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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I have a really difficult time suspending disbelief enough to buy into the idea–on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead–of a Romero-less universe, where not only the term “zombie” but the concept of the dead returning is totally foreign. At the least, I thought when I watched the first mini-season of FTWD, wouldn’t you figure that you should run from or incapacitate someone who was ill and trying to attack/bite you? …I appreciate the impulse to try to help someone who’s sick, but I can say for certain that even in a world without zombies prominent in the zeitgeist, I would stay away from anyone who tried to bite me.

Also, why don’t they assume it’s rabies? Or does rabies not exist in this universe either?

That said, I thought about what would happen if things were inverted–if people in our world, so heavily saturated with zombie TV, movies, and books, started to get sick and become violent. In all likelihood, we would say, “Aha! This is the zombie apocalypse. We must shoot these people in the head!”

…and then it would turn out that they were not zombies at all, just sick with some kind of violence-inducing virus (or on bath salts) that might not even be communicable.

So that thought experiment helped me suspend my disbelief slightly more. Though with Fear the Walking Dead, it’s difficult. Those characters are making ludicrous decisions even for people walking around in a zombie-free collective consciousness.

I assume there’s someone whose job it is to determine what monster will be starring in popular culture next–like someone predicting trends in fashion. We’ve been through wizards (no, not a monster, but anyway), aliens, and vampires recently, and now zombies, so–back to ghosts? Time for werewolves to shine again?

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What happens to something you told someone in confidence once you no longer care if anyone knows? Especially if, to their mind, you still want it locked away.

I’m thinking of secrets I’ve told people in the past (high school, college) that I wouldn’t care at all, now, if people knew them. Or things that people told me that I doubt they care about keeping private anymore (not that I would chance it…I’m no monster). If you’re the keeper of secrets for people you’re no longer close with–i.e. people who you conjecture, but don’t know/can’t confirm, no longer consider those things “secrets”–then the information is orphaned.

Maybe it’s just that it’s not in common parlance anymore, but the term “orphaned” only makes me think of Microsoft Word with its widowed paragraphs and orphaned sentences. First of all–what grim terminology! (though I kind of appreciate that aspect of it). Second: the analogy doesn’t hold up. A woman becoming a widow (and where, yes, are the widower paragraphs?) has nothing to do with a child becoming an orphan (unless there’s an alternate definition of orphan that derives from losing one parent?)

In word processing, they are similarly only related in theme (the death of your full paragraph!):

“Pic­ture a para­graph that starts at the bot­tom of one page and con­tin­ues at the top of the next page. When only the last line of the para­graph ap­pears at the top of the next page, that line is called a widow. When only the first line of the para­graph ap­pears at the bot­tom of the first page, that line is called an or­phan.”

This would seem to counteract my complaint that widows and orphans, though related, don’t happen at the same time…because a widowed paragraph and an orphaned paragraph can’t happen at the same time (unless you are verbose enough to have paragraphs that take up just over one page). Still, what’s the justification for designating one widow and the other orphan? And why isn’t there a term for the blank line (which is anathema to me; I would much rather have a single line of a paragraph at either top or bottom, though to be honest I would ultimately prefer to go back and add or delete so that this can all be avoided completely) that Word puts in when it acts to prevent widows and orphans?

This website cautions,

“Be aware that if you use widow and or­phan con­trol, you will fre­quently see blank lines at the bot­tom of your pages. This is nor­mal, since lines must be trans­planted to cure the problem.”

Though the author didn’t create the widow/orphan function in Word, the language he uses–“transplanted,” “cure”–settles neatly into the governing analogy.

At some point, surely, this issue of blank space at the bottom of a page will be obsolete (or hang on only tenuously, the way the convention of using two spaces after a period has sustained). In the sense that the internet exists and a “page” is a continuous scroll, it already has.

Where do my old secrets live–bottom of someone’s consciousness, about to be pushed out? At the top, barely visible, away from the main narrative? I don’t care whether the whispered thoughts I’ve collected from people over the years are the widows and my former secrets are the orphans, or if it’s the other way around. What I think about is that blank line at the bottom of the page (because unlike widowed or orphaned text, the blank line only ever occurs at the bottom), the space that reminds me of people I no longer know, whose confidences I still hold, but who are no longer present enough in my life to tell me whether they still treasure them as secrets. Time and distance: the real causes of blank space.

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Overheard in living rooms, mine and others’:

“I’ve got to be honest…and honestly, I don’t think that the orcs will punish them for that.”

“Don’t I have that portable exsanguinator handy?”

“Well, what are your thoughts? …On what? On the infinite blood coming out of this snake.”

“Use it. Make us look like snake people.”

“Also, we’re going to be holding up a giant eyeball.”

“I like to ingest small businesses”

(It took me a moment to realize that he had, sadly, said “invest in”)

On waiting rooms:

More people try to talk to me in waiting rooms than in bars. Or, at least, the ratio of people in waiting rooms deciding that it’s the time to strike up a conversation is higher than that of people in bars. I get it: waiting rooms are boring. Maybe you’re waiting for a doctor, dentist, or other entity you would really prefer not to see. You may have been waiting a long time. But when I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office (and I’m there frequently, because I’m a hypochondriac who lives a block away from the doctor), I’m not at my most relaxed; I’m trapped; I’m trying to keep one ear attuned to the door, where someone will soon appear and call my name; probably, I am wearing pajamas.

I prefer to spend my waiting room time either with my Kindle or texting my parents form texts based on the kind that women get when they’re pregnant and receiving weekly updates about the baby’s size and development:

“Your baby…is now the size of a record-setting prize-winning squash! Her blood pressure is 104/69 and so far cholesterol is still low. “

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