I decided to stop playing music round about Thanksgiving. Haven’t done a gig, rehearsal, jam session, or hardly touched an instrument since then. Regrets? Second thoughts? Refinements? Continue reading
In no specific order.
If you’re going to have 8 dogs in your house, the more of them that are housebroken the better.
Batting .500 really isn’t good enough, and in this case, two out of three IS bad. Don’t ask.
To paraphrase George Carlin, it’s pretty easy to consider anyone who’d driving much faster than you as crazy, and anyone who’s driving slower than you to be a jackass. I’ve noticed some more granular versions of the rules here in Eldorado, and it’s deepend the awareness I already have that I’m a hypocrite. (Yay!) Continue reading
I offer now my own Dave Barry style contribution to Murphy’s Law; nothing scatological need be implied by the title.
I don’t know what cosmic law of attraction is involved, but as a mostly private person, I’ve found that the best way to abort a lonely fugue right at the onset is a quick trip to a bathroom, wherever I live, whoever I live with, and whatever I’m doing. Continue reading
This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.
Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error – mostly error – I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be. Continue reading
I’m halfway through quitting music, or playing music live to be more precise. Phase one is saying no to anything new; my current relationship with music – not good – is largely a byproduct of taking chances with strangers that haven’t worked out, so I’m taking a step back from that. I know I’m on the right track because on one hand, I dread every single music commitment I get entangled with these days, even good ones with people I love and music I ought to enjoy, but especially when I’ve committed to something I know from the beginning is a poor match for my interests and love. And on the other hand I glow with pride whenever I successfully avoid something music-related, it feels righter than almost anything else I’ve ever done, at least in recent memory. Continue reading
I just finished Week 1 of my Super Busy Period™ and survived. It’s been so busy I haven’t had time to quite stress about any of it, and now that I have a minute to breathe, I’ve done a little math so I can quantify my relationship to it, the numbers tell stories. Continue reading
I’m not sure what sort of metaphysical dynamics are involved, but I’ve gone from almost no music involvement to a temporarily crushing workload. Pretty amazing. I’m not sure why music, of all things, tends to be like that for me – it’s like an on or off switch and very few shades of gray in between.
It’s been OK to not be busy; conceptually I hate the idea of not playing more, but realistically, I have a pretty full plate with my business and my family so it’s usually OK. Like I didn’t have any gigs or rehearsals last weekend, so I built gates. Wooden ones. And I barbecued. And the weekend was too short. Add to that a couple of 150 mile drives and several hours of practicing or playing, and they get even shorter. Continue reading
A friend of ours who has just about completed a house she’s building invited my little family over to be part of the blessing ceremony she had arranged. She’s a Buddhist, I can’t remember if she started with the Zen tradition and moved toward Tibetan or the other way around. Anyway, there are some visiting Tibetan monks in town, and it can be arranged that they come to your home to bless and purify it as well as anyone within it. Continue reading
I just read an interesting article in Wired Magazine called The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn’t Led Us Into a New Dark Age. It’s not one of their 20-page epics, it’s more of an editorial piece. The premise is that “the experts” are all atwitter about how computers and technology and video games are making us dumb.
I’ll spoil the ending; it’s still worth a read. The answer is that they’re not. Continue reading