american pants

My window is open and someone, somewhere is playing a cello.

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:32:00 -0400

My window is open and someone, somewhere is playing a cello.

When my complaint about a piece of art is “All the characters in this are horrible...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:22:00 -0500

When my complaint about a piece of art is “All the characters in this are horrible people,” I am generally not convinced to change my opinion by the observation that “yeah, but you’re SUPPOSED to think they’re horrible people.” So whatttttt? The art about horrible people that I DO like has the feature of giving me something to work with beyond “Sometimes people are horrible in this particular way.” There had better be something that makes it worth hanging out with horrible people, is what I’m saying. The world is too rich and delightful, and full of too many real horrible people, for me to need to waste time with fictional horrible people.

Just now, while putting on pants, I got really happy that I’m here, putting on pants, while...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 18:01:00 -0500

Just now, while putting on pants, I got really happy that I’m here, putting on pants, while there used to be only primordial soup. Small victories, but also, you guys, VERY LARGE ONES. Respiration! Vertebrae!

i don't really know what to do with this thought

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:49:00 -0500

but I like that all the men in Europe know how to drive stick.

I’d felt for a long time that throwing all my clothes on the ground at the end of the day and...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 18:47:05 -0500

I’d felt for a long time that throwing all my clothes on the ground at the end of the day and never flossing were bad things that were having a bad effect on my quality of life, but these habits were so ingrained, had such sway over me in the way that only habits can, that the feeling&knowledge of their badness was not enough. Something would have to be done; extensive research on the power of habit would need to be leveraged before I could change. Or so I thought. One day, I just started putting my clothes away and flossing. And I still do. Sometimes I skip a day, but then I do them just fine the next day. Neither of these things is hard. Sometimes you just get sick of getting in your own way.

cool hobby

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:08:47 -0400

The day after going to a club and not having fun, listening to the good songs from the club and pretending I’m at a club having fun.

The Science of Pomato Plants and Fruit Salad Trees

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 16:08:00 -0400

The Science of Pomato Plants and Fruit Salad Trees:

Thinking about fruit salad trees—trees producing multiple types of fruit via the humble magic of grafting—and the fact that they actually exist is making me so unreasonably happy that I thought I should share this article.

I would describe my communication style, and my problem-solving style, as “slightly deranged...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:26:20 -0400

I would describe my communication style, and my problem-solving style, as “slightly deranged camp counselor.”

Isn’t “my anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns, hon” an...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 07:17:44 -0400

Isn’t “my anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns, hon” an example of…ASSonance?

adventures i guess

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:28:53 -0400

Wednesday we had the day off from our conference to explore Copenhagen. I started my day with breakfast in a trendy cafe that only serves oatmeal, where I had an oat/barley/spelt porridge with plum jam served to me by a hot blonde with exquisite English (which is how I would describe most of the Danish people I met). After that I went wandering, and wandered into a pretty cemetery. Cemetery in Danish is “kirkegaard.” As I wandered around the kirkegaard, having lost where the exit was, whose grave should I come across but that of the philosopher Kirkegaard. Meta! Eventually I found my way out and continued to wend my way through the city, stopping on benches to read my book, on bridges to admire bodies of water, and on street corners to revolve slowly trying to figure out which way I meant to go.

All day I was having trouble thermoregulating. It was warm in the sun but there were piercing cold winds off the Baltic Sea. I kept putting on and taking off my fleece and feeling like an idiot. I woke up Thursday with a tickle in my throat. However for most of the day I didn’t notice, since Thursday happened to be the best day of the conference yet. I learned about the resilience of bacterial communities on a human tooth, and about cholera’s cryptic sister. I drank a hundred cups of conference tea, trying to ignore my throat.

That evening was the big conference party in a converted slaughterhouse downtown. Q: why are slaughterhouses and other meat-related things so often turned into hip event venues? I spent the evening talking to a an amazing older lady scientist about cholera and her work as a science ambassador, and then, after she left once the band started playing, unsuccessfully flirting with the world’s most perfect dude. I don’t want to talk about it.

Despite not drinking all that much, I spent the night retching and alternately shivering and burning in my bed. In the morning my coworker gave me tea and Advil, I slept through the plenary, and rallied enough to go to the final set of conference sessions. I learned about the bacteria inhabiting the guts of great apes. As I went back to my hotel my cell phone died. I bought a crepe and took it up to my room, looking at the window at the impossibly romantic nexus of canal and boats and twilit sky and strolling people and Friday-night music, and felt lonely and sorry for myself.

On Saturday I drifted in a haze, blowing truly impressive amounts of vividly colored mucus out of my head. On Saturday night I went to see Leonard Cohen perform in a park, which was beautiful and perfect and I’ll talk about separately. It rained intermittently. I could barely stand. I went straight to bed afterward and awoke with the type of cough that feels like someone is taking a saw to your throat. I had planned to stay in Denmark till Tuesday, moving into a hostel instead of conference housing, seeing more beaches, taking a train to Hamlet’s castle. Sunday morning I realized this was out of the question. I went to the train station, which was full of people with backpacks and a sense of adventure, or suitcases and a sense of purpose, or overnight bags and a rumpled postcoital glow. I ruefully thought of my youth, when I thought I would have adventure or purpose or sex instead of just luggage and a terrible cold. An agent of unsurpassed kindness at the ticket counter found me a big discount on a ticket for the overnight train and I almost wept with relief. There were three hours left until the train and it was raining outside, so I schlepped around the station, ate a McFlurry, read a book at a table in the corner of a crowded station cafe where I didn’t immediately realize that there was a pigeon sitting quietly between my suitcase wheels and my feet.

