Okay, this is officially starting to get old.
I'm a homebody. If somebody told me I could spend a week at home doing nothing but lounging on the couch watching TV, I'd be the first to sign up. But it turns out its a little less fun when somebody tells me I HAVE to spend a week at home doing nothing but lounging on the couch watching TV. And instead of a week, it's two months. And all the TV kinda sucks and no better shows are coming because all the people who make all the shows are ALSO staying at home doing nothing. This is not ideal.
The only original show left to watch is this one science-fictiony soap opera that's allllways on, and it's SO boring. It's about this dystopian society where an unrelenting virus attacks the world, and the leader of the free world is this orange guy who's only concerned about his re-election chances, and then the rest of the show is just a bunch of people bickering about how wrong and/or right the orange guy is. It's like "Game of Thrones," just with WAY fewer dragons. I don't give it high odds of getting renewed for another season.
I am, however, happy to see that "Days of our Lives" is still thriving. I haven't seen a second of DOOL since college, when it was pretty much required viewing in the Augie student center. I caught five minutes the other day, just in time to see Patch awaken from his coma with amnesia after Kayla operated on his brain to remove the implant that made him think he was Stefano. In other words, it's business as usual in Salem. I'm sure I'll be hooked again soon. Curse you, Stefano!
I can also attest that I've begun holding lengthy one-sided conversations with my cats. I now understand why Grizzly Adams had chats with a bear. I'm pretty sure two of my three cats fully understand what I'm saying -- they're just too aloof to respond. The third just wants food and is deeply irritated that the human keeps hanging out on her favorite daytime sleep spot.
You guys may have noticed a lack of ME in the paper last week. I'd like to tell you I was off on some exotic vacation or doing incredibly fantastic things that would provide weeks of column fodder, but I can't because fun has been cancelled. Truth be told, I was sick. This is not a good position to be in for someone who's already a bit of a hypochondriac living through a global pandemic. In the course of about twelve hours, I went from "I feel a little off" to naturally assuming I was days away from death and pondering who to bequeath my vast fortune of mixtapes and cats to.
Thankfully, it was a bug that (knock on every piece of wood in here) came and went. Three days of fever, chills, and grossness and then fine. Was it COVID? Doubt it. I didn't even have enough symptoms to merit testing. Truth be told, I'm wondering if I didn't give myself food poisoning -- a possibility that seems a little more realistic once I noticed the expiration date on the pickle relish I had up to then been eating with gusto. I am virtually incapable of self survival. And being sick DOUBLE stinks when there's no one to baby you.
What HAS gotten me through, however, are family and friends. My parents had my back when that stimulus check didn't show up as fast as I needed. I've already mentioned my friend Dianna, who's done all my grocery shopping for the past month (as well as a most excellent and appreciated surprise Easter doughnut.) I also need to shout out the Isbells, who sorted me out with an insanely stylish mask -- if you've got to walk around looking like a bandito from a spaghetti western, you might as well do it with some flair.
The best part of the weeks have been Saturday nights, when my closest friends gather together on the internet for solid evenings of socially distant debauchery -- or, in our case, Pictionary. Still, it's good to see the smiles and faces of those I too often take for granted. Life without their companionship is weak at best, so even if we can only muster it via webcam, it's a good hang. Even our friend Chris who moved to Japan years ago has joined our weekly fray -- and in these homebound days, Nagoya suddenly feels about as close as Moline.
There's just been one problem with our online hang. Google thinks one of us is racist.
We've been using Google Hangouts for our little webcam meet-ups, and the other day I decided to fiddle with the settings to see what all I could do while logged in. That's when I discovered Google Hangouts has captioning. If you turn captioning on, it'll try to figure out what your friends are saying and it'll appear in typed print beneath their camera feeds. I thought it was kinda fun, so I turned it on. Sure enough, with about 90% accuracy, Google could understand even our most demented ramblings.
EXCEPT when one of my friends coughed and her microphone caught it. This happened twice the other night. Each time, Google translated it as -- well, as a word that no one should say ever. (Just ask recently fired NASCAR driver Kyle Larson.) For some reason, Google thinks my friend coughs racial slurs. (She doesn't. I promise.) Plus, we were playing Cards Against Humanity at the time, a game that already requires liberal usage of some salty and tasteless language -- but Google's captioning made it WAY saltier than it actually was.
So if someday we all finally emerge to greet the toxic-free dawn of a new day, my friends can all rest assured that I have some screencaps of varying accuracy that could probably get them fired, ex-communicated, and looked down on by civilized society should any of them wrong me. And yes, if you're curious, at one point one of my cats jumped onto the laptop close enough for my microphone to pick it up. And Google duly translated it as "Shane: Meow." So, according to Google: I'm a cat, my friend is a racist, and we're all potty-mouthed heathens.
Still, it's way better than the show with the orange guy. I wish they'd cancel it.
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