Let’s suppose I was running and a bug flew into my eye, smacking straight into the eyeball at high velocity. Surely the bug is no longer there, but the pain, irritation and some blurriness and eye discharge remain. Could I have an eye infection from this harrowing collision between my eye and a bug? This is so crazy. HELP?
Category: Extracurricular
We Won Bar Trivia Again
I mean, when this is one of the handout rounds, how could we have lost? Terp was in town and joined the crew, and thankfully he knew Jeff Gillooly on sight. Watching every single Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan retrospective pays off, eventually.
To be honest, though, this was a close one because the wheels really came off in the last round (when every question is worth a point and the last one is worth 5.5 points).
The last question was, how many days will have passed between the release of the original Top Gun and the new one (which comes out next year)? I thought it came out in 1987, but the rest of the team calculated it with summer 1988. Then we learned it actually came out in 1986, so we lost so much of our advantage that we ended up only winning by half a point. A win is a win!
Had Nurse Kelly (on our team) not recalled that Bob Carlisle was the singer of “Butterfly Kisses” (for the “father-daughter song” round) and Friend Sunil not known that 97 was the highest prime number under 100, we would have have been paying full price for our tab that night.
Everyone The Light Touches Was In The Pride Lands
I don’t live in Hollywood, I live in the much cooler (at least temperature-wise) beachy area of Marina del Rey/Venice. But every once in awhile, since this is LA, I like to drop into the “Hollywoody” denizens of this town, like red carpet premieres. Friend Tim (my dorm mate from freshman year at Mizzou) is the executive editor of Entertainment Weekly, so, he gets the good invites.
But we are journalists, not show business people. So we get confined to sitting in the backs of the theaters or up on the mezzanine levels of these exclusive events. You know, up with the riff raff, where we belong. The thing about the world premiere of director Jon Favreau’s live-action Lion King last night is that the stars were SO A-list (Beyonce, Steph Curry, Chance the Rapper, Seth Rogen, etc) that the “riff raff” consisted of almost all celebrities. It was super weird.
The setting is the Dolby Theater, which you’ve seen if you’ve watched any Oscars ceremonies on television. Security locks up everyone’s phones in individually-sized pouches with electronic locks that only the security team can unlock after you’ve left the theater. So no snaps from the theater from me.
Anyway, we were up there in our mezzanine seats, and the following people were in the three rows in front of me: Ali Wong, Leann Rhimes and Eddie Cibrian, Megan Traynor and her husband, who was the kid in Spy Kids (no longer a kid), Chrissy Metz from This is Us, some actor from Game of Thrones I did not recognize because that’s not a show I ever watched (Update: Tim says it was Pedro Pascal), and right behind us was Raven Simone.
“That’s so Raven!” I said. “And she’s sitting behind us,” quipped the girl next to me. “That is so NOT Raven.” (Y’all may know I have used “That’s so Raven” as a recurring bit to react to things for maybe, ten years? Being able to make a Raven joke about Raven herself was a surreal high.)
Before the show got started, aka, before Beyonce had entered the building, I went up four rows to chat with Friend Eric at the WSJ. We were talking about Pittsburgh or something when I’m tapped on the shoulder by someone asking me which seat I’m supposed to be in and it’s … Tracy Morgan. “Ohhhh, I was just squatting here talking with a friend, sorry,” I had to say, to Tracy Morgan, because they put there were so few “normals” at this premiere that they had to put legit television stars with the journos.
As someone who’s seen the animated Lion King a gazillion times (I also saw the 1994 version in the theater), screening the live-action reboot gave me all the feels. Watching it at the world premiere took things to another level — the director came out and brought each cast member on stage BEFORE the film, which led to a standing ovation before the movie ever started. Given all the buzz and Beyonce in the air, the audience broke into cheers and applause after every song, which made screening a film feel more like seeing the Broadway show. I peered down at Ali Wong if she laughed at the jokes in the film, and she didn’t, which surprised me because Billy Eichner, Seth Rogen and John Oliver were hilarious in their roles.
