Hi bass fellows, recently I've been transcribing an episode called "I got you pegged" from one of my favorite Podcast, This American Life as a practice because English is not my native language. I enjoyed this as much as the way I transcribe music with ears (not written tho) and believe that transcription is a great way to improve, both musically/lingually speaking. However as I worked on I encountered spoken words that I had no clue what they are, therefore in the contexts I replaced these unknown words with blanks. If you happen to like the podcast and have time for discussion, please help me out here. I'd be grateful for all your helps.
This episode is about 60 minutes. So far about 11 minutes are done. I'll post others later if as I work further.
You can download the episode for free here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radi...px?episode=362
By the way This American Life is an all-time ranking champion on the itune podcast site. I really dig it.
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I got you pegged. from This American Life
Ok, as an adult it’s pretty rare to have a moment where you are talking about somebody, in your own country, in your own hometown, in your own language, and you have no idea what is actually happening. When things become confusing, and not in the, Oh, what do you mean by that sort of way, but in a _________, how did I get myself into the situation kind of confusion. Like, for example, Amy, who is back home in Indiana on a break from college and, she is accompanying her brother’s high school class in a trip to this health and science museum we haven’t, erm ________, the Health works, Kid’s museum, and just to give you a sense of who the characters are in this story, Amy’s brother is artistic, and he is moderately mentally retarded.
“If you have to picture Ben, I would say picture this really handsome, star-athlete-looking guy, who is… sort of has an age of maybe 5 to 8 years old, and loves dinosaurs.”
As for Amy, beside the face that she is very close to his brother. And get a really good sense of who she is by the conversation that she had with Ben’s teacher on the bus, with all the development or disabled kids, driving to ______. Amy was talking to the teacher about her schoolwork which frankly seems very, very hard. Amy was majoring in physics, and studying in Germany.
In Germany, not only were the classes in German, we were all using all these graduate textbooks and so… but she was really nice and she just listened to me the whole way over.
So they get to the museum, and they took some videos and some science experiments where they boost things up, there’s time to walk around the exhibits.
So, during all of this, one of the things that has been really pushing, they have these new computers that were installed, they were computers designed to walk kids through, making really neat identification card. And there were all really excited about this. I think they must just have gone live the day before we came because they were all just… “make sure you use our id computers.” You know we were so excited about this, you get print out your id, and pick it up at the front desk. And so when we walk out onto… to the actual museum park, my brother and I walked around and he shows some of his favorite exhibits, and this stuff member comes to me, and he says have you made your id yet?
Now, for a second this seems good or weird that he would ask one of the adult to make an id card, but Amy figured it’s new, they are excited for everybody to try this thing, kids and adults. So, her brother ambles on, and she’s down questions on the computer screen, but the guy doesn’t go away. He keeps finding way to help her.
Then it occurred to me oh maybe he is hitting on me a little bit.
… which made sense but the help that he’s getting her keeps getting stranger and stranger. He’s giving her instructions and everything that no fully function adult would ever need instructions for. And Amy wondered, does he think that she is one of the development, or disabled kids who wondering in all the museum. But at the same time, Amy thought it was completely obvious that she wasn’t. The way she moves, the way she expresses herself. And the guy’s manner, his tone of voice was unmistakable. He talked to her like a peer.
I mean I almost wondered maybe that was why I was always paralyzed, with confusion, it was really rare to meet people who don’t use some kind of special voice with the mentally disabled. This… ahh, slightly higher pitched, slightly I-know-you-are-a-special-person kind of voice. So it was so strange.
Then, luckily, the very next question that comes up from the computer screen, is when that Amy realizes that cleans up all of this confusion, once for all, definitively, worked for the both of them.
So, the question is… erm, tying your age. Ok. So, I am 21 years old at the time, so I am thinking, I can type in 21, and he’ll realize that I can’t be a student. And we can just both pretend like we understood what was going on this whole time. So I type in 21, and he looks at me and he looks at the age, and he says “oh Amy, you know, if your age is a number that ends in tee, then that number starts with a one.
So he just assumed you typed wrong.
Yeah. But I haven’t. So at that point I decided instead of saying, OK, actually I’m 21, and letting that fold out, however it would have, I erased what I typed and I type in 18.
Why?
