Saturday, May 2, 2020

Angry Teapot

Inspirational song: Rescue Me (The Alarm)

There is nothing more guaranteed to make a person feel old than tech so confusing only calling in a young person for help can fix it. That's where we found ourselves this evening. There was a special one-night livestream event put on by one of our favorite stand up comedians, and half an hour before it started, we decided to crawl out of the hot tub and try to figure out how to tune in. An hour later, and a ticket purchased, we were doing a video chat with our kids, trying to find the link to stream it on my TV, and I had thrown the remote across the bedroom and stomped off to the kitchen twice. To make it work, we had to drag our hugely pregnant daughter out to our house, through a thunderstorm. We had three devices all focused on the problem: my phone, laptop, and TV. It took the kid clicking the "contact show administrator" button, to get a second email with a link sent to us. Once she worked it out on the laptop, we had to get it on the browser on the TV, and finally, 35 minutes into the special, we were tuned in. 

Christopher Titus is good for some seriously cathartic laughs. His humor is dark, because it is based on his desperately dysfunctional life. He said the stories in this bit were things that were even too warped for his mainstream specials, and to some extent I could see how it was true. In the hour we watched live, he told stories he had held back, and holding back is not what he is known for. I was sad that we missed the beginning of the show, but I had gotten enough I didn't feel cheated. Then the magic happened. I had assumed that since this was a one-time-only event, I wouldn't have been able to rewind it. As I was going for the exit full screen button, I accidentally discovered I could scrub it backwards after all. So we went back, and watched the whole thing from the beginning, even all the stuff we watched once. We got a whole lot more of the callbacks and mumbled jokes the second time. Totally worth the extra time.

I needed a night like this to blow off some pandemic anxiety and to take my mind off my physical condition. I was getting past the chronic pain that decided to mess with me during the week, and I had decided I had enough spoons to set up in the front garden bed and dig out several more square feet worth of vineweed and creeping bellflower. I sat there for well over an hour, digging out roots that looked like tangled carrots, trying not to destroy the hen and chicks or Shasta daisies. Between the two of us, we packed solid a gallon bucket of weeds and roots. I am not sure how I managed to get off the ground after all that time. I hurt like heck, but I'm proud of what I accomplished.

No comments:

Post a Comment