Awards Season

Linguistic superlatives from life recently:

 

Best appellation:

12-year-old student: “Do you like the snake I won? I named it prefrontal cortex.”

 

Best Venn diagram intersection:

The shaded region where “gummy snacks” and “popular sperm bank choices” meet: Trader Joe’s “Scandinavian Swimmers” Swedish Fish knock-off.

 

Best portmanteau of more than two words:

Boyfriend describing the zombies who live in a video-game subway station: “Deadizents”

(citizen…denizen…resident…dead!)

 

Best observation about words’ failings and shifts:

Friend talking about how hard it is to adequately describe what you see when traveling: “It’s hard to use words like “amazing” because we’re always using those words. We’re using extraordinary words for, like, a fucking taco, so to describe Egypt I have to come back around again and just say, “I was happy.””

 

Best mixed metaphor:

Roommate on shooting one’s self in the foot/burning bridges: “She salted the well!”

…which births a slightly different interpretation of events. You can salt the land; you can poison the well; if you salt the well, perhaps you really just wanted to improve someone’s iodine levels.

 

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

So much to keep track of

I’ve been trying to get rid of things. Mostly tangible things–clothes that itch or that I got in high school, lightbulbs for lamps I no longer own, tutoring materials from the old SAT–but also digital detritus.

Items that exist only as files do take up literal space–on my hard drive, Dropbox, Google account–but I’m not generally lacking for that (at least not since I got an external hard drive). What I’m lacking is the ability to ever listen to all of the songs I have on iTunes, or flip through all of the pictures stored in disparate places, or the right keywords to find the email that I remember receiving but can’t locate…

Digital clutter is a sibling to mental clutter, which seems to proliferate during the winter when the outside world has fewer variations, is less welcoming, and encourages turning inward. Mental clutter like: How much do I need for retirement? What’s about to go bad in my fridge, making me feel like an asshole for wasting food? Which diseases do I need to keep in mind in case I ever contract a mysterious, hard to diagnose illness? Is it less wasteful to throw out that difficult-to-wash bottle or to use water to wash and recycle it?

It may not help that I’m in various places in five books*–due to losing interest for the moment, needing to finish this one first because it’s due back at the library, leaving that one at home because it’s too heavy to carry with me, and on. None of them are books I intend to give up on, but I usually limit the books I’m holding in my mind at one time to two.

*(The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Infested by Brooke Borel, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman)

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has one comment.

Who are you? Overheard at home

Sometimes my living room is full of mythical beings:

“Who here is a small creature, besides me?”

“Wait, wait–can you tell me how rage works? I’ve never been a barbarian before.”

“I just really want to tweet that my roommate is playing harp in a panda suit right now.”

 

Other times…

“If you have an extra free printer, great. But you understand I’m a 32-year-old man, right?”

 

LET’S BE CLEAR! Roll call.

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Another Subway Story

I love hearing conversations between couples on the train.

Woman telling man about the book she’s been reading: “So then her boyfriend gets killed, right? So he’s dead.”

That is generally how it works, yes.

Woman: “So then she’s going through his stuff and she finds, like, a video of a woman chained to his bed, being tortured to death.”

Man: “Oh, a snuff film.”

Woman: “Yes–that’s what they called it! Wait. What does that word mean to you?”

Man: “Uh…snuff film?

Woman: “Yeah. You recognized that word. What does it mean to you?”

Man: “Um…well…a movie where a girl gets tortured and killed?”

Woman: “Yeah, but it’s fake.”

Man: “Well…no…I mean, sure, yeah, maybe.”

I don’t think that guy was looking forward to continuing the conversation at home.

(Also, I  hope that I don’t get really odd spam out of the keywords in this post.)

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Best books I read in 2015

ALL of the books I read in 2015…subjective favorites in bold:

Blackwater, by Jeremy Scahill

The Infinite Sea, by Rick Yancey

On Immunity, by Eula Biss

The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, by John Crawford

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, by Will Chancellor

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Hell House, by Richard Matheson

The Collector, by John Fowles

Flatland, by Edwin Abbott

Feed, by Mira Grant

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanigihara

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, by Matt Bell

Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card

Bright-Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card

Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy

Deadline, by Mira Grant

Blackout, by Mira Grant

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

Hush, Hush by Laura Lippman

To the End of June, by Cris Beam

The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits

Terms of Service, by Jacob Silverman

Biohazard, by Ken Alibek

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, by Allan H. Ropper

Brain On Fire, by Susannah Cahalan

The Viral Storm, by Nathan Wolfe

The Living, by Matt de la Pena

It’s Not About Perfect, by Shannon Miller

Plague Time, by Paul W. Ewald

The New Killer Diseases, by Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti

Inside the O’Briens, by Lisa Genova

When Germs Travel, by Howard Markel

The End of Illness, by David Agus

Abroad, by Katie Crouch

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

The Hunted, by Matt de la Pena

No Time to Lose, by Peter Piot

The People of Forever are not Afraid, by Shani Boianju

The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt

The Ice Twins, by S.K. Tremayne

Find Me, by Laura Van Den Berg

Infectious Madness, by Harriet A. Washington

Hyacinth Girls, by Lauren Frankel

The Story of a New Name, by Elena Ferrante 

 

I guess I would describe this overall as eclectic people with difficult relationships against a backdrop of zombies and germs?

