Yoga teacher, instructing students to relax in savasana: “Now unhinge your jaw…” #areyousurethatswhatyoumean
Pilates teacher: “Really beautiful neutral pelvises, guys.”
I was hoping for a bold or metallic pelvis myself.
Pilates teacher losing her zen: “Lift your butts…OK. Your head is not your butt. I know it can sometimes seem that way–”
Yoga teach encouraging students to releve: “Now shift your weight into your balls…”
Well, they do say every body is different.
Linguistic superlatives from life recently:
Best appellation:
12-year-old student: “Do you like the snake I won? I named it prefrontal cortex.”
Best Venn diagram intersection:
The shaded region where “gummy snacks” and “popular sperm bank choices” meet: Trader Joe’s “Scandinavian Swimmers” Swedish Fish knock-off.
Best portmanteau of more than two words:
Boyfriend describing the zombies who live in a video-game subway station: “Deadizents”
(citizen…denizen…resident…dead!)
Best observation about words’ failings and shifts:
Friend talking about how hard it is to adequately describe what you see when traveling: “It’s hard to use words like “amazing” because we’re always using those words. We’re using extraordinary words for, like, a fucking taco, so to describe Egypt I have to come back around again and just say, “I was happy.””
Best mixed metaphor:
Roommate on shooting one’s self in the foot/burning bridges: “She salted the well!”
…which births a slightly different interpretation of events. You can salt the land; you can poison the well; if you salt the well, perhaps you really just wanted to improve someone’s iodine levels.
I’ve been trying to get rid of things. Mostly tangible things–clothes that itch or that I got in high school, lightbulbs for lamps I no longer own, tutoring materials from the old SAT–but also digital detritus.
Items that exist only as files do take up literal space–on my hard drive, Dropbox, Google account–but I’m not generally lacking for that (at least not since I got an external hard drive). What I’m lacking is the ability to ever listen to all of the songs I have on iTunes, or flip through all of the pictures stored in disparate places, or the right keywords to find the email that I remember receiving but can’t locate…
Digital clutter is a sibling to mental clutter, which seems to proliferate during the winter when the outside world has fewer variations, is less welcoming, and encourages turning inward. Mental clutter like: How much do I need for retirement? What’s about to go bad in my fridge, making me feel like an asshole for wasting food? Which diseases do I need to keep in mind in case I ever contract a mysterious, hard to diagnose illness? Is it less wasteful to throw out that difficult-to-wash bottle or to use water to wash and recycle it?
It may not help that I’m in various places in five books*–due to losing interest for the moment, needing to finish this one first because it’s due back at the library, leaving that one at home because it’s too heavy to carry with me, and on. None of them are books I intend to give up on, but I usually limit the books I’m holding in my mind at one time to two.
*(The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Infested by Brooke Borel, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman)
Sometimes my living room is full of mythical beings:
“Who here is a small creature, besides me?”
“Wait, wait–can you tell me how rage works? I’ve never been a barbarian before.”
“I just really want to tweet that my roommate is playing harp in a panda suit right now.”
Other times…
“If you have an extra free printer, great. But you understand I’m a 32-year-old man, right?”
LET’S BE CLEAR! Roll call.
I love hearing conversations between couples on the train.
Woman telling man about the book she’s been reading: “So then her boyfriend gets killed, right? So he’s dead.”
That is generally how it works, yes.
Woman: “So then she’s going through his stuff and she finds, like, a video of a woman chained to his bed, being tortured to death.”
Man: “Oh, a snuff film.”
Woman: “Yes–that’s what they called it! Wait. What does that word mean to you?”
Man: “Uh…snuff film?
Woman: “Yeah. You recognized that word. What does it mean to you?”
Man: “Um…well…a movie where a girl gets tortured and killed?”
Woman: “Yeah, but it’s fake.”
Man: “Well…no…I mean, sure, yeah, maybe.”
I don’t think that guy was looking forward to continuing the conversation at home.
(Also, I hope that I don’t get really odd spam out of the keywords in this post.)
