Nostalgia Week, Part 1

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!)

 

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Summer spread

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).

 

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The Three Body Problem

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.

 

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Lark, Lark, Owl

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?

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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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