The Quarantine in Trichotomy

The Setup

The reason I am back here is because of quarantine. I’m starting the 3rd week of working from home now and haven’t ventured more than a few blocks from my house. This feel strangely similar to grad school, when I could work any time I please.

I have to work from a company-issued laptop, which I’ve had for a year, but almost never used. It stays at home, and I just use loaner laptops when I need a laptop at work. I think this computer has seen more use in 2 weeks than it had in a year.

The nature of the work didn’t change though, I’m still a coder, and since I switched teams last fall, I am no longer roped to be a tech lead (or a “de-facto tech lead” in my second team, which was trying to get TL work out of me without me having the title), and got to focus on the actual engineering tasks. So that part is nice.

La Professeure is now an associate dean of her school and had been roped into being the “liason” between her school’s faculty and the IT department. Not really sure why they need it (it’s the IT department’s job to communicate with faculty), but that is keeping her more busy than usual, so even though she’s staying home too, she is working a lot more than me.

We use our dining table as our office - our actual “office” has an old computer on it that acts as our print server, so can’t be moved. That is just as well - our dining table seats 6 but we aren’t expecting guests. We can fit two workspaces on there and still have space to serve dinner.

The thing I like most is the shorted commute time: my ‘office’ is now a few seconds from my bed, rather than a few hours.

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The Art

One of the things the new Music Group Organiser did was to institute a “long-form” recital, where a small number of performers could present a concert with longer pieces in it. It’s been a success so far, and I’d been roped into doing one in April with a group with Retired Opera Singer when their pianist bailed on them a few months back.

I hadn’t played collaborative music since last summer when I went to chamber music camp (more on that in a later entry), so it was a nice break from my usual rep. I was supposed to play the Rossini cat duet and a soiree musicale, the Delibes flower duet, Brahms Zwei Gesange, a Ukranian pop song, Violetta’s second aria, and play in Brahms quartet. It was a lot of music and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t already know the Brahms quartet.

But, the quarantine came and all of that changed. Suddenly, no more concert. No more collaborative piano.

So, I get to switch to solo repertoire. I didn’t audition for last year’s Carnegie Hall concert, but figure I should audition for next year’s. So I’ve been slowly learning Horowitcz’s Stars and Stripes Forever transcription (this November will be my 10 year anniversary of becoming officially Fat, Dumb, and Lazy!!!) for a few months now. So I can switch back to that. Plus, I’ve been learning Chopin’s C# minor nocturne and Berceuse for the concert. I am digging up some Poulenc so I’d have something resembling “classical” repertoire.

I anticipate playing a lot more now that I have the time.

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The Social life

Social life has suffered due to the quarantine. Between La Professeure me, we usually have at least one social event to go to every weekend. But not anymore!

The only remotely social thing we’d done was a factime with WYF. Because La Professeure is a Zoom expert now, she’s been helping our dance studio instructor and my musician’s group experiment with Zoom.

Our musicians group has been arguing over how to hold virtual recitals. It’s been a week now and no resolution. It began with our organiser suggesting we need to do something to give our membership something to do. Now it’s a discussion about whether to do a live event where people dial into a zoon session to live stream from their home, or just have everyone send in a video recording and we stitch them together and release it on youtube. Most of us think livestream is more like a ‘real’ recital experience, but given the difficulty of using zoom, knowing the technological abilities of our membership base, it’s carries high logistical risk that could make it fail. As the only technologist in the group, I feel like a Cassandra. We did an experiment zoom session hosted by La Professeure last week, which exposed some logistical challenges. Hopefully everyone will look at it and we’ll see what everyone thinks.

To those of you out there by yourselves, stay safe and healthy.

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