Pet peeve is a weird expression. It’s obviously related to the word “peevish,” but it’s still a bit odd. In any case, on NPR’s “Fresh Air” the other day, they talked about pet peeves in language. I think I mentioned it on here. I’ve been thinking about it recently some (first as “how would I translate this?”, to which I got my answer), and also identifying some pet peeves of mine. The point the guy made on NPR was that it’s only a pet peeve if it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t annoy many others. So disliking something everyone dislikes isn’t a pet peeve.
Anyway, not sure if this counts.
I went to a concert last night, with one of the women I work with (Ade), her boyfriend (Javi), and their friends (David, Álvaro, María, Pedro/Peter). The concert was for this Catalunyan band called Standstill (pronounced, if you’re a Spaniard with the typical problem with s-consonant pairs*, as eh-Stand-eh-Still), which Ade introduced me to months and months ago. She and her friends have seen the band quite a few times — for example, Javi has seen them more than ten times. They sound a bit like the American band Murder by Death, I guess. That’s what I thought the first time I heard them. Wikipedia articles say they’re post-hardcore, but frankly that seems misplaced; they’re pretty much just alt-rock. (Maybe their English albums were harder? I’ve only ever heard their more recent, Spanish-language stuff.)
The concert was pretty awesome. I like this band quite a lot, and I know their music fairly well (although not the lyrics — it’s even harder to make out foreign-language lyrics), so it was fun. But here’s where we get to the possibly-a-pet-peeve thing: in recent years, I’ve found it more and more likely for the light-operators at concerts to flash floodlights at the crowd. It seems completely fucking bizarre and unnecessary, and they did it more than often last night. It seems to me that if you want the band to see the crowd, you turn on the house lights. But blinding the crowd with floodlights to punctuate the music? Bizarre. I know I’ve got sensitive eyes, but I just don’t get it.
In any case, it was a lot of fun.
Earlier yesterday, I went hiking in La Pedriza, also in the Guadarrama, with this German guy named Max and his Czech friend Luci. It was a lot of fun. We drove up to Manzanares el Real, the town to the north of Madrid that has a castle, and into the park. It was a wet day, so there were very few people around — unlike the last time I was up here. (I never actually finished that post — like a month ago, this kid Tim and I tried to go climbing, but ended up mostly just hiking around, which was okay since it’s gorgeous.) It didn’t rain until we’d pretty much reached the peaks, four hours in, so we had four beautiful hours of hiking up to the ridges, and then four hours of hiking back through sparse rain, mist, and (holy shit, what!? it’s May!) some snow. The misty valleys were quite gorgeous as well, and as always in the wilderness, it’s kind of fun to climb without seeing a soul.
We ended up going slightly off-course for a bit, and doing something that was more climbing than hiking. Which I liked a lot, as always, although I’m glad we did it before it started raining. All in all, we ended up without mishap.
It’s always interesting hiking by map versus hiking by guidebook. There are benefits to both, and they’re best used in unison I would say. But Max had a map, and we were just following the guide-lines and trail blazes (and cairns†). The difference in this approach is that you can get off-track and still be fine, but it’s easier to get off-track. I kind of like both — I don’t know that I’m up for going with the newer way of hiking, using GPS.
In any case, yes, a good day.
* I know this is probably super-obvious to many people, but I was confused for a while about how native Spanish speakers often have difficulty pronouncing words like “snake” or “spring” or “Spain,” while they have no trouble with other words that begin with s. Finally I realized that it’s not the beginning-with-an-s, but the beginning-with-an-s-and-then-another consonant. “Solo” is easy. “Stork” is not. That sort of sound doesn’t exist in Spanish without an “eh” first. I’m pleased I figured this out on my own, even if it took forever.
† A cairn is a pile of rocks used to signal a trail, these days. It’s what I’ve called them for a long while. I guess I picked up the word from someone at a camp?, because my father doesn’t use it. It’s an awesome word. Max used the word “stone man,” which I immediately intuited to mean cairn, but now I see was probably his direct translation from German.