The Joys of Public Transit

On the R train, pulling into Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center. The N is across the platform, doors wide. I get up to stand near the door because although the N looks to be waiting, you never know. The woman already standing at the door taps on the window glass and says, “Wait!” as if scolding a potentially disobedient child.

She mutters, “N across the platform, but who knows if it’s going to wait? Are you going to wait? Why would it just sit there so long and not wait? I’m going to flip my shit if it doesn’t wait.”

I almost turn to her to say, reassuringly, “It’s going to wait!” but then decide I don’t want to face her wrath if I’m wrong. The doors of the R open and I let her out first, then march proudly behind her with the sense of authority that comes from being in the presence of someone who’s clearly in charge. If the N closes its doors now, I know she’ll find a way to make it right.

We get on the same car. I sit down and fiddle with my phone. She takes a selfie, looks at it, and says, “I know you!” Then she turns to the elderly woman sitting next to her. “Do you have grandchildren?” The older woman says, “No, I don’t.” “Oh,” says the first woman, “that’s so sad.”

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Where to go?

It always seems like I’m going to have great swaths of time available for summer travel, since tutoring slows down so much. And it’s true that I already went to California for four days and will visit my parents in Cincinnati for four days in July…but even if the calendar isn’t getting filled UP by any means, it’s getting chopped into smaller portions.

In August I’ll go to London to teach a class and, when it’s over, will either go to a Mediterranean island or somewhere else in Europe. So I’ve been thinking about where…

Outside of Europe, the places that top my list are Northwestern China, Peru, and Madagascar. In Europe, if I consider places I’ve never been, I always think about Croatia…and after seeing a friend’s Instagram post about Slovenia, it also looks pretty amazing. But what looks amazing in Slovenia isn’t a national monument or a specific geological feature; it’s the Swiss Family Robinson-esque place she’s staying and the absurdly blue lake it sits on. Not that that disqualifies Slovenia as an amazing and interesting place, obviously, but maybe it highlights the importance of secondary research once you’ve chosen a destination.

Usually when I’m planning an entirely hypothetical trip, I go to flymeanywhere.com and see where I can go for not too much money. This is how I almost ended up in Sweden in March of 2015, until I realized my passport was going to expire in less than six months and I had to renew it before I could travel. But I’m not opposed to the “throw a pin at the map and see where the fates point you” approach, during the initial stages.

I’ve come to really hate being on long flights and also to feel guilty about the carbon a 6+-hour flight produces, so once I’m in London maybe I should consider train options…there’s almost nothing I like more than an overnight train. This is not going to sound like a logical comparison, but: something about overnight trains reminds me of ice cubes. If you drop an ice cube on the floor, you can rinse it off. It’s self-cleaning in that it’s self-melting. Please don’t ask me for the thread that connects that to the way train travel allows you to skip the drudgery of being stuck in a vehicle for hours while also saving the cost of a hotel for the night. I’m sure it exists, somewhere.

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Duolingo: The Neverending Story, Part III

I was going to call this post “Duolingo Squared,” which doesn’t quite make sense even if it were the second post I’ve done about Duolingo’s subliminal messages…but it really didn’t make sense when I realized it would be the third Duolingo post (Part I, Part II)

Since my posts last year, Duolingo has added Mandarin! Now I’m just holding out for Thai and Latin.

I’ve taken a break from studying Spanish, since I also tutor it and that keeps me in good practice. I’ve gotten far enough in Russian that I’m now getting to the really important questions…

(click through)

I’ve also gotten advanced enough to learn a number of topics I doubt I’ll ever have to speak on in Russian:

There’s a weird fixation on cats:

And finally, I’m fairly sure that this was the third thing I learned to say in Russian, after “water without bubbles” and “vegetarian”:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Double vision, Double audition?

Continuing with the topics of hearing seeing (though not in the mind’s eye or ear this time), I discovered a new (to me) song that I like (Waiting, by Alice Boman) and subsequently found out it’s part of an entire album of remixes (of that same song).

When I hear “album of remixes” I think to myself, “I will figure out which one is my favorite and then listen to it exclusively,” but although that’s mostly true, there are numerous songs that I love in two different versions. A whole album? Probably not. But here are a few songs I like as fraternal twins of themselves:

(original) The Knife, “Heartbeats”

(cover) Jose Gonzalez, “Heartbeats” (even though I have trouble not hearing shades of sad Kermit when I listen to it now, much as I love it)

 

(original) Kanye, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights”

(cover) Hackney Colliery Band, “All of the Lights (Wah Wah 45s)”

I actually much prefer the brass cover of this song, but I’ve listened to a few of Hackney Colliery’s other pop song covers and haven’t been into any of them. Their version of “All of the Lights” makes me want to march around proudly like a human that knows what it’s doing and has had too much coffee.

 

(original) Andy Prieboy and Johnette Napolitano, “Tomorrow Wendy”

(also sort of original) Concrete Blonde, “Tomorrow Wendy”

Johnette Napolitano is the singer for Concrete Blonde, and she sings one of the verses on Prieboy’s original. In the Concrete Blonde version, two of the verses are switched in order. I go through phases with these–sometimes I only want the one, sometimes only the other.

