For my birthday, which was yesterday, I gave myself the gift of no longer running for the subway.

I wish I could say I came to this decision 1. based on ideals about either a) leaving early enough not to need to run for the subway or b) some sort of well-developed thoughts about whether saving two minutes is really important, or 2. because of some critical junction of age (no running for oldsters!) and technology (perhaps it isn’t actually useful, in the end, to know exactly when the train is coming)…but really what happened is I tripped on the sidewalk (it may have been damp, it was definitely dark, but I’m fairly certain Occam’s clumsiness was the root cause), tore the knee of my jeans, slightly bruised the heel of my right hand (I just typed “heal of my write hand,” which sounds more optimistic), and absolutely destroyed the heel of my left hand, by which I mean there’s probably still a flap of skin several centimeters deep on a Brooklyn sidewalk four days later.

I would say it was a face-palm of a move, but it was more accurately palm-to-concrete.

Also, although my jeans saved me from going to a wedding next weekend with a skinned knee, my knee does resemble nothing in the world more than a plum.

There was a guy walking down the sidewalk towards me when I took my flying leap, and as I lay there trying to get my bearings, he…kept walking.

Fortunately, as I was holding my palms up to the ethereal lights of the subway (having missed the train that I was running for, but getting another one fairly quickly, which is just one more reason not to run) – checking the level of swelling on my left hand-heel, which looked like it might actually burst and was bleeding all over itself and my other hand – a man across from me pulled out a paper towel and offered it to me while saying kindly, “I noticed you were bleeding.”

Indeed.

My hand was NUMB, and after the initial sheen of blood was gone, the part that had made contact with the ground was still a deep red.

I’ve been impressed by the inverse relationship between [the decrease in how utterly abysmal the heel of my hand looks] vs. [the increase in the sunset-nature of my knee], and originally I planned on including photos with this post, but…I’ve learned over my many years that no one is as interested in gross things as I am (especially bruises. People watch other people pop zits on YouTube; surely bruises are less gross than that??). So I settled for texting two of my friends “Who wants to see something gross” and then minimally taking into account their response (“I’m afraid to say yes”).

And if I’m late over the next week or so, I have two very colorful explanations for why I didn’t take extreme measures to attempt to ensure my timeliness.

Happy birthday to me!

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I’ve made a goal to write 500 words a day and this may be a way of finding a loophole/avoiding the short story I’m working on – but if, as they say, writing is a muscle, consider this flexing. Even if I’m flexing one muscle while lying in bed watching TV with the rest of them.

And in this scenario what I’m watching (unless there’s a gymnastics competition, preferably with either a competent or ludicrous commentator) is almost definitely the Australian teen ballet show Dance Academy, which has been on my Netflix list for years and which I’ve blasted through the first season of (the second and third are NOT on Netflix for inexplicable reasons, but if after reading this you’re DYING to watch, you can find it on YouTube!) It’s every comforting thing you could ever want in a series, down to the voiceovers at the beginning and end of (most) episodes that tell you what the theme and lesson of the week (or of the, um, hour, if you happen to be watching several many in a row) is.

I’m going to pose a few questions which are based on very little data (that is, mostly this show + Center Stage) and on ignoring the elements that don’t further my case. Such as: Why is the protagonist in every performing arts show/book/movie the one with the bad technique/lack of experience? Why never the one who has the drive and experience even though her natural abilities aren’t as strong (that dancer tends to end up in the villain role and also occupies the eating disorder storyline), or the super naturally talented one with the lackadaisical attitude (hello wild best friend to the protagonist, the role that tends to nearly self-sabotage by means of carelessness before coming around in the end). I understand that there’s a storied history of rooting for the underdog, but underdog doesn’t have to translate to “new kid.” Why not mix it up a bit? Maybe throw in a supernaturally talented best friend who haunts the studio.

I’ve found that in dance books for middle grade or YA readers there doesn’t tend to be a love interest, but in my sample size of two data points (Dance Academy and Center Stage), the initial love interest is the older blond choreographer/playboy, and the *true* love interest is the fellow new-ish dancer. Fortunately the constraints of the two-hour format forced Center Stage to avoid a lot of tedious back and forth/love triangles, while Dance Academy’s episodic mode has led to some very tedious intersecting love polygons.

