Questions: Which of the apps that I use actually accomplish what they purport to do, and which apps don’t claim to advance a user’s skills in any particular way but actually do?

Considering the first question…

Duolingo:

The premise: advance your knowledge of a language or learn a new one.

The process: short lessons comprised of a mix of vocabulary, forming sentences using a word bank, translating written sentences into English, and transcribing spoke sentences into the language you’re studying.

Does it work?

With languages I already knew (Spanish, Latin), the lessons were great for refreshing my vocabulary and refamiliarizing myself with grammatical concepts, although to get an explanation of any concept one has to go to the Duolingo website – there’s no explicit instruction within the app itself. In one sense, it’s useful to learn inductively and come to your own conclusions about why the preterite tense is used in one case and the imperfect tense in another. However, it’s easy to feel lost without concrete explanations, and sometimes an increase in correct answers doesn’t reflect a better understanding of the language but simply an understanding of specific, repeated questions.

The lessons suffer, too, from their focus on a particular tense or concept. If I’m completing a lesson called “subjunctive mood,” I’m not being asked to distinguish between situations that call for the indicative and those that require the subjunctive (the hardest part!) – all I need is to have the subjunctive endings memorized, and I don’t even really need that, because there will likely be several examples in the first few questions from the lesson. I only need to remember them from there.

With languages I had a small amount of familiarity with (Russian via friends, Mandarin after studying it my freshman year of college), the results were both better and worse. I can read Cyrillic fluently now even if I don’t know what the words mean, and I can pull up a number of useful Mandarin phrases (“I don’t understand,” “What is that?” “Where is the bathroom?”). And much of the Russian that I can read I can also understand, or at least get the gist of. But I can’t generate my own sentences and thoughts, and if you put me in a room with a group of Russian or Mandarin speakers – even if they made an effort to speak slowly – I would have a hard time conversing spontaneously

Rhythm Trainer:

The premise: “Master essential rhythmic skills” by using the app for 15 minutes a day, tapping a finger on your phone’s screen in perfect time with the patterns given to you.

The process: The app plays a sequence of beats – in 3/4  or 4/4 time – while a metronome chirps in the background, and then the user attempts to mimic the sequence perfectly. The metronome continues and the pattern of notes remains on screen; the user’s taps appear below the original sequence in green (if the tap is close enough to being exactly on beat) or red (if it’s too far off). Getting a sequence right triggers a new sequence to appear, while getting it wrong requires repeated it at least twice correctly. If the user misses a particular pattern too many times, the tempo is lowered.

Does it work?

I will confess I typically don’t use Rhythm trainer under the conditions it requires for optimal success: I don’t always use headphones, I sometimes try to do my ten minutes (you only get ten minutes a day with the free version of the app, though it ends up being 11 or 12) on the subway or in a café with music blasting, rationalizing this as an effective way to learn to block out distractions, and I definitely don’t place my entire forearm on a table or other flat surface to tap out the beats. As such, I may not be the ideal case study. Also, I ran through all of the exercises pretty quickly and am now simply repeating them and attempting to stay at 80 bpm, the maximum tempo. The fact that I don’t think it would necessarily be worth it to purchase the app and access more time per day/additional exercises gives away my conclusion: it’s fun, and it probably does improve one’s overall sense of rhythm, but when I’m playing drums – with or without other musicians – two things I don’t have are 1) a metronome; 2) the beats in written form in front of me.

Pomodoro:

The premise: Work for a fixed amount of time, then take a break.

The process: 25 minutes is the default for the “work” period, which is followed by a five-minute break. After four cycles of this, you get a longer, 25-minute break. The name “pomodoro” comes from the analog version of the timer, which is shaped like a tomato, though it doesn’t seem an official “Pomodoro” app exists; the one I use is called “Focus Keeper” and although it clearly seeks to mimic pomodoros (tomato icon, red background for the timer), it isn’t officially associated. Some of the other members of my writing group use the pomodoro method, but with their kitchen timers or iPhones. It seems that “Pomodoro” has joined Band-Aid and Kleenex in the pantheon of brand names that have become stand-ins for the generic item.

Does it work?

