Once, many years ago, I told someone I was going to do a sugar fast, and they thought I meant I was only going to eat sugar.

So no, when I say “internet detox,” I do not mean that I’m trying to spend all of my time on the internet.

I’ve known for years that, since computers became part of my life (pretty late – age 13 – even if I’m old, it was late for my era) they’ve steadily eaten away at my hazy patches of uncategorized time. I can still pinpoint the time I spend doing yoga, playing harp, reading, sleeping, working, etc, but there are massive fields of hours – and also fragments of lost time – that go to the computer. And, really, to the internet.

The first step (I mean…other than recognizing it) is probably writing down all of the time I spend online. (My immediate thought here is “Ooh – I should buy a special fancy notebook for this!” but that’s probably a) procrastination; b) jealousy over my students’ new school supplies.) AND THEN? Trying to repurpose that time for something that is, at the least, more intentional than reading about blogs on reddit or scrolling through gymnastics message boards.

In part, if I can spend more of my subway and at-home time reading, I think I’ll feel better. If I can spend it WRITING, I’ll really feel better. And I’ll also feel justified in spending time on things like paring down both my physical possessions and my digital belongings.

I could also feel better about setting aside time to do things like listen to my Discover Weekly playlist all the way through (necessary, no; I’m kind of a completionist, though, which is why having too many magazine subscriptions is dangerous for me and also why I’m still reading a book that I find pretty boring–and, until I finish it, I can’t take my Kindle off of airplane mode to download new ebooks, because this one is overdue at the library…I know, the horror and trauma) or searching for a program with which to draw the various ideas for graphic design/cartoons that I have kicking around my brain.

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

If I have a (very) limited time in a city, I favor three things: grocery stores, signage, and cobblestone streets. Amsterdam is no Prague or Lisbon when it comes to magical alleyways, but the signs and the supermarket did not disappoint. A seven-hour layover equates to as much walking + as much eating as possible.

Pictures below – click through for more signage:

IMG_2255

It's really an Amsterdam cliche if this is what my search for "breakfast" yielded...

IMG_2291

That said, our on-foot search led to this display of everything I have ever wanted in a breakfast, so no complaints. HALLOUMI CHEESE.

IMG_2258

And after the breakfast, it's the sweety sweets...

IMG_2259 (1)

You can't blame them...they saw the opportunity, they took it!

IMG_2266 (1)

This establishment went with just the facts.

IMG_2268 (1)

This is...I feel like they went out of their way to not make this look obscene but failed terribly.

IMG_2280 (1)

It wasn't totally clear if the hamster is the store mascot or some kind of discount program. I'm still floored they didn't go with Hamsterdam.

IMG_2286

And then, on the flight from Amsterdam back to NYC through Iceland...the joys of the WOW air snack catalogue

IMG_2285

"I'd like one duvet of nutrition, please"

IMG_2284

For all of your favorite bachelors!

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

September starts and many people ask, “Where does the time go?”

I ask that question too, of course, but I’ve also been asking lately, “Where does MY time go?”

(so self-centered)

I suspect that most of it gets sucked into the computer, which functions much like a high-powered vortex fan. I don’t know if vortex really works as an adjective in this case, or if I’m conflating natural phenomena and the fan brand name vornado.

When I think about how I could better spend my time, I fall into the trap of “if I cleaned my room and got everything in order, THEN I could work” – to such a degree that I find myself thinking “if I pared down my possessions, they would both be easier to keep clean AND there would be fewer to take up mental space…” which is when you know you’re in trouble.

In actuality, the physical possessions that fill my room are only a convenient distraction, and the real drain on mental space is that which takes up (almost) no physical space at all – the thousands of pictures, text messages (in PDF form, at that), and word documents I have on my computer.

For one thing, there are too many. It’s a trope but also a truism that digital cameras have facilitated a lack of discretion: pixels aren’t expensive, and you don’t have to choose your shots carefully, let alone delete duplicates or reduce your vacation pictures to only the very best.

For another thing, they’re spread out in different configurations across my computer, external hard drive, Google drive, dropbox, probably iCloud…I didn’t mean for it to be that way, but you run out of space on one thing and next thing you know you’re buying a storage unit. I actually have PLENTY of space on Dropbox, but I can’t get my iPhone to stop syncing when I connect it to my computer, so things are always uploading into whatever the Macbook photo program is called…and that’s why I’m constantly having to figure out why my hard drive is full again and where the perpetrators have gathered.

But then, maybe if I just got rid of enough odds and ends that I could thoroughly dust my room, all of my time-management problems would be solved!