The Dance Academy theme song is very reminiscent of Degrassi: TNG, though there are far fewer characters to introduce. It seems like the budget for series 1 of Dance Academy didn’t provide for minor characters, such that literally all of the lines spoken by the young dancers were spoken by the six main characters, unlike Degrassi’s cast of multitudes.

Thank you for indulging my flexing/attempt at minimizing the feeling that all 500 words a day must be FANTASTIC or they don’t count/excuse to watch more Dance Academy.

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The Circle, by Dave Eggers: I think that in order to accurately gauge whether this is prescient dystopia or heavy-handed…I have to try to imagine reading it back when it came out in 2013. And I think in 2013 it would have seemed dark but clearly exaggerated, while now it seems…pretty close to the actual state of things. So I’ll say it was, indeed, unfortunately prescient, and also thoroughly enjoyable, even though there was one comparison (or three, really) at the end that was a little too on the nose. ETA: the more I learn about Facebook the more accurate The Circle seems, which I understand is likely because Eggers *based* the novel on places like Facebook, but it still gives me the heebie jeebies.

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi: Engrossing storytelling, but the writing didn’t amaze me, even feeling pedestrian in places. And the end of each chapter felt abrupt, even though I don’t have anything against linked stories/novels in stories generally. I like the overall structure, but I think the book would have benefitted from spending more time with each character. There would also be less need for exposition from the descendant characters, which felt sort of wedged in to let the reader know how each new character related to the previous one.

The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker: I loved The Age of Miracles and I like that this similarly deals with time behaving in unusual ways (though that’s not quite the right way of putting it – it’s more like time being altered by physical processes, like the slowing of the earth’s rotation or a sleeping sickness plague). I did find the writing beautiful in most places and then curiously sentimental in a few, and the ending left me a little lukewarm. I don’t mind when an author has a neat, intriguing premise but an ending that doesn’t quite match it, but I felt like this one petered out more than it had to. I think I feel that way because the sleeping sickness wasn’t the backdrop to a story; it was the story itself, so I was hoping there would be an ending to match. But overall I was absorbed and would recommend.

*I’m finding it hard not to be bland. Maybe I’m subconsciously hovering over my opinions, afraid to let them be seen? Then again, it’s not so hard to believe that three books in a row would engross but not stun me.

The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh: I spoke too soon about the monotony of my responses to books lately, because I loved this. At first I was wary because I’ve grown weary recently of very elliptical books, the coyness and crypticity, the meting out of vague details without really committing to anything. This is emphatically not that way; you have the sense that you know everything that characters know, and likely more. It reminded me strongly of the movie Dogtooth, but when I saw that I came away feeling cheated by never finding out what the parents’ motivations were for keeping their children away from the world. I don’t feel that with The Water Cure, whether it’s a change in me (and that seems likely: it seems all too obvious now why you might want to keep your children away from the world) or something about the book itself.

Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi: I received this galley inside of a tote bag at a party for the Center for Fiction’s new Brooklyn location. The writing and characters felt incredibly remote to me (perhaps by design, but I didn’t like it). When I started it, I kept thinking that the feeling it gave me reminded me of Serial (which I listened to recently for the first time), and I couldn’t figure out why (“high school,” “terrible events,” and “high schoolers that seemed older than I felt in high school” didn’t seem like a particularly strong trifecta of similarity) until I realized it was because the remoteness of the characters made it harder for me to feel immersed or to picture things – as if I were listening to a podcast instead of reading a book. (This hinges more on how I listen to podcasts than it does on potential differences in visualization based on spoken vs. written words.) Then I got to part two…which is hard to write about without spoilers. And that’s where I am now, so maybe I’ll have additional thoughts when I’m finished.

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1. Things I’ve overheard recently in my house:

“No…horribly, I’m still in the dating pool.”

“This is my first time being a butt guy, I think. That makes me a team player.”

