May we introduce Emily Underwood, to whom you’ve already been introduced because for years she’s been writing guest posts here, like the one about her suicidal hamster. She writes about neuroscience, the environment, mental health, and of course everything else. Her bio is here; her first official post is tomorrow, 1/3/2018. She’s one of the most delicately civilized people on earth. She spends a lot of time — as she and Kenneth Grahame say and as Helen so redoubtably illustrates — messing about in boats.
I had some trouble with the state of the world in 2018. As a result, I’ve been having trouble figuring out what to write for this blog. (I wrote about this problem in October.)
Christie suggested “beginnings” as a topic for today’s blog post, and I noodled around a while on that. But when I came back to it a few hours later, none of it seemed worth sharing.
So I decided to draw it instead. Here you go: How I feel about the beginning of 2019.
Once again, I was thinking that this year would be my year to keep a journal. Or a calendar. I spent a lot of time looking at various new options online, thinking that perhaps some clean fresh pages in a new format would help. Then I remembered this post, which first appeared in 2014.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to write in a journal everyday. I’m terrible at it, even though I wished I loved to scribble daily. I can’t even keep up with my Planner Pad. (In fact, I’ve already lost my 2014 edition).
That’s not to say that I haven’t occasionally kept a notebook. I have one from the eighth grade that is sealed shut with duct tape and says DO NOT OPEN UNTIL YOU ARE VERY OLD. I am not sure when I plan on opening it. The only time I’ve been successful in journaling is in cases of extreme boredom (see: eighth grade, and the summer when I had a two-hour commute) or extreme novelty. I usually write every night when I travel—often, in recent years, in hopes of being able to use the notes in a future story.
Absent these situations, I can’t do it. I get self-conscious. I devolve into whining. I lament my penmanship and my small mindedness. In every class where keeping a journal has been a requirement, I grit my teeth and do the minimum. I was thinking of applying for the California Naturalist program, but when I saw the naturalist notebook requirement (along with the every Saturday commitment), I had second thoughts.
But I do love reading other people’s notebooks. I like naturalists’ notebooks in particular, with sketches and descriptions of the places they visit—and sometimes, revealing the people behind the pen. These notebooks don’t seem boring—they’re fascinating. And also, quite useful. Both Henry David Thoreau, in Massachusetts, and Aldo Leopold, in Wisconsin, made extensive records of when plants flowered each spring. Last year, researchers compared these records to more recent flowering times, finding that plants bust out the blooms earlier when faced with climate change.
Even still, something about the idea of actually taking out the notebook and feeling required to use it seems intimidating, as if I need to be writing down the right things. As if there are right things to write about.
Sadly, no wine.
Maybe because I know what I’d really like to have my notebook look like is this. But I’m really not an artist; all my watercolors have been done with a glass of wine in hand, and they look like what you might imagine. While artists and naturalists offer many practical suggestions of what tools to include in a field bag, wine is never among them.
I’m not quite sure why I’m intimidated by doing this badly—there are plenty of other things I do badly without a second thought. So to give myself the easiest of resolutions (to complement the elephant seal training plan): to notice one thing each day, even if I never use a notebook.
The thing I’m noticing doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to serve some larger purpose. Take yesterday—the tide was low, and we found anemones covered in confetti bits of shell among the rocks. The biggest ones, each about the size of my hand, had pale blue tentacles and had tucked themselves into a pocket of water beneath an overhanging rock.
Later, I found out that the big patches of anemones were likely all clones—called aggregating anemones, they can divide and spread their genetically identical brethren across the rocks. They don’t mind being packed in with their gene-mates, but should they encounter an unrelated group of anemones, they’ll unleash the fighting tentacles and start their own version of clone wars.
Next time I’ll look for the fighting tentacles. Maybe I should bring some wine and watercolors after all.
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Images Top: Wikimedia Commons user Walun Middle: Flickr user Donna L. Long
My grandma died yesterday morning. She did not go quickly or painlessly. It was not what most would consider a good death. Difficult, heart-wrenching decisions were made. I want nothing more than to write about how her life ended — about how the system failed her, about how the system is failing so many people — but the wound is too fresh. So I’ll give you another post I wrote about difficult endings. This one originally ran in July 2013. (The story below is about my paternal grandparents. It was my maternal grandma who just died.)