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

“Mum, when you’re the queen, are you able to get broke?”

“Asymptotically, the lost landscape doesn’t look glassy at all.”

(upon checking for accuracy – of speech, not physics – it was actually the LOSS landscape)

I wish I could say I overheard these in the same place, but they were collected from different countries and demographics, i.e. England vs. France and small child vs. physicist.

I’m at this physics conference next to a Corsican beach and while all of the physicists and dual-specialty professors are inside hearing a lecture, I’m sitting under a massive tree outside, looking at the ocean while doing a Duolingo lesson that’s teaching me to say things like “What is the weight of the particle?” in Russian.

(In a separate lesson, it also gave me the practice sentence of “The monitor is very dirty” which is just as accurate as one of its other offerings, “An atom of oxygen is sixteen times heavier than an atom of hydrogen.”)

When I’m not eavesdropping and mining high-level theoretical physics for metaphor, I’m mostly thinking about Ferrante, even though I’m not in Naples and technically this is France, not Italy.

Tomorrow I hope to overhear something else worthy of inclusion while in Amsterdam or Iceland, because I have two layovers – Schiphol for 7.5 hours, KEF for just over an hour – and certainly plan to leave my suitcase at the airport in Amsterdam while I go have a walk along a canal. Not that I had the option of a direct flight back to NYC from Corsica, but I did choose the longer available layover to sit between my Corsica – Amsterdam flight and Amsterdam – Reykjavik. If I have greater time than necessary to walk to a new gate without fear of missing my next flight, I would much rather have even more time so I can leave the airport and explore.

I don’t know what percent of people would count my approx. five full hours in Amsterdam as “having been to the Netherlands,” but it will fit my personal requirements of 1) leaving the airport (OBVIOUSLY – I’ve been in Schiphol before but an airport isn’t a country) and 2) having enough time to see/buy something. I’ve only done this a couple times (at least with countries I otherwise haven’t been to – my shortest “leave the airport and run around” layover was about 4 hours in Beijing (IN WINTER, on my way home from Thailand, aka sans jacket and feeling in my fingers and toes), but I’d already been to China and Beijing years before). The others were…Portugal, but that was 22 hours and I spent the night in a hotel, so I don’t think anyone would question that; Budapest, where I had a 9-hour layover (if you want to be technical, I was only in Pest); Bangladesh, where I didn’t get to see much in the 12 or so hours but did make it to a grocery store (favorite item: Lays potato chips in “American – SALT” flavor) and nearly to a hospital (probably, someone (not me) should have had stitches, but sometimes you slap a bandaid on and hope for the best); and Fiji, where I think I spent about 8 hours on a lawn chair next to a hotel pool. That’s the weakest one, certainly. Oh – and Canada, for about 20 hours, but I guess I didn’t technically leave the airport at all and anyway I’ve been to Canada a few times before (…intentionally).

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

I stayed in a very comfortable hotel for seven nights (er…it was supposed to be seven nights, but ended up being more like five and a half, since I arrived 24 hours late and on my final night there I left at 3:15 am) while I taught SAT/ACT boot camp and I think I gave them some odd impressions on which to build a character sketch of me while I was there.

First, I arrived so tired – not even jet-lagged, because my entire circadian rhythm was so scrambled jet leg just got folded into it and disappeared) and out of it that when they asked if I was there for work or pleasure my brain short-circuited a bit and I gave the same answer I’d given customs – “Vacation!” Now – I don’t think there was actually anything objectionable about me teaching an SAT course in London without a work visa, given that my employer is in the US/I’m an independent contractor/my pay was all coming from the US even though I was physically in London, and considering that I often have students in other countries (including the UK) via Skype…but it seemed like a lot to go into at customs (and the last time I went through UK customs was almost a decade ago and they were highly suspicious because I didn’t know the address of the hotel I was staying at, so I don’t have a great track record here…).

Anyway, I gave the hotel the impression that I was “on holiday,” which didn’t do much to explain the two giant packages of books that were delivered to my room ahead of me (and which I then struggled with mightily trying to get them into the elevator and then an Uber to take them to the school…). Subsequently, my colleague had an enormous plant delivered to my hotel room for my co-teacher (no one at reception mentioned this – I just returned to my room one afternoon and there it was, taking up most of the table). Also, I needed to avail myself rather heavily of the hotel printer, and my overactive guilt/fear of being scolded led me to do this by stealth (the printer was, luckily, under a counter! But also directly across from reception!), even though my office manager had called the hotel ahead and asked about printing and they had responded that it was free and I could print as much as I liked!