I didn’t intentionally juxtapose those sentiments…they were just the only two interesting things I eavesdropped lately. I swear!

2. Thinking further about chores: Another way to slot chores into column A or column B is…well, I wanted this to be a legitimate methodology, but now that I’ve begun the sentence I realize that actually all I’m about to say is “There is just one reason I like making the bed in the mornings but HATE changing the sheets.” (That reason is not all that interesting in the absence of a larger framework (ha! Bedframe-work), but I’ll tell you anyway: making the bed in the morning gives me a lovely, clean, made bed. Changing the sheets gives me the least-made bed of all time for some number of minutes while I a) wash the sheets and put them back on, or b) sit around grumpily before getting new sheets from the closet, because I don’t like wrestling with the corners of the mattress and because the fold-job I’ve done on the fitted sheets in the closet makes me feel incompetent.)

I suppose there aren’t really other chores that capture this dichotomy so neatly, other than the general category of “it has to get messier before it gets clean.” That works to a degree – maybe your bookshelf is presentable but not organized, and in order to make it both presentable AND organized you have to chuck all of the books off the shelf and start fresh – but not categorically. Your floor doesn’t get dustier or less presentable when you start dusting it, and your laundry looks no worse when you’re in the process of washing it than it does in the hamper (sequestered, in both cases!)

3. I had a dream that I had just gotten to college, and in the dream the dorm room looked exactly as I had expected college would look. Somehow, this was the most unsettling element of the experience. Things aren’t supposed to look the way you imagine them before you’ve ever been – any time I’ve tried to picture someone’s house, or room, or a new school, I’ve arrived to find that, no; the entire structure somehow feels, regardless of actual cardinal direction, as if it’s facing a different way than it did in my imagination. But this dream-college didn’t. It perfectly mimicked the interior I had created in my mind (my dream mind; this wasn’t some waking vision of college that I’d long held before attending college – anyway, those visions of how you believe something will look usually dissolve quickly after you see the actual place), and was uncanny for it.

4. I’ve been reading the NYT series on procrastination and am very curious about their terminology – “procrastination” and “precrastination.” The only other pair of terms that I can immediately think of are “probiotic” and “prebiotic.”

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I know I said something in my last post to the effect of “and he doesn’t talk about men’s bodies in the way he comments on women’s…” Okay, I take it back. This guy has something to say about nearly every physical aspect of the men competing at the Stuttgart World Cup:

Their acrobatics (which, obviously, fair game, but the phrasing itself was a little lacking): “And then he dropped back, and it was very ugly in the end.”

“Ohp…what was that?”

“You can see the knees were not adding any beauty to that particular movement”

Their legs: “Oh my, he’s lost some weight, hasn’t he?”

Their tattoos: “He’s a mobile art gallery, isn’t he, my goodness!”

And…their tongues?: “He puts out his tongue with relief.”

“Tongue came out in celebration as well.”

“The tongue comes out in frustration as well.”

This guy needs a new repertoire.

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So there are two “rebroadcast” commentators for gymnastics on The Olympic Channel. One is Olly Hogben, who was just interviewed on Gymcastic and who makes a point to 1) not infantilize female gymnasts; 2) know the names of the skills, the scoring system, etc. He is overall delightful, and manages to say things like “and…there’s an accidental dismount” when a gymnast falls in a way that sounds empathetic rathr than mocking.

Then there’s the other guy.

He sounds like he’s probably also British but significantly older (but what do I know – when I can only hear someone’s voice, I essentially just picture them as a large sentient chin). I won’t fault him for trouble pronouncing names (but I reserve the right to giggle when he repeatedly says “cereal” for Cyril, and I will never understand why, upon realizing he couldn’t pronounce Padarariu, he decide to say it over and over again with slight variations, as if he were chewing on a particularly sticky candy), but the *other* things he says…I haven’t watched the men’s individual all-around competition from the Stuttgart World Cup yet (I was maybe not going to because I know who won and men’s gymnastics is 1/3-1/2 boring depending on who’s doing the parallel bars), but I have heard him do commentary on men’s competitions before, and while he says just as many inaccurate things about the scores, he doesn’t comment on their appearance or gush over them in a proprietary way (actually, I may be wrong about that…I have some lingering memory of him gushing over the men’s bodies in a slightly different proprietary way last time).

