Many moons ago I had the opportunity to read a number of essays written for a general music appreciation class. Because this class fulfilled a requirement and was geared toward non-musicians (or even to people with very little musical experience at all), and because the particular group of students seemed somewhat disinterested…the essays sometimes contained very interesting observations.

On musical structure (like…A B A form…):

“This piece is a ba ba ba. It is a beautiful pea.”

On Chopin and his many nocturnes:

“Chapping Nocture is one of many noctures. It was not played by a large scup.”

On live music:

“Mr. Brian was whaling away on his trumpet.”

“The cello is a string. It is a family of four strings. Mr. Enzo was playing with his fingers, which looked difficult and hard. He was playing Pitsy Cato.”

“One of the older students composed his own songs, presumably from scratch.”

“At one point the teacher got up to give a speech and I think she said I hate to give the pitch, but I thought she said I hate to be the bitch, and I hope so because that would be funny.”

On Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons”:

“Then on to winter, the season of the freezin…and spring, when I could picture the happy pheasants dancing in the square.”

Some pieces went over better than others:

“At the end it sounded like one of them was going to be gnashed with a sword. I didn’t really like it. It seemed to gruesome.”

“I listened to this piece while sitting on my bed with my little tweety bunny aside of me.”

Composers are very prolific:

“At the age of 75, Beethoven became death and started composing music.”

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This is what I was thinking about the other day:

The pharmacy:

the city-acy

the phlegacy

the pharma-sky

The pharmacist:

the pharma-boil

…that was pretty much it.

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I try to clean out my purse every so often because it’s generally full of garbage, but today I cleaned it out because I discovered, en route to work, that my metrocard was missing.

Though I know that the staple women’s-magazine feature “What’s in YOUR purse?” is likely about as true to life as YM Magazine’s “Say Anything” column–which is to say, partially true and heavily edited–I always snicker/grimace when I think about what my response would be if someone posed the question to me.

What’s in my purse (a sampling):

7 straw wrappers (yes, 7. I buy iced coffee and a bagel across the street all the time and I unwrap the straw there (so as to more quickly transmit the coffee into my veins)…there’s no garbage can at the counter, so instead of hanging onto the wrapper and throwing it in the trash on my way out, I shove it in my purse. Frequently, it seems.

Ear plugs in various states of newness. For concerts.

Graphing calculator that I took for tutoring and then forgot to take out.

Hunting the 1918 Flu.

Pink and green earbuds that I got for free, with one of the little green earbud-softener things missing.

Packet of sugar.

Sad, scraggly hair ties.

A bra that I left in my purse after I did yoga and didn’t change out of my yoga clothes, and then forgot to remove.

A silver dog tag that says “Superhero,” which I found smashed into the gravel at a campsite.

A lifesaver. Bonus!

What is not in my purse: My metrocard.

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Overheard

On the street:

One guy to another: “It’s a lot of work, man–to pick an avocado.”

Elderly woman to her elderly friend: “I share my birthday with Father’s Day this year…THAT SUCKS.”

Someone catcalling me…I think: “Damn, red hair like Jesus!” Okay.

In a high school:

One student chasing another, shouting accusatorially: “They could have been twins! They could have been twins!”

One student to another: “Oh? Incest? What?”

Student to her friend: “I’m afraid to go on a cruise!”

At a campsite:

“This soap smells like spit and gum.”

“We don’t have plans. That’s how we get lost.”

9-year-old, singing: “A deer peed on your tent–oh no! A deer peed on your tent–oh no! A deer peed on your tent–oh no! <stops singing> This is reality. Deal with it, people!”

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This weekend I’m camping in Pennsylvania. Russian Duolingo, accordingly, has been giving me the practice sentences “The forest is really close” and “I like sleeping on the floor.” (Other frequently recurring sentences are “My girlfriend doesn’t cook, but she can eat a lot,” “I like jumping!” and “Big Brother is watching,” so clearly it knows me well.)