These are all problems of my own making, is what I’m saying. Except the plant. And it was a pretty delightful companion the one night it stayed in the room with me.

I did manage to print a total of something like 24 full SAT/ACT practice tests (having to request paper from the front desk only once, before bringing my own (thanks to my co-teacher) after that to avoid drawing suspicion) before the printer started crying out for help and the replacement of M, Y, and C toners. I sweet-talked it through printing six of eight student reports before it went quietly into the good night.

So, am I making a good case for myself for a secondary career as a spy? I thought so.

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

So…maybe humans are evolving away from traveling huge distances.

As much as I would mourn that, I sometimes think it makes sense. Long-haul flights for short-term vacations are terrible for the environment. I’m as guilty as anyone and, while I don’t know that it’s necessary to give up travel completely, I wonder if it would make sense for flights to cost even more than they do now.

I say this as I remember back to 2004, when I flew round-trip to London for $300 (against doctor’s orders–I had mono–because $300! I couldn’t lose that!). And I say it from a hotel in Toronto, where I’ve washed up after my flight from LGA was delayed (ON the runway, where there was no food and we weren’t allowed to use the bathroom for most of that time) more than 2.5 hours and I landed 10 minutes before my connecting flight departed for London.

(without me, obviously)

La Guardia is…inefficient, but this has been a pretty treacherous week for travel in general because of the weather. I was supposed to go to California last Saturday…but the flight was canceled because of the thunderstorms and the next available flight was on Monday–it would have gotten us to California Monday at 8 pm. And our flight back was Tuesday at 4 pm. So we just didn’t go. Today’s delay actually wasn’t due to thunderstorms, but about two hours after we were supposed to leave it DID start storming. We were able to take off anyway, and the very Canadian-stereotypical flight attendant announced, “I’ve come to the understanding that some of you might be frustrated. Glass half full perspective: we ARE going to get to Toronto!”

(at least, that sounded cliched-positive until I learned that most of the people on my flight were supposed to fly to Toronto LAST night, but…their flight was canceled because of the torrential rain and thunderstorms)

Unfortunately, it would have been better for me to have just gotten stuck in NYC, because then I could have gone home instead of to the airport hotel, and I probably could have gotten to London faster on a direct flight leaving tomorrow morning or afternoon. But because I made it to Toronto, my only option on this airline is 24 hours and 5 minutes (RANDOM) after my scheduled flight.

My dad worked in logistics for Proctor and Gamble. As a child, I didn’t fully understand what he actually did. Now I’m gleaning more insight. And while I understand the logistics of a particular airline only operating a particular flight once a day, and can reckon with that, I wish that other elements could be different–particularly, the way that everyone disavows all knowledge of ANYTHING (it would do away with a giant percentage of anxiety if the flight attendants could give you any info about your connecting flight and your chances of getting on it, where to go to make that happen most quickly, whether you and other passengers with possible connections (in spite of the delay) might be able to get off the plane first…). And I don’t have reason to doubt that the flight attendants DON’T have that info, but…why don’t they? They tell you, instead, that as soon as you get off the plane you’ll be able to speak to the airline’s customer service desk. That’s…about 0.6 miles and one GOING THROUGH CUSTOMS inaccurate.

Why do you have to go through customs if you’re just getting on a connecting flight? I know you don’t HAVE to, because not every airport makes you! LAX does, which is highly unpleasant, and apparently YYZ does too. It leads to awkward encounters like the customs agent asking, “And what will you be doing in Canada?” and the subsequent fight not to shout “I’M TRYING TO LEAVE” or “I AM NOT TRYING TO BE IN CANADA BUT NO ONE WILL TALK TO ME.”

My original train (HA) of thought–as much as it existed by 10 pm–was that it might be better if flights were more expensive but also more efficient and if airlines could use the additional funds to improve recourse for travelers when delays happen (like comping hotel rooms for passengers who are stranded). I don’t know that I actually want that–not trying to make it more financially difficult for people to fly–but it did seem like the whole industry was overburdened. Though maybe that’s mostly La Guardia.

I’m in London now but I’m still jet lagged. Hence my undigested thoughts!

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

I have exactly one person in my life with whom I can talk gymnastics (well, I have three if you count Jessica and Spencer of the Gymcastic podcast and Balance Beam Situation; I wrote them some fan mail once in which I stated that I wanted a Greek chorus to follow me around and narrate my life and that I wanted it to be entirely made up of SPENCER clones, and they wrote back, so…friends! They also once retweeted a tweet that I sent from my secret twitter. It’s the little things.)