It definitely makes sitting down to work – or standing up to fold laundry, or doing any task you’d rather avoid – less intimidating. I use it for writing, practicing music, meditating, and responding to work emails. For writing, I use it more or less as it’s intended, but not as much as intended. That is, my writing muscle is weak right now and I do one pomodoro (“one tomato” is what I log on my writing group’s Slack channel, in the form of the tomato emoji) a day, so the 5-minute break afterward is unnecessary. If I do two, though, I follow the pattern. When I meditate I reset to one of the five-minute breaks, and when I practice music I just blast right through the break and into the next work period. It’s easy to adjust the length of the pomodoro, but for some reason I persist in doing a 25-minute work period,  working through the break, and continuing into the next 25-minute period, having to do math to gauge how long I’ve actually been playing.

Finally: Which apps are not intended as dating apps but are misused as such?

All of them. Words With Friends is a particularly egregious example. You expect this with social media, but not crosswords.

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This time I’m ready with tab open for writing down all of Olly’s puns (I’m…fighting an impulse here. You can fill in the blanks, I’m sure) and probably even inventing some where they don’t exist! (Such as: yesterday the other commentator, Dr. Lisa Gannon, referred to a male gymnast’s dismount as “the culmination” of his high bar routine, and I was certain she was hiding a pun on “Kolman-ation” in there (Kolman is a very difficult but fairly common release move, and there had indeed been one in the routine…)

Today we have the women’s vault and uneven bars, and the men’s floor and…um…oh! Pommel horse and rings. The less interesting ones, although pommel horse is sort of the men’s beam equivalent and does at least lead to falls that result in the athlete standing atop the horse as if he’s lost, and rings has a whole set of elements that are not included in the actual score but which are for cool points only, namely opening one’s palms to show that you’re so strong you don’t even need all of your fingers and giving a quick nod of the chin to show that you aren’t screaming in agony inside and have energy left to demonstrate your chill.

So my attempted difficulty was 5.4, but in reality I watched all of the day 1 event finals from bed, without typing, and then fell asleep during the rings final. So I lost all of my difficulty but had a good Z score. But – highlights: Simone nearly sticking her Amanar. Sunisa winning bronze on bars. The whole bars final was pretty impressive, with only one fall. Pommel horse had the medal stand right but in the wrong order. And Yulo Yolo-ed all over floor for Phillipines’ first gold medal in gymnastics ever. Can we petition – er, inquire – for YULO to stand for You Ultimately Live Once? Usually? Uber-ly?

Special award: The interaction between David Beliavsky and his left hand when it forsook him and slid right off the pommel horse. Definitely the look of a man who suspects alien hand syndrome.

Day 2:

This day I had to watch in shifts. I slept through the entirety of the competition, actually, because I thought it started at 10 EST like Saturday’s. I had an hour to watch the men’s vault “Watch me descend like a cannonball from the sky” final and women’s beam before going to work. SIMONE. Breaks the record for most medals won at world championships, of all time, male or female (noteworthy because the men have six apparatuses – apparati? Apparatchiks? – and thus two more changes for medals ever year), and breaks a score of 15 for the first time this year (I think. I’m approaching these statistics with the same approach the men’s vault finalists take, that is, fling yourself as hard as you can and pray).

Then I had four hours of work followed by a break to watch men’s parallel bars, an event I had to strenuously avoid working into my discussion of geometry with a ninth-grade student. It’s also an event for which the men have their own personalized upper-arm guards, because that’s where they’ll be landing. Sun Wei of China has a pair with cartoon chickens draw on them (by member of the Chinese women’s team, Chen Yile, I hear). Only one tenth of a point separated the top 5 finishers on parallel bars, which meant my personal favorite Ferhat Arican of Turkey missed out on a medal, but I can’t help loving it when the gold medalist doesn’t quite expect it and cries happy tears, so I was glad that Joe Fraser of Great Britain ended up on top, and I was sad for Lukas Dauser who ended up on top of the bars and at the bottom of the standings in front of his home crowd.