It’s just somewhat baffling as he clearly has no idea what will cause a routine to score in the 14s versus the 11s and so was constantly startled by the scores. And though I’m sure he intended no ill-will, he kept saying things like, “Well, she’s taken the second position with that score! But not for long, I’m sure.” I was so disappointed that Spencer at Balance Beam Situation watched the broadcast that had Tim and Nastia commentating, so I can’t even look to his blog for other gems from this guy.

Of course, now I feel I should make a case study of this and watch the men’s competition, especially as I’m sure it will include many of this commentator’s references to “bunny hops.”

One fantastic thing that came from me watching this (in addition to seeing Simone, Mustafina, and the aforementioned Padarariu) is that I found a song I heard at least a decade ago in China and thought I would never hear again. I could hum it for quite a while after I got back, but there weren’t iPhones then and trying to transliterate melodic syllables in another language doesn’t get you very far in a google search (neither, incidentally, does searching for “very popular Chinese song”). At this competition in Stuttgart…it was playing in the background at the arena! And I managed to Shazam it in spite of the commentary running over it, so now I have it forever…although I still have no idea what it’s called because it came up in Shazam in Mandarin (which is logical, but means I cannot tell you what it is).

Speaking of music and melodic syllables…women’s artistic gymnastics has a rule (I want to say this is new-ish, by which I mean post-2008) that although floor music can’t have words or lyrics, it can have vocalization…which has led to some gymnasts doing floor routines while a singer scats wildly in the background, or mumbles, or emotes in a most extreme way without quite saying anything that could be definitely pinpointed as a word. I mean, someone has the Grease song with “wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a wop-bam-boom!” or something along those lines.

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I’ve talked before about spending years (not, you know, full time or anything) fruitlessly searching for something on the internet (the particular elusive title from an elusively named series of middle-grade fiction, the theme song from a vaguely remembered childhood TV favorite) and then, suddenly, finding it, without fully realizing what (if anything) I was doing differently in my search. Of course, as my boyfriend pointed out, the internet has been changing over those years, filling with new information and potential leads.

Yesterday’s search was one that I’ve thought about for – truly – more than 25 years. According to my memory, when I was seven years old my dad and I watched a news program about children in South America who had pinkeye, recovered, and then a few weeks later turned blue and died. This TERRIFIED me until I was 12 (because that was the age of the oldest child who succumbed), and maybe through force of will I avoided coming down with pinkeye for those five years (I don’t think I had it again until I endured it concurrently with mono and a sinus infection my junior year of college). It’s an episode I’ve written about in my manuscript and in an essay I’ve been working on recently, so over the past month it became more urgent to figure out what, exactly, I had watched.

I wasn’t positive that I was seven – I could have been eight. I know it was the fall of either second or third grade, because my best friend was Vanessa, and it was Vanessa’s mom who pulled my dad aside after a play date at their house to warn him that I seemed to have some unresolved fears (AKA all of Vanessa’s baby dolls had come down with cases of “death pinkeye” that afternoon). My mom was in Florida at the time, visiting her parents, and it was November. At least, I thought it was November, but that may have been only because November was always the scariest month for me. But I started to doubt that, as well as my recollection of where the mysterious deaths took place – for some reason South America seemed right, but could it have been Southeast Asia instead? Somewhere else?

“pinkeye deaths 1990s” is not a particularly useful search, but in searching for “children pinkeye deaths” I found several articles about a recent (2014) adenovirus outbreak in New Jersey that killed several children. Pinkeye didn’t seem to be a particular symptom, but I filed “adenovirus” in my mind as a potential culprit. Then I set about trying to determine what the television program had been. Dateline? 60 Minutes? Not the local news, surely. I quickly learned Dateline only started airing in 1992, so it was out. I found a list of 60 minutes episodes, but they were hard to comb through and missing most of 1991. Was it Nova? Scientific American? I Googled “adenovirus outbreak south america 90s” and landed on a scholarly article about deaths in the “cone of South America” in the 1990s, though pinkeye didn’t seem to be prominent. I also texted my dad. His response: “I’m either an inattentive dad or have a dose of creeping dementia,” AKA no recollection of either the show or my response to it.