Huge regret I didn’t selfie with Levar Burton since he seemed really open to it at the after party. Said party took place in white tent that stretched a couple of blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the Dolby Theatre. I love these industry parties for all the unlimited booze and buffet, of course. But this one being a Disney premiere also had amazing kid stuff! DOLE WHIPS (usually only available at DisneyLand), makeup artists doing safari animal face painting, projection machines so you could make your own souvenir video of walking in silhouette with Simba, Pumbaa and Timon, warthog slime-making and Pride Rock-painting crafts, the McDonald’s food truck parked to serve Chicken McNugget Happy Meals with the Lion King merch toys inside … and yet very, very few kids. Then again, it was 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night. How many children should be out at that hour?
Things I’ve Done While Out of Commission, A List
The whole arm popping out of socket situation could have been so much worse that I’m counting my lucky stars that I’m merely stuck in bed in a sling. I just got cleared to return to work, too, so tomorrow I plan on going in, to get off my ass.
A fairly complete list of what I “accomplished” while convalescing this week:
Caught up on the Taylor Swift/Scooter Braun rift
Listened to a recording of Curtis Sittenfeld reading her short story, Creative Differences
Sent articles to friends, according go their individual interests
Reviewed my doctor’s notes from Ireland
Saw an American doctor, got new x-rays
Canceled a bunch of previously scheduled trips and engagements
Started watching Black Mirror based on a handy ranking of all its episodes
Watched the full season of State of the Union
Watched 13 episodes of Jane the Virgin
Saved a list of movies to watch on Netflix based on this “100 Best” list
Read the following books: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, Lifespan by David Sinclair
Journaled
Meditated
Approximately ten squats and nine lunges
Made a dessert involving lots of puff pastry
Wrote newsletter
Read some poetry curated by Friend Patrick
Played with Luna with my good arm
Talked on the phone with Friend Janet
Ordered Amazon Fresh
Ordered Amazon Pantry, after learning they were two different offerings
Checked my credit card points
Asked realtor to drive me around to see some houses, since I can’t drive
Updated my DC tenants’ lease
Walked to order a cake, found bakery closed
Walked to another bakery
Intermittently g-chatted with Kat, Reeve, Danny, Fiscus and Mike (individually, not as a group)
Called mom four times
Pain Reactions
My entire team at work is reading/read Homo Deus, which is about post-humanism, the central topic of our video show. Despite its weight, the book is a pretty smooth read. The most interesting thing I learned from it is about the narratives we create around pain: Nobel-prize winning research found that in our memories we average the peak pain point and final pain point of experiences. So when given a choice between a shorter experience of moderate pain and a longer painful experience with a higher peak pain point, we choose the longer experience, so long as the ending was not-that-painful.
So if you’re getting a colonoscopy and your peak pain was an 8 and your final experience was a 2, you’d choose a long colonoscopy over a short procedure with a sustained pain level of 6. Ditto childbirth, etc. Harari:
“Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’ – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average.”
This reminded me of an interview that director Mike Nichols gave about his film Closer, which follows a quartet of miserable relationships, or they end up feeling that way, anyway. He talked about how he wanted to bring the play to film because it features only scenes of the beginnings and the ends of relationships — that’s all the audience gets to experience — you don’t get all the quiet mundanity in between. Nichols said something about how that’s exactly how we remember our romances, too. The peak pain and the bliss at the beginning; but not much in between.
Science seems to bear out the play/film’s idea … about the end points, anyway.
Like everyone else, I think Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a genius and recommended Fleabag to every reader of my newsletter when season one came around a few years ago. I did not expect a second season (season one was so self-contained) so when it dropped a few weeks ago and was PERFECT, it was like finding a twenty in a purse you hadn’t used in months and then having a friend come by to offer you an ice cream sandwich.
Kristin Scott-Thomas guest stars in an episode and gives an epic speech about a woman’s pain:
“Women are born with pain built in,” she says. “It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t.
“They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby.
“We have it all going on in here inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years…”
Audiences loved it.
I recently started reading the work of Leslie Jamison, a writer who is my age but writes like she’s been alive for 200 years and has all the wisdom and experience to show for it. Her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, ends with the essay “A Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which catalogues her own pain, examines the pain women carry, and the literary trope of the wounded woman. “I’m tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it,” she writes. If you don’t read the book, here’s the piece.
It raised a lot of questions for me but a key one is this: When a woman’s pain and suffering is so often expected and cliched, how do we best carry our actual wounds? She riffs on the notion of the “post-wounded woman,” a generation of us who grew up doing everything we could to avoid the identity of a wallowing victim/woman. I recognize this in myself:
“Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, apathetic, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect. I should rather call it a seam. We have sewn ourselves up.”
