banjo update: blue christmas

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Last night our teacher taught us Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the banjo.

He started playing it, and then was explaining what he was doing as he went, and then explained “I’m teaching it to myself as I go, I’ve never played this on banjo before,” and then proceeded to break it down into a pretty formulaic chord progression and then explain that, since a banjo has no sustain, what you have to do is find 1) the chords, then 2) the melody notes within the chords, and then 3) a method of ornamentation that brings out the melody notes but keeps the banjo playing because you can’t hold a note so if there’s a sustained note in the melody you need to create an ornamentation pattern that accentuates it. So, slides, reduplication (where you fret two strings to be the same note and then play them both within a roll), hammer-ons, etc, all within the framework of the three-finger rolling patterns that make up most of bluegrass-style banjo playing. 

It was great, and it’s what I want to learn to do on the banjo, and next month it’ll be one year of banjo lessons and I’m delighted to have gotten to that point. 

He then admitted it was unlikely we’d actually master the song in time for the holiday, but reminded us that we’d absolutely have the chords by then, and you can perform a song at any point in the learning process, whether you have all the ornamentation down pat or not. 

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convince Dave to bring the banjos with us for Christmas. We’re only going to be gone two days, after all. Not a ton of time for messing around.

stormslesbian: does anyone else w/ adhd think about time passing as like, losing time until the next

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stormslesbian:

does anyone else w/ adhd think about time passing as like, losing time until the next event like “oh i only have 30 minutes until i need to leave for work” vs “i have 30 minutes to do what i need to do before i leave for work”? like i constantly feel like i’m fighting time passing and getting closer to when i’m ‘out of time’ is really stressful

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oh my gosh yes. I am an ADHD person who is Extremely Punctual for everything because I always leave twice as long as I think I’ll need, etc. And I know that if I start a new task I run the risk of getting sucked in and then not doing the Thing I Need To Do At [Time]. I’m jealous of my sister, who is a mom and business owner and is an absolute master of “I have to do something in five minutes? I’ll do this task that will take me four minutes and fifty-four seconds, no problem” and it WORKS for her EVERY TIME. Meanwhile I’ve been standing in the corner fidgeting and watching the clock for fifteen minutes already because I noticed the time twenty minutes before [time] and was afraid to try to start anything new then. I have 1) no idea how long anything takes, and 2) horrible anxiety about Inadvertent Hyperfocus, which is probably justified because at the end of any given day I couldn’t tell you what I was doing for probably ten hours of it, non-consecutively; time just Goes, sometimes, and I don’t know where it went or what happened but it sure did go by. 

But by God I have never once been late for work or school in my entire life. I just… haven’t done anything with myself in all that time. 

right behind the eye

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I got one of them headaches where it’s behind your eye, and I’m writing it down because I always forget about stuff like this until it recurs and then I’m like “wait didn’t I… I don’t remember” so.

This started yesterday afternoon with my left eye feeling really dry, like I needed eyedrops, but I don’t have any so I didn’t do anything about it, and just kept the eye closed a bunch, but over the course of the evening it got worse and by dinner it was like, my whole head, on that side, and the bathroom lights while I brushed my teeth were torture. I slept fine but this morning it just hurts behind my eye. I’ve finally take some ibuprofen but I’m not super hopeful. It’s just weird that it felt like it was dry eye to begin with, and then morphed into whatever this was!!

It’s not too bad, I just really wish Bill had brought in that lamp like he said he was gonna so we could turn off the overhead lights. I brought in two lamps and that’s not enough for the whole room. The overhead fluorescents normally don’t bother me but today they’re sort of like death. Ugh. 

Bummer! 

Also today’s the day where we’re going to start getting messages to explain how we’ve ruined Christmas. I think we should keep a tally of how many Christmases we ruin each year. Downstairs they’ve been getting them all along– our main printing guy actually got into an altercation with a customer, and then one of my former coworkers, the one who used to torment me at the old store (one of several, but this one was actually insane, like heavily-medicated and occasionally institutionalized, which i say not as like, a knock against her, but as an explanation that when i’m like oh she was nuts i really mean, no, she was, she’d sometimes get convinced various of us had done things we hadn’t and so on, and mostly she tried to keep her shit under control but sometimes she did not, and so she hurt me quite a bit over a period of time)– well, she was visiting the store to buy her Christmas cards here, and she dove right in, and then came upstairs and i realized I’m still sort of traumatized about the shit she used to do, so that was fun! I sat at my desk like a pinned insect and smiled blankly and didn’t quite look at her and was Extremely Awkward, and thought about how funny it was that she was involved in a customer altercation here, when that was her specialty at the old store. (She no longer works for the company and I assume has herself better-managed, since she’s got three little kids now and by all accounts they’re doing fine. I’m glad, just. Do that over there and we’ll keep our lives heavily separate. That is Fine.)

Man oh man this ibuprofen could start working any minute and that’d be keen. I have low hopes though.