By that time, though, I had started looking at a list of NOVA episodes, helpfully listed on a Wikipedia page. And lo! There it was, not in November but December 18th of 1990 (so I was seven): “What’s Killing the Children?” (Side note: What a title – no wonder I was terrified.) Googling the exact title turned up a summary that confirmed my suspicions: the show had focused on the deaths of children (mostly under age 10) who had exhibited pinkeye, recovered, and later died of pulmonary distress due to Brazilian Purpuric Fever. As an adult sifting through the vast garbage heap of the internet looking for my grain of sand, I was operating under the assumption that the disease had been, in reality, something rare that simply presented with conjunctivitis as a symptom, that the children who died were probably a minority of those who’d had the illness in the first place, and so forth, but what I didn’t expect was to discover that all of those deaths (okay, all 18) had occurred not in 1990, but in 1984! I don’t think that would have allayed my (symptomatic of OCD) fear back then, but when I watched the show as a child, I took the title literally: I assumed that children my age were dying of this mystery disease right as I sat on our living room floor watching, and that no one knew, in fact, what was “killing the children.”

I was so pleased with my search engine tenacity that I may have made a bit of a scene in the coffee shop where I was working, and also tweeted about it. I just can’t believe I found it after all these years, or that, had my dad and I chosen two weeks earlier (the previous episode of NOVA, which was on biweekly*), I would have seen a program titled “In the Land of the Llamas.” How different could my life have been??

*I cannot get over how phenomenally stupid it is that biweekly can mean either every other week or twice a week. THOSE ARE OPPOSITES YOU JERKS.

PS: What are the chances I can go to the museum of TV and actually WATCH this episode? (I say this having not even done a youtube search yet…) I know they only have representative episodes of each program in their archives, but…

PPS: One of my students had pinkeye last week. I used a fair bucket of hand sanitizer, but only because I didn’t want to catch it and then have to make a doctor’s appointment to get eyedrops.

PPPS: Not to get too high on my internet capabilities, but I feel like I should tutor “google searching,” because most of my students seem convinced you have to type in every single word of the question you’re asking (and spell everything right…and put it in the right order…) if you want results.

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Come With Me, by Helen Schulman: The description for this pushed a number of buttons for me – nuclear radiation! near-future technology! – but I was expected something that veered more speculative than this ended up. That in itself I didn’t mind, and I generally enjoyed reading this, but…it felt like a draft to me, one that, were I the editor, my comments would have been along the lines of: 1. Too many components that aren’t given their due because the book is so crowded with them; 2. The characters’ voices lean towards parodic in their combination of whine and self-awareness, but it doesn’t seem like an intentional choice (for them to be insufferable – at least, it seems like the husband, Dan, is supposed to be to some degree sympathetic); 3. In addition to the crowding of ideas and plots, there are characters whose voices are heard once and never again – in a way that felt like filler rather than commentary. I like the idea that a novel can have an excursion into a minor character’s life without having to explain itself, but this felt like digression.

Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green: As someone who has OCD/writes about OCD, I was really happy to see a portrayal of OCD that takes the form, primarily, of obsessions. Not to say there isn’t room for the more visible forms of OCD – the compulsions – but sometimes, it seems like that’s all there is. I happened to be reading this when my boyfriend wanted to show me a video of John Green (on CrashCourse: Philosophy) talking about free will and hard determinism vs. libertarianism, and the next passage in Turtles All the Way Down referenced Godel, so it was all quite synergistic.

Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman: Jessica and I were in the same MFA program and had several workshops together, so I saw the very nascent beginnings of this more than a decade ago. It’s fantastic, and as soon as I bought it I started reading it. There is nothing I like so much in nonfiction as a writer who can weave multiple threads of plot and theme together in a way that illuminates all of them more brightly – synergistically, more than the sum of their parts – and Jessica does so deftly.

