Covid sounds close to co-morbid. Co-morvid? What are the afflictions that come, hand in (thoroughly washed) hand, with Coronavirus? Malaise, both physical (quarantine, avoidance of gyms as petrie dishes even in the healthiest of times, lack of movement beyond a certain safe-feeling radius) and mental: we’re in a holding pattern, as if the entire globe is a single plane circling above its destination indefinitely, uncertain of when we’ll land, what the landing will feel like, or if we’ll run out of fuel first. A terrible snow day that doesn’t have an end in sight.

The event that marked my first year of college was 9/11 – it didn’t affect me in the same way it affected students who had just moved to NYC, or my classmates who were from NYC, but it defined our year and especially our fall. Classes weren’t canceled immediately (and, obviously, the tenor of the tragedy made cancelations a step taken for emotional reasons rather than physical ones), and students without direct connections to New York wandered around Providence – the city we’d lived in for just two weeks – speculating abstractly about the event, until they ran into a friend or unit-mate from New York and suddenly nothing was theoretical anymore.

Many of the students I teach now weren’t born in 2001. Some of those who were (barely) are now in their first year of college, not yet sure if they’ll be going back to finish second semester. They’ve spent their entire lives online to one degree or another, and either because of this or in spite of this they’re desperate to go back, physically, to the places they’ve only recently begun to think of as their own.

There’s is something poetic about the measures we take to minimize risk and exposure. I envision the standard protocols – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid groups, no hugs or handshakes – as a series of face masks, each filtering out smaller and smaller particles. None is a guarantee of continued health, but each reduction builds on your percent chance of not getting sick. On its own each might be minimally effective, a wet piece of tissue struggling to sustain a heavy burden, but as the layers increase so does the strength.

I keep wanting to not post this until I’ve revised it or thought about it SUPER carefully to make sure I’m saying what I mean, but everything is changing so fast that if I do that, everything I’ve said will be out of date.

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On January 27th, I wrote:

“The other day I heard someone ask a friend, “So are you really worried about the Wuhan virus?” The reply of “No, I haven’t been a hypochondriac in at least a decade,” made me laugh with recognition. I was the child terrified by the movie Outbreak and the real-life Ebola outbreak, the child who was constantly afraid of contracting HIV even though there were virtually no ways in which I risked doing so, the child so anxious about Brazilian purpuric fever that she seemingly (and nonsensically) willed herself into not getting pinkeye for a decade. Everyone who knew me before college assumes that news about SARS or MERS or coronavirus will send me into high alert.

But as devastating as any virus that causes increased mortality is, I’m no longer a child hypochondriac; those who have known me as an adult know I’m more of an armchair epidemiologist, and that public health would be my alternate career if my life had gone slightly differently. So my roommate was correct when he asked me if I was following the developments because it seemed like something that would interest me.

It is fascinating that the Netflix documentary Pandemic came out right before/as the Wuhan outbreak came to light. Or not – the whole premise of the miniseries is that an animal-to-human flu or respiratory virus like SARS or H1N1 is overdue, and that it’s only a matter of time. Scientists have been working on a universal flu vaccine for years precisely because they know that something like this virus will appear or reappear and eventually one won’t be able to be contained as effectively as SARS and MERS were. But even in the absence of a vaccine, that’s not a cause for panic. This isn’t a hemorrhagic fever with an 80% mortality rate; it’s a heightened version of seasonal flu. I don’t say that to downplay the deaths that have occurred or the care that needs to be taken to attempt containment, but to counter the run on hospital masks and the crashing of the stock market that have resulted from overreaction and fear. “

Now:

Even as a non-hypochondriac adult with well-managed OCD, over the weekend I determined that it was time to be worried. Not panic, but worry. It seems like the combination of Covid (I thought they would go with WORS(E) or WARS, but I know they aim to stay away from place names – even in acronyms – now) being less deadly than SARS/MERS and it having a long, infectious incubation period will combine to make it impossible to contain. So…of course that on its own could be hugely devastating, if the published case fatality rates are accurate (they range from .2% for healthy people under forty – but again, that’s a lot of people if the entire population ends up getting it – to 10% in those over 80; 1918 flu pandemic was about 2.5%) – but then the seasonal flu is devastating in terms of lives lost, and many things are devastating, so while I don’t want to minimize case fatality rate of COVID, what concerns me more is that no immunity is conferred by catching/surviving COVID. (There isn’t hard data yet to confirm this, but there are reports of people catching COVID, recovering, and then contracting it again a few weeks later). What? Is that normal for all coronaviruses? Was the the case with SARS? I was operating, for the past six weeks, under the assumption that if you caught COVID and lived through it, as you’re likely to, you never had to worry about it again.

So then I got worried.

There are also unsubstantiated reports of people with reinfections having much worse cases or even permanent organ damage…but again, unsubstantiated. But I can see why people have latched onto it; it’s one thing to go through an ordeal – a serious disease in this case – make it through it, and then regardless of whether you’re unscathed or not, assess the damage. You’re able to know, in most cases, and the diseases that cause silent internal damage (Chagas, eg), aren’t tested for, and take you by surprise are the most frightening to me. And without immunity conferred (if that’s the case, or if the immunity is short-lived)…is the world going to turn into one huge petri dish with everyone passing COVID back and forth, no one permanently immune, until there’s a vaccine?

And then I worry about the election, and whether Trump will try to use this as a means of further dismantling democracy…and then I try to return to a state of alert-but-not-panicked. It’s a work in progress.