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

A subway story

Small child–7? 8?–on the F train sits down next to me, begins quietly singing to the tune of “My Darling Clementine: “Went to Hellll, went to Hellll, went to Hellll just now–”

Her 6-ish-year-old sister: “Which one is that? The up one or the down one?”

First child: “Heaven is the up, boring one. Hell is down.” (resumes singing)

Unfazed grandmother chaperoning them: “That song just goes on and on, doesn’t it.”

 

ETA: Later on, when the train was going from Manhattan to Brooklyn…

8-year-old: “Where are we now? Are we in Brooklyn?”

Grandmother: “Yes. No. We’re underneath the river almost to Brooklyn.”

8-year-old: “Why can’t I see any water?”

Grandmother: “We’re in a tunnel, because if we were just in the water the pressure would break all of the glass in the windows and everyone would die.”

 

…I really admire the undercurrent of subtle morbidness that seems to run in this family.

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

WTF, Internet?

While using Hopstop (RIP), I found that there was a section for East Anglia, England. What’s the public transport there? Eels?

Hopstop might have fared better if it had the functionality to tell you how long it would take you to walk to the train while staring down at your phone the whole time.

Things I’ve accidentally Googled while trying to search for “Hopstop”: 1. “hoo” – got this: A welcome misfire in the end. Many uses of hoo! 2. “Ho,” constantly. 3. Hope.

Things I’ve accidentally Googled while trying to type “Pandora” into my browser: Panda.

I looked up the noun form of “mundane” online, and doing so somehow caused MS Word to shut down, causing me to lose my paragraph about mundanities.

Instead of getting emergency texts about unlikely flash floods, my phone should really let me know when it’s free donut/coffee/ice cream day nearby.

Weather.com with its constant rebranding is already like a teenager who can’t decide if she wants to be goth or punk or emo. Now it’s also dealing in schadenfreude: “NEW! See Friends at Risk in Severe Weather.”

Further, I need my weather options to span a broader range than “Love!” to “Ugh!”

Found in my saved drafts folder: email titled “Things to Remember” with a list of “Books to read” below a list titled “Diseases to worry about.”

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Apps I Need

  • Sneeze-counting app, including tracking of the ever-frustrating missed sneezes.
  • App that gives you new weather when you hit refresh.
  • Similar to the many step-tracking apps: an app that counts all of the words you type and delete on different devices throughout the day.
  • App that lets you change Siri’s voice to Morgan Freeman’s or the vocalist of your choosing.
  • Shazam for my moods.
  • Ability to Google “What’s in my fridge right now and when is it going to go bad?”
  • On my homescreen, in bold font: the differences among shallot, scallop, and caper.
  • App that rolls the cuffs of my shorts down when I sit and re-rolls them when I stand back up.
  • Google advanced search constraint that specifies “But not LITERALLY”

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has one comment.

Best books I read in… (Part Two)

2011:

The Ask, Sam Lipsyte

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

God on the Rocks, Jane Gardam (and shouldn’t this be the name of a cocktail?)

State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson

 

2012:

The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein

Bats Out of Hell, Barry Hannah

Airships, Barry Hannah

And When She Was Good, Laura Lippman

Spillover, David Quammen

I guess 2012 was the year I went minimalist, but I cannot fathom why I didn’t include I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck on here. Maybe I was too emotionally scarred.

 

2013:

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

The Likeness, Tana French

Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

 

2014:

American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett

Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill

Others of My Kind, James Sallis

The Fever, Megan Abbott

The Word Exchange, Alena Graedon

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Best books I read in… (Part One)

I started keeping a word document of all of the books I read during the calendar year back in 2007, bolding the ones that I liked the most. I usually tried to keep the year’s best to ten and later, five–not forcing it, especially in years when I read more books or loved more of them, but it was nice to have a constraint. Here are (were?) my favorites from the past eight years…

 

2007:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

Disturbances in the Field, Lynne Sharon Shwartz

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

The Joke, Milan Kundera

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

The World Doesn’t End, Charles Simic

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

 

2008:

What is the What, Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits

Anticancer: A New Way of Life, David Servan-Schreiber

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Susan Jane Gilman

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

There are a few in these lists that actually surprise me–really? That was one of my favorites of the year?–and a couple of others that I KNOW were included only so I could have a list of ten (making it, really, nine winners and the next closest thing)…but I’ll try not to revise history.

 

2009:

A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks

All That I Have, Castle Freeman

The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll be Dead, David Shields

Twilight of the Superheroes, Deborah Eisenberg

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

The People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vendela Vida

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

Even as I do this I’m tempted to further differentiate by bolding, here, the ones that I want to shout about the most. I’m mostly only not doing it because for some reason whenever I use the bold font it doesn’t show up bold, so it would just be a waste.

 

2010:

Whore’s Asylum, Katy Darby

The Man in the Wooden Hat, Jane Gardam

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Lay the Favorite, Beth Raymer

The Photograph, Penelope Lively

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

As a side note: I’ve taken SO many Europa books out of the library solely because I love their jacket design so much.

 

Posted by & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.