I read about Descript, a new robot that its makers claim will transcribe your spoken words with 95% accuracy. Unless you speak extremely clearly and deliberately I do not believe that is possible, but even if it is I question if it is even desirable. As I’ve been recording my ramblings the last few months and even years I start to understand why people do podcasts versus writing stories. It’s just easier. Compared to the written word one is not bound by the same expectations of grammarly accuracy in the more conversational format of the podcast. So do we really want our everyday ramblings automagically digitized? I don’t think I would but I also suspect the motives behind the development of such a product. It’s an attempt to textualize and then monetize sound by slapping ads on it. I cannot try it out since it’s only available for Mac, but if all it’s doing is leveraging Google’s voice transcription services then why wouldn’t I just use that?
Well, who knows… The entrepreneur startup space confuses me with its fail up trajectory, but corporate was like that too. I have things to do. Why am I writing about this? Trying again to find someone to talk to on the dating sites but everyone ignores me. Whenever I get a match of the swipe-right variety the person takes another look at me and I guess she says “ew”. So many women out there just seem impossible to me, and impossible for me. Globetrotting CEOs of companies I might have heard of or accomplished novelists on the Times bestseller list multiple times. What the hell would someone like that want with me? It’s never about character or even looks, it’s about getting through the mental screener that casually eliminates more people than it allows. ½ an inch too tall? Bzzzt. ¾ of inch too short? You’re out. Not Jewish? Sorry, but I’m not even going to say sorry.
A problem I’m having with one of these sites is how autocomplete keeps trying to make me go back to the profile of a woman with whom I had a brief and ill-advised dalliance last year. I cannot get it to stop showing up in autocomplete, and it’s a site where the person can see anyone who viewed their profile. I found her profile while we were dating, after she mentioned that she had an account there but she identified herself as living in a Connecticut town, not in NYC. At the time I thought it might be funny or cute, somewhere along our path to conjugal bliss, if I contacted her through the dating site as if for the first time. It would be obvious it was me, and not a trick of any kind to make her think otherwise. But our dalliance came to an early denouement in what is probably the biggest bullet I’ve dodged in a long time.
I feel conspicuous contacting Asian women since so many of them seem to harbor an assumption that white men would have a fetish that clouds their interest in the woman’s personality. I do not have a type when it comes to women, and I don’t think I ever did, though in my shallowness I find obesity to be a turnoff. I know, that makes me a horrible person but we are all wired differently and, of course, instincts are malleable. As a matter of fact there is a woman I see around who is quite huge but her gentle nature and bombshell beautiful smile had me imagining her as a possibility.
I knew a woman once who said that when she was in her 20s her ideal man would have looked something like Christopher Reeve, the clean-shaven smooth-skinned star of Superman. She ended up marrying an apeman dude with a ½ inch of hair covering virtually his entire body.
The woman with whom I had the dalliance once made the comment that she thought everyone married their mother. I’ve never even dated my mother, as the saying goes, since I cannot imagine finding anyone like her.
I had a strange dream with her in it last night. I was at a school, either as a student or in some administrative role, when I discovered my computer was gone. Someone had stolen it. I told a few people about it but no one seemed to care or think it was noteworthy. I was trying to decide if I should file a police report, even though it seemed like a lot of bother for an item that technically was not even mine. I decided to consult my mother, who had some position at the school that was equal to that of Mrs. Allyn, a grade school English teacher who at one time seemed like my Kingsfield. I had to wait until after 5pm to tell my mother about this, since she had some kind of class or appointment. I walked around the campus, which was a huge and sprawling compound with open air space and covered areas. Similarly laid out compounds are common in my dreams. I saw someone wearing a shirt on the back of which I thought was the name ALKAN, the French composer whose piano music I sometimes play. But the word might actually have been AKAN. Whatever the case I thought it would have been odd for someone to be wearing a shirt with the name of a relatively obscure composer on the back.
5pm came and I found my mother at her desk. She placed her hands on the desk and complained that I had sent her a blizzard of text messages the night before, messages which I had no memory of sending. Apparently I or the both of owned a rental property and I had messaged to let her know of certain maintenance issues I was dealing with. She made a cutting comment about how I suggested that I might have to raise the rent on someone named Jason. She was like that in real life. At almost any mention of money she would become something like indignant or insulted, as if the very subject was tasteless. One time I turned on a radio right at the moment the announcer said the words “MORE MONEY.” Mother reacted as if I had intentionally turned on the radio just so we could hear those words. Of course I had no idea what words would come out of that device when I turned it on, but it didn’t matter. Intentionally or not I had summoned those words and she took offense.
Back to the dream: It ends with me waking up to a very, very clear image of my mother. It was not a good feeling, really, since she is gone and Dreamland is not my space for escaping or denying that reality.
I miss talking to her. As I’ve been sorting through old papers from the storage I found that my call records were surprisingly intriguing. The lengthiest calls were, of course, to my mother, my father, and certain friends from Tampa. But then there are calls to forgotten people in places where I don’t remember having any contacts. Looking now at a 12-minute call I made to someone in Ithaca, NY, in December, 2004. Who was that? Later I called someone in Old Saybrook, CT, for 26 minutes. I have no possible idea who that could have been. Looking up the phone numbers is probably pointless, since they must have changed hands by now.
