Lost in Translation

1. Coffee.

We have several ways of making coffee in our house. The one that gets the most use is a Gevalia coffee maker (we had a Cuisinart, but I forgot to take some old grounds out when we went out of town for a week and Bad Things Happened). It’s pretty basic: you put the water and grounds in, press a button, and ten minutes later you have a pot of coffee. If I’m really inclined, I can pre-load the grounds and the water, and program it to turn on at a certain time. (The clock is currently blinking 12:00, largely because I don’t use the programming system.)

The other major way to make coffee is an espresso machine. Where the Gevalia is set-and-forget, the espresso machine requires pretty much constant attention. To make a latte (the variety of espresso coffee that we drink), you need to

1. Make sure the water reservoir is full.
2. Pre-heat the steam chamber.
3. Load espresso grounds into the filter. Pack the grounds gently.
4. When the steam chamber is ready (a light goes from blue to green), fill the measuring cup with milk, place it under the steam nozzle, and turn the steam dial to full.
5. Carefully monitor the steaming milk to make sure that it’s not scalding. Foam it by tilting and moving the cup.
6. When the milk is heated and foamed, place two shot glasses under the filter, turn off the steamer, and turn on the espresso maker proper.
7. One shot glass will fill faster than the other. When the first is full all the way, move the second glass so that it’s being filled by both streams.
8. When the second glass is full, turn off the espresso maker.
9. Pour the espresso in the shot glasses into the desired mug. Follow with the (hopefully not too de-foamed) milk.
10. While the milk and the coffee mix, clean off the steam nozzle with a damp cloth, and dump out and rinse the grounds filter.

On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said for being able to dump some grounds and water in, press a button, and then have coffee available whenever I want it (at least until I drain the pot).

On the other hand, I really like lattes, and they get me going in the morning far better than standard coffee does.

(On the gripping hand, milk is cheaper than coffee grounds, and lattes use more milk and less coffee than the Gevalia does.)

Plus, if I make a latte, I get to be part of the process. Instead of just walking away and coming back when the coffee robot is done its job, I’m actually the one making the coffee. If it’s a great latte, it’s because I made it that way. It’s very satisfying to drink that latte, and that’s probably why it does such a good job of perking me up.

2. Twitter.

I just ran a quick straw poll on Twitter:

Do you prefer to see “classic” or “new” retweets in your timeline? Which do you prefer to use? On both questions, why?

“New” retweets are the inline ones – if you use the new retweet, you can’t edit the tweet, and it shows up in your timeline as from the original user. “Classic” retweets are the kind where you actually say “RT @etherjammer: Do you prefer to see…”; you can edit the tweet, and it shows up in your timeline as from you.

The drawback to new RTs is that you don’t get to add your thoughts, and they don’t show up in the original user’s “Mentions” – in fact, the API doesn’t seem to provide an interface for gathering them at all. The drawback to the old RTs is that if you’re trying to retweet a long tweet, you’re going to have to truncate it to get it all in. (I know a lot of people who actually advocate keeping your tweets to 140 – (5 + the length of your username) characters, to make it easier for people to retweet you.)

There’s something to be said for set-and-forget RTs. You don’t have to worry about whether you should add your thoughts or whether you need to truncate the tweet – you can’t, and you know that the original tweet fit the guidelines so it’ll fit in your timeline without editing. Plus, it’s a single button-click – push the button, and the system does the work. But the original RT system gives you the opportunity to interact and be part of the process, and that shows on the far side.

By the way, the results of my straw poll? 100% in favor of “classic” retweets (except for one friend who doesn’t like retweets at all). Nobody who replied likes the new style (which, incidentally, is the style that I’ve been using for the last few months).

• “It’s easier to tell who retweeted.”
• “I can add a comment if I want.”
• “I get confused by unfamiliar userpics popping up in my feed.”
• “I want to see the retweeter as the source.”
• “If it’s too long to RT, only then will I use the new.”

3. Process and agency.

My latte tastes better than my drip coffee in part because I’m the one who made it. I’m involved in the process and so I’m engaged. Even when it’s just a cup of coffee, it makes a difference.