Can we discuss the choices of music on women’s floor? Since the quadrennium beginning in 2008, “vocalization” has been permitted in floor music, even though music with lyrics is still prohibited. In practice this means that a gymnast can compete to a background of a man basically singing the text of “Jabberwocky,” as long as it sounds like nonsense, or that we’re treated to Lilia Akhaimova (RUS) dancing to the strains of a woman who sounds like she’s being held at gunpoint and forced to endure key changes until she’s screaming.

Also, please no string quartet versions of Ed Sheeran. I’ll take back Melnikova’s somber “Despacito” cover over this.

The floor final was really lovely overall. No one had a mistake bigger than a step out of bounds, and most of the finalists were artistic in their own ways. And, of course, Simone’s fifth gold medal of the championships.

This ceased to be a live blog at some point.

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Conversations With Friends, by Sally Rooney: It’s sometimes hard to read a book objectively when it’s been so widely discussed/acclaimed (I haven’t researched too deeply, but my assumption is that Sally Rooney’s other book, Normal People, is much more recent and came out to huge praise, and that that caused everyone to go back and read this first one (or I’ve been living in a tiny hole far away from the rest of the reading world, but it definitely seems like everyone has been talking about Sally Rooney in the latter half of 2019, not years ago). Most of what I’d heard about Conversations With Friends was “it’s amazing” and “how did she write this at 26”? I’ve heard it compared to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be. The former comparison seems like it’s based more on content (two friends, one brasher, the other a writer) than writing or plot, though there’s something similar in the directness of the writing. The Heti comparison I don’t see at all, but then I didn’t connect with How Should a Person Be (but loved all of Ferrante). As with virtually any hyper-successful novel, I’ve also heard the resulting backlash, “it’s just a romance,” “I don’t get the hype,” etc. I have to say I found it pretty extraordinarily well done – it’s only “ordinary” in the sense that the characters are incredibly realistic. They aren’t realistic or ordinary in a generic way – they’re all really specific. And that, I think, is much harder than writing a larger-than-life character. It reminds me of seeing one actor in different movies in which the characters are nominally the same/have the same characteristics/don’t have anything dramatic happening to them – but feel and behave entirely differently. That’s talent.

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews: I had a hard time keeping the characters straight for the first 50 pages. I also kept stopping to think about how many books I’ve read recently have eschewed question marks for dialogue. Why is that? It does have the effect of making the reader feel like she’s farther enclosed in the world of the book, ears plugged to the outside world, and it’s not new, but it does seem to be in fashion of late. It gives the sense, also, that the words are being set on the page more gently. Somehow, even with exclamation marks and italics or capitals, it doesn’t feel like anyone is being loud if there are no quotation marks. The critique I’d heard going into this was: Why does it need to be framed by the perspective of a male narrator? And this is valid…even if, in the interest of verisimilitude, the author didn’t want to have a close third or omniscient narrator (because the Mennonite women can’t read or write and so can’t narrate the events?), it felt more at times like the women and the events of the novel were the framework for August’s story, not the other way around.

Normal People, by Sally Rooney: Going into this, I was most curious to see if Rooney pulled off what I suspected she was capable of (that is, creating characters that are “ordinary” but not generic, that are fully realized without relying on dramatics, and doing so in two different novels with characters that don’t feel like echoes of one another). She does, pretty unequivocally, though you could say one of the main characters in Normal People is more extreme – as a movie role, it might not be unfair to call it “Oscar bait” – but at the same time, she’s so interior that it would have taken a real deftness to write her. Not spoiling anything, the depiction of abuse here is really chilling, and the book is pretty bleak overall. I’m curious if the ending was intended to be a small triumph or despondent – really, I’m not sure. In both this and Conversations With Friends there’s a serious vein of existential emptiness running through, which isn’t merely alluded to yet is never a focal point. That I found particularly interesting (and it would make me more likely to compare these books to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels). Final thought: it’s not a critique per se, but it frustrates me beyond coherence when characters constantly misunderstand one another because each refuses to say what she means and instead says what she thinks the other person wants to hear. I understand that these characters are very young and the whole point is that they’re misaligned in communication, but I wanted to shake the book hard enough to force the real words out of them and onto the page as dialogue (though there is no conversational punctuation in Normal People, furthering my conjecture that lack of quotation marks is a trend), instead of leaving them as internal dialogue.

