Student, describing one interpretation of the justice system and putting someone away for smaller but more convictable crimes: “Like when someone is a murderer but you can’t prove they killed someone, so you get them for taxidermy or something”

Student describing a marriage: “Then Lady Macbeth is like, did you kill him without me? FOMO.”

Train conductor, apropos of nothing: “People wobble but they never fall.”

My Fitbit, confusing because I was simultaneously getting a text message and thought the person texting was telling me, “One foot, two foot” or “One foot in front of the other” or “Right foot, left foot” or whatever Fitbit says when it wants you to get more steps.

I’m currently watching gymnastics (American Cup) without commentary, because I’m watching the International Feed, which seems to be available in the US but not…internationally. I have to say that while I sometimes don’t like the commentating, I much prefer watching with it. Even if it’s to disagree.

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Analog.

Overheard on the train:

One kid to another, describing a video game: “That’s the whole point. That’s the cool part about being a responsible dad.”

Overheard from my students:

High school student, reading Latin: “Delia, I only want to yoke oxen with you”

Student: —

Student: Chivalry isn’t dead!

11th-grade student, reading Sylvia Plath: “…and I eat men like air.”

Student: SENIOR QUOTE

There are deep thoughts and there are shower thoughts, but there are no deep shower thoughts. You need a bath for that.

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I thought I just heard my roommate say “Alexa, regime change,” but I’m thinking it was probably “Alexa, resume please.”

Also heard in my apartment: “Think about how much rendering must have gone into these breasts. They’re very…breasty.”

Speaking of the digital world–so, the advertising for Candy Crush has gotten a little…sinister and desperate, no?

I usually ignore The Listserve emails even though I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe, but this one entertained me. Derivative of Black Mirror, yes, but they got me with the “title” of their company…

Gravy is an afterlife social media platform that allows you to continue to connect after you cross to the other side.  By installing Gravy’s proprietary deep learning algorithms in all your current social media accounts, our app aggregates the entirety of your data into an AI replica of you that can continue to create, share, and connect with friends and family in perpetuity.

Gravy operates on a freemium model.  Once you’ve built your Gravy profile, browse the Gravy store and check out our constantly-growing of in-app content.  Choose your own skins, themes, add-ons, soundscapes, and page layouts.  We’re even offering reduced prices for our full CGI-suit VR pack, which allows users to create custom avatars that will be fully interactive once a user’s account activates.

Until now, death has meant the end of your social media presence.  You can’t engage with content if you’re not alive!  What will happen to the sum of your online activity once you cross the great divide of mortality?  Nothing will happen.  Your accounts will sit inactive like monuments to a static past in which you were alive, signposts to nowhere.  Your vibrant online life of today will stand forgotten like the ivy-festooned relics of yesterday, mere oddities on the roadside of life.  That’s why we made Gravy.

Create a free account today.  See where it takes you.  And think of the possibilities. Tomorrow might be the first day of the rest of your death.  Don’t be content for it to end there.

Gravy Corporation
The Beyond

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Here are some things my Fitbit credits as exercise:

-practicing the drums (sometimes, it even gives me cardio!). It usually classes this as “outdoor cycling”

-practicing the harp (it only logs this about half of the time, probably when I’m practicing faster music, and it automatically categorizes it as “walking;” since I *actually* walk at other times, I recategorized it. There is no option for “musical performance” or “fine-motor handwork,” so I went with “gardening”)

-walking, but only if it’s cold out and only when it feels like it

Here are some things my Fitbit does NOT credit as exercise:

-hourlong yoga classes

-TRX classes (come on! these are no joke!)

-a one-off exercise class I did titled “Best Butt Ever” (I spent about 30% of it making jokes along the lines of “FitButt” to myself), during which I definitely was working more strenuously than when I’m playing celtic music on the harp

Hmmm.

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Today I misread “hazelnut” as “amazelnut,” which I think would be excellent branding. You’re welcome, nut lobby.

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I’ve always liked the week between Christmas and New Year’s. This year I was even lazier than usual and spent most of my time sitting around in a panda suit and face mask, watching the new season of Black Mirror. I leave the house to go to yoga and also so that my Fitbit will congratulate me on things.

I read three more books through the end of the year:

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich

Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel

I was reading the last two somewhat simultaneously – Secondhand Time is pretty large to be a subway book – which felt somewhat thematic, since they’re both nonfiction and take place (at least in part) in the later days of the Soviet Union. Initially I found Secondhand Time difficult because it’s so vast and seemed both static and amorphous – a chorus of voices that aren’t always identified, starting stories that are related by time, place, and theme but don’t necessarily begin at the beginning. It started to coalesce around page 150, or maybe something changed in the way I was reading it. That was also the point at which it became more depressing, such that I had to stop reading it on the plane home to Ohio for Christmas and read O Magazine instead. I think I would still recommend Voices From Chernobyl over Secondhand Time; an oral history of a singular event in one place has more clarity than one of a complex period over thousands of miles.

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I actually made some progress on my bedside book stacks, which is good as I was tripping over them with some frequency. Granted, I have tripped getting out of bed even when there’s only a pristine floor.

I’m in the middle of both Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel, and Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich (so, technically, those are either *on* the bed or in my purse…but we’re being analog here).

Still forming the foundation of pile #1 are Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Joining them are Amen, Amen, Amen by Abby Sher and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

Pile #2 consists mainly of borrowed books: Preparations for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, and, on my Kindle, Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong. Rounding out that stack is Augustus by John Williams, which was my holiday office party prize.

(And underneath all of that are about five magazines that I haven’t gotten to. That’s okay, because I like to take them on flights as a sort of ballast.)

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There are too many things that I hope happen in the world in 2018 that are depressing enough and obvious enough not to list. That said, I really need 2018 to bring me

1) a better approximation for “is not equal to” than =! (because really, that should be interpreted as a joyful shout of “EQUALS!” or “is excitement!”)

2) a past tense version of that sign. I need this both for a keyboard and also just for any written communication. “Is not equal to/does not equal” is not the same as “did not equal/was not equal to.”

Please! I’ve been good. Or decent. Though decent =! good.

(See, I really need it. I’m going to buy it in stamp form.)

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I intended to write this…I think before Halloween.

With reading, I’m something of a completionist (I think the number of books I’ve started and not finished is five or fewer, and most in the past couple of years). With writing, clearly, a procrastin…ist.

Anyway, as I was doing live-DJ yoga and thinking about mashup titles, I was also thinking about graphic design and visual puns. Their analogue re: sound is obvious–mixes–carrying on the declaration of “This thing looks like this other thing,” but with music. Sound, of course, also gives us puns.

So we’ve covered vision and hearing. Food contributes double: in terms of taste with things like herb substitutions, and visually when people do things like make mashed potatoes in the shape of cupcakes. So sight, sound, taste. What about touch and smell? All I’m coming up with are: peeled grapes as a Halloween-time petting zoo substitute for eyeballs, and durians smelling like…well, a whole heap of things that are highly unrelated to durians or any fruits.

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I do listen to (aka read) the news, as grotesque as it is these days, but I will say I prefer listening to people talk on the subway, like the pair of older women I sat next to the other night. They must have just come from a reading; one said “I’ve never understood singing–I mean, I understand why YOU would want to hear yourself sing, but why would *I* want to hear you sing?” The other shook her head and muttered, “Everyone just writes about orgasms these days. I’m tired of hearing about orgasms. They’re great–done. Write about something else.”

As we neared my stop and I stood to depart the train, I heard a snippet of conversation that ended with “So there he was, lying prostate on the floor…”

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