Killian's Blog/Website/Whatever

My local pool, Columbia, was officially closed-- condemned --in 2022. I still haven't gotten over it. As a person who suffers from a chronically bad case of nostalgia, I don't know if I'll ever get over it.  I spent my very early childhood going to swim lessons there, spent afternoons at open swim with my mom and siblings when we were being homeschooled (middle-school), spent a few high-school mornings trying to swim a mile before having to sit my butt down in a chair for seven hours*, and spent my summers on the city's youth swim team from age eleven (if not earlier) to seventeen, repping Columbia every year but the last**. I got really, really good at swimming there. I was basically raised in that pool. The main place of my childhood joy, and the only place I ever did sports. The only place where my body has ever exceeded expectations. I'm much, much older now (nearly twenty years, jeezus). College was busy (and there was no swim team), I moved away for a while, ...

Just watched (five times) an excellent video by a microbiologist ( @tardibabe ) who posts all kinds of amazing stuff. This particular video was focused on a tray with lil dot of human blood.  I am awestruck every time I can look closely at our bodies—everything is in constant motion (at least ideally), sticking together, bouncing off of each other, flowing down rivers between slow, red glaciers; white blood cells moving alone, pushing against the current with wide open mouths.  We're made of so many living (and dying) pieces. Despite all of the ways we can break down and fall apart, I think you could call us truly, literally marvelous.

 We found a praying mantis in our backyard last night, and it was still against the house in the morning--until the dog started freaking out (understandably) and then tried to play with it (an odd choice). So Daniel and I embarked on a rescue mission.  It went well. I briefly flirted with the idea of nudging it onto the paper with my finger, but when one of those  "raptorial legs"  got its grabbers on said-finger with great speed and strength, I backtracked* and we got an additional piece of nudging paper. I made sure it got to take the blade of dead grass it seemed very attached to (literally, and perhaps emotionally). The relocation progressed uneventfully from there, and we gingerly placed it in a protected area. I've never seen one of these guys in real life, let alone touched one. Did you know they have FIVE EYES? I did not find this out until after the encounter, so no photo evidence, but scientists have told me this is the case.  It's difficult to go...

While poking around JSTOR this afternoon, I came upon a paper titled "Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: A Prolegomena to Ancient Irish Rhetoric" . Obviously I read it. On page four, there was a quote (footnoted--although the footnote doesn't actually match the resource), and the poetry of it was almost painfully beautiful. So I tracked it down, found the full story online. Here's a larger excerpt than that used in the journal paper. Prepare yourself: Brigit ceased to sing, and there was silence for a little space in Tir-na-Moe. Then Angus said: "Strange are the words of your song, and strange the music: it swept me down steeps of air--down--down--always further down. Tir-na-Moe was like a dream half-remembered. I felt the breath of strange worlds on my face, and always your song grew louder and louder, but you were not singing it. Who was singing it?" "The Earth was singing it." "The Earth!" said the Dagda. "Is not the Earth ...

I started this blog in (*checks timeline*) 2010. I was a borderline child (I don't know if you've met many 20-21 year-olds, but they are still pupae. I'm not sure a person can be described as fully-formed until the age of 27...if ever). Looking back at old posts--which I just unarchived--I am a little embarrassed. I don't know what I've written in the ~200 posts prior to 2022. Am I somewhat worried about people scouring my shit for absolutely stupid things I've written? Yes. Because people can be really mean. But I've never been a really mean person, so I don't imagine I've said many mean things (at least not targeted at groups of people that aren't conglomerated into The Government of Any Particular Country). Still, the fear remains. I'm hoping you are all kind to me and my past self.  Past-self didn't know a lot about me. She didn't really know that she was sick--she had ideas, inklings, but not the clinical words to put to it.  I ...

An easy, few-hour plan to distract yourself from greater world events: 1. Spend over an hour on public transportation to get a blood test 2. Stand in line for the lab test for 15 minutes 3. Go outside before you sign in because there's a fire drill (in a hospital building) 4. Get a latte at a nearby coffee shop to get out of the wind while you wait for the fire drill to end 5. Don't drink your latte, because you want to be warm inside and you can't take your mask off 6. Fire drill over, stand in line again 7. Wait 8. Relinquish some body juice 9. Slam latte before it gets cold 10. Take another 1.5 hours of buses back home 11. Get a little grumpy at the amount of pointless construction in your neighborhood 11. Worry about test results 12. Get test results 13. Be thankful that the results look great, because you don't have a dysfunctional organ 14. Feel a wee bit frustrated, though, because you still don't know what your body is doing 15. Eat a bagel Congratulations! ...

1. I wish I loved baseball. Some people get a lot out of baseball. 2.  It is, by all accounts, a beautiful day today. Cloudless sky, ~66°F, my ideal nice day (t-shirts! light sweatshirts in the shade! no overheating!). Flan happened to need more dry food, so I walked to the pet store. I took a new route, going up an additional few blocks before turning to the side. It felt very strange. The farther you get from the main road/the closer you get to the river, the houses, block-to-block, get nicer. Sure, that's nothing new. I grew up on a dividing line street, and I live on one now. But the street I ended up walking down today didn't used to be quite so fancy, I think. I suppose I temporarily forgot that everything is fancier these days. I've been back for six years, but there are still pockets of childhood places that I haven't seen for a decade, which I've preserved in my memory as being A Certain Way. It was unsettling. I took my usual route home.  I'm a bit di...