Last night I read Robin Marantz Henig’s beautiful story about Peggy Battin, a bioethicist and advocate for patients who wish to end their lives, and her husband, Brooke Hopkins. A bike accident in 2008 left Brooke paralyzed from the shoulders down and in need of almost constant care. Some days Brooke wants to live; other days he wants to die. And that puts Peggy in a difficult position: “Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be,” Marantz Henig writes. Still, Brooke has the ability to make a choice and to communicate that choice. Not everyone has that option. The story made me think of an example from my own life that was both simpler and more complex.
My grandpa had a series of small strokes in his 70s and developed dementia. Grandma cared for him as best she could, but eventually his disease became too much to handle. He would race off in his truck in the middle of the night. Sometimes he would come home; other times he would get lost and end up at a neighbor’s house. Grandpa was strong as an ox. If he wanted to go somewhere, she couldn’t stop him. It was too much for an old woman to handle. So we sent Grandpa to live at the Good Samaritan Center in Park River, North Dakota. His dementia progressed and he stopped recognizing me. Then he stopped recognizing Grandma.
The call came in late May. Grandpa had taken a spill. His head hit the tile floor hard—hard enough to cause his brain to hemorrhage. There was nothing to be done, the doctors said. This was the end. Grandpa wasn’t in any position to make choices, so we chose for him. Don’t prolong this, we said. No feeding tube. No IV. No doubt it’s what he would have wanted.
We expected the end to come quickly, at least I did. How long can a bedridden eighty-two-year-old survive without fluids? A few days, at most, I thought. Yet a week later, we were still waiting for Grandpa to die.
My memories of that week are unreliable at best. I remember accepting cup after cup of watery Folgers despite not being a coffee drinker. I remember watching my dad rub Vaseline on Grandpa’s cracked lips. But mostly I remember waiting. Each time the phone rang, I expected to hear that he was gone. Each time I was relieved and then dismayed.
Grandpa died June 9, 1998. Had he been in the hospital ten days? Two weeks? I don’t remember. But yesterday, when I read about Peggy and Brooke, I couldn’t help but think of Grandpa. I reflected on those last painful days in the hospital. I remembered his cracked lips and sunken eyes. What if some clean-shaven doctor had taken mercy on our family and administered a lethal dose of morphine? Would that have been immoral? Or would it have been extraordinarily humane?
The other morning while we were walking our dogs, my husband slipped on some snow and fell down in front of me. One moment he was stepping over a log, and the next he was on his back, feet up in the air. I laughed hysterically.
He wasn’t hurt. Nor was he amused. And his grumpiness just made the whole episode that much more comical. I couldn’t stop laughing, even after he pointed out that it was actually kind of mean to giggle over his misfortune. I agreed that it was rotten of me, yet I couldn’t stop smirking.
And that got me wondering — why is it so funny when someone falls?
Turns out, scientists are on it. I’ll explain their findings in a minute. But first, notice how many examples of this kind of humor circulate on the internet. Here are three of them, starting with the Ice Man. I dare you not to laugh.
This holiday week, we’re looking back at some favorite posts about snow and ice. This post originally ran on Sept 22, 2011 when the concept of Game Transfer Phenomena was first identified. It has been updated with an anecdote that demonstrates how playing too much Mario Kart could save you from an icy death.
When William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984 in the book Neuromancer, he described it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.”
Decades later, Gibson declared that cyberspace was everting. Which is to say, entering the next phase of its evolution by creeping out of the virtual boundaries that once defined it and into what we consider “real life.”
Earlier this week, a study out of Nottingham Trent University and Stockholm University hinted at what I think is the real potential of the internet: imbuing plain vanilla reality with an extra, shared dimension. Moving our consensual hallucination into reality.
This holiday week, we’re looking back on some favorite posts about snow, ice, and cold weather. In this post, originally published March 6, 2015, Helen tells ice to go back to where it came from.
I am on the record as loving snow and cheerfully tolerating cold. So you’d think I would love winter. And I do, mostly. But as of this week, I am very much ready for winter to pack up its bags and leave the D.C. area.
The reason: ice. Ice is the worst.
Ok, it’s good in drinks and I don’t mind skating on it. But it refuses to stay confined to ice rinks where it can be Zambonied into shape. It has a cruel habit of forming on sidewalks and other places where humans need to walk. And it’s out to get me.
This holiday week, we’re looking back on some favorite posts about winter, snow, and ice. This post by Cameron about life under the snow originally ran on June 5, 2013.
It’s after Memorial Day, so I should be wearing white instead of thinking about the white stuff. (Although if I were in the Arctic Circle or even in Vermont and New York, where a late-May storm dropped a foot or more in some spots, I might be thinking about snow quite a bit).
Even when I do think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.
I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air, brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.
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