I love gross things.

Once, I discovered some sort of silverfish or cousin thereof in my sink, caught by one of its many legs in the drain. I did what anyone would do and took a picture to text to my friend. Several hours later I received an agonized reply – “Why would you send me that???” “I thought it was amazingly gross and I wanted to show you!”

This proclivity is tolerated more gently by people if you stick to bruise photos. I think it’s because there’s nothing slimy about bruises. They’re colorful, which most gross things aren’t, and they possess a measure of self-containment. When I tripped and blunt force trauma’d my hand a few months ago, I had bruising, but also white clammy, raw-looking skin slicked with a reflective sheen of blood. I sent a photo to two of my closest friends from home anyway. Before I texted, I said something like, “Who wants to see something gross??” but it was the WhatsApp equivalent of knocking on a closed door immediately before opening it. “I’m afraid to ask,” one of them responded – not the equivalent of a “Come in,” maybe, but at least comparable to a “Yeah?”

More recently I’ve been in the business of hair photos, or photos of what was once hair and has since been unintentionally discarded from its head of origin. This started after our bathroom drain was severely clogged, I bought a snake and snaked it beyond belief, and then I replaced our rusty drain topper with a neat strainer and requested that my roommates clean the hair out of it after showering. This didn’t go well. Every time I showered I cleaned out my hair from the sieve – a surprising amount made it there even though I try to catch it as it falls, stick it to the shower wall, and then throw it away afterward. But if I checked the strainer before showering, it was always full of either short dark hair (roommate 1) or short medium brown hair (roommate 2). After a few days of this I got annoyed, took a picture of the hair I’d removed, and sent it to both of them. Then I took a screenshot of my text and sent it to my boyfriend.

His response: “I didn’t need to see that!” could have been facetious, but I don’t think it was. And that was the point at which I realized that people do not want to see gross things in the way that I do. So earlier in the winter when I went to the doctor and FINALLY had my ear unclogged with their frightening water pik type device, I refrained from taking a photo of the enormous amount of wax that emerged into the basin.

(But I did ask to see it.)

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I recently finished Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbottom, and had enough to say about it to give it a singular post separate from my book posts. As soon as I heard about the book, I put it on hold at the library.

I watched Chernobyl, of course, and years ago read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. My guess as to the sudden patter of media about Chernobyl is the combination of 30th anniversary (2016) and Fukushima being relatively recent. I was most curious, before starting this, about how nuclear power itself would be portrayed (mainly because of people I know expressing concern over potential fear-mongering and this New Yorker article, which discusses Germany’s switch to building up coal and forgoing nuclear, which has led to thousands of more deaths in the long run…but while Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power does seem to be fear-based, the fear is based on the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents themselves – not any media surrounding them). I came away from the Chernobyl miniseries feeling that it emphatically demonstrated the incredible danger at the intersection of secrecy, bureaucracy, and oppression. Yes, of course the images of what radiation does to a person are visceral and terrifying, but…that’s what happens. The jacket copy for the book tends toward the more alarmist, but jacket copy and blurbs are going to err toward the dramatic no matter what.

That said…perhaps the book is doing some of what nuclear-power advocates fear it could, in that I am becoming increasingly convinced that humans can’t be trusted to wield nuclear power. But I’m not yet sure that that’s more pronounced with nuclear power rather than just more visible/more acute, while human recklessness with coal and other fossil fuels will kill many thousands more even in the short term. But my GOD the human fallibility – not just at Chernobyl but in incidents in Siberia and London before that…all of which showcase humans attempting to meet quotas/make money, cover their tracks, and keep things secret, to the detriment of everyone around them.