I spent a large percentage of my life believing that I hated camping, before sort out the data and realizing that all of the camping I did between the ages of 16 and 22 either:

a) took place when it was freezing; I guess I can’t claim that November is “winter,” but I did spend most of  that camping trip counting all of the pebbles that were digging into my back through my sleeping bag, feeling more like ice cubes. The rest of the time I spent with my feet in my friend’s armpits, because they were cold enough to have turned numb and white and someone told us that was a way to save them. I gave her two quarters that I found in my jacket as means of payment.

b) involved carrying 35% of my body weight on my back for the first part of the trip, and again sleeping on a bed of twigs and other pokey things. I could barely put on the pack without overturning like a turtle.

When I was traveling in my early twenties I often stayed in hostels/guest houses/various forms of shelter that had no lights, water, fans, or other amenities. The thing they had in common, however, was a FLOOR. And, almost always, a mattress of some sort. The walls could be full of holes and mosquito netting a bonus, but as long as I had something between me and the ground I could go to sleep at ease.

In conclusion? Go camping in the spring or summer. And take a sleeping pad.

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In my house:

“But I’m not a craftsman, you know? I’m not a maker of fine wearables. So I put the wings in a bag.”

On the train:

One woman to another: “The thing about time travel…”

Other woman: ?

First woman: “Is that even if you could go back and change something, you don’t have to go back and change something. You know?”

Other woman: —

From a middle-school student:

Me: “Autotrophs create their own biomass, so they don’t need to consume other living things in order to make energy. Above them, you have the heterotrophs, starting with the herbivores and continuing to the omnivores and carnivores. Heterotrophs are consumers, because they primarily consume rather than feed other animals. Like humans–”

Student: “Humans do feed other animals.”

Me: <thinks about cannibals, zombies, kuru>

Student: “Their children. With breast milk (pats self on back). Good job, good job. That was a great point.”

Me: “Okay, yes. Good observation. And then humans are at the top of the energy pyramid because we aren’t natural prey for–”

Student: “And then dingoes eat babies.”

Me: <can’t argue the truth of that>

In a dream (but not the same dream that I had about vertical realness):

“Height is a combination of your inches and your posture score.”

Regarding that post, I have since been informed that the dragon was not named Noam Chomsky but Noam CHOMPsky. How could I not hear that?

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Before there was Johnny Appleseed there was Martin Luther, and he banged his thumb while hanging his 95 theses and thought about the end of the world. If he knew the end of the world was coming, Martin Luther said, he would plant apple trees. After this proclamation Luther retired into his brown robe and watched as King Henry VIII hybridized the church and saw how Gregor Mendel would hybridize the plants, and Luther’s theses fell into the ashes out of which grew the Puritans. They stepped into their long dresses and buckled belts, thought of the brightness of the flowers and the size of the vegetables that would soon grow around them, and left immediately. After building a boat made of oak trees and soot they doffed their tall hats and pressed the thumbprint of their ship into the sea, hoping to gently bump into a land across the ocean where the soil would be pure and dark and free of roots.

Plants do not grow on boats, and fruit trees were not standing on the shore when the Puritans tumbled into America. Instead there was the City on the Hill, already capitalized and waiting for them, and there they stopped and planted their feet firmly in the dirt and began to build. They had drowned the will-o-the-wisp and the persecution of Galileo in the ocean on the way, wanting to start over from the very beginning, and they had forgotten smallpox and the burning of the Catholics and all of the way back to the Seven Hills of Rome. When they could no longer trace the flotsam of their language back to its beginnings, they broke into thousands of seeds and grew up thinking that mendacious, lying, was the same as mend, repair, and two hundred years later when a young boy named George chopped down a cherry tree with an axe he lied about it, thinking that that was the way to fix things. Somewhere Martin Luther laughed and wondered if they would ever change.