The train ride took 16 hours. I mostly napped and coughed. Now I’m home, I guess.

I’m a little bummed to be down with a cold on a Saturday in a cool new city where I’m...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 06:52:36 -0400

I’m a little bummed to be down with a cold on a Saturday in a cool new city where I’m seeing my favorite musician perform tonight, but still impressed with the amount and quality of mucus my nose can produce? I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.

People I enjoy: people too stylish and energetic for their Midwestern suburbs, too earnest and...

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:21:00 -0400

People I enjoy: people too stylish and energetic for their Midwestern suburbs, too earnest and sturdy for their east coast cities, too hip for their church choir, too awkward for their cheer squad. There is a place for every type of person but I hold that sometimes the best thing you can do is go plant yourself somewhere else.

a good joke from "how i met your mother"

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:23:00 -0400

Barney: [Wants to insult Sweden, does so by talking in a French accent about baguettes]

Ted: Sweden isn’t France, you know that, right?

Barney (disparagingly): Oh, it’s France.

on the plus side, my hair has been looking great lately

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:07:12 -0400

"Delphiniums in a Window Box," Dean Young

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:56:34 -0400

"Delphiniums in a Window Box," Dean Young:

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.

Not necessarily swans, even crows,

even the evening fusillade of bats.

That place where the creek goes underground,

how many weeks before I see you again?

Stacks of books, every page, characters’

rages and poets’ strange contraptions

of syntax and song, every song

even when there isn’t one.

Every thistle, splinter, butterfly

over the drainage ditches. Every stray.

Did you see the meteor shower?

Did it feel like something swallowed?

Every question, conversation

even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,

because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,

confiding in a cat. Everyone says,

Come to your senses, and I do, of you.

Every touch electric, every taste you,

every smell, even burning sugar, every

cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples

at the farmers’ market, every melon,

plum, I come undone, undone.

That summer, girls wore tops made of cheap lace in shades of pastel and beige

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:34:37 -0400

Would be a sentence in a story about this summer

boyz

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:23:00 -0400

I ventured briefly out of my monastic cave of cheese and science to investigate One Direction. (This is the introduction I will use for all future forays into “pop culture commentary,” because the thought of attempting to become actually literate in these phenomena fills me with exhaustion and terror.) I like boy bands because having a chorus of boys singing about girls is very sweet to me somehow; for the length of the song it is boykind appreciating girlkind in a way that one dude singing about one lady is not. (It is certainly not better than individual men appreciating individual women as individuals and vice versa, but it’s pleasant complement nonetheless in the ongoing opposition to mankind being terrible to womankind.) “What Makes You Beautiful,” I need hardly tell you, is an inadequate song in all ways, and “You don’t know that you’re beautiful/and that’s what makes you beautiful” is an unnecessarily convoluted message to send, but it accomplished EVOKING LIFE with the line “The way you flip your hair has me overwhelmed.” It reminded me of being at a party recently where I was conversing about life&feelings with a male acquaintance, having that weird unexpected temporary intimacy that sometimes blossoms at loud parties. (I had started cultivating this skill—of seeking out a suitable person in a scene of din and dull chaos and drawing them into transient kindred-spiritude—already back home, but I think I got really good at it when I moved into multilingual foreign lands where I a) had to stop feeling self-conscious in order to survive while also b) being unfairly more comfortable conversing in English than anyone else in the room simply by virtue of being a native speaker.) In the middle of the conversation I flipped my head over in order to gather my hair into a ponytail, and my new friend with sudden unguarded admiration said “You don’t realize how hot that is!” And I was very pleased by that, because I had in fact not realized it was at all hot. And it’s an overall stupid situation, right, but it was also one of these moments of sudden, glorious sincerity—that a woman can be doing (apparently) hot things and a man can be talking about hotness but they’ve somehow transcended the stupidity and pettiness for a moment to just talk and be guileless and honest for a minute about the fact that men and women can find each other ineffable and fascinating.

on the way home from the flea market

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 07:09:51 -0400

A dad on a bike with a kid seat in the back; a five or six year old girl, probably a bit too old but not too big for the seat; her arms are wrapped around the arms of a LARGE ANTIQUE CHANDELIER that she is carefully holding in her lap

Places I've Lived

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:24:00 -0400

Places I've Lived:

Wait, I freaking LOVE this feature. I don’t even need there to be any real narrative payoff—I could just listen to people describe their memories of former domiciles all day. The Little House books were the first books I can remember being my favorite, and they are also basically this.

I don’t know what my current adventures mean, but with each room I live in as an adult, I feel like additional chambers are being added to my heart and I cannot WAIT to describe them to someone someday.

sublime

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:14:00 -0400

Halting but industrious plinks and plunks of “Ode to Joy” floating out an open window into the street at dusk after a light summer rain; occasional chirp of a probably wet bird.