Then, she asks, What if some of us want to take our scars seriously?
And answers:
We don’t want to be wounds, but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one.
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields.
LA Is Really A Small Town, With Excellent Bar Trivia
Chance encounters are the best. I get more than my fair share of good ones.
Yesterday, I had just flown back from a conference/retreat in Sonoma when I got a random message from my high school friend Bryan, who I hadn’t seen since 2001.
Bryan introduced me to blogging nearly 20 years ago by setting up my LiveJournal as part of building elisehu.com for me. (That site got even fancier when Friend Justin added Flash!) Besides websites, our times spent together consisted a lot of Cici’s Pizza (all you can eat for only … 2.99).
So, the reason Bryan reached out is because his Tuesday night bar trivia team only had three other members who could make it, so he took a gamble in asking me to go (not knowing if I could even be helpful at a trivia challenge … little did he know I EFFING LOVE BAR TRIVIA).
Upon joining the team, which we named “Alexa, Sue The National Enquirer,” I met Kat and Kevin.* How did Kat and Kevin meet? Good question. It turns out they met through a matchmaker, and their first date was recorded in full on, wait for it, NPR for a Morning Edition piece that aired a year ago. NPR? Hey that’s where I work!
I am happy to report they are now engaged. And our trivia team CRUSHED IT, coming in first place, winning fifty dollars off our bar tab. But perhaps we should have slacked a little because the prize for second place was a copy of the book, “Conflict Resolutions for Couples.”
*Kevin really showed his chops on a question about the common name for the medical condition ‘circadian dysrhythmia.’ Answer: jet lag.
Vogs
Yesterday my favorite culture critic, Chris Vognar, got laid off by his employer of 23 years, The Dallas Morning News. He’s a casualty of another round of cutbacks at the paper, which has been bleeding out for my entire adult life.
I can’t overstate the loss for local readers and for all film/book/music lovers who followed him. He is a sensitive dude with a thoughtful way of explaining his taste, his contextual knowledge of film and books is deep and wide and Voggie* is just one of the best contemporary writers that I know, period. He’s concerned with truth and how art can get us closer to it. I loved seeing things anew after reading one of his interpretations. I rely on his annual “best” lists and his film festival coverage because I trust him implicitly.
While I’m thinking about Voggie I might as well keep riffing because this is my blog and no one will stop me. Our friendship goes way back, to when I was 16 years-old, a junior in high school. He’s a fair number of years older than me, so he was already a film critic at the DMN at the time. My 11th grade English teacher was BEYOND excited to learn CHRIS VOGNAR talked me through some ideas in Ellison’s The Invisible Man during our African American lit unit. Many years later I was at his apartment and tickled to discover he keeps the Norton Anthology of English Literature (which you might recall, weighs about four tons) on his john for light bathroom reading.
When I lived in Waco for my first job out of college, we went to a lot of movie screenings together as I frequently fled to Dallas to hang out. Usually these films were good, though I have never let go of the time he dragged me to a snooooozefest indie Korean flick about a Buddhist monk called Spring Summer Fall Winter Spring or something like that. Or was it Summer Autumn Winter Spring Summer? Groan.
We subsequently spent a lot of magical SXSW nights together while he covered the fest each year. At one SXSW, we both instantly bonded with fellow Dallasite, Scoot McNairy, which I will forever remember as “that time I became briefly obsessed with Scoot McNairy.”
He introduced me to Lakewood Landing, probably the best bar in Dallas, and Cosmo’s, the setting of dreamy memories of my youth. Later he battled an alcohol addiction and came out the other side, so we don’t go drinking together anymore. But we do still hang out and talk about culture a lot — so much so that we almost got kicked out of a listening party in Dallas last month because we were gabbing when we were supposed to be listening intently to music.
Bottom line, the man is a marvel. Vognar’s way with words, wit and the output of his brilliant mind are now for hire — so challenge him to do stuff, people!
BTW if you’re looking for films to watch, here are his picks for best films from the first decade of this century. I wish I could find his original review of one of his favorites and mine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because it was beautifully written and displayed what he gets about love and what he gets about art.
*Don’t try to call him that, btw. It’s my nickname for him and someone who isn’t me tried to use it once and he snapped at her, true story.
