💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 11-04.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:52:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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My wife and I both woke up at 6:30, which is unusual. Since our first dog died, we've been sleeping in a little later. He was wonderful, but he'd bark to get up and have his breakfast just after 6, every day of the week. I used it to my advantage for years, working on my software project for a couple hours each weekend morning before my wife got up. And since he died, we've been sleeping in more, at least on weekends. But not this morning: we were both up at 6:30, and I was wide awake. She's currently upstairs, trying to fall back asleep. I let our older dog up to be with her. He likes to curl up on a corner of the comforter. The room's dark from our heavy drapes, and she has her small orange reading light on, trying her usual approach of reading to fall asleep.
Time change this weekend. I love the fall change, the extra hour. It feels like cheating, even if it's a debt paid back in the spring. It's nice to have that extra hour to do things, which for me often means coding, or practicing music. The last little while I've been struggling to keep up with guitar. Not because the music is hard, but because the circumstances are. Three weeks ago my guitar teacher admitted himself to the emergency room with breathing problems. He's still in hospital. I don't know the full details, but I know he's being treated for pericarditis. He can't leave until his kidney function gets better. The medication they're giving him is affecting his kidney function. They're trying other things.
He's been texting me, cancelling our lesson each time. I've been practicing a bit in the mornings before I go down to my basement office, or over my lunch break. The want is there, but the focus wanders.
It's been three weeks. I'm slowly working through a modern suite of four movements, getting it into muscle memory, getting it ready to play for him. Three movements down. I need to start the fourth.
He's not old, but he's not young. Lives alone - no spouse, no girlfriend, no dependents - except for his five cats (being looked after by one of his cousins twice daily). Close to retirement. We talked last year about it, how he'd like to buy a place outside the city with some land. He's been my teacher for sixteen full years now. I started taking lessons a year after I moved here, as a way of continuing with music: I'd tried a community band with my partner, but we both found it deeply disappointing after our university experiences. To be blunt, we were both used to elite groups. And in our community band, nobody really practiced. It was a glorified social club. The music selection was poor-to-awful. I still remember the piece that broke my back, that caused me to quit early: Shrek Dance Party.
I'd started teaching myself a bit of guitar, and after going back home to visit my parents, my mum saw me plucking her classical guitar with a pick, and set me straight, showing me the basics of how to hold the guitar, how to hold my hand, stressing that I really needed to be using my fingers with this style of guitar, her own playing days decades behind her. Before I left, she had taught me a simple version of Gaspar Sanz's "Espanoletas" (I still play it daily).
When I got back, I looked up some teachers. Emailed the one nearest me, a ten minute walk from the old house. And that was that.
We're now now starting year seventeen. At this point, I probably don't even need to take lessons. I'm at the point where I can learn on my own effectively. But the weekly-ish lessons (we both allow ourselves to cancel/move lessons as much as we want) help keep me practicing. And when I look at all the other instruments I play that I don't play, well...
As for my other instruments that I _do_ play, well, I'm slowly learning Irish fiddle music. Mostly just via YouTube, regular practice, recording-and-replaying. It's not something I do at my lessons. My lessons are for Proper string music only. But with Irish music, it's a lot of fun, and the gratification is quick. A lot of the stuff has a pretty similar form, typically AABB. It doesn't take a while to run down a piece, especially without repeats. It's a fun way to start my daily practice.
Earlier this week, and I can't remember the trigger, I purchased Gabrielle Zevin's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". It's a wonderful novel about love, collaboration, and tragedy, about friends who make games together and how their lives unfold, and end. I think I started it a few nights ago. I've already devoured it. Finished it last night. I immediately ordered Marlowe Granados' "Happy Hour", on a recommendation from a friend. We'll see if it's anywhere near as good.
Two novels in a month? Who am I?
Other than that, coming up in the next week: several lit mags, which all hit my mailbox at once, and Fagles' Aeneid. I'm really looking forward to the latter. It was an impulse purchase the last time I was at the bookstore, and it'll be my third readthrough of it. Or maybe fourth? Cecil Day-Lewis was my first; then Sarah Ruden, then Heaney's translation of Aeneid VI. Regardless. Fagles was actually my introduction to the Iliad, and I loved his version of it. I'm looking forward to watching the Achaeans leave for Italy, arrive in Libya at Carthage, meet Dido, watch her eventually climb her pyre in despair. It's winter - not officially, but temperatures are below freezing, and the snow is staying. It's the season for roasts, strong coffee, long books, and generous pours of whisky.