I guess the question is – are human recklessness and bureaucratic obfuscation going to be less deadly to us when applied to coal power than to nuclear? And I’d guess the answer is no. But it’s hard to read about civilians who would have escaped Pripyat virtually unscathed if they had only shut their windows, avoided produce, and kept their kids inside, or men who received enormous doses of radiation in part because no one told them to take off their irradiated uniforms when they left the reactor site. Wanting to avoid mass panic isn’t a trivial concern, but so much could have been mitigated (then again, when I think about LED and incandescent lightbulbs versus CFLS – which draw a fairly neat parallel to fossil fuels (safer seeming, less volatile, but ultimately worse for the environment (and for fossil fuels, worse for humans) and nuclear power (cleaner when used correctly but with higher potential for extreme consequences if something goes wrong) – I recall our broken lightbulbs and my frustration at trying to follow “best practices” for cleaning them up. The best practices for CFL cleanup were akin to the leaders in Chernobyl providing as much information as necessary to the citizens of the region – they gave me every possible chance to reduce the potential for harm. Yet I was frustrated by them anyway, because they caused me to panic (and to switch to LED bulbs). So…is that hypocritical, if I’m finding myself on the side of advocating for both nuclear power and transparency? Maybe.

Higginbottom doesn’t ignore any of this; his epilogue directly addresses Germany’s recent changes and the detriment to the environment that will occur if the world continues to rely on fossil fuels for the majority of its power. Yes, of course wind and solar power carry neither the long-term devastating effects of coal nor the threat of sudden nuclear disaster, but until then…nuclear power seems increasingly worth the risk. Unfortunately, the best ways to prevent nuclear disaster and mitigate the potential effects of the power plants are preparedness, lack of hubris, transparency, and caution, which are some of the things humans – in collective, especially in the form of governments – fall shortest of.

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Last two of the year:

Fleishman is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I read that the original title for this was Schrodinger’s Marriage, and for a second I thought “That’s much better!” before just as instantly deciding it wasn’t. It’s more clever, maybe, but less memorable, and less clever than it would be if the term hadn’t already been appropriated in clever ways elsewhere. I enjoyed this thoroughly, especially the way the narration crept in from background to foreground. I did keep wondering if the reader was intended to be startled by/to mock Fleishman for categorizing his $230,000 salary as decent-but-not-wealthy or…if it was intended to be viewed as a reasonable opinion?

Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman: I think I read this over the course of 24 hours – it’s hyper engaging and perfectly paced, and completely pulls off the trick of being told in 20 different first-person perspectives (as well as a close third that follows the main character through the novel). I’ve read a number of books that attempt multiple narrators and usually those that succeed are the books that limit themselves to three or four that recur – although there are two (essentially) recurring voices in Lady in the Lake (the protagonist and the titular Lady), no one else who narrates a chapter ever resurfaces, but the story fits together perfectly. The 1960s setting and protagonist who starts out at a newspaper at age 37 were extra bonuses.

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I only started to see this snowclone on twitter a month or so ago – that’s not to say I’m not late to the party – and I had to go looking for its exact origin. It sounded like something out of an instruction manual for pets – “Dogs can have a little table food, as a treat” – or something along those lines, and that wasn’t far off. Doing the usual rounds of research – knowyourmeme, cheezburger, etc – led me to “Cats can have a little salami, as a treat”

One thing that’s interesting about this particular snowclone is that the required text – X can have a little Y, as a treat – is taken from the beginning and end of a much longer paragraph of text.

Paragraphs aren’t pithy and they don’t perform well as phrasal templates. Some internet renegade saw the true meat (heh) of the cats-and-salami advice, made a well-executed cut, and here we are. The snowclone wasn’t a snowclone at first – it really was just a meme when it started to gain traction in November of 2019. The first iterations were all still about cats and salami; they hadn’t been slotted out in favor of other nouns.

While reading about the origins, I discovered the term “Wholesome memes,” which is new to me. At first I got excited because it sounded like an alternate way of talking about snowclones – like…memes…with holes in them…it was probably a niche response.

What interests me about the evolution of this snowclone in particular is not just that I saw it almost from its origins, but the way it forces its subjects to bend to its grammatical rules: it turns every noun into a collective noun. You can’t say “Squirrels can have a few nuts in the winter, as a treat.” “A few” applies to countable nouns, and countable nouns have no place in this format. Most of the iterations stick with nouns that are typically uncountable – e.g. someone or multiple someones’ (pretty brilliant) “Americans can have a little impeachment, as a treat.” Those that really, really have their hearts set on countable nouns can add a countable modifier (in the same way that “water” isn’t countable but “glasses of water” are): “my ears can have a little bit of sad songs, as a treat,” (though that person could have said “a little sad music”), but trying to make a monolith out of a countable item, like “Claires can have a little Nintendo games, as a treat,” doesn’t work.

