Category — Uncategorized

There have been few books that have meant as much to me as the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.  A bunch of people have told me that they couldn’t stand the characters and stopped reading after the first book because they found them annoying.  But I loved every last character, every plot twist and turn (even the ones that made me sob because I was filled with regret FOR the character), every square inch of Fillory.

I love the books as much as (and maybe even moreso?) than Harry Potter.  I know.  Your mouth is probably hanging open at this point because Harry Potter is my life.  I’ve worn my Ravenclaw robes to the carpool line at school.  But, yeah, the Magicians trilogy is a comparable love.

The Guardian recently had an article about visiting the real life inspirations for Pemberley or Thornfield Hall.  Not included on the list was the inspiration for Brakebills: a combination of Bannerman’s Castle and Olana in New York.

We’ve been trying to plan a trip to the area, but the ferry (we don’t want to do the kayaks) to Pollepel Island only runs on the weekend, and we can only hit the area on a weekday.  We’re not sure if you can see the ruins from the shore, or if it’s a waste of time to go to the area if we can’t get out to the actual island.  I love the idea of being in the space that inspired Brakebills.

If I can’t get to an actual wizarding college, it’s the next best thing, right?

Does anyone know the area?  Can you see the castle without going on the island?

Moreover, which fictional building would you want to visit?

Have you ever heard an interesting word and then suddenly heard it used three more times in quick succession?  The word, in this case, was cant.  A cant is a secret language designed so a group can speak in front of other people and not be understood.

The first time it came up, it was in an article about thieves’ cant.  The next time, it was a line in a person’s biography mentioning that they wrote a book about Polari.  The third time referred to nadsat and A Clockwork Orange.  It was strange because I clearly knew words from cants — like drag — but didn’t remember that there was this word, cant, to describe these languages.

I liked the idea that something exists that is like a language geocache.  You know how there are dozens of treasures you walk by every day and have no clue that they’re buried in plain sight?  Well, I love the idea of these little languages spoken around us that we don’t know because the whole point is to be able to speak in front of other people without revealing the subject of conversation.

To operate in secret, out in the open.

*******

The twins and I just finished translating their Torah portion together.  We took it apart, word by word.  First, they would write out the word.  Then we would think about whether the word sounded similar to a word they already knew.  If it didn’t, I helped them look up the word in the dictionary.  We went through the portion, word by word, until it formed sentences and paragraphs.

We did it this way because I felt silly hiring a tutor to teach them something that I could teach them.  I have a translation degree.  Wasn’t it high time that I actually used it?  Plus I didn’t want to have to drive them to a tutor once a week.

But it was also special, taking something apart, word by word.  Learning etymology and how random words were related.  My goal was to instill in them a love of being a word archaeologist, something that will serve them well with everything from the SATs to discerning what someone isn’t saying in a conversation.

The project made us talk a lot about how languages divide all of us, making it difficult to understand one another.  But in the case of the translation project, it also served to bring us closer for hours at a time around the kitchen table.

*******

It was strange that the term cant kept popping up right as we were finishing the translation project.  The whole point of the cant is to set up that divide.  The definition is focused outward; it’s to exclude.

But, of course, it’s also to include.  To let someone in.  To clearly state that they are a part of a group.  Outsides only exist when there are insides.  Translating their portion together was about giving them a key.  They own Hebrew, are insiders even if they don’t know it fluently yet.  The project was about beckoning them in.

*******

A co-worker sent along an article about Facebook researchers that shut down an AI project when the system began developing its own language because the researchers wanted robots that spoke efficiently to humans, not to each other.  “In each instance, an AI being monitored by humans has diverged from its training in English to develop its own language. The resulting phrases appear to be nonsensical gibberish to humans but contain semantic meaning when interpreted by AI ‘agents’.”

I love the idea that even robots gravitate towards making language more efficient and more exclusive to other robots when given the chance.  Sets of people develop a shorthand, an informal cant, over time.  Our instinct is to always separate linguistically while we cleave to others in our defined groups.  Even robots.

The key is our ability to translate and cross linguistic bridges.

A puddle showed up underneath a kitchen chair.

