is a good friend and I’ve been in a writing group with her for years, so I’ve seen this book since its very first drafts (and am extremely proud to be in the acknowledgements!) She worked with her editor for more than a year to turn the books from a collection of linked short stories into a novel–so while the writing was as stunning as I remembered it, it was my first time really experiencing the plot. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Each chapter is its own bright jewel, but it’s now also an incredible tapestry. Am I mixing metaphors? If so, I don’t care – it’s a beautiful, spangly, jewel-strewn quilt.

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It seems like a fairly safe (if mundane) statement to make that America/the world’s obsession with Marie Kondo and downsizing has to do with both environmental concerns (not that getting rid of personal belongings does any good for the environment directly, but I think the impulse is connected) and a desire for control (in a world – and for Americans, a nation – whose survival seems more and more uncertain by the day). Owning fewer things seems like it should require less mental space, as well: if I own a discrete number of countable objects, they take up less thinking time in aggregate.

For me it goes beyond a straightforward desire for control – it’s a longing for some sort of reset button, a way to return to a fabled baseline that I’ve never actually experienced. I am extremely lucky in where I live and in relatively low rent for NYC, but since I moved into my apartment almost a decade ago it’s never been what I would consider baseline clean. That is, it’s a little bit falling apart everywhere. I can see through the cracks in the floorboards, brick dust sometimes come tumbling off of the walls, there’s not great sound- or smell-proofing so there’s always noise from upstairs and occasionally smells from downstairs (which is currently a nail salon…)–but it’s pretty lovely and reasonable. Still, I have a bourgeoise dream of moving into a place that is, if not new, freshly painted, fully sealed, and so clean that (even if this turns out to be a fever dream of my own capabilities) I can imagine keeping it so clean forever, because all I’ll have to do is maintain!

The only places I’ve lived (since leaving my parents house, that is) that had that clean-slate quality were dorms or grad student housing, and by design all of those places felt temporary. I have this very impractical vision of moving into a new place (one of these magical, hyper clean, free of lead paint places) after preparing by getting rid of anything I own here that I don’t need anymore – digitizing all of the reams of paper I have sitting in a clear plastic bin that weighs down the top shelf of my closet, rifling through my costume box and paring it down to things that maybe actually see the dark of another Halloween, taking photos of the “memories” I’ve saved in file folders marked with years so that I can recycle the ticket stubs, programs, and letters…and then, somehow, doing this same Kondo-esque process to the overwhelming number of files and pictures (most of them, now, of these items I’ve carefully photographed and then discarded) until I have something manageable, a set of photos on my hard drive that’s small enough to actually look through and enjoy from time to time.

If I had few enough objects resting on the floor that I could lift and dust underneath each one

If I had the exact number of pairs of earrings as the number of pairs of earrings I actually wear in real life

If my items were so manageable that I could not only keep them all clean but even keep the cleaning products clean

If for one single minute there could be no things left to do

If I’ve said something like this before, and I’m sure I have, it’s because it’s still tumbling through my mind on a daily basis, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet – not just the solution, but even how to say it, to explain the idea of this mythical baseline in which huge undertakings are no longer required, and all that’s left are the maintenance tasks like folding clean laundry and washing dirty dishes, leaving wide open fields of mental and physical space.

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Today I read this article with one of my students–it focuses on the role of repetition in listening to/enjoying music–and then started to make a list of things that felt analogous to the Diana Deutsch experiment described therein (to summarize, Deutsch recorded a spoken sentence, then looped a phrase “sometimes behave so strangely;” after hearing the loop numerous times, the original sentence (which on first lesson sounded wholly spoken if slightly melodic) now sounds like someone speaking before suddenly switching to singing))

A contrarian once (just now) told me that he thinks we train ourselves away (on a daily, hourly, microsecond-ly basis) from perceiving the fact that we’re essentially singing whenever we speak (that is, everything we say has a pitch) rather than being manipulated (as in the Deutsch experiment) toward hearing singing where it doesn’t exist. (Then he sang and whistled “so strangely” in a delightful but repetitive manner for half an hour.)

When I was in high school, seniors were tasked with writing an “I-Search” as our entire quarter grade for English class – a 15-20 page essay on whatever topic we chose, and with research that was more exploratory and participatory than a typical research paper. Mine was an attempt to “teach myself to hear English without understanding it,” as if it were just a set of phonemes divorced of meaning. I think I made a soundtrack to go along with it, and I definitely had a hard time finishing it: there were a number of sleepless nights that fall because I just couldn’t stop adding to it, and when it was finally time to print it out to turn in, our printer broke and my dad took me to Kinko’s at four in the morning, after which he sputtered, “You have to sleep! You have to go to bed!” (I did hear the meaning and content behind those words, but my dad was the first person I was able to – in real life; the first not-in-real-life voice was Bono’s – hear without understanding…so he was instrumental to the project in several ways!)

Although I’m sure I talked about “repeating a word until it loses all meaning” in the I-Search, I’d actually never heard it termed “semantic satiation” until today. I like it…”I’ve eaten so many consonants; I’m stuffed! No more room at the inn!”

I’ve digressed so much (and this – lampshading your digression – is something that I gently chided my college students for during my first semester of teaching when more than one of them turned in a draft that included the (non)-sentence: “But I digress.” They were not writing blogs, however) that I now need to return to what I promised in the first sentence of this post: things that feel analogous to Deutsch’s experiment in that they alter our perception even as we’re aware of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They are! 1. The game (favored by those slightly older than the semantic satiation crowd) in which your friends hold your arms off the ground until they’re practically numb, and then lower them slowly so that they feel like they’re “going through the floor,” and 2. The rubber hand illusion.

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