My classic RTs are better received by my audience because they know I’m involved in the process. My engagement engages them. That makes a difference too.

If something as simple as a cup of coffee or a retweet can be affected directly by your engagement, what else could you improve by being part of the process instead of just letting the machine do the work?

We’re warned to take eyewitness accounts with a grain of salt. Humans are very good at pattern-matching, and we’ll often make up details to support our memory’s version of a story – or even completely reverse details: an eyewitness to a car accident might, for example, say that he saw Bob get out of the Subaru’s passenger seat to look at the damage caused by the Mazda when, in fact, Bob was a passenger in the Mazda and never came close to the Subaru. Memory and perception are funny things, and we can’t always rely on them to be accurate.

In browsing TV Tropes today (I won’t link, so as to save you from wasting the entire day), I came across the page for The Casey Effect. It’s a sports trope that dictates that fictional sports games invariably go down to the wire, with one final push, buzzer-beating shot, or last-ditch home run winning the game for the protagonists who were otherwise sure to lose. The page reminded me of a baseball game I’d watched about ten years ago: it was a Mariners game, where the opposing team had scored a large number of runs – 20 or more – in the early innings, but then the Mariners came back from behind in a massive rally that won them the game. I remember watching it at a friend’s house here in Richmond, and I remember all of us being sure that the Mariners couldn’t win the game, and getting more and more excited as they fought out a win anyway.

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember who they were playing or what date the game was on, or even what the final score was, and records of the Mariners’ seasons about that time didn’t mention a comeback like that. So I went hunting. I knew that the game had to be in 2001 – in 2000 I hadn’t met the friends I was watching the game with, and in 2002 I’d moved away before the beginning of the baseball season – so I went to the definitive baseball reference and started looking through each game of 2001, looking for a high-scoring, close-scoring game that involved the Mariners. After about half an hour, I found what must be the game in question: on August 5, 2001, the Cleveland Indians defeated the Seattle Mariners 15-14.

Wait, what?

According to my memory, the opposing team (the Indians make sense; since Cleveland is nearby, we had a reason to be watching the game) scored at least 20 runs early on, and then the Mariners came back from behind to win the game in a breathtaking rally. In reality, it was the Mariners who’d scored 12 runs in the first three innings; the Indians scored two in the fourth, but the Mariners scored 2 more in the fifth to re-establish their lead. The Indians then spent the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings tying the game – they were the home team, so they really did tie the game up in the bottom of the ninth – and then scored another run in the 11th inning to win. The majestic Mariners comeback that I’d been holding in my memory for almost a decade was actually a game where the Mariners had been the favored team – they were 18 games ahead of the Indians – and they’d lost the game.

Strange how our memories choose the wrong things to remember.

I’m thinking about a new design for this blog. I’ve run a blog called “Lost in Translation” since 2006, and honestly it’s not really fitting anymore. I don’t do a whole lot of translation anymore (when I started LIT, I was in the middle of finishing a degree in Classical Studies, and translating Latin and Greek every day), and I think “Lost in Translation” implies something about me that I’d rather distance myself from at this point. (Also it’s the title of a popular movie.)

I’ve mocked up a new design for the blog, and I’d like your feedback on it. It keeps a few elements of the current blog, but it’s an entirely new theme and feel. Please let me know what you think! Any response is a good response, even if it’s just “I like it” or “I hate it!”. :)

A few years after I graduated from high school, I was back in my hometown for the summer and a kid I knew from school came up to me at the grocery store. “I was always impressed by you,” he said. He’d been one of the guys who relentlessly tormented me – about being shy, about my weight, about how I was the Smart One instead of the Sports One. “You just kept going. You didn’t give a crap about what anybody said. Water off a duck’s back, man.”

He’d been to therapy because he was abused as a child and became a bully to compensate. It was the only way he’d known how to get the anguish out. “I wish I had your coping mechanism.” It was a therapy term. “Nobody should have to put up with that shit. I’m sorry.”

Funny how different we look from the outside.

Inspired by this post by Kyeli.

