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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Batty easily pushed the dirt out of the bottoms of her stiletto sandals. People hovered around her, handing her tissues, giving words of advice. Helping. As she removed her curvaceous arm from an equally luscious leg, the thin silk of her dress brushed pleasantly against her face. The party wouldn’t be over for hours. She had almost forgotten where they were, and had to remind herself that she was on a boat. Planting her feet firmly, she stretched until her posture reached impeccable status. The temperature had certainly risen, not surprising given the number of people filling the low, fairly cramped quarters of the green room. She removed her matching brocade jacket; shook her hair loose as it came off. It would be cooler out on deck, but in order to get there she would have to fend of innumerable greetings from the women and obvious stares from the men. She hated knowing that people were staring at her. Loosening the sash around her waist, she contemplated for a minute before swaying slowly out of the congested room.

Giant potted trees stood indifferently outside, the obvious natural sheen of their green leaves contrasting to the garish colors on many of the party’s attendees. They were added to the boat as soon as its spring season began, emerging from a contained hothouse below deck. The boat’s owner had an impressive skill for timing, never exposing the plants to cold air too quickly or causing them to meet premature deaths. If it remained cold during more that half of the spring, they would refrain from using them at all, in the interest of fairness to all customers. Once fall arrived they quickly shed their leaves and died, unable to withstand the colder ocean climates. Batty did not pause to watch their shadows dancing on the white plains of the deck. She remained indifferent to the trees, contented enough by the coolness of the night air.

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Reasons people over the course of my life have said I’m a monster: An incomplete list.

(or, alternatively, why I’m “always the worst”)

1. I did not want to go halvesies on the purchase of a bidet for the bathroom.
2. I never use dryer sheets.
3. I refused to stay for the encore because I was tired.
4. If I open the mailbox and there’s only one piece of mail in there, and it isn’t for me, I just close it as if nothing has happened.
5. I thought you were done with the cookie so I ate the rest of it.

“Monster Culture” is an essay I used to teach to college freshmen. I recently reread it with a student and found it unnecessarily dense and stilted, but the content is still excellent.

Final (ha! As Cohen says, “they always return”) thought on monsters: When will we as a culture settle on ONE monstrous explanation for electronics using up electricity even when not turned on/chargers that are plugged in but with no machines attached to them/devices that are turned on but not charging? We have “vampire power,” “ghost energy,” and “phantom load” dueling for the title role…and though all make sense metaphorically–sucking the energy/draining the life vs. invisible forces–I would like to propose, given that this phenomenon generally involves many tangled cords, throwing a monster with tentacles into the competition.

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Last year I was talking with a friend about what monster categories we and our friends/relatives/significant others would fit into. We ended up talking less about who was a vampire, who was a werewolf, etc., than we did about what the categories should be in the first place. Vampire, Ghost, Werewolf, Zombie, and Mummy seemed like the big five, but is there some overlap between Zombie and Mummy? Are they the same idea/metaphor/creature, just in different places in the world and times in history? What about Witches/Warlocks–should they constitute their own phylum among the monsters, or be nested in some sort of other domain?

Then we remembered Aliens, which were both different enough, humanoid enough, and prevalent enough culturally to fit into our concept map of major monsters. But Frankenstein’s monster, in part due to being singular, would be shuttled off to some small branch under the heading Trolls or Ogres; Sirens might be some subform of Witch; Poltergeists surely fit into the greater Ghost category, et cetera. Do we consider fairies? No, we’ll keep it to “evil” monsters, or at least those that are generally cast as evil though sometimes good (Witches/Warlocks, Ghosts) rather than those who are generally cast as good though sometimes evil (Sprites and so forth).

I think dragons were ruled out by virtue of being animals, whereas Vampires and Werewolves retain human form part-time. Animal-esque monsters, perhaps, are the other Kingdom. And since we had started by trying to fit everyone we know into the supernatural creature of best fit, we stuck to the Humanoid Kingdom.

For a second it amazed me that everyone seemed to fit so neatly into one of the categories we’d settled on. Then I remembered that humans love categorization, and that you can find cause to cleave the population into groups as sensical as “Which Ninja Turtle are you?” or as random as “Everyone is a bird, horse, or muffin.”

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