That is: Snowclones can have a little variation, as a treat, but can’t be completely upended.

Basically the best one I saw was “Lou Bega can have a little Monica in his life, as a treat.” What was it that made that one so instantly gratifying? It’s that not only was the structure familiar (I’d seen a number of “can have a little…as a treat” tweets at that point), but the lyrics quoted (from Mambo #5) were also familiar, so there was a zing of double recognition.

One thing I haven’t seen is tweets that turn “little” into a size modifier, rather than a quantity modifier. For example: Twinkle twinkle can have a little star, as a treat (I wrote that just now and tweeted it in real time, although that “real time” was now a week ago.)

In the course of looking for example tweets (should I post @ attributions for them? I would if more than 12 people a month were reading this), I came across a tweet pointing out that the original paragraph – in the picture I posted above – actually says, “Cats can have little a salami,” not “Cats can have a little salami,” and now I’ll never be the same.

Now to think of sentences that would work with “…can have little a…” as a format. Cats can have little a SaLaMI? I’ll see myself out of the browser.

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Alternate title: When one thing isn’t substantial enough for an entire blog post, mash a few things together. A dinner of side dishes, all nutrients covered!

.

I.

Pettiness level: Calling someone by the wrong nickname

Pettiness level: Taking a picture of the hair clogging the drain every time you clean the shower catcher before showering

Pettiness level: Taking your mail out of the mailbox and shutting the door on everyone else’s

Pettiness level: Spreading your washcloth out across more than half of the rail in the bathroom

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II.

Clumsiness level: Hitting your head on the faucet when you sneeze over the sink

Clumsiness level: Purse strap getting snagged on the door handle

Clumsiness level: Accidentally airborne off the lip of the steps to the kitchen when wearing slippery socks

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III.

Techster level: “Inventing” soylent and ignoring the long-time existence of poi

Techster level: Going so far in the direction of private rides that you circle back and think you’ve invented buses

Techster level: Stealing “dopamine fasting” from the Amish and meditation practitioners

.

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The Lost Man, by Jane Harper: It probably wasn’t the most restrained or prudent to read all three of a new-to-you author’s books in one week. Now I have nothing! But I assume Harper will be writing for decades to come, and if she, Laura Lippman, and Tana French can each publish a book every two years or so…well, it won’t be enough, but it will be something. This departed from the first two Harper books, which featured the same detective, but was tonally very similar. With Tana French’s books, I feel like I have fairly strong feelings about which are my favorites (at least the top four- The Likeness, The Secret Place, Witch Elm, and In the Woods), but I don’t know if I could say among Harper’s three.

Who Says You’re Dead? by Jacob M. Appel, MD: I was expecting the entirety of this book to focus on end-of-life/definition-of-alive dilemmas, and (for no particularly well-founded reason) thought it was going to be several in-depth case studies. Instead it’s very scant scenarios (from all areas of medical ethics, not just end-of-life) followed by a few paragraphs of discussing weighing the possible options. Something about it just felt very rote and cursory, although it was still a semi-interesting read.

The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esme Weijun Wang: I was waiting for a few holds at the library that arrived so slowly it seemed they must have taken a canoe down the Gowanus Canal to get to my branch. I read almost the entire collection of essays on a bus to Maryland, engaged and interested. I was expecting them to be more formally experimental (not because of the subject but because that’s what I associate with Graywolf Press, whether that’s completely accurate or not), but while they are more straightforward, they build on each other in interesting ways as the book progresses.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong: I keep thinking of an anecdote I read on Twitter about a bookstore patron who was looking for this book but couldn’t remember the title and asked for the book about “how for a minute we are beautiful” (and that’s not even what they said but my attempt to remember what they said…a double misremembrance). The writing and structure of this book are not briefly but enduringly gorgeous. I stayed up far too late reading the middle part of this one night – until 2 am – because I was so happy in a cave of blankets, wearing black fleece tights and a long-sleeved black shirt like a cozy ninja, the book just poking out so that the page was lit enough to read. I was so happy doing it that I did it again last night, waking up tired and addressing that by staying in bed to finish the book. Gorgeous.

