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dragonlady7Well, I didn't bring my computer to work, and my compromise with Tumblr is that I only look at it from one device, which is my laptop. (It and Facebook are not and never shall be on my work computer or my phone. Google can track me everywhere but at least Facebook has to be content with the vast majority of my data instead of all of it.)
(Amazon likewise is only in one browser on one device, and so the shadow profile it collects on me at work where I'm logged in as a seller is probably pretty hilariously weird. I don't ever even click affiliate links on my work computer because what "you've" been browsing lately shows up to everyone in the company and no thanks, I don't need the weird brothers who own our company in Philadelphia knowing the shit I get up to online even if they wouldn't ever be able to tell which of us it was. Though I do occasionally deliberately search for really weird shit on eBay and Etsy while logged in just for shits and giggles, because I know my coworker locally is the only one who'd notice.)
(Yes, the work Etsy's "recently searched for" is mostly rubber fetish gear at any given time, but what's funny is that I don't think my coworker realizes he's logged in and so sometimes there's even weirder shit in the recents. Never kinky, alas, just weird, but I know it's stuff he's looked at.)
Anyhow I was going to post about last night. Dude was feeling grouchy and unpleasant, and so instead of going to the Monthly Bluegrass Jam Night our teacher hosts at the library by his house, he stayed home. I dithered, but then went on my own, and it was lovely.
My banjo teacher was there with a guitar and a flat pick, which is very much not his preferred instrument (he plays banjo and dobro, largely), and there was another older man there with a mandolin who confessed his primary instrument is upright bass and he's just starting to learn mandolin, and then there was another man there with a guitar who said he loves going to sessions but really just wants to play rhythm and listen to everyone else. And then there was me. That was it.
Last time we went there were five banjos, four of whom were our teacher's students, plus our teacher on dobro and a guitarist, and that was it. So you really never know what you'll get.
I sat next to my teacher and he excitedly made it into a lesson when the other participants called out songs with chord progressions I hadn't yet learned, and it was fantastic because he also would tell me which chord when if I looked lost, and to my delight, I mostly wasn't. "Oh, this one's not a standard one, four, five, one! It's a one, TWO, four, five, ehh just play five again you don't need to learn this one, and one." So I mostly managed to keep up.
Dude would have hated it. My issue is I can't keep the names of the chords straight, can't move my fingers nimbly enough not to fuck up the melody picking, can't memorize the songs very well, but boy oh boy, I can hear where the chords are and keep right up. Whereas Dude is decent at memorizing the melodies and picking patterns, but I really don't think he can hear when the underpinnings shift. He can't hear chord changes. He keeps asking me, "how many measures until it changes? How many times do you play that one?" and I don't know, you go until it gets to the next bit.
The other part is that I usually find the words and teach them to myself, when we're learning a song, and I know where the chords shift under the melody, because if you get hung up on picking a fancy part sometimes you're gonna be a little behind the chord shift or you're gonna lose count of how many repetitions there are of an ornamental flourish or whatever, but if you hang on the words you know when the chord shifts. Especially in, like, a jam kinda setting-- if the lead is the vocalist, and the vocalist is doing some funny stylings, you hang on and wait until they get to the right word before you resolve, right?
And since he's not really a singer, he doesn't ever study the words, so he doesn't know what I'm talking about when I'm like "OK the C-- that's the 4 in this one-- comes on the second never" and he's like never what and I'm like that's the words to the song bro.
So I don't know how to help him learn that. I know he can get it, he can hear as well as I can and has nearly as much musical performance experience as me. (Well, ok, he only did band in high school, and I did band and several vocal ensembles and whatnot, but still, it's not that much more.)
The other complication is that he hates practicing with me, he wants to practice alone. And I get it-- he started learning banjo because he wanted to pick up something to fidget with during the long cold winters and the lonely times in summer when I'm not around, so for him, the ideal is that he can play well by himself on the couch alone in the house. But for me, I want to play with other people, I have spent my whole life mostly hungry for making music collaboratively while I sang alone in the shower as my only outlet, and by sheer amount of time spent the most musical experience of my life now is singing lullabies to children.
So it may just be that I'm going to seek out a lot of jam sessions to go to, here and near the farm, and he's going to just keep playing at home on the couch, and we'll both be happy, and it'll be extra funny because the banjo teacher and his other students all see me and Dude as this indivisible unit, and think we must jam together at home all the time, and that's Not The Case.
