I don’t actually have a nightstand. I have a fairly deep window sash, upon which live my lamp and probably some spiders, and I have a portable air conditioner that cautions “Do not place items on top of air conditioner,” upon which I compromise by only putting items on it when it’s not shuddering from overuse.

Generally, though, whatever book I’m currently reading is either in my purse or on top of my bed, and the books I’m also reading or am about to read or am going to read eventually are stacked in two piles next to my bed.

Deciding which books to read next falls on a number of factors, mainly 1) which is due back at the library next 2) can I renew that book or is it on hold 3) is it too heavy to be a subway book 4) what do I feel like reading. Sometimes I don’t take books with me when I go to pick up holds from the library, but then, absent of other books, I start the new library book while on the train, and that’s how I find myself in the middle of several at once.

Right now:

I just finished The Assistants by Camille Perri because it’s due in three days and is very zeitgeisty so there’s a long waiting list. I had a suspicion it wouldn’t take too long to read; next up in its stead is The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, which also can’t be renewed and is due imminently.

I’m in the middle/beginning of two nonfiction books: Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen, which my dad recommended and which I’ve been reading sideways and slowly when I go to bed because a) it’s too heavy for my purse and b) no one is waiting for it so I can continue to renew it. I’m about 70 pages into Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene (that one is also due and cannot renew, but I have ten days left to tackle it…)

As a side note, did Siddhartha Mukherjee become a father between writing The Emperor of All Maladies and this new one? Because it is already FULL of Dad Jokes. (“He couldn’t visualize whirled peas…” Mukherjee says of a non-Mendel scientist.)

I’m also technically in the middle of American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but I think I might abandon it. I read the first 200 pages last summer and then got bored and if I wanted to give it another go I would need to start over. I liked The Ocean at the End of the Lane but American Gods just never caught me.

The rest of the books lying in wait:

Pacific by Simon Winchester (also a Dad recommendation, also a library book, but not one that’s in danger of being recalled)

Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart (loaned to me)

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (also on loan)

A Strangeness in my Mind by Orhan Pamuk (given to me by a student’s parent)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (found ON THE STREET, in perfect condition!)

Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel (friend and former classmate)

Man v. Nature by Diane Cook, (same!)

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (my prize from last year’s office book exchange)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (my prize from last year’s family book exchange)

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1 by Bryan Lee O’Malley (borrowed from my roommate)

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum (borrowed from a friend)

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (borrowed from a different friend)

Yes, I do knock them over frequently. No, I’m not going to have room on my shelves for the ones that are mine. It’s okay. They like where they live.

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If I could choose a talent to wake up with one day it would be graphic design. What’s more fun than being supremely great at a never-ending game of “this thing looks like that other thing”? I have a few friends who are graphic designers and I’m always impressed by the balance of idea + execution.

But if I think about an alternate career path, I nearly always consider epidemiology. I doubt I’ll actually go back to school for an MPH or an MS, but sometimes I look at online courses…and infectious disease literature for the layperson constitutes about half of my nonfiction reading.

Last year I was listening to a podcast about rapid-onset OCD in children following strep throat (I grew up with OCD, but not the type that appears suddenly or is thought to be temporary after having been triggered by an infection) and the broadcaster referred to his doctor-guest as “a pioneer in the field of PANDAS” (PANDAS being the acronym for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections–I guess it’s not PANDASI because that’s less cuddle/more like something from Game of Thrones?).

A pioneer in a field of pandas! I immediately had the most vivid mental image of a tall puritan-style hat wending its way through a field of gracefully swaying panda bears. And that’s what I would draw if I were a graphic designing epidemiologist.

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Likelihoods I dislike:

The threat of blood-borne pathogens and/or OSHA violations

The probability of sunburn

The risk of witnessing someone vomit

The uncertainty of not knowing when you’ll be able to leave a function and go home

Likelihoods I like:

The chance that there will be pastries.

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Overheard:

Person A: “I could make you a nice dinner.” Person B: “I think I’m kind of past the point of a nice dinner.”

Sometimes you’re just past that point. 

“Stop it! Will you stop trying to do ear things to this chicken?”

Perhaps instead you could make chicken a nice dinner. Interpret that as you wish.

Father singing to his crying baby: “Pasta, pasta, pasta, pasta…”

That is also what I want when I’m crying.

“You can’t Freudian slip your way into a marriage!”

Oh no? 

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When I teach collective/uncountable nouns–usually as a consequence of teaching the distinction between “fewer” and “less,” and between “number” and “amount”–I find myself thinking “I should describe a collective noun as something you could take from your roommate without them noticing!”

I would like to note that I don’t actually traffic in that practice unless one of my roommates offers (except for shampoo. It was an emergency), but that’s where my mind goes. A splash of milk? A palmful of conditioner? Collective nouns! Not noticeable when removed! Countable nouns, in contrast–one or five candy bars, a lightbulb, (this premise stopped working when I considered things like grapes and paper clips, but countable hypothetically versus easy to count is a different discussion).