Blacklight, by Kimberly King Parsons: Kim was a year ahead of me in my MFA program. This collection of stories is phenomenal on both the idea level and the sentence level. Just after I went to Kim’s NYC reading, bought the book, had her sign it, and went to her book party, National Book Award long list nominations came out, and this was on it. I had only read the first story by that point, but I wasn’t surprised, and now I’ve read all of the stories. In addition to being complete gems individually, the stories in Blacklight are really a cohesive collection (like Barry Hannah’s Airships, as opposed to something like Barry Hannah’s Bats Out of Hell, which is longer than airships and thus contains more amazing stories but feels like an anthology or a retrospective – maybe it is, now that I think about it – more than like a collection).

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles Blow: I can’t remember where I saw this recommended. O Magazine? The prose in this memoir shades purple at times, but the story is compelling. His descriptions and commentary on fraternity hazing could have used…more reflection and unpacking.

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Or more accurately, the ballad for Judy Loman. Most accurately, it wasn’t a ballad; it was a piece commissioned by – who? I can’t find it online. It’s probably in a paper program somewhere deep in a box, part of my relentless archives.

Some websites say Loman retired in 1991 – she would have been in her mid-fifties. Other sources say she was the principal harpist for the Toronto Symphony until 2002 – mid-sixties. I heard her play live only once, at the American Harp Society conference in Cincinnati in 2000. I was about to be a senior in high school and was applying to conservatories, but I had gotten a late start – fourteen, after six years of piano lessons – and was still behind.

Loman gave the first performance ever of a piece commissioned specifically for the conference – at least, I’m fairly sure that’s accurate; there are no YouTube videos from 2000, and the American Harp Society’s website only has programs for the events going back to 2002. But I remember sitting in the auditorium – a familiar one for me, where I’d played in the Cincinnati Youth Wind Ensemble under the direction of a gentle young conductor and where I’d performed disastrously in a piano concerto competition – waiting for Loman’s performance, then watching her fingers fly across the strings until suddenly her hands came to rest in her lap. She quickly raised them again, and I would not have been able to tell you that anything had gone wrong until the second time she stopped. This time, she shook her head and said, “Well, it happens.” She explained calmly that she was going to go and get the music, because it was a premiere of the piece and she wanted to do it justice. Then she disappeared from the stage and returned with a music stand and a handful of sheets.

I don’t remember whether she started the piece over from the beginning again, or what the reaction of the audience was. I want to say that there was wild applause when she finished, but that’s little more than conjecture, because I spent the rest of the performance in a state of admiration and fear. Here was one of the most treasured living harpists, a professional of at least 40 years, and she, too, could forget the notes? There was a clear positive takeaway dangling in front of me: we are all humans, perfection is to be expected from no one, and an illustrious career will not be torpedoed by one slip of memory. But my conclusion at the time was that even if I became a professional harpist (I would not), even if I performed in opera houses and concert halls worldwide and made such an impression that pieces were commissioned for me, I wouldn’t be somehow separated from failure, on a higher plane where it couldn’t reach me. Essentially: I could never let my guard down.

The idea that professional musicians ever let their guards down was a naive one, but even as an adult I find myself thinking that those at the very tops of their fields must reside in some sort of protective bubble that failure can’t penetrate. The idea that that isn’t so is alternately terrifying and buoying.

I know I’ve written about this incident before, probably on this blog. But I don’t think I used Loman’s name, and there’s not a way (that I know of?) to hit control-F on an entire website, even your own. Or have I not actually written about this before? I’ve thought about it before, many times. But how do I find out? My memories aren’t searchable even when they’re in writing. Putting them on a page is a false sense of security, as if you can never forget, as if you’ve ascended to the rank of artist and will never miss a note again.

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Duolingo finally listened to (half of) my pleas and added a Latin course! I’m not currently tutoring any students in Latin, but enough schools in NYC require it of their 7th and 8th graders that I hope the chance will arise again. So far I’ve only worked through a few of the most basic lessons, so I can’t say how effective or comprehensive the course is.

(I can say that I can tell it’s new/in beta because, as compared to the uniform and polished voices and high production quality of the audio in the Mandarin and Spanish and Russian courses, the spoken components of the Latin often sound like a guy shouting from his bath.)