The puddle wasn’t there when we exited the house.  It was there when we returned.  It was a clear liquid with a yellowish/brown tint.  Someone spilled something, right?  Except no one was in the house.  Still, I asked everyone in the house if they had spilled a perfect puddle of ginger ale underneath my chair with nary a drop anywhere else.

The liquid was under a chair.  The chair itself was not wet or stained — nothing had dripped on it and then continued to the floor.  There were no water stains on the ceiling or walls.  The tile was not buckled or damaged.

I cleaned it up and tucked it away in the back of my head.

*******

Days later, I walked out of the kitchen and stepped in something wet.  When I entered the kitchen, nothing was on the floor.  When I exited the kitchen 15 minutes later, there were suddenly several puddles.  One was in the doorway to the kitchen.  Another was about a foot away.  A third was a foot away from that.  There were a few drops of liquid here and there, but most of it was contained to these three main puddles in the hallway.

The puddles were maybe four feet away from the front door.  The space between the door and the puddles was dry.  The tile underneath the puddles was undamaged.  There were no water stains on the ceiling or walls.  The puddles were in the center of the tile — not on the seams.

The puddles were not there when we went to sleep.  They were not there when I woke up (and I was the only person to walk downstairs in the morning).  But they were there 15 minutes later.

*******

Days after that, a puddle showed up in the bedroom above the kitchen and hallway.  The puddle is maybe an inch or two in diameter.  When I press a paper towel into the carpet, it draws up water.  It’s not a small amount of water — we’ve gone through an entire roll of paper towels, and the puddle isn’t getting any smaller.

*******

The only other strange occurrence has been a leak from the basement ceiling; a single tiny hole that sometimes drips water when we’ve had a lot of rain.  The last time it leaked, it didn’t happen for the first 18 hours of rain, but it leaked sometime before the puddles appeared in the kitchen above.  There isn’t a pipe, and the no other space on the ceiling drips.  Just this single, tiny hole.

*******

So three rooms with water, one on top of the other, all in somewhat the same spot.  On the top floor, the water is on the carpet.  On the middle floor, the water is on the tile.  On the bottom floor, the water is coming from the ceiling.

Last facts to know: with all the puddles, there had been a storm.  In the first case, there was one big, quick rainstorm.  In the second case, it was after 24 hours of intense rain.  In the meantime, there have been other storms and no puddles.

The puddles are at least four feet away from external walls to the house.  They’ve appeared in different rooms, though all the rooms are one above the other.  The liquid has no scent, so while it could be ghost pee, it isn’t animal urine.  I trust that everyone in the house is telling me the truth about not spilling anything.

There are no water stains on the walls or ceiling.

Your thoughts?  Everyone who has looked at it is baffled.  We’re going to check that the gutters are clear and slope the dirt away from the house for better drainage.  But other than that, do you think it’s a ghost?  A ghost animal peeing on our floor?

I don’t normally read David Brooks, but a newsletter I read linked to one of his recent columns. It was pure Brooks, cranky and curmudgeonly, swinging his fist out at the act of bailing.

His thesis is that technology has made it too easy to cancel plans. On Monday people set up drinks for Thursday, and then on Thursday afternoon, they cancel said plans because of X, Y, or Z. He writes,

There was a time, not long ago, when a social commitment was not regarded as a disposable Post-it note, when people took it as a matter of course that reliability is a core element of treating people well, that how you spend your time is how you spend your life, and that if you don’t flake on people who matter you have a chance to build deeper and better friendships and live in a better and more respectful way. Of course, all that went away with the smartphone.

I am curious if others have experienced this because I have not. At least, I haven’t experienced it in any greater amount since the advent of the smartphone. Cancelling existed back in my dial-up modem college days and it still exists today.

So, yes, people still cancel from time to time, but there is generally a good reason given. (For example, a project they thought would be done is taking longer than expected or someone unexpectedly needs them so they can’t grab dinner.) I am finding the opposite is true in the Facebook age.

We connect with so many more people than usual throughout the day. Not just face-to-face people, but we leave a comment on a friend’s Instagram picture and end up having a fun back and forth for a few minutes. And then someone says, “We need to get together!” And it never happens.