I haven’t tried this out on any students yet. Mostly because I don’t want them deciding that I’m a secret thief.

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When I started high school I remember thinking that my whole life was going to change because….I would be falling asleep at night with the image of a different set of surroundings in my head (that is, the knowledge that I would be spending most of my hours in a different building than I had for my five years of middle school was a minimal but constant presence).

I was thinking about that today because the yoga teacher who gave the quote about anxiety/depression/mindfulness (see here) also talked about how she had, before becoming a yoga teacher and thus having a more variable and peripatetic schedule, worked in an office setting, and although she didn’t like the job itself she did find calm in knowing that eight hours of her day would be in a constant setting.

Because I usually–though less frequently with the growing preference for Skype–see students in their homes, there’s no one place that I go Monday through Friday. Obviously, both the yoga teacher and I know where we’re going (I assume…but when I get a last-minute call, there isn’t any time for anticipation, and I’m already out of the house, so that actually has less of an effect); it’s the holding-in-your-mind of so many different places that feels more tiring than having a fixed destination.

(Not that I’m complaining. I like going to different places every day. But it’s a different background state of mind.)

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The other day in a yoga class the teacher said something about meditation/being present that I have never heard before, even though I live with a meditation teacher. It was something along the lines of “The present moment is the only moment in which we can be happy–if we’re stuck in the past, that’s depression; if we can only think about the future, that’s anxiety.” It made me go WOT.

She attributed it to–well, she couldn’t quite remember, but she thought it was someone along the lines of the Dalai Lama or Ram Dass. When I googled it I found that it’s sometimes erroneously attributed to Lao Tzu. It doesn’t matter who said it, in any case, but I did find it amusing that someone on the internet was much more annoyed about it being falsely attributed to Lao Tzu rather than by the content of the statement.

Let’s skip over the fact that it’s reductive, because of course it is; most single-sentence summations of vast and nuanced topics will be reductive by nature. I’m sure whoever said it is aware of that. It’s also pat, yes, and maybe has a self-satisfied air to it (that’s probably me projecting), but that in itself isn’t such a terrible crime. I don’t particularly like this koan, but I’m not opposed to others, and I even appreciate a good tautology if it hits the right note…

Anyway, my bafflement was primarily focused on: why is the statement reductive in this particular way? Why was it so obvious to whoever said it to associate anxiety with the present and depression with the past? I’m aware of the logic behind it–it’s depressing that you can’t change the past; we aren’t in control of the future and not being in control produces anxiety–but it would be easy enough to justify drawing a parallel between anxiety and the past (worrying about things you’ve done, obsession about guilt for things you’ve done wrong) or depression and the future (bleakness, blankness). Why only anxiety, depression, and happiness, for that matter? Why not anger, excitement, and fear, or some other combination?

When I was depressed the most terrifying thing to me was the actual concept of “a moment” and the present was the most difficult place to inhabit. I could at least look to a past in which I hadn’t been depressed and a future in which I would conceivably not be depressed. So when I heard the yoga teacher repeat the (still unattributed) quote, I wasn’t thinking “platitude,” so much as I was thinking “misalignment.”

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In the wake of the Olympics (sob), I had a weekend of various life-stage parties: a 10-year NYC anniversary (mine)/birthday (my roommate’s)/lease re-signing (my apartment’s) party, a 50th wedding anniversary bash, and a first birthday party.

At our small house party someone arrived bearing (ha, ha–I promise that was accidental) vodka-infused gummy bears. I didn’t actually try any, but they did look colorful and intriguing. However, they are now in two jars in our kitchen and have taken the form of solid-block-of-fused-together-candy. What’s the group name for bears? Apparently, it’s a “sloth” or a “sleuth.” The group name for candy? Let’s go with a “handful.” So we have great handfuls of gummies sleuthing around on our counter; they are, I hope, trying to figure out what to do with themselves.

At the 50th anniversary, I danced to Russian pop songs, did shots of wine and then water, and tried to catch what everyone around me was saying. After leaving for a walk to the (Brighton) beach, I returned to find that the house band had changed out of its formalwear and every member was now wearing a striped shirt and sailor hat. (Group name for sailors: crew.)

At the first birthday, which took place the day after the anniversary party and two days after my house received large stores of spiked gummy bears (the group name for anything gelatinous should probably fall in line with the group name for jellyfish: a SMACK), I was tired. So I sat down on the floor and just watched as a dozen babies/toddlers between 7 months and 18 months maneuvered around me and occasionally over/on me. The group name options are many, but let’s go with crawl. A crawl of babies to close out the weekend.