((This doesn’t really require double parentheses – in fact is strongly does not require them – but it feels more like a pps than a separate parenthetical. Cough. Anyway, when I was choosing a language in sixth grade, I was totally baffled by people telling me “You can’t speak Latin out loud” because I took that very literally, as if there was something about the language that inherently limited it to written form, when really they were speaking somewhat colloquially and meant “People DON’T speak Latin out loud in the world unless they are the pope or are the seventh graders who were chosen to visit all of the sixth grade classrooms and put on a short Latin skit))

When I took the Duolingo Latin placement test, I found that I was often accidentally mixing in verb endings from Spanish, or getting confused by which language something happened “nunc(a)” in – in Spanish, never; in Latin, now. When I first moved to Thailand and didn’t know any Thai/had just started to grasp a few key phrases, my brain’s response was to try to tell my taxi driver to stop “aqui” instead of “jod ti ni.” And as I learned Thai, I found my Spanish lapsing, though that’s more likely because I wasn’t studying it any more.

I don’t know if, by doing the Duolingo courses in Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Latin (they still don’t have a Thai course, hence why they’ve only answered half of my please – they do have Vietnamese, and I’ve heard rumors of Thai soon, but who knows), I’m allocating limited resources to each language that could more effectively be concentrated on one or even two, or if that’s a misunderstanding of how the brain processes language. It certainly feels at times that there’s only one slot for a new language and the others have to be pushed to the edges. Sometimes I try to correct for this by doing a Duolingo lesson in one language and testing to see if I can come up with all of the requested words and phrases in one of the other languages I’m learning. It’s mixed. But I think the “too many languages” explanation is more of a red herring, and the real issue is that I’m listening, reading, matching vocabulary, and even repeating in these languages when I use Duolingo, but I’m not generating them. I’m not trying to write a story or even speak to someone conversationally, and as such I’m not requiring myself to pull forth sentences or even words. To really speak any of them with any measure of facility is going to require immersion.

(The ability to read with fairly strong accuracy in all of them is pretty useful, though.)

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What causes that occasionally morning eye pain, the chlorinated feeling after being nowhere near a swimming pool? Is it closing your eyes too long? Not shutting them for long enough? It happens infrequently enough that I find myself weaving through the same thought process each time.

I worry more about my ears than I do my eyes. Every time I see a show I wear earplugs – sometimes I wear earplugs in loud bars or restaurants, and always when I play an actual drum kit (as opposed to an electronic one). So I’m not worried about losing my hearing, but my right ear has been some degree of blocked for almost two years. If the degree never varied it would be a questionable move on my part to have gone this long without seeing a doctor, but I keep thinking, “Well, now it’s finally gone.” It’s hard to see that something is continuous rather than a series of issues, and sometimes the degree to which my ear feels like it needs to pop is almost imperceptible, lulling me into believing I’ve finally vanquished the issue.

My vanquishing tools have been q-tips (only once, after a lifetime of haranguing people with the “Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear!” canard), special irrigating solution from the drugstore (a serious missed opportunity for puns on their part), and hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes in combination with one of those bulbs for washing out your ear. But, perhaps in part because we’re tipping slightly into fall, I’ve been waking up lately feeling like my entire right ear is underwater, and having to physically pull it down and out away from my head in order to break the seal and open it up (but not completely). I think I have to come to the conclusion, at this point, that there’s wax on my eardrum or something more nefarious and I need someone to really peer inside and see.

If I wake up feeling like I’ve been swimming wide-eyed through chlorine, at least I’m not worrying about my ear.

The type of water that has concerned my recently is the regular tap variety. For whatever reason, my anxiety about rare parasites (ie naegleria fowleri) has spiked and every time water glances off the inside of my nose in the shower I think, “Well, this could be it.” The rational mind (I note in real time that I’m not making a claim to that rational mind…) knows that naegleria fowleri is incredibly rare and typically kills people when it’s living in lakes or non-chlorinated waterparks. Without googling – because clearly that’s not a good idea for me at the moment – I don’t recall that the amoeba is any less common in tap water than in lakes or ponds (but there may be something about still water that encourages its growth), so my guess is that the vigor with which a person inhales the water (viz snorting some when you tumble off of a raft versus gently aspirating a bit while standing upright) has an effect on whether the amoeba is able to take hold (now I’m thinking of the nose as a pneumatic tube to the brain).

