1. My office is on a street of science centers, so I will occasionally drop by labs to participate in research studies. Lately I've been doing a sequence of smell studies for which I am given a tray of anonymous brown bottles which each contain a few drops of colorless, oily liquid. I have to… Continue reading Triangles and Quadrants
Category: Personal Narrative
An intention for 2020
My family (well, really my mother) has established a New Year tradition for the last few calendar years: pick one word. Verbs are good; some nouns work too. Choosing your word is like setting your intention at the beginning of a yoga class: it's the one thing you most want to find, or aspire to,… Continue reading An intention for 2020
Pandora’s Music Box
In 2015, when my friends were curating Spotify playlists to listen to on their smartphones, I still listened to CDs and the same three Pandora stations I created when I registered in 2009 and could only seed channels with musical concepts. One of my stations was exclusively for classical and modernist instrumentals--study music. One featured… Continue reading Pandora’s Music Box
Failure Landscape
There's a story I sometimes tell about myself (or tell on myself, perhaps). I minored in art as an undergraduate. The long studio hours tried my patience, but I craved the repetitive tactile sensations of building or painting. In my first sculpture class, the instructor provided basic safety instructions for all the tools and machines… Continue reading Failure Landscape
The artichoke
Have you ever cooked an artichoke? They are a pain in the ass to prepare. If you want to steam a whole fresh artichoke, you first have to snip the spiny tips of every outer leaf so that they don't draw blood. You have to cut off the stem so that the vegetable sits upright… Continue reading The artichoke
Fat ballerina
If you've been within ten feet of Twitter recently, you might have heard that Nike has set up a fat mannequin somewhere and the Telegraph published a viciously fatphobic op-ed in reaction to it. I don't want to talk about Nike; representation is great, but global brands are not your friends and don't need your… Continue reading Fat ballerina
Sara Davis 