Given that I had just spent three days going through old papers and photos and coming across items like my prom picture and handwritten mix-tape liner notes, it made sense that upon arriving back to my adult life in NYC I would see the Foo Fighters play for the first time since I was a month shy of both prom and 17 years old. (That was the only other time I’ve seen them. They co-headlined with the Red Hot Chili… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Nostalgia Week, Part 2: Hard drives are the new basements
By the end of my long weekend in Ohio I had reduced all of my preschool, grade school, high school, and college memories to two boxes–however, I also had half a box of essays and assignments (from high school and college–good god, the typed essays from middle school were in a font I’ve never seen since and on the kind of paper that’s attached at the short end into one long accordion of Apple 2E-produced large print) typed on standard… Read more »
Nostalgia Week, Part 1
Like shark week, but with slightly less blood! Last weekend I visited my parents, who are moving within the next six months, and was reasonably tasked with going through all of my old papers and possessions, which have been residing in their basement in Cincinnati. I was under the false impression that I’d done a good job of being ruthless (I was kind of a hoarder as a child) in previous sweeps…but it seems that I mostly just pared down… Read more »
Summer spread
What level of crime or misdemeanor against my roommates would it be for me to roast carrots in my apartment’s oven when it’s over 85 degrees out? Because I have these nice orange, yellow, and purple carrots that are not going to last much longer, and eating them raw hardly seems like it would be at all delightful. It’s not like we avoid using the dryer–which raises the humidity in our entryway about 50%–when it’s hot out, but if you… Read more »
The Three Body Problem
Today at my coffee shop the barista told me he’s reading a book called The Third Body Problem. I thought this was funny because recently I’ve been hearing stories about the two-body problem in academia–I think we used to call it something different in college, because I remember hearing that Judith Butler refused to go work for some university (maybe even Brown?) because they wouldn’t hire her partner for a professorship and I don’t remember the phrase “two-body problem”–and it seemed… Read more »
Lark, Lark, Owl
Is there a name for someone who’s an afternoon person? We have, per this article, morning larks and night owls, and I thought my rhetorical question – because I assume that no, we do not – was going to be made a failure when I saw reference to “hummingbirds” in another article, but it turns out a hummingbird is not an afternoon person, just someone who vacillates between the two major bird-classes of circadian rhythm. Could we have gone with ducks… Read more »
The Joys of Public Transit
On the R train, pulling into Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center. The N is across the platform, doors wide. I get up to stand near the door because although the N looks to be waiting, you never know. The woman already standing at the door taps on the window glass and says, “Wait!” as if scolding a potentially disobedient child. She mutters, “N across the platform, but who knows if it’s going to wait? Are you going to wait? Why would it… Read more »
Where to go?
It always seems like I’m going to have great swaths of time available for summer travel, since tutoring slows down so much. And it’s true that I already went to California for four days and will visit my parents in Cincinnati for four days in July…but even if the calendar isn’t getting filled UP by any means, it’s getting chopped into smaller portions. In August I’ll go to London to teach a class and, when it’s over, will either go… Read more »
Duolingo: The Neverending Story, Part III
I was going to call this post “Duolingo Squared,” which doesn’t quite make sense even if it were the second post I’ve done about Duolingo’s subliminal messages…but it really didn’t make sense when I realized it would be the third Duolingo post (Part I, Part II) Since my posts last year, Duolingo has added Mandarin! Now I’m just holding out for Thai and Latin. I’ve taken a break from studying Spanish, since I also tutor it and that keeps me… Read more »
Double vision, Double audition?
Continuing with the topics of hearing seeing (though not in the mind’s eye or ear this time), I discovered a new (to me) song that I like (Waiting, by Alice Boman) and subsequently found out it’s part of an entire album of remixes (of that same song). When I hear “album of remixes” I think to myself, “I will figure out which one is my favorite and then listen to it exclusively,” but although that’s mostly true, there are numerous… Read more »