But since my fellow gym-watching friend is in Los Angeles and Jessica and Spencer are in my computer, I need to take to my blog to discuss the commentator from the recent European championships. Now…NBC has made some progress in that they no longer use Al Trautwig as part of their gymnastics commentary team (I DON’T UNDERSTAND why he gets to talk about so many things–I heard him doing commentary for hockey once, though at least I can avoid that), but what would really be ideal is a commentary team of Kathy Johnson and Bart Conner (they were/are commentators and at one point were a team on, I think, ABC?) OR just find a way to poach the commentator from Eurovision’s broadcast of European Championships. He was a delightful middle aged British man (I’m partially making this up based on how his voice sounded, which incidentally is how I ended up with a lifelong habit of picturing Garrison Keillor as just a giant chin) and NBC should do whatever is necessary to coax him across the pond.

Because he not only knew the PROPER gymnastics terminology EVEN THOUGH he is the layman commentator and not a former gymnast, but ALSO was full of epic dad jokes:

On the men’s high bar final, notorious for thrills and spills: “In short, will it be no holds barred…or NO BARS HELD?”

On the woman who performed her CATS-themed floor final routine wearing cat makeup: “If you were wondering if that’s against the rules, don’t worry: there’s a CLAWS”

On the gymnast from Belgium with the Harry Potter floor routine: “I don’t know about Bellatrix, but those were some Belgian tricks!”

On top of that, Eurovision isn’t geoblocked. Can they please just host ALL gymnastics from every country? I don’t know if I even have the ability to watch the (NBC broadcast) US National Championships (even if they’re on regular old NBC, aka not even cable) because I don’t have a cable subscription.

There also used to be a channel–I forget if it was Universal Sports or something else–that would let you pay $5 to watch all of the gymnastics world championships coverage. Please can we all accept that our consumption of media is a la carte now? I am totally happy to pay for my entertainment. I just don’t want it bundled with football. (Speaking of: I always start out thinking that it’s unfair that football fans can watch multiple games EVERY WEEK, but then I wonder if I would get overwhelmed if I had so much coverage (there is that much coverage for college gymnastics, but I find that less exciting). It might be a tyranny of riches in the vein of how I feel when I go to a vegetarian restaurant and suddenly have to read the whole menu).

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

Sunburn, by Laura Lippman: I’m nearly positive I’ve read everything Laura Lippman has ever written, which is rare for me to be able to claim for anyone with more than five books (Murakami–I think I’m missing one or two; Tana French–I think she just has five or six so far.) I would expect to have her mysteries figured out by now, but I never do, and they’re always great.

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller: I think I prefer my post-plague literature a little more suspenseful and/or comedic, but I still thought this was worth inclusion in my own personal canon, even though one scene made me cry for 20 minutes at one in the morning and wake up with a completely puffy face the next day.

Dreamland, by Sam Quinones: Totally fascinating journalism about the way oxycontin and prescription opioids created a devastatingly perfect market for black tar heroin, and examination of how different that form of drug trafficking was from anything that came before it, making it much more difficult to prosecute or curtail. When I left Cincinnati there wasn’t a publicly known opioid or heroin epidemic, though at that point or in college I heard about it contextualized as a problem in Appalachia. Now Cincinnati has an intense heroin problem (which, at least, is much more recognized as a serious issue, though the reasons governments prioritize opioid addiction (vs. the crack epidemic of the 80s, for example) are often depressing (and discussed in depth in Dreamland)).

What Made Maddy Run, by Kate Fagan: This was depressing enough and not well written enough that I almost regret reading it. It’s an important subject, to be sure, but with an absence of anything resembling a way forward or a method for preventing teen suicide.

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie: There’s so much to recommend this book for; in addition to discussions of race–African experience in America vs. the American experience of African Americans–and gender (what stuck with me most were the main character’s observations of how CERTAIN of themselves and their ideas/worldviews many of the men she interacted with were, whereas she was much more interrogative of her own motivations and much more able to express uncertainty), the main character is hilarious and the dialogue is fantastic.

