Bubble baths
Walks in the rain
Muscular calves
Escalators
Knuckles
Steamed clams (“obviously”)
Archive for the ‘Lists’ Category
Things That Turn Misty Quigley On
March 15, 2023The Sensory Delight Scale
March 10, 2022Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann and her cohort developed something called the Sensory Delight Scale, a kind of counterpart/complement to the Tellegen Absorption Scale, that measures “who is more able, by temperament and choice, to have vivid experiences of gods and spirits.” If you answer yes to all of these, you might be a mystic!
When I’m listening to music, I like to imagine the sounds taking shape and moving in the air around me.
When I finish reading a really powerful book, I find that the ordinary world around me seems oddly unfamiliar.
Sometimes I feel like my body is weightless, as if I’m floating, even when my feet are firmly on the ground.
I like to watch the shapes and movements that sunlight makes reflecting off the water.
Sometimes the world seems intensely present to me.
I like to think that the trees in a forest are talking with each other.
I have had a distinct sense of a watchful presence.
Sometimes when I am at a concert, I find that the music has ended a few seconds ago and everyone is clapping before I notice.
The sounds of different languages seem to be connected to different colors in my mind.
Sometimes I feel like the air is full of little bubbles of light.
Sometimes I feel like I can sense the passage of time almost tangibly.
When I hear the waves lap against the shore, I sometimes think of how much those waves might know.
I find joy in little things, like a newly opened flower.
Exquisite pleasure sometimes floods my senses.
I can get lost watching a spider lower itself on a thread.
Sometimes I feel the arms of the universe embrace me.
When I dance, I like to feel that my body is simply responding to the music.
Thoughts can have different colors for me.
My Son’s Ice Cream Flavors
February 2, 2022My four-year-old son likes to play a game in the bathtub in which he pretends to be an ice cream man making ice cream and selling it to me. Here are some of the flavors he makes:
Yellow Fire
Blue Ocean
Salt White
White Cloud
Seaweed Green
Orange Setting Sun
Purple Rising Sun
Pink Grapefruit (this one is the most ordinary)
Mud Brown
I feel like I am forgetting some! My favorites I’ve tried so far are Orange Setting Sun, Salt White, and actually Seaweed Green is surprisingly good.
Two Lists
January 27, 2021The foods the Israelites pined for in the desert after fleeing Egypt:
Meat
Cucumbers
Melons
Leeks
Onions
Garlic
Fish
The names/nicknames T.S. Eliot’s childhood friends:
Dago Parker
Chicken Gilbert
Doodle Page
Butch Wagner, Pat Sullivan
Snowball Wolfpert
Elephant-mouth Hellman
Gander Giesecke
Twelve Foreign Concepts With No American Equivalent
November 17, 2020Coming soon to a self-help-inflected Netflix documentary!
Jutpälvirsaippy (Finnish): A warm, fuzzy feeling induced by thinking of your nation’s robust social services
Zzxjoanw (Maori): A secondhand embarrassment one gets when watching foreign political leaders behave poorly
Voirepergne (French): The miraculous ability of some women to eat high fat diets and remain slim (alternative, archaic: the miraculous ability of some women to look stylish even when wearing rags, or, the miraculous ability of some women to somehow be pretty even when hideous)
Schnitzengruben (German): a friendliness that nevertheless grates or disgusts the recipient
卞工几と 日ヨ工几呂 (Japanese): the sense of mental well-being that comes from knowing one has the exactly ideal number of possessions
Kamelåså (Danish): a cozy aesthetic that should be easily achieved with purchases from large Scandinavian chain stores yet somehow looks stupid and cheap if you live outside the Arctic Circle
Dututebatti (Luxembourgish): a fluency with myriad languages, acquired early in life and seemingly with ease
쟁반 받쳐줄게요 (Korean): the ability to blend in to or be embraced by a wide variety of societies and cultures; alt. impeccable social skills (useful idiom: “polite tourist in a china shop”)
Schulleilis (Gaelic): a soft and universally pleasing tone of voice
Darajuiwolo (Yoruba): a combination of perseverance, strength, and optimism, all of which are readily understandable to English speakers, and yet none are able to harness the power of darajuiwolo without purchasing a book or listening to between six and eleven Ted talks on the subject
Title Dropping
September 27, 2020Every book the narrator of Want by Lynn Steger Strong references reading. This book got a lot of buzz but I hated it for many reasons that I’m more than happy to elaborate on if you would JUST GIVE ME THE CHANCE. I honestly feel like this reading list encapsulates some of my irritation: I’m super highbrow and super, super sad!
