— चार हजार सात सौ तीस —

Not a lot for me to tell you today. I never went anywhere yesterday, as is the case with most days.

Oh, wait—I nearly forgot. I did spent the better part of an hour singing the song "Connection" by OneRepublic, over and over again, trying to learn the lyrics, until I sang the chorus a few times to video recording from my iPhone, which I then sent to Hayley.

You may or may not recall, Hayley and Thayer are Laney's close friends, Thayer being a long-ago ex of Laney's, and a few years ago they moved back to Hayley's native Wisconsin. Hayley reached out to a bunch of Facebook friends about a week ago, specifically asking that we record ourselves singing the chorus of this song and sending her the video. She's working on a "mostly acapella" version of it in which she will integrate all these clips. So I said, okay, I'll do it; I asked when she needed it by and she said Saturday.

Now, my Birth Wee officially begins tonight, with "Birth Week Quarantini #1," with Laney. So, this evening was not going to be ideal for doing this clip. Tomorrow I both need to go to the office and will do "Birth Week Quarantini #2" with Jennifer. And, last night Shobhit worked until 7:30 and so I had some time to myself after work was done.

I had some initial, kind of lofty plans for this video clip, in which I actually learned the lyrics in their entirety, and I would send myself singing the whole song to Hayley. Well, turns out I just didn't have that kind of time. I could have still done this, had I spent a whole lot more time practicing the song. But, I lost my patience with it quickly.

Also: even with only one AirPod in so I could hear my own voice better and try to stay on pitch, holy shit, once I listened back to the video I recorded and it no longer had the sounds of the actual song playing, I found it deeply embarrassing. That chorus is slightly outside my most comfortable voice range for singing, but I still managed to hit the notes—albeit without singing anywhere near as well as I would prefer. I did not sound great. But, I consider this a testament to my personal growth over the past couple of decades: deeply embarrassing or not, I still sent Hayley two clips. I did edit them, but I made the first one longer with a couple screw-ups included just for her amusement.

I trust that she will blend my voice with a bunch of other people's and make it sound like I sang just fine. As for the native files I sent her, I deleted them and hope never to watch or hear them again.

Whatever Hayley's final video project looks like, that I expect I'll be happy to share.

— चार हजार सात सौ तीस —

— चार हजार सात सौ तीस —

Shobhit got home around 8:00, and I waited until then to eat dinner so I could help him fry up parathas and we had them with leftovers for dinner, which we will do again tonight with the last of the dough he made. Prior to that, I watched this week's episode of Mrs. America on Hulu (I now use Laney's login for that; in exchange I gave her my Disney+ login—we did that in December but only now did I finally return to Hulu, just for this show). That show is really great.

After we were done with dinner, I went to bed rather early: about 9:30. I got a solid, nearly eight-hours of sleep, and guess what? I feel way better today than I did yesterday. Maybe it really was just that I had too little sleep the night before. I'm not really coughing at all; I still don't have a fever; I don't feel nearly as tired as I did yesterday. And I keep seeing those as the key symptoms of COVID-19: dry cough, tiredness, fever. So I think I'm good! For now.

Last night was the series finale of Will & Grace and Shobhit did call out to me to ask if I wanted to watch, but I was just drifting off to sleep. We can watch it tonight. Even Shobhit came to bed not long after. He was complaining of a sore throat this morning, saying it felt dry, which was exactly my complaint yesterday. Hopefully that doesn't get any worse. His continuing to leave for work every day is the most worrisome part of all of this, for us.

. . . And, now that I have posted this, my 2020 Birth Week officially begins! Not even close to what I had long envisioned (literally since last year), with the plans changed far more radically than ever before. But, I'm still going to make the best of it, goddammit! And drink a lot.

— चार हजार सात सौ तीस —

[posted 12:27 pm]