Simplification

"Scott," she says, a box of Lean Cuisine in her hand, "how many tablespoons is 550 milligrams of sodium?"

"Well, really you're talking about two different types of measurements," I explain. "Milligrams is for weight," I continue, "while tablespoons and teaspoons are more about volume."

Finally, I conclude with, "Listen, a gram is about the same weight as a raisin."

Good Even at 1.5D

Watching the movie "Gravity" on the IMAX screen in 3D is an almost overwhelming experience. The sound, the sheer scale of the visuals, stuns the audience into silence.

About fifteen minutes into the movie, my eye itches, and when I rub it, I inadvertently push my contact out of place, leaving my vision half-blurred.

Rather than get up, mess up everybody's experience as I sidle out the row to the bathroom to fix my eyeball, miss part of the movie, I fight down the panic of knowing there's a tiny piece of plastic shoved up deep under my eyelid, and sit there and watch; and it's still an amazing film.

A Glimpse of Darkness

We sit on the bench on the platform waiting for the train to take us to Queens. Across the tracks on the opposite platform, a woman sits, staring off into space.

She looks young, clear skin, dressed in a long skirt that doesn't fit poorly, hair clean, nothing unusual.

As I watch, she reaches up and strikes herself in the head repeatedly, then pushes her fist to her forehead with a pained expression, then punches herself again.

Good Job!

I mention unfriending someone on Facebook because of their take on the Sinead O'Connor/Miley Cyrus back and forth nonsense which will likely be forgotten before I even finish writing this post.

Katie doesn't even blink. "Everybody's doing their jobs," she says, getting out dishes for dinner. "She's acting like a little spoiled brat, and that's her job, everybody is all outraged, and that's their job; everybody is doing exactly what they're supposed to do."

Rock Star

I read on Facebook that he's dead, and though I'm not sure I believe it, part of me is unsurprised.

I remember standing in front of the stage watching him play, watching the beautiful women dance to his music, thinking that this was the only thing I'd ever wanted. I was nineteen, ready to change into something else, and realized in that moment that that necessarily involved disappointing all the people who thought they knew who and what I was.

So I set out to destroy myself, and luckily I did not entirely succeed.

Invisible Subways

The details, the lifeblood of a writer, have begun to blur together. I'm on the train, again, and a woman gets on, her bag presses into my back; or: I stare out the window at the wall of the tunnel smearing by; or: the sun blinks through the repeating trestles of the Manhattan bridge, blinding me.

I realize that the trains have begun to overlap in my head, and distinguishing between them has become beside the point. Every train ride I describe is the one train ride, repeated, variations on a theme, like different recordings of the same piece of music recorded over and over until the waves of sound, the rising and falling of an unintelligible melody, are all that can be heard.

Do I Remember What I Saw? Or the Words I Used to Describe It?

I'm standing at the sink, washing dishes. Beside me, ignored, the window opens onto the backyards of a block's worth of buildings - backyards filled with trees still green with summer and climbing ivy and peacefulness.

A sudden, unheard movement of the wind catches my eye (can it be fall so soon?), and yellowed leaves spiral up the window to flutter down, spinning to the ground three stories below.

I think to myself, watching the leaves, "Spiraling, yellow, flutter, dishes, window, backyards, green, fall."