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Gayl Jones, Corregidora
Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for an Unborn Child
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Claire Lispector, The Passion of G.H.
Henry Tree, Party Going
Dorothy West, The Living is Easy
Gerald Murnane, The Plains
Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
Magda Szabo, The Door
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Jean Rhys, D.H. Lawrence, Colm Toibin, Deborah Eisenberg, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Comyns, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Jane Bowles, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Louise Erdrich, LaRose
Pugwashisms
May 10, 2020Last summer, my kids and I were lucky enough to be invited to spend a few days at a friend’s family’s summer house, on a rather magical island in the Atlantic with a long, bright beach and a weird little petting zoo and a giant pond of salty water smack dab in the middle. The friend’s family had an excellent collection of vintage children’s books, including a few about Captain Pugwash, a rather inept pirate who gets his crew into all sorts of pickles (due to said ineptitude) and has to rely on his savvy but unacknowledged cabin boy, Tom, to save the day. I wish I could find an image of this one page which just depicts Pugwash dreaming about having a normal life and tending to a garden, but humans are idiots and therefore most of the stuff that comes up on Google Images is related to the not nearly as charmingly illustrated film, and not the books.
Anyway, apparently Pugwash has a number of funny sayings he uses when he’s miffed, which Wikipedia has helpfully compiled. Work this into your every day repertoire, folks.
“Dolloping doubloons/dolphins!”
“Coddling catfish!”
“Lolloping landlubbers!”
“Suffering seagulls!”
“Staggering stalactites!”
“Nautical nitwits!”
“Plundering porpoises!”
“Kipper me capstans!”
“Tottering turtles!”
“Dithering dogfish!”
“Scuttling cuttlefish!”
“Stuttering starfish!”
“Blistering barnacles!”
“Shuddering sharks!”
Keywords
March 4, 2020related to Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia,” according to The New Yorker.
Africans
Badminton
Cambodia
Children
Choking
Embassies
England
Firings
Hiroshima
Khmer Rouge
London
Nannies
Passports
Rape
Rwanda
Servants
Slaves
Swimming Pools
The Playlist in Hell
February 13, 2020I was working at a Joe & the Juice in Manhattan a few months ago, and they were playing the following songs on an interminable loop, and while I like a few of these songs on their own, by the end of a few hours I was seriously ready to die. I think I missed a few titles but it honestly couldn’t have been more than 25 songs total. I started to write them down for posterity’s sake, but then zoned out every so often as a means of self-preservation.
Genesis “Invisible Touch”
Chaka Khan “Ain’t Nobody Love Me Better”
Dolly Parton “9 to 5”
A horrible updated 80s version of “In the Jungle”
Fleetwood Mac “Everywhere”
Luther Vandross “Never Too Much”
The Proclaimers “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”
Hall and Oates “You Make My Dreams”
A-ha “Take on Me”
Kim Carnes “Bette Davis Eyes”
Eric Carmen “Hungry Eyes”
The Pointer Sisters “I’m So Excited”
Wham! “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”
Michael Jackson “Beat It”
Rick Astley “Never Gonna Give You Up”
Want To Read All These
December 12, 2019Bernd Brunner (born May 27, 1964) is a writer of non-fiction and essays. His best known works are peripatetic explorations of the relationship between people and deceptively simple subjects, such as bears, the moon, and lying down.
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