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).

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).

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).

 

On Amtrak (regrettably, not in the quiet car):
One side of a conversation:
Hiiiii. Where are you? I wanted to see you guys and say hi.
There’s something in your butt?
Yeah, we went shopping and she tried on a bunch of dresses but she really liked the third one.
Stop scratching! Do you have lice?
Anyway, the dress is really beautiful.
(She got off the phone and said to her seatmate: You’re so cute that you don’t need exact change. I think she meant “it’s so cute that you don’t care if you have exact change” but WHO KNOWS.)
While tutoring:
Student, doing geometry: A triangle has two legs.
<pause>
Student: have two legs!
On the train:
Look, there’s method man. I used to think he was a badass motherfucker. Now he’s just an old man.
On that same train:
I can tell you right now, I won’t be taking Tums tonight.
Apparently everyone on the G train was super old that day.

Given that I had just spent three days going through old papers and photos and coming across items like my prom picture and handwritten mix-tape liner notes, it made sense that upon arriving back to my adult life in NYC I would see the Foo Fighters play for the first time since I was a month shy of both prom and 17 years old. (That was the only other time I’ve seen them. They co-headlined with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Dayton, Ohio; my mom drove us (my mom is a CHAMPION); and Dave Grohl’s stage patter consisted of talking about how he had gotten diarrhea.

Some things have changed. Primarily, that I took the subway to the venue instead of having my mom drive me! But I did go with a friend who went to middle and high school with me.

Dave Grohl gives the impression of being made entirely out of caffeine. I thought it was just an SNL skit but now I believe he drinks tens of pots of coffee per day. That still doesn’t explain how, after 2.5 hours of playing, he was still running from one side of the stage to the other every ten seconds, jumping off of things, and talking in a steady stream when he wasn’t singing.

I’d like to put a FitBit on Dave Grohl. (That’s what all the ladies say.)

Something else to make everyone feel old: Dave Grohl’s 12-year-old daughter was singing backup vocals on two songs. I saw her on the big screen and thought, “Who is this little creature?” because while the other backup singers could have probably been any age from teenage to forties, she was so clearly a preteen. I would not have known she was his daughter, of course, except that he said, “I just have to give a shout-out to my little boo, Violet Grohl, singing with the Foo Fighters!” Since Dave Grohl is, and I mean this in the best possible way, someone who seems like he’s ALWAYS been a dad, it’s nice to see him as a literal dad.

*I have to say nothing was more exciting than when the drummer got up from behind the kit to sing a cover of “Under Pressure” and Dave drummed

By the end of my long weekend in Ohio I had reduced all of my preschool, grade school, high school, and college memories to two boxes–however, I also had half a box of essays and assignments (from high school and college–good god, the typed essays from middle school were in a font I’ve never seen since and on the kind of paper that’s attached at the short end into one long accordion of Apple 2E-produced large print) typed on standard printing paper, making them scannable. Thus my hero of a mother has been sending me emails all week with large PDF attachments and subject lines like “EL156 – Victorians and Moderns” or “Performance Ethnography.”

(Don’t worry, she has access to an industrial scanner at work and just has to slide the piles of papers into the feed. I’m an only child, not a sadist!)

Even as there’s more work to be done in the basement–which is okay with me, because I’m dumbly attached to things and my parents’ house is the only one they’ve lived in since before I was born, so I don’t mind the excuse to go back again before they move in the fall–there’s now more space there and less space on my hard drive. “Space” in a non three dimensional sense, so there’s no worry about running out of room (at least since I have a very large external hard drive and a business Dropbox account), but…

If I have thousands of pictures, when am I going to look at them?

If you have a record of everything, is anything important?

(If you have a map that’s the size of the world, can you ever find anything on it?)

It might be that taking pictures of everything I get rid of (not EVERYTHING–I don’t need five C-shaped post-it notes with the address and phone number of the guy I liked in sixth grade written on them) is my memory-addict version of nicotine gum, and that eventually, I’ll go through those and pare them down as well (I may have a big hard drive and space in the cloud, but my macbook’s GBs are…dwindling). I know I went through all of these papers at some point after college (or, at the least, was asked if I would perhaps consider going through some of them and responded by running away shrieking “IT’S TOO SOON!”)

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the act of rifling through the boxes, even if I wished I weren’t so pressed for time.

Back to computer space: Now that film is a luxury/choice rather than a necessity, I have so many more duplicated, unnecessary, and unrecognizable pictures. I actually started to go through them several months ago–getting rid of repeats or shots of Dorito bags that seemed somehow interesting at the time, captioning the photos so that can I can locate myself in the when and where of them, labeling people with first and last names because those start to erode–but when something isn’t shouting its presence in your physical real estate, like the extra books I have in a pile next to my bed, it’s much easier to ignore.