 

And an abomination against nature…

The very worst offender, cover-wise, is Sheryl Crow’s attempt at Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest.” I don’t strongly dislike her–she can sing–but this kills me. It has no teeth and is lazy (which are very bad things for both songs and for creatures trying to make their way in survival of the fittest).

 

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Mind’s Eye

This is not a recent article, but I only read it a few weeks ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

This will probably rank as my strangest week ever. Here's the story of what happened.

Posted by Blake Ross on Friday, April 22, 2016

I’m still reeling from this. I had actually had a conversation prior to this with someone who can’t picture things in his mind, but I don’t think I fully bought into it…I assumed it was more difficult for him to do so, or the images were less realistic, but not that they DIDN’T EXIST.

Taste and smell – or my mind’s tongue and my mind’s nose, if you will – are more difficult for me to conjure up, but I can do it with all of the senses.

I had to stop and consider what I do when I’m teaching a student reading – because usually I’m asking what they’re picturing in their mind, or what concrete images they can visualize…but what if they can’t?

Somewhere in the midst of following this condition, aphantasia, around the internet, I happened on the Wikipedia page for synesthesia…which makes sense because in a crude way, synesthesia is the opposite of aphantasia. I’ve been reading about synesthesia since I was young – I’m pretty sure I requested and received The Man Who Tasted Shapes for Christmas when I was 13 – but had never encountered all of the subtypes of synesthesia. The types that are commonly discussed, the ones that come to mind when you hear about synesthesia, are these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Mirror-touch_synesthesia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromesthesia

Maybe you have a different experience, but those are the two phenomena that I’ve heard about when I’ve heard about synesthesia, much like the way OCD is portrayed in movies and TV is almost always as obsessive handwashing or lightswitch flicking, which aggravates me even though I can see those lend themselves better to a visual medium.

So it was the first time I saw these included (ignore auditory tactile, though I don’t think I’d heard much about it either):

 

…and thought, OH, that’s what I’ve been trying to describe to people when I talk about how the number line looks in my head or how the months of the year seem to be spread out at an angle across my childhood home’s front lawn. I always thought my experience of the number line/years of the centuries/calendar/alphabet was particular, but not remarkable (and I still don’t think it is, at least not in the way that tasting shapes would be), but now I’m questioning everything I know about how our minds diverge, like I’m back to be seven years old and wondering if your green is really my green.

 

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Dreams

I’ve been having weirdly quantifiable dreams lately. Quantifiable isn’t the right word, but it feels right–that or codifiable. They aren’t like most dreams, wherein upon trying to describe them to another person you find yourself stumbling over the “then I was in my house but it wasn’t my house” and “so-and-so was there but then all of a sudden it was whats-her-name” and so on. These are more along the lines of: “I had to recreate the cover of Nirvana’s In Utero using a rhesus monkey instead of a baby” or “I was in a room with a rabbit that had just given birth to eleven kittens.”

I guess my dreams have been blurbable, lately? Caption-friendly. I hope I get some more.

 

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Booklist

2018 started out slow, reading-wise. I’m lucky in the amount of free time I have and unlucky in the amount of commute time I have, so I’m not sure why this year has a lower book count than past years so far. Here are the first ten books I read in 2018:

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong: Technically I read most of this in 2017, but I finished it in January. It was pretty delightful.

Kitchen/“Moonlight Shadow,” by Banana Yoshimoto: My student was reading this for school and had an extra copy. I’ve heard about Banana Yoshimoto for years but had never read her work. I love the specificity of Kitchen and the conceit.

Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish: At first I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to pull off two perspectives, but he does, though I have to say my favorite sections were towards the beginning of the novel when the main character is still in Northwestern China, a place I have wanted to go for years.

Beauty is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan: This is so macabre and so full of terrible events, yet amazingly jaunty. The characters are impeccable and it manages to be funny, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

Off the Charts, by Ann Hulbert: This is about child prodigies/geniuses through the eras, and is thoroughly enjoyable even if it shook my (inexplicable) belief that Shirley Temple was embittered by her child-size Oscar and caused me to have to excise a reference to her bitterness from an essay of my own.

The Danger Within Us, by Jeanne Lenzer: Surprise! There are massive conflicts of interest in the medical device industry, the FDA, and healthcare in general!

Amen, Amen, Amen, by Abby Sher: Since I’m writing an OCD memoir, I avoided reading this for year–I was afraid I would open it and find the exact book I was hoping to write. Fortunately, I did not, even though I’m still jealous of the title. She’s a great writer and funny, but it’s much more of a straightforward memoir than mine. Phew!

The Odyssey, by Homer, trans. Emily Wilson: I read this with a student. Though I appreciate Wilson’s transparency/unsparingness in acknowledging things like, “these people were Odysseus’s slaves, not ‘servants'” and so forth, I thought it was missing the poetry.