A Really Good Day, by Ayelet Waldman: My only exposure to Waldman’s work was her NYT article about loving her husband more than her children. Which…although it isn’t something I would personally write about (unless under a pseudonym), doesn’t seem like the Most Terrible Thing That Has Ever Been Said (but I’d like to hedge my bets and point out that I do not yet have children, so maybe I’ll feel differently when I do!) It certainly seems less egregious than writing, under your real name, about having a favorite child (again, what do I know – but while it seems like an important conversation for parents to have amongst themselves, and I’m not trying to shame anyone…it seems unnecessarily cruel to write about it in such a way that your kids could read it). (Sidenote: A memoir I read over and over as a child, titled Karen, includes a scene in which the author (Karen’s mother) prays that God won’t let her husband die of…I think it’s TB or measles or something like that…because she could bear losing one of her children, but not him.) Anyway! The controversy over Waldman’s article seems sillier after reading her work, because she’s so clearly prone to exaggeration for effect, facetiousness, etc. I found her wildly entertaining, personally, and although I doubt I’ll be microdosing with LSD (or anything other than gummy vitamins with very low percentages of your daily recommended allowance) any time, soon, it was pretty fascinating.

The Tangled Tree, by David Quammen: I have to admit that as I read this, I frequently wished I were instead reading Spillover for the first time…but that’s no fault of Quammen’s; zoonotic diseases are inherently more dramatic than Carl Woese and archaea. Also, there’s a certain amount of background material common to lay science books, and I’ve read so many recently that I found it hard to get excited about another overview of gene transfer, or narrative of Darwin’s background. That said, I like Quammen’s voice and the attention to lesser known figures like Woese and Lynn Margulis.

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I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong: Microbes! I started this before January 1st and thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the cold, quiet days following.

Sick, by Porochista Khakpour: Super engrossing and beautiful in its structure. I’ve read a few books that investigate or narrate experiences with the long-term effects of Lyme disease (see, I’m even afraid to say chronic Lyme because it’s so controversial!) I’ve read intelligent, considered arguments on both sides and my only certainty is that it would be terrifying to have a disease or condition with clear and extreme health effects and to have your experiences dismissed. That, and you will not find me anywhere in the northeast outside of the city without long pants and high socks.

In Order to Live, by Yeonmi Park: I started and finished this on the same day, which is to say it’s a quick read. It’s very compelling, though it’s a book you read for the story rather than the writing. There’s some controversy about Park’s memory and/or retelling of her escape from North Korea and her two years in China, but that really doesn’t make a difference to me–yes, if her story somehow undercut the stories of others who have fled NK (AND it were untrue or embellished), that would be problematic, but if she has inconsistencies in her memory because of trauma…well, that frankly makes perfect sense.

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer: I hadn’t read any Zimmer before, and his voice quickly became one of my favorites among science writers. This is a delightfully huge brick of a book that I persisted in taking on the subway anyway. Parts of it engaged me much more than others–the history of how we’ve misperceived and misunderstood heredity, studies of human behavior, chimeras and DNA tests were high points, while more general information on genes, the microbiome, and botany covered material that’s been thoroughly covered elsewhere and could have been condensed.