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Track and Field

• I don’t fully understand why track and field is only appealing to me as an Olympic sport, why I would never watch the track and field world championships or any other major competitions. I guess it mostly hinges on how Olympic track and field fits into the greater Olympic narrative…for some reason all of the analogies coming to mind have to do with foods that I would eat in combination with other foods, but not on their own, so I’ll spare you those thoughts. BANANAS.
• Part of it is also the fact that the stadium is open-air, while I believe most of the major track and field competitions are indoors (don’t cite me on that). Not that they ever really show the sky above the Olympic stadium, so it’s not technically in the frame, but it’s in the diagesis. You know it’s there, exposed, even when you aren’t seeing it.
• At first I was flummoxed trying to figure out why high jumpers got three misses per height rather than three overall. It didn’t seem fair that one jumper could go through the first rounds with no misses at the lower heights, then have three misses at, say, 1.94, and lose to someone who had two misses on all of the lower heights, barely squeaked by on the final attempt at each, and then barely squeaked by at 1.94. Even though it technically makes sense because the person who cleared 1.94 literally jumped higher, it felt a little hinky. Like the person who had three misses at 1.94 but none before that should get a few extra tries at 1.94 or something.
• Oh!–I realized toward the end of the competition– the number of misses is how they determine the medals if multiple people end up with the same final height! It doesn’t completely address my initial question, but it does go a long way, and explains how ties are addressed (in doing some very nominal googling, I also learned that if two jumpers clear the same final height, have the same number of misses at that height, and have the same number of misses overall, they have a jump off.)
• I further enjoy the high jump because the women’s outfits make them look like superheroes, especially the red and yellow outfit worn by the eventual winner, Ruth Beitia: Also, she’s 37, and it’s always somehow comforting to know that there are still Olympic champions older than you are.
• I loved seeing high jumper Inika McPherson, who is only 5’4″, competing against the rest of the high jumpers (the majority of whom were around 6 feet tall). I did wonder why there are weight classes for wrestling but not height classes for high jump or long jump.
• Why are some races tactical (the longer ones) and others not? If I’m remember right the 100, 200, and 400 are strictly separated into lanes and the 800 and up are slightly more free-for-all. I understand that that has to do with the staggering of the track, since the staggering can’t even things out when the runners are doing more than one lap…but it does make the middle and long distance races completely different in character (which, to be fair, I suppose they already are in terms of power versus pacing, typical runner body type, et cetera). But how is it fair if there are two runners from a particular country in the final who can team up against a lone runner from another (like the two Ethiopian runners and Mo Farah in, I believe, the 1500m?) I get irate enough when people are fanned out abreast on the sidewalk, slow-walking. I cannot imagine the frustration here.

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Gymnastics

• The event finals were the first time that the gymnastics crowd seemed anything other than supportive of all of the athletes. It was amazing to see two Brazilian men medal in the Floor event final, but when they were in second and third positions with one competitor left to go, the crowd actually booed during Sam Mikulak’s floor routine. Okay: if you boo at a hockey game you might get angry looks, but if you boo as someone is about to run and do several flips that require perfect timing, you might cause that person to break his neck. Not a good scene.
• As a corollary to that, Thomas “roll-out” skills (when a gymnast does a double flip (1.75 flips if you want to be technical) with multiple twists, but instead of landing on his feet essentially lands into a forward roll) are no longer allowed in men’s gymnastics as of next year (they’ve been banned in women’s gymnastics for at least 35 years, since Elena Mukhina was paralyzed while training one).
• I’m not at all opposed to the ban on Thomas roll-out saltos; even seeing Max Whitlock land his slightly off–but ultimately with no damage done–and how dazed he looked afterwards was enough to convince me. A skill that has caused multiple neck injuries in the course of the time people have been attempting it seems like too obvious a danger to ignore…
• …but, as one of the non-gymnast commentators (not Al; thank goodness for NBC’s streams that allowed me to enjoy my Olympics Trautwig-free) said, look at all of the other things they’re doing! As in–gymnastics is a dangerous sport, period. We saw French gymnast Samir Ait Said break his leg–gruesomely–vaulting; injuries are common in gymnastics. But there’s a clear distinction to be made between danger that’s inherent to the sport (built into it almost unavoidably like concussions seem to be built into football for some positions), life-threatening, and chronic–the type of danger that should be mitigated against and banned–and danger that is possible but avoidable or extremely rare, and which is not life threatening. Alt Said’s injury was horrific, but was never going to end his life. There’s nothing about the particular vault he was doing that frequently leads to that type of injury, the way that Thomas saltos have historically led to neck injuries. I wouldn’t advocate for a bubble-wrapped world in which no one took physical risks, but allowing that Olympic gymnasts may end up with chronic–but not life-threatening–arthritis, or several serious broken bones/torn ligaments over the course of their careers, is quite different from accepting an inherent risk of brain damage or paralysis.

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