THAT: two people state that they want to grab dinner or go see the same movie but they never set up the plans.

I don’t know if it’s something that some people just say because they don’t know how to dismount from the Instagram conversation. They can’t just take the interaction on face value and allow the interaction to stand on its own. Maybe they feel embarrassed that they’re taking the time to comment on a photo but they haven’t taken the time to grab Starbucks together.

But I cannot tell you how many people tell me we should do something together and then never set up the plans in the first place. And I know that I do the same thing, too. I say that we should get together when I know full well that I don’t have the time.

It’s like saying a soft yes in the moment so you get remembered for the yes and hopefully will never have to state the hard no down the road.

So I guess I don’t agree with Brooks that bailing is the issue — and maybe you disagree with me on this — but I think the smartphone has either (1) put us in touch with too many people and therefore we keep feeling like (and saying aloud that) we should make plans when we know we don’t have the time and space to honour all the fictional plans we’re setting up or (2) set up a system where we feel like we don’t have to make concrete plans because we know we’ll be able to see where they are from a Facebook post and then show up in the same space if the opportunity aligns.

What has been your experience? Are more people bailing on plans or not making concrete plans in the first place?

Buzzfeed had a great post last week about mourning someone you didn’t really know. She begins with the death of a popular vlogger and then continues into various celebrities such as Prince or Amy Winehouse. The author describes what so many of us feel when we see the news online; gutted.

She knew the vlogger — Meechy Monroe — in the sense that she watched her videos and commented. She writes,

Meechy Monroe, who was a couple years younger than me, had occupied a space somewhere between celebrity and friend in my mind: I looked up to her in a way, but also felt intimately connected to her, by virtue of her tutorials and age. This was not the time to die, not by a long shot.

The possibility of death was there — Meechy fought brain cancer for two years — but that doesn’t remove the gut punch felt when the worst comes true. When you are going about your day, oblivious to what is happening for that person’s inner circle, and then read the news after the fact because it is posted online.

If you are with someone who is dying, you begin the mourning process before the person is gone. If you are one of the everyone else, the death comes out of nowhere: a jolt, a slap. Your day was about getting to the grocery store or finishing a project. And now it is suddenly about mourning, too.

The author was grateful that the vlogger’s sister posted a message expressing her condolences outward — to the people who watched her sister and now missed her — and it’s a touching moment that the author describes as “a gracious gesture to include strangers in this most private of griefs. Meechy was MsVaughn’s little sister. But she belonged to us also.”

It made me think about all the bloggers in our community who have died over the years. Emilie and LisaP and Nancy and Alex. Sometimes I’ll be looking for an old post and find their comments. Sometimes Facebook will ask me if I want to wish a person a happy birthday when that date rolls around but the site hasn’t been told that the person is gone. In all cases, I remember mourning deeply; crying hard because someone that I read, someone that commented or emailed with me, was gone.

A friend described feeling sad about the recent diagnosis of John McCain’s brain tumour. It’s not that she liked John McCain’s politics or had admired him greatly throughout the years. It’s that she knew exactly what his family must be going through emotionally right now because she had gone through that news in her family, too. And she felt gutted for them because we are all human. She doesn’t need to know the person to feel sympathy knowing how one feels when facing down that sort of diagnosis. Humanity, in that case, trumps all other facts from how well you know the person to how you feel about the person’s work.

I think that shared humanity is there when it comes to all deaths that we read about on the Internet — from celebrities that we thought would be around if not forever than for a longer amount of time to the random people who enter the national consciousness because their story breaks the surface of the news cycle.

Death is an expected part of the lifecycle, and yet it’s the one life moment that feels so incredibly wrong. We dread it and we don’t like to think about it. Any death — the ones on the Internet or the ones in our face-to-face world — force us to confront death as fact. Sometimes we miss the person, or what we knew of the person, and sometimes it’s that the person serves as a gate to considering our other losses or worst fears.

It’s a moving post about loss and the Internet and how much we end up meaning to one another. Our lives crash into each other on the Internet — yes, even celebrities get closer to the general public on the Internet — and it changes us. So we mourn them when they’re gone. All death is hard. The death of someone we’ll miss is even harder.