Using Your Words

This was a rough week for me for reasons not at all related to global events - just random shitty day stuff, day after consecutive day, like Ciro's brother having to last-minute cancel a trip to see us, or my needing to buy a new bra that is a different shape than the one I already like (good lord this trip was not successful), and not sleeping well, and a million time-consuming but dull errands, and blah blah blah.

And yes, work was busy. I was mostly shielded from bombing news reports, whether by coincidence or design. (I strongly suspect the kindness of the scheduling department played a role. I am the only Boston-local captioner. I was assigned a lot of baseball.) However, by happenstance, I was the person on emergency standby when the Watertown news broke; I was the first one to jump on a Boston local station with captions about it. I was also the person on duty when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught. Those are the only two times I was on local news. I started it, and I ended it. And since I know how to spell the street names, and since I'm the only person in the company who could monitor a visual feed for local stations, the captions were close to flawless.

I did at one point caption someone's exclamation as "they've got flocking guns!" because I forgot my software would automatically censor swearing unless I typed (and it's Boston; many of us use that word as a default intensifier, like other people use "very.") I let it stand, because I thought it was evocative. A stranger on twitter noticed and also thought it was beautiful, although I don't think they realized I exist.

There's a popular screencap being passed around facebook in which the captions name "19-year-old Zooey Deschanel" as the bomber. We are also passing that around a lot and laughing, doing a little "not us! not us!" dance. (We were on channels 5 and 9; that was channel 4.) Non-captioners wonder how you could make that mistake. Captioners totally know how you could make that mistake, or more accurately how voice recognition software could make that mistake. "Hotkey that name, fool!" we say gleefully at not us, not us. It doesn't get old.

I didn't use a hotkey, although I had one set as a failsafe. I used a vocal macro. I told my software to publish "Dzhokhar" when I said "Joker." Because Joker sounds like Dzhokhar. And because he was acting like a Batman villain. It worked perfectly every time.

Preferences

Mom and Dad are in Virginia Beach this week, and Ciro is adventuring in Boston today, so I had to make my own dinner - in this case, sausage and peppers and onions over pasta, splash of marsala, little bit of pecorino. (Garlic, obviously.) It occured to me that this was the first time I'd cooked anything in maybe a year and a half, maybe longer. (I'm not counting reheating or rehydrating. I'm also not counting eggs, which I put in the "making tea" category - 5 mins, single ingredient, single serving.)

Further, it occurred to me that while I enjoy cooking, and while I am a capable and even laudable cook, it is something I don't miss at all if I don't have to do it. I miss having good food if there's no good food around, but cooking? Don't care. I feel the same way about driving: fun, good at it, wouldn't miss it if it went away forever.

I can't think of anything else that falls into that category; everything else, I would either very much rather do or am mildly irritated I ever need to. (The latter category includes showering. It's not unpleasant, but if I could cut bathing out of my life entirely without offending anyone, I'd go for it. Unfortunately, I would offend even myself, so this is a no-go. Like most of my "I don't like this" things, I find ways to enjoy it, but the key thing is that I find ways. Intrinsically? Annoying. And proportionately more annoying the longer my hair is.)

Piano comes close to the cooking and driving category, but isn't really the same thing at all. With piano, there's a high barrier to entry; to really enjoy playing, I have to do hand exercises every day and have to devote several hours a week to practice so that I'm in physical condition to do the fun stuff. I also get bored playing the same thing over and over and it's a hassle to hunt down and learn new repetoire.

So I don't wind up playing very much, even though I do miss it when I don't play, because I don't miss it enough to make it worth giving up the amount of time I'd need to give up for it. Also, I hate performing (solely on piano, I don't know why, I don't mind performing not on piano) but also don't like playing for just myself. Ideally, I'd like to play piano around people who don't play piano, and by "around" I mean I'd like them to not be in the same room as me, but still in hearing distance. Piano is complicated, is what I'm saying.