If it were so easy to contract naegleria fowleri from showering and sniffing a little too indiscriminately, huge numbers of people would be dead. As is, I don’t think anyone has ever died from tap-associated n.f., and if they have, I bet it was from using a neti pot (ie forcing water high up into your nasal cavity) without boiling or sterilizing the water first (DON’T DO THIS). I will probably continue to avoid the “drinking water upside down” hiccup cure trick (a popular one when I was a child, second only to a spoonful of sugar), though, as one time I did it and the water all came running out my nose.

Perhaps contradictorily, I’m probably less concerned with what goes in my mouth than most people are. Er – what I mean is that I’m not super fussed about an errant hair in my takeout order (just pluck it out) or carrots being 100% free of any peel that may still have slight dirt residue on it. But the other day I had assembled ingredients for dinner on my counter, then took advantage of the 25 minutes of tofu-baking to clean the kitchen floors a little bit. I sprayed all-purpose windex on a paper towel at about hip height, then immediately started to worry about the windex particles floating through the air (given that I could smell it) and settling onto my small bowl of minced garlic, being folded into the recipe, and killing me. Okay, not killing me, but sickening me. And that’s why (in addition to not being a dum dum spraying windex at hip height near prepared food) I prefer non-windex forms of cleaners, like white vinegar. But I also recognize that, much like standing in the shower worrying about brain-eating amoebas, this is a spike in concern that probably means I need to think about the level of worry I’m experiencing, even if I’m also joking about it.

Now I have “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes! (knees and toes!)” in my head, but the Latin version.

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In sixth grade I was tasked with writing my first research paper (I chose Andrew Lloyd Webber as my topic, and quickly discovered that structuring a research paper around a person is easier than structuring a paper around an event, idea, or place). Every sixth grader at my school had this assignment, and two years later we all were assigned slightly longer research papers. I can’t remember what my topic was in eighth grade, which is bothering me. I feel like I remember enough details – eighth grade research paper, Mr. Schneider, 10-12 pages long – to be able to Google it…but the analog search engine for this particular query is a box of papers in my parents’ house in Florida, so I’ll have to wait either until the holidays or until my brain dredges up the memory.

And I could be misremembering – maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber was eighth grade and sixth grade was something or someone completely different. But I remember working on my Andrew Lloyd Webber paper over Thanksgiving break that year, at my Aunt Barb’s house on a farm in Maryland, and in the memory I feel eleven years old, not thirteen.

During the early stages of finding books and other materials to use as sources (but mainly books – digital resources were not particularly widespread. My family didn’t even own a computer yet – if this was sixth grade, that is; in eighth grade, we had one – and in our once-a-week “library” class we’d all watched a movie about the end of the world and five brave students who knew the Dewey Decimal system and thus were able to save themselves and humanity) I began to feel a deep unease about the entire process. It seemed that I was gathering facts from various books and simply repeating them, taking them farther and farther away from any semblance of primary source. It felt like the whole purpose of my research paper was to dilute facts (even though, on a more physical level, I was concentrating them from different sources into a much shorter document). I didn’t have any new information about Cats, or how Andrew Lloyd Webber liked to spend his evenings.

Either none of our teachers or librarians really emphasized how much of our assignment was geared toward teaching us the research process, not anticipating wildly successful final products of scholarship, or they told us and I wasn’t listening or it didn’t register with me. There was nothing new to say, I thought, unless I could research something in person, something that still existed and which I could see or interview myself. And although much of my attitude was due to being young and unable to conceive of research papers as vessels for new perspectives, integrations of information, or arguments, I still feel an element of that unease when I listen to some podcasts.

