The ritual: When science feels like elegy in advance

By: | July 17, 2019

On the eve of disappearing to the ever-warmer-every-year Bering Sea for a couple of weeks, I thought it a good time to re-post this piece I wrote after my first visit up there, in August, 2017.

Each morning, when the fog was thin enough to see, I went to the cliffs.

I’d park the white pickup down a grassy ATV trail. Or off the main dirt road on a pullout. Or in the turnaround at the island’s southwesternmost point, where, when the wind was up at sea, waves coming from the south and west slapped together in explosions of spray and sound that I could feel like thunder in my chest.

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How To Win Friends And Influence People, According to My Dog

By: | July 16, 2019

It’s my dog’s birthday today, so re-sharing this post from the winter felt appropriate. Also I am on deadline.

Last fall, when I was deeply in need of a warm, distracting project, I got a puppy. She is very cute, extremely soft, and really annoying. She enjoys chewing everything, but she especially loves my shoelaces and my wrist, both of which she would carry in her mouth at all times like a prized possession, if I would let her. She is also very good at making new friends.

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Richard & the Trouble with Gravity

By: | July 15, 2019

Ann:  After you’ve gone to the immense trouble of writing a book, having to sell it seems a bit much.  My own personal best was always with the radio interviewers who began with, “So what’s the name of your book again?”  So Richard, what’s the name of your book again? Oh, right, Gravity.  What’s it about?

Richard: Nice try, Ann, but no, the title isn’t Gravity. It’s The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet

Ann:  You were supposed to say, “It’s about gravity.” But I sidetracked my own setup, didn’t I.

Richard: Sorry. I do know a setup for a punchline when I see one, but in this case the set-up seemed to be along the lines of “Why did the chicken cross the t’s and dot the i’s?”

Ann:  So I won’t quit my day job and go into comedy.  And, yes, your book is called The Trouble with Gravity.  And I haven’t read it — I will, because what you write, I read—but I have a good excuse, which is timing this post as closely as possible to your pub date.  Now then, what’s the trouble with gravity?

Richard: It’s about gravity. Oh, wait—I was reading the wrong question. The answer to this question is that the trouble with gravity is nobody knows what gravity is, and just about nobody knows nobody knows what gravity is. The exception is scientists, and they know nobody knows what gravity is because they know they don’t know what gravity is. 

Ann:  I was maybe 35 when I realized I didn’t know what gravity was.  I mean, an effect should have a cause, right? You don’t fall down for no reason.  Then I learned in night school physics that gravity is something mass does, but honestly, that didn’t help at all.  

Richard: Exactly so. Gravity is what we’ve come to accept as the cause of various effects, but what that cause is, nobody understands. The book is about the history and philosophy of this concept we all take for granted, and how that concept has evolved, starting with creation myths, virtually all of which begin with a division between Earth and Sky—a distinction that wouldn’t be evident if gravity didn’t make us conceive of the universe as down here and up there. That division extends to later myths (think: gods), religion (angels and devils, heaven and hell), and Newton’s revolution in breaking that down here/up there mental barrier. But I have to ask: “night school physics”?

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The Surprises of Coming Back Home

By: | July 12, 2019

It’s often a surprise, coming back home. When I came home from Saudi Arabia five years ago, I was shocked by the trees. I’ve lived with trees like this most of my life, but just seeing them lining the airport road, sucking gallons of water from the ground and throwing it into the atmosphere like it was nothing – what a miracle, after a month in the desert.

In May, I came home from two weeks in Japan. The differences were smaller – Japan is also quite humid – but they struck me. So I wrote down what I noticed on a post-it note, and now I’m sharing them.

1. Cars drive on the right here. So weird, a world where we can’t even agree on that. There are only two choices but not everyone agrees, and once you get started down one path, switching is nearly impossible. So here we are, with infrastructure built for one or the other, and pedestrians’ brains trained to look one way or the other, and we’ll be different until, presumably, the end of cars.

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No-Sky July

By: | July 11, 2019

Each June, I revisit a post about June Gloom, a weather phenomenon that turns much anticipated summer sunshine into foggy despair. You thought you were safe this year, but no! Our gloom was so deep it started in May and lasted all day, every day. Now it’s July, and there is light at the end of the fog, which seems to lift around noon. So here it is, a post that first appeared in 2012.

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Drawing for My Nerves

By: | July 10, 2019

This post originally appeared November 28, 2016.

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I have a tendency to worry. When I’m stressed, I can worry pretty much any time of day, but my brain’s favorite time to worry is in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., there is no problem that can’t be mulled over, chewed on, and puffed up until it seems like the biggest problem in the world.

Anxiety has been a problem for a lot of people I know lately. First there was the election, which hung over us all, with daily news stories (fake and real) and opinion pieces (anxious and more anxious) and stupid memes (mean and meaner). And now there’s the uncertainty about what this next administration will do.

But at the end of October, I was worrying about something pretty great: a three-week trip to Nepal. And, yeah, I was worrying about it. That’s just a thing my brain does, ok? In the middle of the night before I left, I did one of the things that helps me keep my mind off of things: Drawing. And I went for one of the more challenging subjects, my hand. And then I thought maybe I’d just decorate it with some of my travel-related worries.

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Be Ashamed of Your Hard Tears

By: | July 9, 2019

To be a parent is to get jerked around. Toy manufacturers jerk you around into buying useless crap. Other parents jerk you around making you worry you live in the wrong zip code. The kids themselves jerk you around into buying that second scoop of blueberry brontosaurus crunch with rainbow sprinkles.

And, of course, Hollywood jerks you around, jerking your tears. My child loves the Pixar movie, Coco. If you haven’t seen it, first of all, what the hell? You have time for Cars sequels but you can’t watch Pixar’s best movie?*

Secondly, there is this scene at the end where the main character is trying to remind his senile great-grandmother of her father, who he just left in the Land of the Dead and who will die if she forgets him. So, he uses the father’s old guitar and plays his song, which she hasn’t heard in decades because music was banned in her house.

And he plays the song and she raises her aged brows and, in a heartbreakingly tender moment,  sings along. The song, called “Remember Me,” was stolen and turned into a pop song but was originally written as a lullaby, which is how the kid plays it. It kills me every time. Then my kid turns from the screen and says, “Is this the part that makes Daddy cry?” As if he doesn’t already know, the little jerk.

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Do Not Be Ashamed of Your Easy Tears

By: | July 8, 2019
An old illustration of a crying woman, drying her eyes on her apron.

Yesterday I woke up, after sleeping in, to the sound of my husband and 7-year-old son yelling at the screen during the Women’s World Cup final. I came downstairs in time to watch the end, and soon enough I was crying like anything, even though I am not a Sports Person. There was just so much emotion on the field that it reached out and wrung my mirror neurons until tears came out of my eyes.

The older I get, the more emotionally sensitive I seem to be. I tear up at movies, at books, at commercials, at tweets. My switches are flipped so easily, just a few bars of “sad” music sends me over the edge.

There is so much horribleness out there in the world—so much real horribleness, from concentration camps at the border to a sexual predator in the White House to climate change—that it sometimes baffles me that I can listen to the news without curling up into a ball and sobbing. And yet some celebrating soccer players or an obituary in the paper will throw open the flood gates. Things that hit me the hardest include people behaving decently to one another and people who faced obstacles achieving their goals. Not sad stuff, but the opposite. My mother has the same tendency, despite being pretty tough and very much Norwegian-American about displays of emotion. When she is moved to tears despite her attempts to stay dry-eyed, she often says “its all just so goddam poignant!” And then we laugh. What is wrong with us?

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