Ahhhh…. I don’t know. I mean, I thought… how many more questions could there possibly be? I’ve already told them… you know everything about myself… how much I weight in… and I thought there is just gonna be a couple more questions… and they’ll take a picture of me and it’ll be done and then he’ll never have to know…
He is a stranger in a museum like this will be over like in minute… you’ll walk away… like who cares…
Exactly. I found it was the lesser to evil at that point.
But she is not near the end of the questionnaire. Far from it. It continues with pages and pages then this is a set of paragraphing questions that requires actual concentration.
And while I am… fast as I can, I am skimming these questions, trying to get through this. He started reading them to me out loud… word for word. And, erm, I’m sort of melting into my chair. And I’m thinking this is too way of the deception. This is way too much. I have to somehow stop him.
So I did, I said: “Oh! I can read.” And he looks at me, he puts his hands on my back, and he says: “you parents must be so proud of you.”
So, as you might have imagined, I am working really hard to skim through these questions… this quick I am blur at the activity… I am just trying to get through these questions so I can get out of this room and escape… and as I am working through these questions as fast as I can, I see my brother’s teaching walking toward me and she says: “Hi Amy! How’s it going?”
And you are thinking like, oh my god, what’s gonna happen?
Oh! Oh… yeah… and… erm… and then it happens. He points to me and he said… again voice full of admiration and pride and he says: “Amy was just telling me that she can read.”
Herherher… and how did teacher dig this news?
Oh my gosh… so this teacher who I’ve been complaining to her about these graduate level classes in German... she looks at him and she says: “Of course Amy can read.”
And then, the truth pours out. They begin a flaring of apologizing on all sides. Amy apologizes to the guy, the guy apologizes to Amy. Both of them, she says, clutching their own hearts as they do this. It turns out he’s so careful not to talk down to development or disabled students because he himself had a learning disability. And so, she has misread what he was doing… why he spoke the way he did, and he misread who she really was... and in this case they both discovered the truth but just as often people meet and walk away and never straighten this stuff out. They assume they get it all wrong… and that is the subject of today’s program. From Chicago Public Radio, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I’m Ira Glass, today’s now: I’ve got you pegged. A story people assuming all kinds of things that other people usually in error, are showed today in 4 accidents, there is quite lineup: Richard Price, Chuck Klosterman Shalom Auslander and Nancy Updike. Stay with us.
ACT 1. The fat blue line
We begin today with the story about something that happen all the time in all kind of places, something that is so common, it’s not even big enough to make it on the local news. Richard Price tells the story. A novelist and a screenwriter, he often writes about cops and crime, he wrote Cocker, he wrote Sea of Love, he wrote for the TV show “The Wire,” his most recent novel is “Lush Life,” he told this story on stage at “The Moth” in New York, he describes this is tale -taken from real life, and dramatized.
in the mess novel I wrote, it’s been a lot of time on the loriside, and, as it’s my want, I wound up in the back of a police car a lot, and loriside is very low crime area right now… it used to be the worst, but Giuliani and real estate pressure took care of that. Now they basically have nothing to do down there, in terms of crime. So, what did they do is basically sit in fake a taxi, you know for beefy white guys, eh, sit in a fake taxi about the side of Williamsburg bridge, and they eye-wall what’s coming over from Brooklyn… If the car looks like a 200 dollars [beep] ... or somebody's got an _____... or a ponytail... they pull up, pulling behind the car, and they wait to see if the guys are gonna go all polite in this driving like throw on lane-changing signals... and they know he's dirty... and you know, so, worst comes to worst, you know, it's fishing, really, it's big fishing all. During all this spree. So I spent all night in this bogus taxi, with about 850 pounds of white beefs... and its the end of the night they made their... colors...
there are two cops up front... now I was sitting in the back. When I ride with these guys, I don't really comment about what they do... I don't engage them... you know, any kind of debates... it's kinda I'm very bare-witnessed... see what can I do with it... in my word. They are grinding up...Essex street... it's kinda Miller's time... as they are going out, they passed a black guy about 30-year-old in a dress, on a bicycle. And on the cross-bar he's got a white kid about 9, 10 years old. The black guy and the white kid they are kinda chatting... the kids looks up at the guy... you know, it looks like they are sort of familiar with each other... the cops drive by, in a dead silence, after about a block, white guy says to the others: "Hey big guys, do I look fishy to you? It is this [beep] midnight, what's going on there? What do you wanna do big guy? So I tell you big guy.Erm, I'd made the right, you know, pull over and see what is what."