So anyway. I played out at the library and had fun, and he sat at home on the couch at the same time and had fun, and I guess that's what's important.
I had something else I was going to talk about and I can't remember now.
The other thing I did that I'd been procrastinating since ohh, recently, November? was that I finally dropped my car off to get new tires put on. In March when I got my last inspection they were like uhhhh ma'am these tires, well. they pass, but. and I was like what kind of idiot replaces their all-seasons in spring? i'm waiting until fall. so i meant to do that in fall. But it's winter, it's well into winter, and Dude was driving my car one snowy day and was like holy shit these tires suck and if I'm driving out to the farm next week I am just asking for there to be a lake effect storm by Syracuse that I die in because I'm driving on a glossy low-friction finish instead of all-weather tires. So.
I started shopping online for tires and then was like, ok, these are all like $500 and then i gotta pay a dude to put them on, so like. no. i'm just going to bring them to my corner garage, which has been good to me in the past, and tell them to put on whatever they think is best. and sure enough, the guy called and was like well I have these good ones you could pick, gave me the sales pitch, gave me the price, and I said yeah that sounds good. He was faintly surprised; I think he'd likely done the classic salesy thing where you start off mid-high and then give them a mid-low and then sell them up to the mid, and I just was like you know, I don't care that much, the mid-high is probably what I actually want.
I've been going to this garage for seventeen years now, and while they're not saints, they're also not charlatans usually, so I'll take it. I can walk there, and once when my car wouldn't start they wheeled their jumpstart machine up the street to my driveway and did the work there, so. Can't beat that.
(Also when Dude's mom dropped off her car there and then tripped on the sidewalk by her house when she'd almost gotten home (you can see the garage from her front window), and hurt herself badly, they came and got her and were extremely solicitous of her, so I like them for that too.)
(Also also one day I dropped my car off on a day when school was out, one of those holidays only schools and banks get, and the new owner's elementary-school-age boys were running riot in the place and clearly all of the mechanics thought it was hilarious and were used to them and were messing around with them affectionately and I also thought that was sweet.)
OK time to work, whatever else I was going to talk about on here isn't coming back to me so I'm just gonna hit "post".
(Amazon likewise is only in one browser on one device, and so the shadow profile it collects on me at work where I'm logged in as a seller is probably pretty hilariously weird. I don't ever even click affiliate links on my work computer because what "you've" been browsing lately shows up to everyone in the company and no thanks, I don't need the weird brothers who own our company in Philadelphia knowing the shit I get up to online even if they wouldn't ever be able to tell which of us it was. Though I do occasionally deliberately search for really weird shit on eBay and Etsy while logged in just for shits and giggles, because I know my coworker locally is the only one who'd notice.)
(Yes, the work Etsy's "recently searched for" is mostly rubber fetish gear at any given time, but what's funny is that I don't think my coworker realizes he's logged in and so sometimes there's even weirder shit in the recents. Never kinky, alas, just weird, but I know it's stuff he's looked at.)
Anyhow I was going to post about last night. Dude was feeling grouchy and unpleasant, and so instead of going to the Monthly Bluegrass Jam Night our teacher hosts at the library by his house, he stayed home. I dithered, but then went on my own, and it was lovely.
My banjo teacher was there with a guitar and a flat pick, which is very much not his preferred instrument (he plays banjo and dobro, largely), and there was another older man there with a mandolin who confessed his primary instrument is upright bass and he's just starting to learn mandolin, and then there was another man there with a guitar who said he loves going to sessions but really just wants to play rhythm and listen to everyone else. And then there was me. That was it.
Last time we went there were five banjos, four of whom were our teacher's students, plus our teacher on dobro and a guitarist, and that was it. So you really never know what you'll get.
I sat next to my teacher and he excitedly made it into a lesson when the other participants called out songs with chord progressions I hadn't yet learned, and it was fantastic because he also would tell me which chord when if I looked lost, and to my delight, I mostly wasn't. "Oh, this one's not a standard one, four, five, one! It's a one, TWO, four, five, ehh just play five again you don't need to learn this one, and one." So I mostly managed to keep up.