You All Grow Up and Leave Me, by Piper Weiss: In theory, this is an examination of a bizarre case of kidnapping, pedophilia, and abuse of power, but it’s more of an exorcism for the author (which, in fairness, she recognizes–the subtitle is “A Memoir of Teenage Obsession,” which cleverly reads as both “of a man obsessed with teenagers” and “of my own obsessiveness as a teenager”). I didn’t love it; I probably would have preferred it to err more on the side of true crime rather than memoir.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders: Outside of anthologies, I’d never read Saunders, which is probably blasphemous to admit. I’ll also admit that sometimes I find it harder to say authoritatively (or listen to anyone else’s authoritative statement) that a certain collection of short stories is SO much better than another collection (as opposed to “this book is leagues beyond all the other books published this year), although I can remember thinking Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes was clearly one of the best collections I’ve ever read. So I went into my read of this knowing that it was a National Book Award finalist and feeling skeptical of that. Okay! You win, Saunders; I’m no longer a skeptic.

Every Note Played, by Lisa Genova: I really like the idea of having a clearly delineated or established niche (Genova’s being: novels in which the main character is affected by a brain disease/condition/injury), even as I also appreciate authors who try wildly different things with each book (Ishiguro–though if you’re wondering, I did think The Buried Giant was frankly pretty bad). As a writer I think there would be a certain comfort in having such a clear starting point for your next novel (but at this point, with Genova having covered Alzheimer’s, TBI, ALS, Huntington’s, and Autism, I’m not sure what’s left!). As as reader, though…I think I generally prefer reading nonfiction about the brain. Every Note Played didn’t hold my attention the way Still Alice did, and I found my mind drifting to the nonfiction I’ve read about ALS and related conditions.

Give Me Your Hand, by Megan Abbott: I’ve read all of Abbott’s contemporary novels (i.e. I haven’t read her noirish fiction set in the 1940s) and I have a really definitive ranking of them in my head. The Fever is at the top, followed by The End of Everything, while You Will Know Me (which I desperately wanted to love, since it was about gymnastics) and Dare Me were books that seemed right up my alley but disappointed. Give Me Your Hand probably fits right in the middle. As with Dare Me and You Will Know Me, I love the premise: intrigue in a lab! Science! and there are some pretty clever turns. But overall, the story pretty much hinges on not just ONE character being a sociopath, but many, which made suspending disbelief too arduous. Also, I predicted most of the plot elements from the beginning, which I’m notoriously bad at (really, the only other time I’ve figured out the “twist” or whodunit has been in M. Night Shyamalan movies).

Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou: As a hypochondriac, I was SUPER excited about Theranos way back when. I literally googled it from time to time to see if it had become available in any Walgreens outside of Arizona. And as someone who likes to read about 1) medicine; 2) conspiracy, I was super excited about this book. I think that the blurb I saw about it was “Whatever you expected…it’s WORSE” which managed to hold up in a meta way even after I went in with heightened expectations (fittingly, this is also what happens if you describe Elizabeth Holmes’s voice to someone…it’s still startling (and, to my ear, clearly faked)). I was disappointed when I finished it and am now reading every article I can find that’s more up-to-the-minute (and the book covers everything through 2017, so it’s not like it’s dated).

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

The only places I’ve ever heard the names Deirdre and Daphne are in middle-grade fiction (at least until Frasier was on TV every day). As such, I never knew how to pronounce them and spent my childhood thinking it was “DEE-dree” and “dah-FEEN.” (The other word that I remember most prominently mispronouncing was “diabetes,” which I assumed was “DIE-uh-bates.”) I don’t know what my trouble with multisyllabic d-words was. And there were SO many girls and women in my middle school and YA books named Deirdre and Daphne!

When I was in my 20s I sometimes wished someone would hire me to pontificate about middle grade and young adult fiction. I guess I’d never heard of something called a blog? Now I could even have a podcast! I have not only a huge collection of paperbacks but also highly specific opinions and FEELINGS about all of them.

As a child I thought there must be something about “having three names” that made you more likely to become an author. Before you write me off as a bit dense, these were three-named authors (most important were Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor) whose “middle” names you would never mistake for middle names. Now I realize, duh, those are probably maiden names, which I didn’t have much experience with as a child–my mom kept her last name, and most of my friends’ moms either did the same or took a married name; there was the rare case of hyphenation, but no one I can recall with three unlinked names.

(Virginia Euwer Wolff, I assumed, went with three names so no one thought she was trying to be mistaken for Virginia Woolf.)

Zilpha Keatley Snyder is still my favorite author of “serious” middle grade fiction, and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor still wins my “comic” middle grade fiction award.

Other important categories, topics, and points to ponder re: middle grade fiction: the power of a series, my sizable collection of “children in the performing arts” literature, why Judy Blume’s writing for children is so superior to her writing for adults, and the surprising volume of REALLY dark–but kind of stealthily so–material (I’m thinking, here, of Louis Sachar and Marilyn Sachs in particular).

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

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