Redux: On the Path of Totality

By: | August 20, 2018

Remember this time last year, when we were all so excited about the eclipse? And then it really was as good as everyone said it would be? Here’s the post I wrote on my laptop in the back seat of a car in the massive I-95 traffic jam on August 22, 2017.

 

drawing of traffic jam on interstate

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95.

When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam, on my phone.

Well, the joke’s on me; my phone died.

Surely no one can expect anything coherent from me, from the right lane of an interstate somewhere south of Fayetteville, NC. Instead, I present some eclipse impressions.

1. Traffic. The drawing that starts this post is from the worst traffic we hit on Saturday, on I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg. Here’s the thing, though – I think that may have been normal August weekend traffic. Apparently taking 2.5 hours to go 30 miles is not that unusual. (It was many hours after that traffic jam that my phone gave up its fight. Fortunately, I also brought a laptop.)

 

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 18, 2018

August 13 – 17, 2018

Except for Cameron, beginning and ending the week with sweet cheer, LWON seems to be having trouble getting through it all ok.

Cameron grows zucchini and like anyone else who does, knows she need friends.  And friends aren’t necessarily those guys on social media, they’re the guys who take zucchini.

Christie was sad about Aretha’s illness even before her death.  Sisters doing it for themselves — shouldn’t that have happened already?  Christie is sad about that too.

Erik just moved back to the U.S. after years in Mexico.  He hasn’t a clue what we’ve done to the country in the meantime and he’s right, God, it’s awful.

Cassie looks around her, adds it all up, and thinks, “Fuck humans. The planet would be better off without us.”  Now, what to do about her little kid?

Street names are called odonyms — who knew?  They give us a sense of identity, of way of belonging.  Cameron would prefer they loosen up a little.

 

 

Where the Streets Have Two Names

By: | August 17, 2018

Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The other said, “Lemon Grove Street”.

When someone asks for my address, I usually don’t say either. I just say I live on Lemon Grove. Often, the person will say, “Is there another part of that? Is it a street or a drive or something?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You can pick if you want.” Continue reading →

Good Bones and Weltschmerz

By: | August 16, 2018

Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes.

Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly everything feels awful. I have a bad case of weltschmerz, a term I just learned that smashes together the German words for ‘world’ and ‘pain.’ According to Joachim Whaley, a German historian and linguist at the University of Cambridge, weltschmerz “is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally.” He adds, “it is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”

Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. My personal failings represent the failings of humanity. And lordy are we failing hard. Continue reading →

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

By: | August 15, 2018

After seven years living amongst our neighbors to the south, I have recently returned “home” to the US of A. I say “home” because I’m a West Coast kid and now I live in Baltimore, which is nothing like the West Coast. Honestly, I culture-shocked less moving from California to Mexico City.

And also, because it’s nothing like when I left. What the hell did you guys do to the place while I was gone? Can I not leave for seven years without having to worry about the whole country going to pot? This is why we can’t have nice things.

I was driving down the freeway the other day (in an automobile that I actually own, which still feels bizarre) and I noticed a woman in a sedan whose bumper was covered in homemade stickers about impeaching the sitting president, who I’m told is some kind of reality TV star, though I have never seen his show.

I noticed her because it was kind of cute. They seemed to be strips of Xerox paper with messages handwritten on them and taped to her car. It rains a lot in Maryland and I found myself wondering how many times she has to re-apply them. It seemed like a serious commitment to a bumper sticker.

Out of nowhere, this big truck with a “Ducks Unlimited” sticker (off the shelf, not homemade) comes barreling towards her like he’s going to rear-end her but stops short. Then he blares his horn, goes around her, and slams on the brakes. It was scary, even two lanes over. This goes on for a while and then he tears off. Continue reading →

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

By: | August 14, 2018

The news that Aretha Franklin is gravely ill hit me like a punch in the gut. I’m not sure I realized it until that moment, but she provided an important anthem for my teenage years. Decades later, I can still remember how my high school girls track team would blast Franklin’s rendition of “Respect” on our boom box at the track and on the bus ride to meets. We could never replicate Franklin’s powerful, resounding voice, but we sure tried. I can still remember Jill, a sassy blonde 400 meter runner, standing up in the bus and belting out the lyrics — R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me! — while pointing her finger and sashaying her hips. We’d all join in, at the top of our lungs. The music spoke to us.

The song’s lyrics gave us a language for standing up for ourselves. Aretha helped us find our voice.

I was recently in the car with a friend I’ll call Wild Rose, and we turned her satellite radio to the 80’s/90’s station. As is our tradition, we were singing along to the music when a special song came on — Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves.

Yes, another Aretha Franklin tune… I couldn’t help but sing, and also contemplate how far (as in, not a lot) women had come since Franklin had sang that duet with Annie Lennox.

When that song was popular in my youth, I thought that women were really on the verge of making it. We were going to rule the world, rise to lead big companies and be President soon. Hearing it now made me sad to realize how little progress we’ve really made.

 

Photo of Franklin at the dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial by DOI.

Redux: Friend Me

By: | August 13, 2018

 

This post originally ran last summer. This summer, we tried to do better–we only planted two squash plants. Still, we went to dinner at a friend’s house last night and left behind a very large zucchini.

At dinner for my 18th birthday, one of my friends gave me one of those long, narrow posters filled with advice and inspiration that were popular at the time. I don’t have the poster in front of me, but there were things like this: Never wash a car, mow a lawn, or buy a Christmas tree after dark. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

And then there was this gem: Plant zucchini only if you have lots of friends. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 11, 2018

August 6-10, 2018

In a personal archaeology, your memories are the artifacts, writes Craig this week. And they are all rooted in place.

Guest Melinda Wenner Moyer did us all a favour and brought together some of science writing’s greats to ask which of their stories we should read—and likely didn’t find the first time.

I went to Mexico for a very short time and recorded some snippets of internal monologue there.

Beavers are the spirit animals of the creature known as the tech bro, says Rose. And it’s not a flattering comparison.

And finally, Sally explains Roko’s Basilisk, “Pascal’s wager for the Soylent set.”