The Great Pretender, by Susanna Cahalan: I don’t understand how I’d never heard of the events narrated in this book before. A psychiatrist sends eight “sane” (the book does a great job interrogating the idea of sanity and mental health/mental illness) people into various psychiatric hospitals, and they’re almost all diagnosed with schizophrenia. And then there are twists upon twists. The book’s title ends up resonating in multiple different ways. I read Cahalan’s Brain on Fire when it came out (or a few years later? It doesn’t feel like it could have been that long) and it was interesting to see how similarly they read (in the most positive sense!) – in her memoir, she’s not only personal but also relentlessly inquisitive and journalistic, and in this book, she doesn’t lose her voice in the facts and details, even though she’s (largely – her reporting is narrated) absent from them.

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After my apartment became an OSHA violation – as in, that same day, about eight hours later – the dryer tried to set my clothes on fire. This wasn’t surprising in general, because the washer and dryer have been in the apartment far longer than I have and, to my knowledge, no one has ever serviced them (yes, this is a failure on my part. I know. I understand that avoiding eye contact with people is one thing and avoiding considering the amount of lint that has built up in your laundry machine – or where exactly it vents, because it doesn’t seem to be outside – is another, stupider thing). At this point they’re probably 15 years old. That said, the attempted self-arson of my dryer was surprising in its specifics because I was drying a small load of clothing on the lowest temperature setting.

We have exactly one modern appliance in our apartment: the stove the landlord purchased after he sent someone to “fix” our old stove and that resulted in, um, a gas leak. Everything else is some double digit number of years old. As a result, none of our appliances sing to us the way other people’s dishwashers or combo washer/dryers do (really, why do they do that? If there’s a jingle, something should pop out at the end of the song. I would have no objection to my boyfriend’s machine doodly-doodly-dooing if it subsequently shot all of his clean clothes out into the apartment afterward). We can’t read the dial on the toaster oven, my air conditioner is a bit lacking, et cetera. None of this is particularly problematic, but burning clothes require a different level of concern. That is, they require something other than “Well, our rent is pretty low, and it’s still functional, so…”

I was confused when I heard the smoke alarm go off because…going back to what I said about owning no appliances that serenade you, I suppose we do have three: the carbon monoxide detector and two smoke alarms. But usually the smoke detector in the kitchen is the one going off, and although it’s identical to the one closer to the dryer, apparently they sing completely different warning songs. So I thought it was the carbon monoxide detector. I did figure the dryer was the issue, though, since it was the only thing running, and opening it confirmed that it was the source of everything smelling like ashes. No actual fire, and nothing was actually burnt, but it did require another cycle through the washer – followed by being hung to dry, obviously – to get rid of the smokiness.

My main point is that I need to take better care of the devices I’ve inherited, but my secondary point is thus: On multiple occasions in the past, I’ve had people use “she wouldn’t let us leave the dryer running when we left the house/apartment/airbnb” as ammunition for an argument on the order of “Claire is an enemy of fun.” Not to say that I’m not sometimes an enemy of fun! I have occasionally had that thought about my own self while at parties. But no one is allowed to use this particular thing as “evidence” for it ever again. Turn off your dryer when you leave the house, people.

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As much as my OCD has been mitigated by Zoloft and therapy, contamination fears still do their worst with me from time to time.

Today the landlord sent someone to replace light bulbs that were too high for us to reach without a proper ladder, and in the course of his doing so two of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs that had been in there broke, scattering little pieces of glass AND ALSO MERCURY OH DEAR GOD I’M GOING TO DIE MERCURY across the floor in our living room. I know the relative risks and how small they are…logically. But my faculties of logic typically recuse themselves in the face of environmental, airborne, or ingestible contaminants. In their absence, in rush the forces of emotionally-based panic!

