Wake up. Go back to sleep. Wake up. Go back to sleep. Wake up. Realize putting off making the floor appear again will not make the floor appear; pick up my room.
Open fridge. “AIEE VEGETABLES GOING BAD!” Steam, stir-fry, and consume inane amounts of bok choy, tofu.
Reply to 262 emails. Decide a better strategy of handling emails will be needed soon.
Train! Olin challenge fail! (Ran into Jessie Sullivan.) Buy beer brewing supplies with Chris! Go “zomg must now learn biology and chemistry!” (This for the something-dozenth time – it seems like I need Massive Spiral Learning to get even the basics of those two subjects into my head. That is okay. At least I know this now.)
Bus! MaunaLoa! “I brought cheese and bread for the eating of the cheese!” “Yay!” “This room needs more photons!” “Yes! Yes! The light is broken!”
That’s it so far – I have way too much energy to dissipate through typing alone, so I’m going to run around a while after I post this up…
While playing “Jump Monk” with the SOLOS GO HERE! part I asked Kevin if there was something other than the F blues scale, blues licks, and arpeggios I could play over the bass lines. He said “yeah, you could play one of the minor scales in this part.” “One of?” I said. “You mean there’s more than one?”
Whoa boy there are a lot of scales. My world before yesterday consisted of two scales: major and minor. Okay, okay. Three. Major, minor, and blues. Then Kevin proceeded to take me through an “I know kung-fu!” Matrix-style moment with a crash course in the modes. Ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian (my favorite), locrian… and then you can layer them on top of all the different kinds of chords (which I only know a few of now – major, major 7, dominant, minor, minor 7, minor 7 flat 5, diminished, augmented…) There are more scales than this and now I want to learn them alllllll.
I’ll leave the combinatorics as an exercise for the reader, and not every combination sounds good, but a lot of them sound awesome in a way I haven’t heard before, and – better yet – some of them sounded awesome in a way I had.
After that first flash of “I have heard this before!” recognition, I went home and spent an hour (I would have spent more but I was about to pass out over the keyboard) on the first 10 bars of an impromptu that I learned 9 years ago trying to figure out what chords and keys and scales were going on. It was slow going, partly because I’m new to this and had to put a cheat sheet on the whiteboard so I could remember which scales were which, and partly because when I finally figured out what was going on in one bar I would get super-excited and bounce around and play that bar a dozen times or so while being really, really happy.
(There’s been a lot of happiness like that in my life lately. There’s been a lot of learning-things. The two are very much related.)
Classical music takes on a whole new depth when you can say “ooh! That’s an augmented arpeggio under a mixolydian scale on the third of the root!” Laugh at my newbie syntax-mangling all you want; getting corrected is how I learn it properly. I’m new to this subset of language, and am still saying things like “sharp 1″ instead of “flat 9″ – mathematically isomorphic, but apparently not what musicians usually say.
I want to write down what I’m learning about music because there’s so much of it and I need to teach this stuff to other people so I can internalize and remember it. I’m not sure how to do this yet.
Kevin asked me to pick a new song to work on for piano this week, since I’m at the point where I can play some basic blues and “Take the ‘A’ Train” without freezing up with panic, and (thanks to pianopracticer.py) able to go “oh! D flat minor 7 flat 5 BAM!” and such. (It feels so good. Even better; I know I’m just at the beginning of the learning curve.)
I’m playing Hanon twice as fast as when I started now (150bpm w00t); I sometimes remember which sharps and flats go with what keys, with the kind of knowing that turns itself on when my fingers hit the keyboard, not something purely intellectual – this is a different kind of knowing for me. Forcing myself to play at pika helped with my “freak out when people listen to me” thing. (It’s not gone, but I’m learning how to ignore it better.) Teaching Not and Woon the small shreds of blues stuff I can play helped, too. Music is awesome. Yay for great teachers who keep you in disequilibrium!
Anyway. My usual strategy for picking things to learn (case in point: my major) is “what confuses/terrifies me the most?” So I set about flipping through my fake book to find the song that was the most “wtf?” inducing. This is how I discovered Charles Mingus. I didn’t know half the notation in the songs attributed to him, and there were big SOLOS GO HERE! parts that I found recordings of online and went “what in the world?” It’s like someone threw a bunch of notes into a blender and then poured them out again so that they self-assembled into a 7-tier cake; it sounded awesome but made no sense whatsoever. (Yes, I’m very new to listening to jazz.)
So I picked the longest and the most confusing Mingus piece in my book, “Jump Monk,” went to Kevin’s studio, and said “I want to learn this!” He looked at me, looked at the music, and then looked at me again. “I’m masochistic!” I said, and then explained my song-choosing methodology. He grinned. We listened through Jump Monk together, went “oh wow, oh boy, oh wow,” and then went to the piano where Kevin began to teach me how to take it apart and play with it.
It’s, uh… hard. (And therefore I am happy.) Listen to the recording link, and then imagine going “how would I recreate all of that if I only had a piano and two smallish hands, and the improvised melodies occasionally strayed outside my hearing range?” I like.