The 54 Books I Read in 2018, Charted
I committed to reading more books instead of periodicals in the haze following the 2016 election. It began as escapism and now, a couple years into it, I think it’s actually helped me grow as a thinker/feeler/human stumbling through life. As Matt Haig wrote, “The process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to reflect this idea.”
This year, I liked most everything I read, which included a heavy dose of contemporary fiction and more science fiction tales and genre romance than before. I continued to select non-white and/or non-male authors, which paid off. My book club kept things in balance with random nonfiction picks, like the Patagonia founder’s business book-slash-memoir, which really affected the way I think about consumption. Now I buy so much less crap!
I also got back to reading classics from giants — Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Joan Didion. I had to read them in school but appreciate them much more as a grown-up.
Here’s how this year’s book reading breaks down:
This year’s timeline shows I pretty evenly distributed my reading, though there was a big gap in which I read no non-fiction. Last year’s timeline was more interesting because I had a baby and that affected things.
I am deliberate in choosing more fiction than non-fiction, generally.
To chart “pages by month,” we used the page sum of all books finished in a month. (I don’t have a count of daily pages I’ve read, so this should really be called “Total-number-of-pages-in-a-book-by-month-finished.”) Note that June was when the Trump-Kim Singapore summit happened and my life was held together by duct tape and gum. It shows in the leisure reading completion.
These subgenres are sort of arbitrary, they are just what the Goodreads crowd classifies the books as, following the fiction or non-fiction categorization.
On Choosing Books
I still continually quiz people for recommendations but settled on a few people I really trust for recs, based on what they recommended before, or what they themselves have written. For example, last year I liked Sally Rooney’s book Conversations with Friends so much that when she wrote a positive review of An American Marriage, I made it a priority. Ditto the author Celeste Ng, who alerted me to Rich and Pretty.
My sister from another mother, Kat Chow (who is currently writing her own debut memoir), is a reliable recommender. She is behind many of my choices this year but notably Severance by Ling Ma, and poet Ocean Vuong’s novel (which comes out next summer — we are lucky to work at NPR because publishers are always happy to send us galleys).
I also trust Japan analyst Tobias Harris, who reads prolifically about subjects besides Japan. When he was in Seoul earlier this year, I asked him to tell me the best new books of 2017 he read and he chose Exit West and Pachinko, which became two of the best books I read in 2018.
Of course, NPR’s annual book concierge is an always helpful, delightful tool for choosing what to read next.
The Full List
1 Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
2 Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew Bose
3 Deception, Philip Roth
4 Chemistry, Weike Wang
5 Outline, Rachel Cusk
6 Sex Object, Jessica Valenti
7 The Boat, Nam Le
8 Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
9 Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
10 Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari
11 Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
12 Sam the Cat, Matthew Klam
13 Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khoung
14 Hunger, Roxane Gay
15 Emergency Contact, Mary H.K. Choi
16 Fire Sermon, Jamie Quatro
17 The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer
18 The Paper Menagerie (And Other Stories), Ken Liu
19 You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld
20 The Man of My Dreams, Curtis Sittenfeld
21 Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
22 How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee
23 Tin Man, Sarah Winman
24 Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed
25 Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard
26 An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
27 My Last Love Story, Falguni Kothari
28 Pachinko, Min Jun Lee
29 Three Body Problem, Cixin Lou
30 Exit West, Moshin Hamid
31 How to Fix A Broken Heart, Guy Winch
32 How Toddlers Thrive, Tovah Klein
33 The Internet of Garbage, Sarah Jeong
34 The Hike, Drew Magary
35 Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan
36 Rich and Pretty, Rumaan Alam
37 Love Poems (for Married People), John Kenney
38 The Proposal, Jasmine Guillory
39 I Want To Show You More, Jamie Quattro
40 Forget Having It All, Amy Westervelt
41 The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly
42 Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
43 Farsighted, Steve Johnson
44 Norwegian Wood, Haruki Marukami
45 Severance, Ling Ma
46 Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
47 The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
48 The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
49 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
50 New People, Danzy Senna
51 Us vs Them, Ian Bremmer
52 The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang
53 Crudo, A Novel, Olivia Laing
54 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari
Credits
Friend Nicole has been doing a 52 book challenge for a few years and analyzes the data in a big wrap-up post, so these annual look-backs are inspired by her.
“This is such a nerdy post I do,” I said. “You don’t actually DO any of it,” spouse Stiles clapped back, since he does all the data clean-up/analysis/visualizing for me. (Thanks, dude.)
