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… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Eyes and Ears and Mouth and Nose
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… Read more »
Research
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… Read more »
Unfinished
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: 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,… Read more »
Books of 2019, Part 6
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… Read more »
Repeat and repeat
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… Read more »
London calling
I’m flying to London on Saturday. I’ve been there three times before, each marked by some slightly disembodying fever dreamish circumstance. The first time, I had mono – or glandular fever, since I was in the UK – and wasn’t supposed to travel, but I was 20 and couldn’t imagine forfeiting the money I’d spent on my flight. I remember lots of things about the trip: falling asleep in St. James Park. Stumbling through the Victoria and Albert with eyes… Read more »
On My Mind
Do people ever cite “a record label turning down The Beatles” and “Michael Jordan not making his JV basketball team” as part of the same pep talk re: rejection and finding success afterward? I feel like they’re examples that might get conflated even though they have nothing in common outside of “first not success, then massive success.” That said, maybe placing them both in the same conversation is smart, rhetorically, because it broadens the circumstances/causes for “not success then success”… Read more »
Boulder
I’ve been whitewater rafting twice (the first time, in Gatlinburg when I was 11, was the more dramatic on its surface – people falling out of boats, people losing their swimsuits, etc – but the second, in the Tetons two years later, very clearly had much more force of nature behind it and beneath the rapids) and tubing once (on the Esopus Creek up in Phoenicia, NY). Last week I was in Boulder just 12 hours after “Tube to Work… Read more »
Books of 2019, Part 5
The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert: I held off reading this for a long time – not to bury my head in the sand about climate change, but to try to keep it from becoming the only thing that I think about all day, every day (when I’m not thinking about Sagan-adjacent meaning of life things). It was far less apocalyptic and depressing than I expected, without being overly optimistic. Panic in Level Four, by Richard Preston: Unfortunately, the primary… Read more »
