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!”

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

More subway thoughts: Both grilling (questioning intensely) and roasting (gently or harshly mocking) are terms we use about people – why are we comparing ourselves to food so frequently? And are grilling and roasting (food version) comparably similar/different to grilling and roasting (people version)?

Why don’t we talk about boiling people, or baking them? I guess we do talk about getting baked. And hammered! And, come to think of it, nailed (and…banged? No; I don’t think people get banged. They just bang)…so the major categories seem to be culinary processes and tools.

And screwed!

Other things people and comestibles get: cured, creamed, fried…glazed? Frozen, poached, reduced, seasoned, steamed, thickened…

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has 2 comments.

Yesterday I was on the train on my way home, though in theory I was on my way to yoga. Yoga would require getting off the train four stops sooner than I would if I were planning to go home, put on a panda suit and relax, which I kind of was. I knew that I would be glad *after* going to yoga, and that I would be content while there, but the idea of going was so much less appealing than going home where there was heat and food.

Because I felt myself wavering and in danger of skipping it, I fairly flung myself off the train at the yoga stop. I could have feasibly gotten off the train and then back on, or even waited for another train–i.e. my opportunities to skip yoga wouldn’t be extinguished–but I knew I wouldn’t. As soon as I stood up when the train pulled into the station, yoga was as good as done. The hard part was making a decision that felt irrevocable.

It was like asking someone to prom: I knew that if I could steel myself up enough to say “Hey, _______?” the thing would be set in motion and I would have to go through with it. Again, I could have backed out somehow, but that would have required more effort–coming up with some other reason I would have been calling this guy over, which I generally didn’t have unless I wanted to broach a discussion about Latin club.

(Fact: when I was back from college one summer and learning how to parallel park, I was startled to encounter my prom date driving a tractor. I backed over one of the bottles of Tide my mom had set up in lieu of cones, and none of us noticed that I had punctured it until I was back at college and it leaked all over my closet. Other fact: I did not go to prom the following year–my senior year–but instead went to dinner with friends and then gathered at one girl’s house to watch Silence of the Lambs and eat Teddy Grahams. We weren’t trying to make any kind of statement; we just had never seen it and figured we shouldn’t go to college so unenlightened.)

I’ve tried to figure out what that kickstart is for writing–what locks me into it (I am not one of the lucky and prolific naturally diligent writers. I like *having done it,* and sometimes doing it, but I don’t ever like STARTING to do it). I think at this point it’s setting a timer. My data is limited (I was recently going by number of pages revised or by word count rather than time spent) but I don’t think there’s ever been a case in which I set the timer and then just sat there.

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

The other night I came home to a noise emanating from either inside of our apartment walls or the apartment above us. It sounded like the middle part of a Venn diagram showing the overlap of rusty pipes, angry ghosts/bees/ghost-bees, and oversized appliances. If our apartment was a face, the alcove where the washer and dryer sit would be the mouth, and last night it would have been screaming.

This was an especially unwelcome development because it was paired with the semi-regular, fully terrible chemical smell that sometimes comes up from the nail salon below us. They moved in in January and opened in February, and before they had their full ventilation system working my room was uninhabitable unless I kept the window open at all times. Now the toxic stench only makes its appearance (what is the word when it’s not actually appearing, but scent-ing? I know! It makes its a-scent to the second floor) every few weeks, but lately I’ve been waking up with a headache that returns in the evenings.

And the best thing for a headache, of course, is industrial-strength wailing within your walls.

I thought of this today in yoga because, somewhat unexpectedly, the teacher started to play the didgeridoo while we were in sivasana, and the sound was very similar, albeit more pleasant.

I once tried to learn circular breathing at the music camp where I worked. In the end, I was able to complete one circular breath at a time, and then had to stop. That is, I could do more than someone who couldn’t do it at all, but not enough to really claim I could circular breathe. It was like being able to juggle…but only with two objects. Kind of like the real thing, but not really crossing the threshold.

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

A few weeks ago I was passing the time by trying to glean a pattern from the letters that are often paired with “J” for nicknames (BJ, RJ, DJ, CJ). You might think it’s the “Eeeeee” sound, but a) that’s probably the most common characteristic for letters of the alphabet, period; b) then you get to “MJ”

(And if you’re quicker on the uptake/more systematic than I am, you…get to “AJ first”)

Let’s see:

“A” and its rhymers: AJ, JJ, KJ,

“B” and its rhymers: BJ, CJ, DJ, EJ, PJ, TJ, (VJ?)

In their own categories:

MJ

OJ

RJ

Haven’t heard/can’t really imagine plausibly: FJ, GJ, HJ, IJ, NJ, QJ, SJ, UJ, WJ, XJ, YJ, ZJ

I’ve heard LJ but mostly as a nickname for someone with two first names/compound first name, and more on the internet as shorthand rather than spoken aloud. I don’t think I’ve ever met or read about a VJ, but it sounds natural to me. That may be primarily because I’m used to hearing Vee-Jay, like MTV VJ, as a title, or because of the name Vijay, even though the stress (and sound of the first syllable) is different.