Concussion, by Jeanne Laskas: It’s easy for me, as someone with no interest in the sport, to criticize football. Not that I think it’s wrong to criticize it – it seems obviously, unbearably damaging. And a third adjective: inevitably. That’s the one – in conjunction with the sheer magnitude of the damage done to a person by CTE – that really makes carrying on with football inexcusable to me. Any sport has a risk of injury. The only sports I have any kind of entertainment investment in are gymnastics, tennis, and large swaths of the Summer Olympics. Let’s look at gymnastics, which currently clearly has numerous problems beyond injury, but let’s focus on injury. It’s common in gymnastics, yes. Occasionally gymnastics injuries can be severe: paralysis, even death. More frequently, they’re inevitable (or close enough – there will always be gymnasts whose body composition/conditioning regimen/sheer luck will save them from chronic pain later in life). But the middle of that Venn diagram is virtually empty. The inevitable injuries are not life-threatening, and the life-threatening injuries are vanishingly rare. Even so, we should continue to evaluate skills that are too dangerous (like roll-out double flips on the floor exercise, which are banned for both men and women) and to improve the equipment for better safety. But with football, it’s become increasingly clear that a significant percentage of professional and college football players (and even younger players…) WILL suffer devastating effects from repeated concussions and “subconcussions,” and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to prevent that via equipment. I’m not trying to take football away from those who enjoy it if there’s a solution, but frankly it seems to me that a true solution would involve flags. And as for the book…I didn’t dislike its focus on the issue via the story of the forensic pathologist who played one of the most significant roles in discovering and publicizing it, but I didn’t love the way it was implemented. There are passages in the subject’s own voice, and that’s okay, but sometimes the author seems to write half in his voice and half in a more distanced voice. I wouldn’t have minded more history and background on concussions and the football industrial complex, also.

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When I taught English to Thai speakers, one of the more difficult concepts (not necessarily to teach, but rather to introduce the topic in a way that made it through my limited Thai and their limited English as something coherent), was that of countable and uncountable nouns. (Another was whether to use “more + ______” or “______er” for comparative adjectives – mainly because the rule relies on how many syllables the adjective has, and I had to a few semi-acrobatic and very noisy examples in order for one student to catch on and provide the rest of the class with the Thai word for “syllable.”

Last night as I did laundry I was thinking about chores as countable and uncountable. Though I don’t have a preference for countable or uncountable nouns (I do like it when they combine and you get to put an uncountable noun into a countable one, almost literally, as in “a glass of water” or “five grains of sand”), I definitely have a preference for countable chores like doing dishes and folding laundry. “Discrete vs. continuous” may be a more precise analogy, but I like the idea of countable chores, and I prefer a linguistics metaphor to a math metaphor (in this particular case…don’t hold me to it on a global level!) Uncountable chores, like vacuuming or cleaning the bathroom, are my least favorite and most avoided (because I find them, to choose one-syllable adjectives, the hardest and the grossest).

Granted, you could recategorize some of what I’ve labeled “uncountable” by saying “I need to clean one toilet and two sinks,” but I think I have a reasonable argument for my designations. For laundry and dishes, items of clothing and cutlery are countable. Dust is decidedly not, and even the dusty things, like the floor, are often uncountable themselves.

By the same token, it’s hard to break habits that have to do with time-wasting than it is to break habits that are easily quantifiable. And…this is kind of a cop-out for me, really, because most of those time-wasting habits ARE now quantifiable with things like phone tracking (I don’t know the technical term – I just know that I don’t have it because I haven’t gotten the new iOS update for my phone, and I may be a little too happy about not having it/being required to face how many minutes I spend on each app). And, of course, one could track one’s time (am I distancing myself from this issue by not using “I”? Probably), or at least estimate it, without fancy technology, but it’s so much easier not to. I can say “I’ve done pilates 3 times this week,” without expending any mental energy, but how much time I’ve spent on the internet this week? Forget it. Also, when I’m doing pilates, or practicing harp, I’m only doing that one thing (oh yes: this is where the dread not-really-effective multi-tasking comes in). If I’m on the internet, I’m probably eating, or talking to someone, or (yikes), um, also on my phone.

Yes, I have a problem and I’m kicking and screaming trying to avoid having that problem taken away from me. But in the spirit of the recent NYT article, I may be at a point of needing to reset/rewire my brain. And the way to do that (okay, a way to do that) is by quantifying my time-wasting habits. Making them countable. You might be thinking “deleting the apps that waste your time is a much more effective way to do this,” but I can’t hear you because 1) not psychic, and 2) the aforementioned kicking and screaming is too loud.

So, will the iOS update kill my phone? It’s old and I’m probably able to get a new one for free in about 2.5 weeks. It already throws up its hands and says “NO NO NO NO” when it’s below 20 degrees out (it’s just imitating what it’s seen me do, I guess).

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