Some podcasts focus on news and debate, and because the topics of discussion are by definition current and the statements made are opinions, they don’t tend to feel like summaries of information that’s available elsewhere (which is not to say they can’t feel, at times, like a rehash of what everyone’s talking about – but that’s a slightly different issue, I think). Others are more experiential – I’m thinking about Reply All in particular. Part of its appeal lies in how delightful Alex and PJ are, but much of it also comes from the fact that they’re doing field research or working through a technological/sociological mystery – they’re doing journalism, I suppose, where other podcasts are (sometimes) doing reporting.

Podcasts like This Podcast Will Kill You (TPWKY – which, let me note, I thoroughly enjoy) and You’re Wrong About frequently rely on the hosts doing substantial amounts of research (usually reading books and articles on the topic of the pod) and then relaying that research to the listeners. And that’s not a skill to scoff at – it’s time consuming, and the process of synthesizing and then presenting the information in a way that’s both understandable and entertaining isn’t a trivial one (if the hosts of This Podcast Will Kill You weren’t themselves epidemiologists, I’m sure the episodes wouldn’t be nearly as cogent). But there have been several times (on those two podcasts) when I’ve read the material they’re citing from and have thought…I knew all of that from the book (and didn’t necessarily feel like anything was added by the podcast). Granted, most of the audience won’t necessarily have read the book, and if they do so after listening, they’re not likely to be disappointed that some of the same facts appear in the book. But when there’s an additional element like an interview with a Lyme Disease specialist, or a breakdown of a scientific research study, or an interview with someone who was personally involved in whatever event the world at large is “wrong about,” the episode feels completely different – no sense of “here’s what we read and now we’re going to tell you about it.”

I wish I could tell you that I’ve just remembered what I wrote about in eighth grade, but the conclusion to this post isn’t going to be as neat as the conclusion to whatever I was writing about then.

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I’m generally a completionist. I don’t like to leave books half-read, and I can probably fit the books I’ve started but not finished into one blog post:

1. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman: I actually read more than half of this and then just…stopped. It sat next to my bed for almost a year before I took it to one of those little free libraries. I also watched the first five or so episodes of the TV adaptation with my roommates, and then we all stopped. (I think. Maybe they finished without me.)
2. The Infernal, by Mark Doten: I think I tried to read this at the wrong time, made it five pages in, and then determined that the timing was wrong and I wasn’t in a mood for not having the faintest idea what was going on. But I just read a review of this that intrigued me, so maybe I’ll go back to it…
3. Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer: I read the first book in the trilogy, Annihilation, and found it difficult to get through but still intriguing, but I waded a third of the way into this second part and thought, “I am just not enjoying this and I don’t see that changing.
4. The Castle, by Franz Kafka: Can I make the excuse that I didn’t finish this because…Kafka didn’t either? Granted, he got much farther than I did…I’ve probably read the first three chapters of The Castle three separate times and renewed it 18 times from the Brooklyn Public Library, after which they finally denied me more renewals and I took it as a sign. While I was reading it, I was generally enjoying it – I just didn’t ever feel like picking it up again afterwards, and kept forgetting what I’d already read. I told my boyfriend that maybe part of my resistance was the knowledge that the book was unfinished and I would never know the actual ending, to which he responded, “That doesn’t make sense. It’s like life! No one knows how they’re going to die, but that doesn’t make living not worth it.” Because of general stubbornness I responded that often people do in fact know how they’re going to die, but that the comparison isn’t a useful one anyway…and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Especially since, in that case, I’ll know that I’m going to die on a hill.
5. (pending) The Sellout, by Paul Beatty: This was an office book-exchange book three years ago (well, 2.5). I don’t have a good excuse for why it took me so long to start it other than that no one was going to start charging me 10 cents a day for leaving it on my shelf, unfinished. Like The Castle, I’ve read the beginning three times so far. But I’m not giving up on this one yet.

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Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: I found this…okay. I think I’m not the audience for sweeping family narratives in which there’s no one main character or family (I felt this way about Homegoing as well), where history and plot, rather than character or writing, are the focus. There are books I love (Waterland, for one) that reach backward into history to explain the circumstances of the main characters, but there are main characters. Pachinko covers almost a century and felt to me like a recounting of events rather than a novel. That’s not to say I disliked it, but it didn’t stun me.