So WHY don’t we hear the ones we don’t hear? (And I’m sure they exist in small numbers–I think there’s an author who’s SJ something–but for my own limited purposes I’m terming these “highly uncommon” in comparison to DJ and MJ and their ilk)

Some of them are easy to reconcile: UJ, QJ, XJ, YJ, and ZJ are not going to be common because U, Q, X, Y, and Z names are already less common. There’s a smaller pool to draw from even before nicknames come into play.

GJ  is hard to say because phonetically, “Gee” starts with a “j” sound (I need an IPA keyboard…). WJ is easy to explain; W has more than one syllable, making it a poor partner. IJ sounds funny because the letters are already adjacent in the alphabet.

That leaves us with FJ, HJ, and NJ. You could argue that HJ doesn’t sound that different from AJ, which is true, and that therefore we should meet HJs more often (I just realized that doesn’t quite sound right, but then, look at how many people/stores are named BJ). I would be willing to venture, though, that there’s something about the “chuh” sound at the end of pronouncing the letter H that makes it more difficult to move directly on to the juh sound of the J. FJ? I guess you could make a similar, but weaker argument about transitioning from the “ph” at the end of F to the juh.

NJ, though? Nothing, phonetically, seems to really distinguish it from MJ. So…why don’t I know more NJs? (Not that I know handfuls upon handfuls of MJs, but I know of a few).

This post is titled “Big ABCs” because initially I was thinking about which letters are most frequently paired with “Big,” as in “The Big C” (both TV show and, minus “The,” a grocery store in Bangkok) or similar. I think I came up with real-life examples for A, B, C, D, J, L, and O). Maybe they comprise, unsurprisingly, the same letters that are most often paired with J, and those are just the favored alphabet pieces for any task?

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

The other day as I completed my Duolingo practice, I asked myself, Will I ever really need to know how to say “this theory describes liquids” in Russian? Or “We need to measure the size of the particle”?

(I’ve reached the “Science” section of the app; other upcoming lessons include “Politics,” “Justice,” and “Nothing,” which I assume will teach me to write about existentialism in Cyrillic. In my Mandarin course, there’s a section on “Existence,” which promises much the same.)

My answer to my rhetorical questions was “Surely not!” until I overheard the following in my apartment this morning, re: one roommate welcoming another to share his milk:

“Feel free to be communist about it”

“Go ahead and milk my udders”

Communism. Liquids. The only thing missing is the theory. OR IS IT?

Then there’s me, who has spent the morning asking roommates to come smell my room to check for cigarette and/or chemical odors. Is someone smoking in the nail salon beneath me, and is their ventilation system actually getting rid of the acrylic glue fumes? Or am I breathing in measurable carcinogens? I think we need to measure the size of the particle…

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

I’ve been flossing every other day for the past month, which is probably up there with the longest stretch of time I’ve managed to floss regularly. I still have to force myself to sit through the whole cycle of the electric toothbrush, though.

My poor dental hygiene habits aside, the new flossing habit got me thinking about the differences in our responses to negative reactions associated with doing certain things. That was a number of empty phrases! Let me be more concrete. For example: if you floss and your gums bleed, I think the conventional wisdom is that they’re bleeding because you don’t floss enough, ergo sudden flossing is trauma, and ultimately this all means you should be flossing more often. If you do, your gums will get used to it and stop bleeding (true, in my empirical sample of one).

But the opposite seems to be the received idea for milk and milk products. That is, if you consume dairy and have digestive problems, no one says you should be consuming dairy more often. Typically, they would say your bad response to dairy means you should avoid it because it’s clearly causing you issues. However, I’ve found that the same holds true for milk-drinking that holds for flossing…when I drink milk consistently (as I did for, I don’t know, the first 21 years of life) I never had the slightest stomach pain from it. The first time milk/cheese/ice cream (and it was the whole trifecta in one meal) made me ill (and it was violent!) was when I had been living in Bangkok for six months, and had consumed very little dairy up until that visit to a touristy beach town, whereupon after finishing my gelato I realized that I was in serious trouble.

I think there’s probably a flaw in my logic/in my basis for comparing flossing and dairy consumption–that they aren’t a one to one comparison, there’s some other contributing factor–but I did wonder about the similarities, especially in light of the new “actually, we lied; you don’t need to floss” admission of a few months ago.

Other medical myths of my own creation, which seem logical to me but are based purely on musing and not medical knowledge:

Retinol/Retin-A: Okay, if the way it works is to turnover skin cell production, getting rid of the aged cells on the surface and bringing forth “youthful” cells…does that mean your supply of youthful cells is being artificially shortened? Surely there isn’t an *unlimited* supply…it seems like using a retinoid would just run you through your layers of “young” skin more quickly.

Resting heart rate/cardio: My heart rate varies between 72 and 80, which is on the high side. I get that higher resting heart rate = oh no, your heart is having to work harder!/you’re “using up” your lifetime supply of heartbeats! (yes, I know that’s not what doctors are literally saying, but it seems to follow). But the way to lower your resting heart rate is to do cardio regularly…i.e. raising your heart rate tremendously for periods of time. Couldn’t it be possible that athletes have low resting heart rates as COMPENSATION for how hard their hearts have had to work/how many beats have transpired during all of that peak heart-rate activity? Is this a chicken-egg situation?

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