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I have to admit that most of these come from one student. His name was Tony (that was a nickname, which is standard; most Thai first names are 1-4 syllables and most last names are 4-6 syllables. My attendance sheet didn’t even list my students’ last names, only last initials, and on the first day of class everyone told me their nickname (some of them may have chosen new ones when they started college, but it wasn’t something done out of deference to a foreign teacher or something unusual). Some of my students were Nui, Anne, Earth, Shirt, Bow, Vava, Ping, Luck…)

Tony had the kind of gift of language that I think some poets have. At first I thought his brilliant compositions were a happy accident that sprung from using his electronic dictionary and getting a weird translation, one of those cases where the technical definition is correct but the connotation is totally off, but some of these are sentences he wrote during in-class paragraphs, where no pocket dics (that was, unfortunately, how we referred to them) were allowed. Even though this was the most entry-level English class, he had an ear for amazing juxtaposition even in a language completely unfamiliar to him. Some of my favorites from Tony:

In a journal entry about his girlfriend, Natty: “Natty be the whole, origin, super morale power of Tony!!”

(I think that’s the greatest compliment someone can give their love)

Once during in-class writing he wrote a ghost story (the double exclamation marks were his signature). The story was about twin sisters who got hit by a train and because ghosts: “One sister lay on rail, her body short by half!! The taxi driver be mentally abnormal–stroke and die this very minute!! This is true story!!”

And, from a poster he made for class (which I still have), regarding the powers of his imagined undersea robot submarine: “It can lay electricity when attacked!!”

In a subsequent class, I had a student whose nickname was A who thought of himself as a gangster. He put his name on all of his tests as: “Big A–Man of West Side.” He also wrote a memorable story about going to the mall and losing his girlfriend, upon which, “I got upset because I couldn’t founded my boo,” and later, “I started yelling because I was angry and hungry.” Reasonable!

**I want to note that I chose these particular quotes (which are anonymous, in the sense that nicknames aren’t official and this was 10 years ago), because of either unintentional hilarity or surprising brilliance (lay electricity–that’s a great metaphor), not to mock anyone in the beginning stages of learning a language (though some of the mistakes language learners make are, I think, universally funny; I know that when I make mistakes in Russian they’re occasionally accidentally hilarious). Sometimes there’s something magical in having only a few tools or pieces that you can put together, and combining them in unexpected and surprisingly apt ways.

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While I was writing about widowed and orphaned paragraphs and blank lines, I was also watching a gymnastics competition streaming online, and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” came on. Fitting! Between rotations the stream defaulted to a screen with the Pacific Rims logo and background pop music. My boyfriend says that the only time he ever hears pop music and the reason he recognizes most of these songs is that he watches so much hockey.

The way he watches hockey: he records it and then fast forwards through pieces of it so that the game ends up taking closer to an hour and a half to watch, instead of three hours or so. Apparently a hockey expert can discern based on the flight patterns and migrations of the players, the clusters and the spread of them, whether something exciting is imminent or not. I wondered out loud if he could make a profession out of doing this: cut the games into an enjoyable but more manageable size for fans who are pressed for time (it seems I was overlooking the existence of highlight packages done by networks, though they have their own agendas and talking heads). Or: could he watch the entire game, but in a slightly faster speed? In the days before Netflix had online streaming, I sometimes did this with movies that I needed to return–watched them at 1.2 or 1.4x. You lose nothing! Everyone just sounds like they’re a little more excited or they’ve had too much coffee.

Over the course of my life I’ve often been sad when my interests–whatever form they’ve taken, from an obsession with baby names when I was 13 (and frequented the AOL Parents baby name message boards) to a fascination with Mount Everest and any book, show or movie about it, to gymnastics–have started to wane, or to feel like work. Perhaps you go to a website, or forum, that you’ve frequented for years, and feel compelled to read every single post even though doing so feels like a chore. Or you wait eagerly for a gymnastics competition that’s actually televised (I often lament that neither of the sports I like to watch, tennis and gymnastics, have multiple games a week–a WEEK!–even as I realize how overwhelming that could be (like hockey is)) but when the competition airs you find yourself tuning out some of the routines, or being sated but not wanting to miss any part of the broadcast because that will somehow make you feel incomplete.

For now I’m still watching every routine–on the women’s side, anyway; for the men I watch the floor, vault, high bar, and anything Kohei does–and reading a dozen threads on the International Gymnast message boards. But I wish I had another hobby waiting in the wings for when this one inevitably begins to lose its pull. Such is the nature of change.

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