Cure Unknown, by Pamela Weintraub: Lyme disease has long been one of the illnesses I fear the most…it fits in that overlapping zone of “you can have this and not know it/not be routinely tested for it/not even test positive for it” and “can wreak all kinds of permanent damage!” (see also Chagas, Creutzfeldt-Jakob). The author is both a science journalist and someone whose entire family has been affected by Lyme, so she fits in the overlapping zone of “skeptical” and “willing to pursue alternative theories and beliefs.”

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson: This is SO SMUG. I get that he’s going for a lightly facetious tone at all times, but WOW. He doesn’t commit fully enough to the whole “imaginary superpowers” element, and some of the things he says are awfully close to “How great it was to be white and male in the 1950s!”

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Topsy

I have a young student who has always had a particular comic style.

The other day, she decided she’d had enough of the pedagogical balance and that she wanted to do more teaching and less student-ing. So I got a very detailed lesson on how to create headings for English essays, which I think I retained pretty well.

After I had mastered formatting, she gave a little lecture on SOHCAHTOA…but first told me she didn’t like the mnemonic and had come up with her own mnemonic for the right triangle trig ratios.

Sort of. She had actually come up with a mnemonic for SOHCAHTOA…a mnemonic for the mnemonic.

Me: “I’m not sure this is very…streamlined.”

Student: “Shhh. Okay, I’ll write it out for you. SOH! Steal one horse. CAH! Catch another horse. TOA! Trot on away.

You have to admit it does have a certain internal logic.

On to the triangles.

Student: “So for this one, Student 1, we use cosine, which is adjacent over hypotenuse.”

Me/Student 1: “I’m feeling a bit dehumanized.”

Student: “Don’t worry about it. No talking back. Don’t distract Student 2 [gestures towards my glass of water]–he’s shy. Okay, here we have tangent, so we need opposite over hypotenuse–”

Me: “Adjacent.” (It slipped out)

Student: “What did you say?”

Me: “I…heard that somewhere, that it’s opposite over adjacent!”

Student: “Oh, you heard it from another teacher?”

Me: “Yes, that’s it!”

Student (leaning towards me and stage whispering): “You’ve been SEEING SOMEONE ELSE?”

After that I had to go to the bathroom, because I’d drunk half of Student 2.

When I returned I was treated to a song my student had written:

Student: “It’s called–okay, first you have to know that my name is Topsy. Okay. It goes: Aw….Topsy! They’ll say at my au….topsy! [pauses] Oh, you also need to know that I’m an elephant.”

There was more but I can’t really do it justice, and I missed some of it because I was crying with laughter.

So my student is a comic genius. If you disagree, well…you can Trot On Away.

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A catalogue of bruises

That’s definitely the group name of bruises. That or constellation, but maybe that’s better saved for freckles.

I seem to be slightly anemic–vegetarian things–and I also walk into things more frequently than I would prefer, so I generally have at least three bruises at all times. Most of them are unremarkable, but I’ve had a few that were epic. After sustaining–not twin bruises, but definitely half-sibling or maybe first cousin bruises–on both legs when I walked into some sound equipment, I thought that the caption for my purpling would be something like “You have one drink and then you walk into the subwoofer.”

Most incidents wouldn’t make for especially interesting explanations, and there would be some intense repetition of “Bed was still in the same place as it was yesterday” and “Doorknobs still at hipbone height,” but there are a few contenders: “Claire’s knee on a gravel road,” provenance France circa 2012; “I was the shortest person at parkour,” and “I carried these boxes back and forth across campus three times.”

I in fact have pictures of all of those bruises, among others, and was going to present them here, but my better judgment/social graces are sitting on my shoulders whispering “Maybe just leave them to the imagination.”

 

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Thievery

The only thing I have ever really had a serious itch to shoplift is fresh basil.

Basil is one of the select herbs that just doesn’t translate at ALL when forced into dry form. It’s like a really ineffective shape-shifting superhero. Very powerful fresh! Very ineffective when powdered.

Basil seems to only be sold in outsize containers of 50 leaves or more. Here is the number of leaves that I need in order to enjoy fresh basil in my farro: 2. For three servings. Believe me, I try to use the rest of the basil liberally, sprinkling entire leaves will-nilly on whatever I’m eating, or sometimes just holding up a particularly large and lustrous leaf to my face and saying “Mmmmmm.”

Basil does not really keep. I hear that you can extend its life by putting the stems in water, but I’m not really trying to decorate the interior of my fridge with vases of herbs.

So every time I need basil I find myself wishing I could just pocket two medium-to-large leaves.

It’s not that I mind paying $2.50 for basil I’ll only use 1/20 of at best, it’s that I hate wasting it. Nothing that smells so heavenly should go to waste, yet I don’t find myself wanting to make basil sachets to put in my underwear drawer either.

My roommate had the same volume problem with cilantro (gross) when he bought a bushel to make guacamole, but he wasn’t too fussed about about wasting it because “Cilantro is basically a weed.” Is the same true for basil? I haven’t googled to find out. Maybe I don’t want to. Nothing so pure and amazing should be relegated to weed status.

And yes, I have taken the route of buying a basil plant, and it was the most amazing two months of my life before I killed it for a second time (the first time, I resurrected it and enjoyed zombie basil for weeks).

I need a basil time-share. A basil-only mini CSA. If you need basil: come to my house.

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