Dude would have hated it. My issue is I can't keep the names of the chords straight, can't move my fingers nimbly enough not to fuck up the melody picking, can't memorize the songs very well, but boy oh boy, I can hear where the chords are and keep right up. Whereas Dude is decent at memorizing the melodies and picking patterns, but I really don't think he can hear when the underpinnings shift. He can't hear chord changes. He keeps asking me, "how many measures until it changes? How many times do you play that one?" and I don't know, you go until it gets to the next bit.
The other part is that I usually find the words and teach them to myself, when we're learning a song, and I know where the chords shift under the melody, because if you get hung up on picking a fancy part sometimes you're gonna be a little behind the chord shift or you're gonna lose count of how many repetitions there are of an ornamental flourish or whatever, but if you hang on the words you know when the chord shifts. Especially in, like, a jam kinda setting-- if the lead is the vocalist, and the vocalist is doing some funny stylings, you hang on and wait until they get to the right word before you resolve, right?
And since he's not really a singer, he doesn't ever study the words, so he doesn't know what I'm talking about when I'm like "OK the C-- that's the 4 in this one-- comes on the second never" and he's like never what and I'm like that's the words to the song bro.
So I don't know how to help him learn that. I know he can get it, he can hear as well as I can and has nearly as much musical performance experience as me. (Well, ok, he only did band in high school, and I did band and several vocal ensembles and whatnot, but still, it's not that much more.)
The other complication is that he hates practicing with me, he wants to practice alone. And I get it-- he started learning banjo because he wanted to pick up something to fidget with during the long cold winters and the lonely times in summer when I'm not around, so for him, the ideal is that he can play well by himself on the couch alone in the house. But for me, I want to play with other people, I have spent my whole life mostly hungry for making music collaboratively while I sang alone in the shower as my only outlet, and by sheer amount of time spent the most musical experience of my life now is singing lullabies to children.
So it may just be that I'm going to seek out a lot of jam sessions to go to, here and near the farm, and he's going to just keep playing at home on the couch, and we'll both be happy, and it'll be extra funny because the banjo teacher and his other students all see me and Dude as this indivisible unit, and think we must jam together at home all the time, and that's Not The Case.
So anyway. I played out at the library and had fun, and he sat at home on the couch at the same time and had fun, and I guess that's what's important.
I had something else I was going to talk about and I can't remember now.
The other thing I did that I'd been procrastinating since ohh, recently, November? was that I finally dropped my car off to get new tires put on. In March when I got my last inspection they were like uhhhh ma'am these tires, well. they pass, but. and I was like what kind of idiot replaces their all-seasons in spring? i'm waiting until fall. so i meant to do that in fall. But it's winter, it's well into winter, and Dude was driving my car one snowy day and was like holy shit these tires suck and if I'm driving out to the farm next week I am just asking for there to be a lake effect storm by Syracuse that I die in because I'm driving on a glossy low-friction finish instead of all-weather tires. So.
I started shopping online for tires and then was like, ok, these are all like $500 and then i gotta pay a dude to put them on, so like. no. i'm just going to bring them to my corner garage, which has been good to me in the past, and tell them to put on whatever they think is best. and sure enough, the guy called and was like well I have these good ones you could pick, gave me the sales pitch, gave me the price, and I said yeah that sounds good. He was faintly surprised; I think he'd likely done the classic salesy thing where you start off mid-high and then give them a mid-low and then sell them up to the mid, and I just was like you know, I don't care that much, the mid-high is probably what I actually want.
I've been going to this garage for seventeen years now, and while they're not saints, they're also not charlatans usually, so I'll take it. I can walk there, and once when my car wouldn't start they wheeled their jumpstart machine up the street to my driveway and did the work there, so. Can't beat that.
(Also when Dude's mom dropped off her car there and then tripped on the sidewalk by her house when she'd almost gotten home (you can see the garage from her front window), and hurt herself badly, they came and got her and were extremely solicitous of her, so I like them for that too.)
(Also also one day I dropped my car off on a day when school was out, one of those holidays only schools and banks get, and the new owner's elementary-school-age boys were running riot in the place and clearly all of the mechanics thought it was hilarious and were used to them and were messing around with them affectionately and I also thought that was sweet.)
OK time to work, whatever else I was going to talk about on here isn't coming back to me so I'm just gonna hit "post".