Epilogue
It turns out we can read 200 books a year in the amount of time we spend on social media, but this would require me ending my Twitter addiction and I have given up enough vices in my life, thank you very much.
Related: 2017 Book Look Back
Repatriation
I live in Southern California now, which feels like I’m in a semi-permanent state of vacation. I have already consumed a green juice from a juicebot, taken the ubiquitous electric scooters of West LA for a ride, taken a Megaformer class (Pilates on steroids) and gotten an excellent tan. Next I need some Botox and I will be all settled in! (Just kidding about the Botox, I spoke to my Korean dermatologist about that — since Seoul is the plastic surgery capital of the world, natch — and he said do not start fillers too early because they won’t work when you need them later.)
We live in West LA so the beach is a ten minute walk from here. And you can just go, anytime. Because the girls are not in school yet, feeling sand between our toes and splashing around in the Pacific is something that we do almost every day.
I am very happy to have graham crackers back in my life, as I didn’t realize how much I missed them until they returned to me. I write this as I eat Salt & Straw ice cream from the Venice location, using honey lavender ice cream as a vector for graham crackers.
Five days after we landed in LA I left for Houston, where the Asian American Journalists Association gathered for its annual convention and I promptly caught the rare August cold. After I parked it for seven hours at a Lupe Tortilla the first night so that I could see various friends who came by and eat flour tortillas and queso for the entire duration, I lost my voice the first morning there and found myself hopelessly jet-lagged the entire time. But the reunions were rad! Not just AAJA pals but also my old Texas buddies, some of whom hosted a little happy hour for me on Thursday and we caught up and gossiped and talked politics just like the good ol’ days. On Friday my lawyer friend Brian arranged for me to see the Astros from his firm’s seats behind home plate and let me just say, those seats were adequate. The best part was the buffet before and during the game for season ticket holders, which consisted of meat, a side of meat and some more meat. Plus all-you-can-eat ice cream and candy! Fireworks every Friday meant I got an all American show after the Astros fell (again) to the Mariners.
Back in LA now.
Surf lessons, next.
A K-Pop Boy Band Is A Tough Act To Follow
A few weeks ago I received an invitation to “speak to some students and other young people,” to which I responded, okay, sure, because I try to say yes to events that involve young people. Pay it forward and all that. Little did I know until I got there this past week that it was a MAJOR PRODUCTION involving an audience of 4,000 people in a sports arena.
I am really grateful and relieved that they asked me to send in a slide deck before the Olympics onslaught so that by the eve of the forum, I didn’t have to prepare! My past self had already sent in some kind of deck that I could just generally follow when I took the stage. But man, what a crowd they had kickin’ in there.
It turns out many of the students had camped out overnight to catch the opening act, a K-pop group called Wanna One, a boy band put together on a reality TV show. You know, like O Town, or Danity Kane, the girl group P Diddy put together. Anyway, it was AFTER those boys, plus the Korean speedskater who won the first gold medal for South Korea in Pyeongchang, that the “anchor show” was programmed. That’s when a BBC documentarian, a CCTV anchor and I had to take turns giving short talks.
There really weren’t any parameters to the remarks except to help motivate young people about the profession, so I just riffed on my work here in Korea in a generally chronological order and ended with some tips on how to not suck in journalism. It felt pretty much like talking to a college class, except with simultaneous translation devices available for each audience member (like they have at the UN), much brighter lights, louder feedback from the sound system and hugeass screens to see yourself beamed at billboard size. (Newsflash: I do not lint brush myself often enough for giant high definition projection).
The craziest part was after the speech when I got swarmed by Koreans from the audience who wanted to take selfies together. This is so different from speaking in the US, where people usually come up to you afterward to challenge you on your remarks, trade business cards, see if you want to drink later, etc. These Koreans barely even spoke to me. They just held up their phones next to my face so we could squeeze in a shot together. I would say half of the selfies were normal and without filters, but the other half had Snapchat/Instgram like insta-face filters where we would be selfie-ing with animated hearts or our faces with auto-blush and auto-long lashes and such. It was sort of insane but also an incredible experience to see what young Korean selfie culture was like. Some people wanted to do the straight peace sign, others went for the pinched heart fingers, some just wanted a straight smiling selfie … so much variety. Kept me on my toes. Thanks, Korea!