A Persuasive Advertisement for a Ride of Undetermined Length on a Time Boat

Hero comes to save the day, lead the way. In a suit and a sweatpants, your point is moot, here's how I dance. The hero follows the crowd ahead of them, keeping a nice straight spine despite any internal resistance. Toes are stubbed gracefully. The march leads to April, who has flowers and knows her Leonardo.

Eros thumbs through the newspaper, and fingers through a notebook. The hero learns that Eros is the god of chaos. Eros learns that heroes don't just divide and conquer they unite and bonk her.

He rows. He rows because it's his job, and because it's fun. He goes two ways at once- first reaching Europe like reverse Columbus, then across the Pacific like neo-Cook. In France they give him a rose. In Hawaii they roast a pig. They were already there on that little-used beach, and the pig was done at the moment the ship landed.

Cheerios for her, for the earthly bird gets the worm. Cheerios for him as he groggily looks out on the water and sees Madagascar/Thursday approaching. Madagascar is just a way of looking at things, but Thursday is coming whether you like it or not.

Mad at gas cars? Worried about lack of flurries? Step aboard my time boat. The more people on it, the better it floats.

Wonkavator!

It's been a few days since I started another blog, so I figured I better get on that. I also realized that the two posts I had planned in my head were about 1) Hilary in Bosnia and 2) My life as a barn owl. In the interest of a little blog consistency I've started the Wonkavator, where I will be depositing all my political thoughts. The Welcome Cat is for sports and Thank Dog will continue to be about thanking dogs and whatever else I feel like sharing. Thanks for reading.

D is for Do It!

I came across a cool interview in the Monthly Aspectarian with a revolutionary in the music learning field. Apparently this guy has people reading music and slowly playing Bach after one weekend, and writing their own songs after two weekends. I haven't gelled with an instrument in a satisfactory way since middle school, so this was nice to read. It's never too late to become a rockstar.

The interviewee, Duncan Lorien, also discusses the resistance he runs into from people who think that it takes years to become a good piano player, and there are no two ways about it. That makes enough sense. A prolonged study leading up to competence is the expected norm for non-savants. I'm not convinced it has to be that way though. While acknowledging that there are people who have thought about this a lot more than I have and would disagree with me, and that these statements don't come close to describing all teachers, I see these issues with some conventional music lessons:

1) Boring.
"Today we'll start with scales, and if you get those, I'll show you 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'" It's really not much harder to teach someone three blues chords and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

2) Elemental over Logical.
Lorien points out that learning piano generally starts with middle C. It was probably around my 3rd or 4th piano lesson that I could identify middle C consistently on my own. Not bad, but here's how Lorien introduces the keyboard:
If you look at a keyboard, you have white keys and you have black keys. If you look at the black keys, they are arranged in a pattern. Groups of two, three, two, three, all the way up the keyboard....
Now imagine a group of two black keys. When I say a group of two, I mean two. A group of two as opposed to two taken from a group of three. If you imagine a group of two and now look at the white note in between that group of two black notes, the name of that note it D. D for Duncan. Now what is the white key to the left? C. What’s the next white key to the left, B and so on.

"This is Middle C," is an isolated fact. The D pattern is consistent and recognizable. Minds are into that shit.

3) Sequence of learning tailored to piano not student.
That's an unfair generalization to many, but perhaps not enough.

All this is not to say that piano education is flawed (it is, but what I'M trying to say is) if there's something you've wanted to learn but you've been convinced that for you it is unlearnable, give it another look. It may have been the process, not the processed. You now have one less excuse to not be a knitter/neuroscientist/rockstar.

(I'd like to be all three, and knitting honestly looks the most daunting to me.)

The Welcome Cat

While I've enjoyed assaulting you from all sides with every topic I feel like tangoing with, it's time to realize that this is at least two blogs. In celebration of sports, the culture of analysis and silly but meaningful commentary that's grown around it, and whatever wongles I can contribute, I've started a sports blog. I moved the MLB preview over there to get it started. It's called "The Welcome Cat" and you'll find it right here.

I figure I've got one blog going, why not two? Maybe three if I decide to do a separate political one. You are welcome to check it out at your leisure.

The Fates Have Interns...

...and they don't always have the elegance of the senior weavers.

When the Possum Met the Sun

When the possum met the sun, he was deep in his burrow. He was alone, safe from predators, with no need to forage. He heard the humming of the grass above him, and felt the truth in the dirt. The sun entered welcome and unexpected, connecting with the possum at his chest. He wasn't burnt, he was connected, and for a moment, he felt no need at all to burn anything. Not his food or his anger. He had a new fire, more complete and wiser than the harsh wisps and licks he was used to. There was no telling how that light would look out in the open, but deep in his burrow, the possum was wonderful and content.

The return was difficult. He got a sort of traveling sickness on the way back, though he'd only gone somewhere by connecting to the huge sphere, impossibly huge, inexplicably equal to the moon from our point of view. He needed all of the next day to feel normal again. Now it's back to foraging, burrow maintenance and the like, but the possum knows he has a new friend, and he'd like to visit again sometime.

Moonday Marbles

Hey superfriends-

Been having some technical difficulties get in the way of posting lately, but I wanted to drop in and say that I basically went on a vision quest in my dreams last night. I do that once in a while. It was fun. Scary at points, because a rogue government, possibly our own, was shooting missles at us. There was also a potentially dangerous dog-lion, some steep downward climbs and a mean old lady. The good parts included lush vegetation, the rewards of shifting and/or maintaining a perspective at crucial moments, deceiving the dog-lion by using a second door, and becoming the leader of a ragtag group of Oberlin students and Wholefoods employees. Also, I got to meet Conan. He was relaxed and funny while we hid from the missles in a train station. Tremble the Cat woke me up for breakfast mid-quest, and after I got back to sleep, I went right back to the journey from where I'd left it. I rarely do that with dreams, but you can't leave a quest in the middle. Well I guess you can if it's just not all you dreamed it would be, but that was obviously impossible in this case.

Thanks for reading, and remember: Monday is all in the Mind.