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[rinue]

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.

Comments

[knaveofstaves]

Started wondering immediately (of course) if I had anything that fell into the same category for me, and sleep came to mind. Too easy an answer though. The reasons I like sleep are tied closely into the fact that I need it. I feel tired, so I go to sleep, feels good. Sort of along the same lines as the way water tastes better when you're thirsty, I think.

Then it occurred to me: typing. I actually like typing quite a lot. Sometimes when I'm typing a short story or whatever, I'll intentionally look away from the screen (miss more typos, but whatever) just to link the physical feeling of my fingers a little closer to my surface thoughts. Wouldn't miss it though because the alternative (voice rec getting much better notwithstanding) would be controlling the computer with my brain.

[rinue]

I played a video game once that read my skin conductivity and allowed me to control a slalom skiier by thinking. It was fun. I was good at it. The rest of my family, not so much. They were actually pretty mad that I was good at it, because to that point they'd just figured the machine didn't work. Never saw that game or that peripheral again, though.