ALL of the books I read in 2015…subjective favorites in bold:
The Infinite Sea, by Rick Yancey
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, by John Crawford
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, by Will Chancellor
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Hell House, by Richard Matheson
The Collector, by John Fowles
Flatland, by Edwin Abbott
Feed, by Mira Grant
The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, by Matt Bell
Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card
Bright-Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card
Deadline, by Mira Grant
Blackout, by Mira Grant
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson
Hush, Hush by Laura Lippman
To the End of June, by Cris Beam
The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits
Terms of Service, by Jacob Silverman
Biohazard, by Ken Alibek
Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, by Allan H. Ropper
Brain On Fire, by Susannah Cahalan
The Viral Storm, by Nathan Wolfe
The Living, by Matt de la Pena
It’s Not About Perfect, by Shannon Miller
The New Killer Diseases, by Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti
Inside the O’Briens, by Lisa Genova
When Germs Travel, by Howard Markel
The End of Illness, by David Agus
Abroad, by Katie Crouch
The Hunted, by Matt de la Pena
No Time to Lose, by Peter Piot
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
The Ice Twins, by S.K. Tremayne
Find Me, by Laura Van Den Berg
Hyacinth Girls, by Lauren Frankel
I guess I would describe this overall as eclectic people with difficult relationships against a backdrop of zombies and germs?
Small child–7? 8?–on the F train sits down next to me, begins quietly singing to the tune of “My Darling Clementine: “Went to Hellll, went to Hellll, went to Hellll just now–”
Her 6-ish-year-old sister: “Which one is that? The up one or the down one?”
First child: “Heaven is the up, boring one. Hell is down.” (resumes singing)
Unfazed grandmother chaperoning them: “That song just goes on and on, doesn’t it.”
ETA: Later on, when the train was going from Manhattan to Brooklyn…
8-year-old: “Where are we now? Are we in Brooklyn?”
Grandmother: “Yes. No. We’re underneath the river almost to Brooklyn.”
8-year-old: “Why can’t I see any water?”
Grandmother: “We’re in a tunnel, because if we were just in the water the pressure would break all of the glass in the windows and everyone would die.”
…I really admire the undercurrent of subtle morbidness that seems to run in this family.
While using Hopstop (RIP), I found that there was a section for East Anglia, England. What’s the public transport there? Eels?
Hopstop might have fared better if it had the functionality to tell you how long it would take you to walk to the train while staring down at your phone the whole time.
Things I’ve accidentally Googled while trying to search for “Hopstop”: 1. “hoo” – got this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoo A welcome misfire in the end. Many uses of hoo! 2. “Ho,” constantly. 3. Hope.
Things I’ve accidentally Googled while trying to type “Pandora” into my browser: Panda.
I looked up the noun form of “mundane” online, and doing so somehow caused MS Word to shut down, causing me to lose my paragraph about mundanities.
Instead of getting emergency texts about unlikely flash floods, my phone should really let me know when it’s free donut/coffee/ice cream day nearby.
Weather.com with its constant rebranding is already like a teenager who can’t decide if she wants to be goth or punk or emo. Now it’s also dealing in schadenfreude: “NEW! See Friends at Risk in Severe Weather.”
Further, I need my weather options to span a broader range than “Love!” to “Ugh!”
Found in my saved drafts folder: email titled “Things to Remember” with a list of “Books to read” below a list titled “Diseases to worry about.”
2011:
The Ask, Sam Lipsyte
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
God on the Rocks, Jane Gardam (and shouldn’t this be the name of a cocktail?)
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson
2012:
The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein
Bats Out of Hell, Barry Hannah
Airships, Barry Hannah
And When She Was Good, Laura Lippman
Spillover, David Quammen
I guess 2012 was the year I went minimalist, but I cannot fathom why I didn’t include I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck on here. Maybe I was too emotionally scarred.
2013:
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
The Likeness, Tana French
Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon
The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
2014:
American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett
Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill
Others of My Kind, James Sallis
The Fever, Megan Abbott
The Word Exchange, Alena Graedon