The Wallcreeper, by Nell Zink: How totally absurd and farcical and delightful. This novel has a clearly defined and deployed plot, but the plot isn’t ultimately so important. The writing is the main event, regardless of what it’s about, and every observation is amazing. As a minor side note, I really like the shape of this book, which was originally published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project and is more square than most paperbacks.

Crisis in the Red Zone, by Richard Preston: It never fails to tickle me that Preston is one letter away from Reston, the name of the facility that had an Ebola scare in the late 80s. Somehow, I feel like he would enjoy that. This was much better than Panic in Level Four, possibly just as a result of being a more focused and cohesive narrative. There’s some backstory about the discovery of Ebola in the 1970s that goes on for too long, but the material about the 2014 outbreak is compelling and handled well.

Marlena, by Julie Buntin: This was a gut punch. So bleak but impressive. In some ways I did want more of the New York present-day narrative, but not badly enough for it to be a real complaint. In trying to figure out how to describe the (excellent) writing, I have in the back of my mind the blurbs that describe it as “sumptuous,” among other adjectives that – to me, at least – are somewhat murky in how they actually relate to prose. So I’m sticking to the mundane: this book was great.

The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan: So I’ve finally stopped confusing Carl Jung and Carl Sagan, and yes, I understand that should be an embarrassing admission. I read this book hoping that it would be…comforting? The title would have sent me running as a child. I consumed it over a pretty long stretch of months (and to be honest, am only halfway through it as I write this), because I had it on my computer but not my Kindle. The chapters are discrete essays, though, so it hasn’t suffered as a result of my pokiness. I love the generosity with which Sagan treats human beings, even if their beliefs don’t measure up to his standards of rigor.

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Just as there are topics that perennially, perhaps cyclically come up on Twitter (“Do you wash your legs,” (h/t Reply All) “Ruin a movie in one letter/Fat band names,” etc), there are pet topics that I can’t deny myself writing about every few years. Going to grocery stores while traveling is one of them.

Last year I spend a week in London and ate the same perfectly calibrated Tesco salad every night: spinach, “semi-dried” tomatoes (are they partially dried by the sun? Or are they dehydrated in some other method? They weren’t uniformly dry, which I appreciated), croutons, mozzarella balls, and pesto dressing. I usually ate it with a spoon because I didn’t know where to look for takeaway forks (I am loathe to ask questions in any establishment and the fact that the Tesco had self-checkout meant there was no way I was going to talk to a human) and my hotel room had spoons for the complimentary coffee.

…I just did a search back to my posts from last August to see if I raved about Tesco salads before, but instead found that, pre-London, my 2018 post was titled “London Calling” just like my 2019 post. How embarrassing!

So the non-creative title that I gave my London posts last year and this year stayed the same, but unfortunately Tesco did not keep their salads the same. Gone was my perfect caprese and in its place I only found a very dry falafel salad. This did, however, give me reason to expand my grocery ventures while in the UK. My hotel this year was near not only a Tesco but also a Sainsbury’s and a Waitrose. I did buy a few practical things there, like three-bean salad and toothpaste, but mainly trolled the aisles looking for the best gummies to take back to the US with me and the most hilarious-to-foreigners aisle directories. Sainsbury’s wins with aisle 23, which advertises:

Fizzy drinks

Long life juice

Squash

“Squash” was very thematic given that the gummies I found there were Squashies (delicious milk and raspberry flavored gums that look like two-tone pillows) and Randoms: Squish ’ems edition (which I’m sorry to report are not nearly as delicious OR as random as Randoms: Original edition, though I do like the symmetry between the llama-wearing-a-hat on the Randoms package and giraffe-wearing-a-fruit-basket on the Squish ’ems variety). Later in the trip I rectified this and got a bag of original Randoms, a “share size” (HA) of Haribo star mix, and in the airport, my greatest achievement – a bag of Squidglets (join our squidgy squad! they exhort from the back of the bag, and I do. I do.)

The gummies were on my mind so much that when the customs officer asked me if I bought anything in London, while I could have alternatively said “Yes, a shirt,” I instead said, “Um…gummies!” which I don’t think he was expecting. “Gummies?” he repeated. “You know, like…Percy Pigs?” I said, and then got nervous because Percy Pigs were probably the one kind of gummy I didn’t buy.

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