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The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead: I’ve read two Whitehead novels before – Underground Railroad, which was tremendous, and Zone One, which was disappointing – but my first encounter with his name seems like it was decades ago. It may have been decades ago, because it was in a print magazine and I’m pretty sure I remember the caption “Next up for Whitehead: a novel set in a Band-Aide factory” or something along those lines, and that points to his 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt – so the feature in Entertainment Weekly or People or whichever it was would have been after publication of either John Henry Days (2001) or Colossus of New York (2003, but it doesn’t seem as likely as a novel to be featured in a magazine). So…almost two decades, cripes. Anyway, the interviewer asked him about “write what you know” and his response was, “Write what you know? Half the fun is making shit up!” which I appreciated. And now, looking at the descriptions for Apex Hides the Hurt and his first novel, The Illusionists…why haven’t I read those?? My guess is that because Zone One was the first Whitehead novel I read and I was underwhelmed (I remember it garnering a fair amount of praise for being a “literary” zombie novel, but I found it to be the most mediocre/lukewarm of both worlds), I didn’t pick up another one until Underground Railroad. Now the scales are thoroughly tipped and I need to go back through his oeuvre. The ending of The Nickel Boys is pretty much perfect. Many brilliant books have mediocre endings, or endings that are good, but this one is really perfect.

Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbottom: See here.

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa: There was something strange about the tone of this, and I couldn’t tell if it was an intentional flatness (it was very Kafka-esque, so in that sense it paired with the story) or if it was related to the translation. The conceit is compelling and the second half of the novel grew more and more engaging, but I felt a remoteness from the narrator (I also realized that, inexplicably, I was picturing the island where the story takes place not off the coast of Japan – where it would be – but somewhere in the Atlantic between Greenland and Iceland if you were looking at the “standard” western map of the world). I did love the novel within the novel – the main character is a writer – and the interplay between that world and the world of The Memory Police. By the end of the book, I was sold.

How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan: The second book about microdosing I’ve read in the past year (in addition to an almost unbelievable number of articles – I think Medium’s algorithm for “what you’ll enjoy” is broken, or people are repeating themselves – and the Reply All episode where PJ and Phia microdose). The last Pollan (the only?) I’d read was The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so it had been a while. I’ve always (okay, not always, but for a long time) been curious about microdosing but equally afraid of it.

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison: I read The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Sula in high school and Jazz in college – I’m not sure how I’d not read this until now, though I’m aware of wanting to mete out my Morrison over time (that’s probably not necessary; her work is eminently re-readable, and high school was…a long time ago). It’s incredible, of course. It’s perfect.

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I love them a little less in this post. The salient difference is that I love LOOKING at gross things. I prefer to keep it confined to sight.

What’s the grossest thing you can imagine finding in your coffee? Don’t tell me a spider, because that’s at least edible, and don’t tell me hair – that’s not even particularly unsanitary. Spare me an answer of “curdled milk” because while that’s gross, it’s something that was…at least edible at one time. And is still edible, it’s just farther along on the spectrum of edibility. And if you are grossed out by finding coffee grounds or grinds in your coffee, I don’t know how to address you.

The grossest thing you can find in your coffee is something that is not only disgusting but also unidentifiable. If you read I Love Gross Things, Part 1 you know that I tend to take pictures of all things gross as I encounter them, so this is your warning to stop scrolling if you don’t want to see for yourself what was in my coffee (and perhaps help me identify it):

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This was after I glimpsed something at the bottom of the cup – AFTER DRINKING 2/3 OF THE COFFEE THAT WAS SWIMMING AROUND THIS – and used a pen to investigate further. Then I sent this image to my parents with lots of profanity and asked if they could 1) sympathize and 2) guess at what this could be.

(My dad has not yet responded and my mom said “yuck” so many times it started autocorrecting into gibberish.)

WHAT IS THAT

WHY WAS IT IN MY COFFEE

Okay, it’s clearly not either of the two things most likely to be found at the bottom of your coffee (sugar sludge or grounds), and it’s not milk-related. Did someone pour my coffee over a discarded muffin half, now partially dissolved back into its batter state? Is this a rogue brown napkin or a coffee filter? And WHO CAN I SHOW THIS TO?

For someone with obsessive compulsive disorder and a long history of disease-related fears, I have a surprisingly robust tolerance for food-adjacent incidents of disgust. Usually I’ll shrug off an unexplained fleck, or a hair, or a weird film on the surface of something. But there are limits!

After sending this to my parents I took my coffee cup and whatever its inhabitant was and went back to the bagel place from whence it had come – the bagel place I’ve been patronizing for almost ten years, which is why I felt comfortable walking in and showing both the picture and the coffee to every single guy behind the counter (they did not have customers at the time; I’m not trying to harm their business, just to identify a new species of sludge creature/assess my risk of mutating into a new creature myself).

They were perplexed. One said, “I made it, you know I would never do something to you!” which, YES, I do know that; I’m not worried about malice, just contamination.

So we couldn’t figure it out.

And…they gave me another coffee.

I drank it. Was that not the right move? I made sure to go home and pour the coffee very slowly into a mug first, to make sure nothing was lurking in its depths. But now I don’t know if I can go back there. I might have to find a new bagel place.

Does anyone know what on earth the monstrosity from my original cup was?? Please, I am begging you. I have to have a conclusion here.

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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!

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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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