From boxes to bytes, I’m filtering, if slowly.

 

Like shark week, but with slightly less blood!

Last weekend I visited my parents, who are moving within the next six months, and was reasonably tasked with going through all of my old papers and possessions, which have been residing in their basement in Cincinnati. I was under the false impression that I’d done a good job of being ruthless (I was kind of a hoarder as a child) in previous sweeps…but it seems that I mostly just pared down the items that were left in my old room, currently the guest room.

The basement was a different story.

Initially my mom thought I had two boxes of papers from preschool through college and three boxes of books (until I was maybe 12, I had zero interest in clothes, and I also had to have braces twice, and middle grade and YA fiction were about $2-4 per book…all of this translates into: every time I had to go to the orthodontist, I also got to go to Algamesis and to the bookstore to buy six books). Actually, I had something like five boxes of papers/memorabilia and six boxes of paperbacks. I didn’t even crack the boxes of books. I was only there for three days!

Even as I asked myself WHY I kept every single issue of our monthly high school newspaper (which I never wrote for), I was sort of glad I did. I can’t claim that, at the time, I was thinking ahead to a future in which digital photos would take up nearly zero physical space, but it certainly worked out well. I found the one article a friend ever wrote for the paper and sent him a photo (“I have zero recollection of ever writing that,” he said). I found a back-and-forth set of editorials (that must have been painful with the paper being issued only monthly) about God, which I’m doubtful their authors would agree with now. I realized how much adolescent innuendo I had missed in every article title (I was kind of on the oblivious spectrum). And then I recycled them, and with everything I recycled in those three days, we had to ask the neighbors if we could start adding to their bins because ours were full.

 

Other items OF NOTE:

-An army of My Little Ponies large enough that when I texted a picture of it to friends, their responses generally referenced feeling like they were on hallucinogens

-Textual evidence that as a small child–I mean five or six–the ONLY plot line that was good enough for my wide-ruled writing paper was the damsel-in-distress scenario, with a thinly veiled Claire avatar named Kara

(My mom was also horrified/questioned her parenting choices when I requested that the first word in my summer kindergarten “word bank” be “pretty.” (I just wanted to say that my cousin Kate had been a pretty bride, not start scattering flowers at the feet of the patriarchy, geez MOM!))

-The one hundred verses my best friend and I wrote to supplement The Diarrhea Song when we were about eleven (that is, we wrote 99 verses to follow the classic “I was driving in my Chevy” opener)

(I sent her a picture of page one, verses 1-12. Her younger sister texted me that night to thank me for not sending all 100. Someone got a singing telegram phone call while she was attempting her commute, and had to pull over!)

 

What level of crime or misdemeanor against my roommates would it be for me to roast carrots in my apartment’s oven when it’s over 85 degrees out?

Because I have these nice orange, yellow, and purple carrots that are not going to last much longer, and eating them raw hardly seems like it would be at all delightful.

It’s not like we avoid using the dryer–which raises the humidity in our entryway about 50%–when it’s hot out, but if you made an argument that laundry is more of a necessity than roasting, I would probably agree with you.

(But I really had the best intentions of broadening my dinner options from where they currently stand, i.e. “tomato basil farro with onions and cheese” and “chips and guacamole and tiny bell peppers that can be consumed like little apples”)

I’ve always kind of wanted a food dehydrator, but I don’t know how many things I would actually feel inclined to dehydrate (other than these carrots…). There are so many culinary tools that are highly specific: pizza stone, rice cooker, sous vide pan (maybe that’s more universal? Like a slow cooker?). Probably all of the universal cooking tools that exist, nebulously, in my head are only available on informercials, but when you live in an apartment multi-tasking implements are critical (this does not explain why we had, for a time, three vacuums, and why we still have two vacuums and an off-brand roomba named D-bot). It especially doesn’t explain why in spite of our sucking power I still really just want a dust buster.

(Dust Buster is the brand name, right? So next time I have the conversation that comes up every 18 months or so–the one about which brand-name items have become universally used to mean the generic of that item, e.g. bandaids and xerox etc–I have a new contribution).

 

Today at my coffee shop the barista told me he’s reading a book called The Third Body Problem. I thought this was funny because recently I’ve been hearing stories about the two-body problem in academia–I think we used to call it something different in college, because I remember hearing that Judith Butler refused to go work for some university (maybe even Brown?) because they wouldn’t hire her partner for a professorship and I don’t remember the phrase “two-body problem”–and it seemed like a three-body problem, though rare, could happen if you had a throuple and all of them were professors.

I did assume that his book was not about that particular scenario, since he said it was science fiction.