So I canceled my drum lesson this afternoon because I figured it was decent to offer my teacher the chance to avoid my living room for today, although this started me thinking about how, if you’re in a profession where you go to other people’s homes (cleaner, music teacher, tutor…) you have very little control over your environment, and you (me) are more accurately seeking the illusion of control. For all I know, each of my students could have crushed a few CFL bulbs at the kitchen table right before I showed up to discuss geometry.

I think less than the exposure itself – I’m trying to comfort myself, also, with the fact that as a vegetarian I don’t have any mercury exposure from fish – because it’s done and (ha) dusted and can’t be rewound, I’m hung up on the idea of “best practices.”

If you google “what to do if a CFL bulb breaks,” you’ll get an expected mix of “abandon all hope” from way-out-there sites and “aim to follow these steps:” from the EPA website and the like. My problem is that the disclaimer of “Even if you broke a bulb in the past and just vacuumed it up and didn’t follow any of these steps, you are fine – these are just the best practices” only makes me more rabid about needing to follow the best practices. So I opened the windows, turned off the heat, provided stiff cardboard for cleanup and followed it with wet paper towels after the glass bits were gone. I don’t know what I would have done if a bulb had broken over the carpet, because it seems like “best practices” would have been “dispose of the carpet in an enormous, sealed glass jar and take the jar to a hazardous waste facility.”

I think leaving the windows open for a few hours and going over the floor once more with wet paper towels is all I can do, but it’s hard to keep from imagining that when I first walked into the kitchen and saw the glass, I got mercury dust on the bottoms of my socks (I did throw the socks out), and then tracked it into my room…and then will continue to track it elsewhere as if I’m painting a radioactive stripe everywhere I go (and yes, this type of mercury is not radioactive, but I was talking about Marie Curie and the radium girls last night so glowing trails are on my mind…). It’s difficult not to want to follow every last best practice, to aim for a total purity that doesn’t exist, to be perfectly safe. But I know my time is better spent doing what I can and working on how to cope with that being enough. Illogically, the incident has made the unbroken CFL bulbs I have waiting for a recycling event seem like little grenades sitting in my room waiting to explode, so now they’re in bubble wrap ready to be taken to Home Depot.

And “Marie Curie” really sounds like mercury.

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The Day the Sun Died, by Yan Lianke: I was initially distracted by some stylistic devices that never ended up working for me (repetition, ironic insertion of the author/his other works into the story). The repetition and some of the other verbal tics may be mainly a translation issue – not an issue with the translator but an issue inherent in translation – but my Mandarin is nowhere near good enough to say, even if I had access to the original (my Mandarin is, in fact, only almost good enough to read 3/4 of a tweet posted in Mandarin by a poet the other day, which ultimately read “You can get lost from me” (the character for the verb “get lost” was not in my repertoire). Per the introduction to the novel, one doesn’t have to know Yan’s other works in order to enjoy this one or understand the references, but the description of those other works made me want to put down this book and find those…I was somewhat more invested in the story as it progressed, but the repetition really never worked for me.

The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami: I moved this to the top of the stack after getting a notification from the Brooklyn Public Library that it was due in three days. Three days? It’s already been a week and a half? And…it’s on hold by approximately one million people, so I can’t renew it. The same timeline happened with Marlon James, but I got lucky and was able to renew even though I think I remember that book having an almost as long wait list. I didn’t attempt to read this in three days – I only had…zero days once I finished The Day the Sun Died, which I was in the middle of when I got the notice. The daily fine for a book is 15 cents, and the library is a good place to donate to. When it was finally time to open the book, a receipt from the previous reader fell out – apparently they accrued $1.35 while finishing The Other Americans, which cheered me. I really enjoyed this, in particular the setting. Multiple-viewpoint novels can be tricky to pull off, but this one works – maintaining one main character while focusing enough on the others that they feel worthy of their own narration, even though for a few characters it’s only one or two short chapters.