About twenty years ago, my sister took horse-riding lessons. She was At That Age, where every girl wants a horse*, and for a couple years she lived the dream. There was no horse that was particularly hers, at least as far as I remember, but she rode every weekend, and read up on horses and riding when she couldn’t actually be on the horses. In the fifth grade I checked a book out of the school library about a girl and her horse, and devoured it; and when I told my sister about a particularly vivid scene where the heroine had loped around on her horse, my sister told me in no uncertain terms that there was no such speed as a “lope” and the author clearly didn’t know what she was talking about.

One summer, my sister and I both went to the same camp that revolved around horses. (I think I was starting to feel left out.) She rode, while I did archery and crafts and such. We did all have the opportunity to get on a horse, though, and walk around a bit. They were very well-behaved horses, but when I got on mine, we walked around a bit like we were supposed to and then he reared up a little and I was so startled that I fell off. I figured that my turn was up, so I started walking away. The trainer shook her head. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.” Then she led the next kid over to my horse and that was the end of my riding experience.

I thought about that day today, for the first time in about twenty years. Today was an exceptionally hard day, in Havi‘s parlance. Money stress, and family stress, and work stress – all the big problematic stressors showed up and made a big mess of my day, and every time I’ve tried to push through and get going again, something else comes up to slap me back down. It’s been, to coin a phrase, one of those days.

There’s a significant part of me that’s trying to retreat. One of the things I tend to do when I’m stressed is to go into a quiet room and listen to water falling. In this house, since the only quiet room tends to be the bathroom, I’ll go in and run the shower for a few minutes. Often I’ll turn the showerhead outward, so that it’s spraying against the curtain, and let the pressure and heat relax me. I can’t express how much I’ve wanted to do that, pretty much all day. But instead, for whatever reason, that horse trainer’s voice keeps coming into my head. I can still hear her – with perfect clarity, my memory tells me, although twenty years and the shame and dizziness from falling off a horse have probably introduced a few artifacts. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.”

So instead of retreating and finding a safe spot, I’ve been getting back up. Every time I fall or am knocked off the horse, I dust myself off and get back on. That trainer keeps prodding me. “No more being the ten-year-old who fell off a horse and just walked away,” she says. “It’d be easy to walk away. You could wipe the slate clean and never have to worry about it again. But if you want to be stronger, and show the people around you what kind of person you are, then you look the horse in the eye and get right back up on its back.”

When you fall off the horse, you get back on.

It’s hard. These difficulties hit me in what’s charitably called the solar plexus. I get dizzy. My vision contracts and I feel my skin tightening and growing hot. My stomach hurts, and I spend a moment reeling. But then I breathe, and smile for ten seconds like my dad taught me to do, and start going again. In the face of so much difficulty I want to be strong. I want to show the people around me that I can come out the other side and be okay. I want to get back on the horse. And it’s strange, because even though today has sucked so hard that Hoover is filing for patent infringement, I’m feeling better about myself than I have in years.

* Yes, I know, you hated horses and wanted a machine gun.

Because I think this is really incredibly cool:

English has nine directional/place words that indicate position in or movement regarding a place. Three of them we use pretty much every day; six have fallen into disuse, which is sad, because they’re pretty amazing words. To illustrate, imagine that you are standing at the other end of a football field from your good friend Bob. Francine, another friend, is moving around the football field:

• Position

  • Here means “in this place”. “Francine is here, next to me.”
  • There means “in that place”. “Francine is there, next to Bob.”
  • Where means “in what place”. “Where is Francine? I don’t see her.”

• Direction toward

  • Hither means “to this place”. “Francine is coming hither, from Bob to me.”
  • Thither means “to that place”. “Francine is going thither, from me to Bob.”
  • Whither means “to what place”. “Whither is Francine going? She’s off to the sidelines and running fast.”

• Direction away from

  • Hence means “from this place”. “Francine is going hence, from me to Bob.”
  • Thence means “from that place”. “Francine is coming thence, from Bob to me.”
  • Whence means “from what place”. “Whence is Francine coming? She just reappeared with a bucket of Gatorade…”

(Incidentally, this means that “from whence” is redundant. “Whence” already means “from where”.)