I need more music. MORE! MORE! Where can I get more jazz and blues?
I was sitting in Government Center picking my one-pin tumbler over and over, waiting for the train and listening to a busker play guitar, when I realized I’d heard the same guy playing the same song, over and over, for… years. Train at the Park Street station; same thing – a singer this time, one I’d earlier pointed out to Ian: “In five years, I’ve heard him sing three songs. ‘The Candy Man,’ ‘Singing in the Rain,’ and the one you’re hearing now.” “Do you think that makes him happy?” Ian asked.
I don’t know. Comfortable, maybe. You need something stable to measure your changes against. And stable doesn’t always mean stagnation. I don’t know if those two musicians think the same way. Granted, maybe they can’t – they’ve tested these 3 songs to bring in the most money… me, I feel like I’m most optimized when I’m off-kilter and in constant motion. Another way of putting it is that the things I want to optimize for are always in unstable equilibrium.
If I had a million dollars
I’d build a tree fort in our yard
If I had a million dollars
You could help, it wouldn’t be that hard
If I had a million dollars
Maybe we could put like a little tiny fridge in there somewhere
If anyone has ever had any doubts about what I would do if I (by some weird, bizarre chance) became ridiculously wealthy, this is part of it.
Myself, I’d want a giant, sun-washed kitchen with a garbage disposal, a dishwasher, and a mini blowtorch hanging on the wall (you know… in case.) My own bedroom, because I need to not-sleep sometimes. A bike, a skateboard, rollerblades, and means of maintaining them; a wok and bamboo spatula, a blender, a rice cooker with steamer, a cutting board and a sharp santoku knife.
Bookshelves. And ready access to a maker space that’s full of people using awesome tools (laser cutter in the garage, a welding shed, etc.) to Make Things to Solve Problems, with mess rooms for painting and the like, a music room, an open room with mats and mirrors for dancing and wrestling and learning how to do backflips, an organic garden in the back for Produce of Awesome for my kitchen, and whiteboard walls.
And then enough to feed me, let me fly (coach – though I would like to, just once, fly across an ocean first class) to visit people occasionally, and study… anything I want. Tuition money, basically.
Aside from the kitchen – and that’s why I visit and cook at other people’s houses - I almost have all of this, actually. Not so much “ready access” to these spaces (note to self: move to Cambridge, not East Boston), but I can do these things if I want to – I have friends who’ll teach me things while I’m saving for grad school tuition, I have…
And I can reach beyond myself and do things with my time and with myself instead of with the money I don’t have – maybe will never have. Having money would sure be nice. It makes a lot of things much easier. It helps. It helps you not worry as much. (Sometimes I worry.)
POINT #1: ALL THE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORLD FAILS IF IT CAN NOT BE HARNESSED.
POINT #2: WE STILL DO NOT HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF FEDORA WORK ITEMS SUITABLE FOR NEWBIES — BUT WE WILL FIX THAT.
This is an absolutely key problem to solve. The following scenario is one that we must avoid at all costs:
Newbie: I just found out that I can help this cool project called Fedora! I’m going to go to the Fedora site to learn more!
(An hour of searching an inherently confusing wiki follows.)
Newbie: This is really hard. I think I’ll go play Freeciv instead!
Note: MORE WIKI PAGES DO NOT SOLVE THIS PROBLEM.
Skills management. It is a problem. We are all learning how to solve it. This is a tough question, because conventional management training (I may be speaking wrongly, as I have little formal business training and have not read every book on the subject – but I’ve read a lot and asked around a lot) seems to focus on how to run things when you do have a chain of hired command.
When you can’t order people to do things, you have to use other ways of getting things beyond your individual capacity to happen. How do you do that? I’m looking at fundraising, nonprofit volunteer recruitment… these are all full-time jobs. What if you have a full-time job? What if you can’t take that much time? What do you do?
But there never seems to be enough time To do the things you want to do Once you find them – Time in a Bottle
I’ve heard that the smartest people are the ones who can simultaneously hold the most (in number and in extremity of contrast) contradictory truths in their head at once. I hope this is true. Right now I’m in the “extraordinarily confused” stage and continuing to stumble forward until the dawn breaks once more (it’s happened before, and I expect the cycle to repeat many times over). Disequilibrium is a wonderful plateau to be on, and comforting in a weird way when you know it’s going to pass someday.
Also: perhaps the reason why startup founders put in such long hours is that they have to keep their company real by sheer force of constant belief – for instance, if I went to sleep tonight, thousands of people would still continue to act as if, say, IBM and General Motors and the like were real. So they are real, because they’re real to us.
But if I had an idea and started it and then I went to bed, then nobody would know, and that vision would wink out of being while I slept. Maybe it wouldn’t wake up again. You don’t know. If you want that vision to stay alive and to persist in the beliefs and actions of others, you have to stay up, you have to believe in it yourself, and act accordingly – act like it’s a fact that will (of course!) be staying.
Turning “real to me” into “real to us” into “of course it’s real!” is – well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?