Sabrina and Corina, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: My feelings toward this gorgeous collection might be epitomized by me telling my boyfriend, by way of description, “I love EVERYTHING about this book except that the cadence of the title means I have the Bananas in Pajamas song in my head now.” “I don’t know what that is,” he replied. “I’ll spare you,” I said. Love, everybody! I’ll take the bananas and their pajamas coming down the stairs, chasing teddy bears, whatever, if that’s the price of admission for this book. I’ve really loved collections bound together by place recently (these are set in and around Denver), and although there are no links between or among any of the stories, they feel very cohesive (which is not necessarily even something I require in a story collection, but it adds to the magic of this one). I read it really quickly and probably would have read it again if it weren’t due back at the library…

(Side note: three of the National Book Award finalists – Sabrina and Corina, The Other Americans, and Disappearing Earth – are either story collections or novels without a singular narrator…just an interesting note!)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: The only troubles with this book were: 1. it was nearly overdue by the time I started it; 2. it is 600 pages long. That was problematic not so much for my library fines as for the book’s weight, which made it a less than ideal candidate for a subway read. Then, truth be told, I was distracted by The Dry for a day and have only just begun this. More to come when I finish…

The Dry, by Jane Harper: I started this before Black Leopard, Red Wolf, because I had it in eBook form and my Kindle weighs almost nothing (it’s slightly alarming to me still how light both Kindle and MacBook Air are; I am always certain I’ve left one or the other somewhere when they’re actually right in my purse). I first heard of Harper on a Twitter thread, where someone compared her to Tana French but in Australia/Laura Lippman but in Australia, and that was enough for me to seek out all three of her books. And lo! They do fill the French/Lippman void, and now there are two more Harper novels out there for me to read after this one. Harper-Lippman-French is a great triumvirate of brilliant female mystery writers (I tried to come up with a way to not make that sound reductive – because so often assigning a genre beyond fiction carries the whiff of “but not literary,” yet going out of your way to note that a book is literary can sound as if you weren’t expecting it to be – but they are all mysteries).

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I’ll go on the record stating that the most important all-purpose ingredient for a Halloween costume is dental floss.

Floss has many excellent qualities: you probably already own some (convenience!), it’s cheap, it’s strong. It’s almost certainly a better plan to use dental floss to hang something around your neck or dangle it from your wrist than it is to attempt shenanigans with tape, glue, or safety pins.

The first time I discovered the critical importance of floss was when I dressed up as the tooth fairy for Halloween back in…maybe 2008? It was primarily thematic until I discovered how practical it was for hanging a cardboard tooth around my neck. Floss is easy to tie in knots and unlikely to break; it’s smooth and thin enough to make its way through tiny holes without tearing something like, say, saran wrap, which I may be wearing later as part of a fake window.

I wasn’t going to dress up – I’m an adult, it’s been a long week, today is Thursday, it’s raining, etc. But at this point in my Halloween career I have a costume box that lives in my closet year round, so when I decided to attempt a party after work tonight I lifted it down from the top shelf (out fell a llama onesie, which was soft, and a pointy crown, which was not) and rummaged through. The window – left over from a stained glass window costume, subsequently used as part of a last-minute “bug smashed against a screen” costume in conjunction with a pair of orange wings that have served me well but are now quite droopy – needed a new sheath of saran wrap because the floss had ripped a path through it (nobody’s perfect), but seems like it will hold – and anyway, it’s part of a thunderstorm costume, so it’s just verisimilitude if it’s broken. The wind was too powerful!

I’ve been a storm before – 2014 – and yes, it does feel like cheating to repeat…but only in the same way that having a signature karaoke song feels like cheating, in that it’s something I tried to avoid until I realized how convenient it was. The previous iteration didn’t include the window, and I have some items in my bag (yellow plastic folder, multicolored scarf, tinfoil) for potential transformation into lightning bolts, clouds, and a rainbow, so at least I hope to be singing in a different style. I’ve retired the necklace of birds and lightning bolt earrings from the previous storm, though the base of the costume remains largely unchanged.

Now if I can find some blue streamers so that I have fake rain as well as all of NYC’s real rain tonight, I’ll be set.

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