My best guess was something like…there’s a body shortage and people’s consciousnesses have to time-share three to one meat sack, like morning body, afternoon body, night body. That did not seem to be very accurate based on the barista’s response.

For some reason, this also got me thinking about interchangeable thermos lids and NON interchangeable computer chargers. It did NOT get me thinking about the three-body problem in physics, but after learning about that I thought it was an amazing linguistic coincidence, and was disappointed when Wikipedia suggested that the problem of two married/partnered academics may have been named as a nod to the physics problem.

Computer chargers were already on my mind because I left mine plugged into a wall of the classroom I was teaching in last week, and didn’t realize until 11 pm Friday night when my computer was at 18% (I really thought it was in my bag and that I was just being lazy not getting it out). For some reason this bothered me more than it would have to lose or break something even more expensive (I mean–this was an expensive mistake, even if I get the charger back, because I couldn’t go the whole weekend without my computer, my roommates don’t have compatible computers, and so I went to the apple store and spent $86(!), but it could have been worse…).

I think it seemed worse because there’s a certain futility about it and a certain mockery. As in: futile because I’m so dependent on my laptop that I couldn’t wait to see if my charger was still at the school, so I had to buy a new one regardless of the outcome, and mocking because obviously if apple desired, they could make the power cords for all of their laptops interchangeable.

My roommates and I have a number of canteens/aluminum water bottles floating around our cabinets, from various companies/rafting trips/etc, and this morning I thought I’d had a revelation that all of the screw-in lids fit all of the bottles…but after mere minutes of lambasting Apple for not being as generous as (diverse and multitudinous!) water bottle companies, I realized the cap I thought was screwed in was actually just spinning happily and loosely atop the canteen. Oh.

What are the odds that my (extremely generic and unidentifiable) laptop charger is safely restored to me but that I never have cause to use it (since I suppose it will be demoted to spare) before I need a new laptop (I hang onto them forever, but this one’s from 2014) and the new laptop refuses to even glance in the general direction of my charger?? (Or that I’ll stumble upon someone in the same lost-charger situation I faced right at their moment of need?)

I guess I’d rather have a zero-charger problem than a two-body problem. The solution is surely less emotionally expensive.

 

Is there a name for someone who’s an afternoon person? We have, per this article, morning larks and night owls, and I thought my rhetorical question – because I assume that no, we do not – was going to be made a failure when I saw reference to “hummingbirds” in another article, but it turns out a hummingbird is not an afternoon person, just someone who vacillates between the two major bird-classes of circadian rhythm.

Could we have gone with ducks and geese? Just to keep all of our bird metaphors in a row? Yeah, yeah, they have similar waking patterns. But it would be nice to have more options for mixing metaphors.

I spent last week waking up between 6:45 and 7:45 am, which is NOT my typical pattern (people are generally aghast when I tell them that, left to my own devices, I wake up around 9:30. I’m going to bed around 1:30! I’m not some huge outlier in the actual amount of sleep I get, which per FitBit averages out to 7 hours and 25 minutes). Benefits of waking up at that time:

  1. Afternoons felt less saggy. I was more tired, but I didn’t have the late afternoon gloominess that I ordinarily feel around 4 or 5. Granted, around 4 or 5 I had just finished teaching for 7 hours and wasn’t home yet, so my brain was too occupied with the logistics of transportation and the things I still needed to get done to feel post-prandial ennui.
  2. I became so EFFICIENT. Or, perhaps, I rose to baseline efficiency for most adults. My days were much more scheduled than is normal for me, but I came home from work and went straight to yoga, or made dinner before even entering my room, or ignored the internet and completed my necessary tasks for the next day. You could surmise that this had nothing to do with waking up earlier and everything to do with a more regimented schedule, but that would be wrong; if my teaching day had lasted from, say 1-8, I would have probably come home, dicked around (whatever spellcheck wordpress uses wants to change this to “ducked around,” which is at least relevant), gone to bed super late, and slept until noon. My day had to be front-loaded in order to force ruthless efficiency, a phrase I’ve undoubtedly never used before in my life.
  3. There’s something luxurious–probably in part because it was so unfamiliar–about going to bed before 11 pm. If I sleep into the double-digit numbers, I feel lethargic and guilty, but slipping on the mask of “early to bed,” even if only for five days, felt so VIRTUOUS.

Will I keep this schedule up? HA. But I am teaching a weeklong course in London in August with an identical schedule, so I will be undertaking this experiment again.

 

*There is nothing beneficial, commute-wise, about waking up early (cough at a typical working-person’s hour); I don’t even think the trains are that much more frequent, but they are certainly much more crowded.

**Why larks and not, I don’t know, CHICKENS? Granted, no rooster I’ve ever heard has actually been especially early to crow. Is it that lark and owl are both on syllable? Few letters? More exotic than the humble hen?