78299505
I’m not proud of this, but
I’ve been playing around with some multitrack recording. Here is Danny Boy for four trombones plus numerous warts. Did I mention that I played trombone today for the first time in two years?
78201355
Cramp
My handwriting is terrible. It is difficult to read, and it causes me pain, both physical and emotional. That’s why I’ve always avoided using it, and that’s why exam time is such a headfuck.
When I finished school in 1989, I could have been forgiven for thinking that I’d never have to hand-write an essay again. I could have looked at the edge of my middle finger, worn raw from hours of excruciating scrawl, and thought that it might be able to heal for good.
But now I’m about to head off again. Politics yesterday, history today, philosophy on Friday, words, words, words, and every one a chore. I’ve never been one to abbreviate in e-mails or SMS messages, but once I come to put pen to paper, every saved character is a blessing.
My script is bad at the start of the exam. It gets worse. I try to compensate by double spacing and writing about five words to a line, so that at least the examiner will be able to tell one word from another, even if he/she can’t identify them. I’ve come to realise what it is to have a handicap. Seriously. I’m pretty sure that, given a keyboard, I could write these exams as well as anyone. My shithouse penmanship puts me at a disadvantage, and there’s buggerall I can do about it. I’m sure that if I was quadriplegic or something I’d be able to argue for a technological solution to my challenges. As it stands, though, I think I’m just going to have to continue to pay for my lack of diligence in Mrs Ebert’s grade two class. For ignoring all those little arrows which we were supposed to follow around the bulbous shapes of perfectly-formed letters. For discarding the rubbery triangular prism which was placed on my pencil for remedial purposes. I’m paying the price as an adult for mistakes I made when I was seven years old! Is that fair?
77886465
My New Scheduling Strategy
I’ve been mulling it over for a week or two and now I’ve finally instituted it. I’ve decided to manage my time.
I’ve got this problem, whereby once I start doing something, I’m unable to leave it until I’ve finished it. That doesn’t sound like such a problem, until you consider an important side-effect: knowing that I’m going to be tied to a task until it’s completion, I’m reluctant to embark upon it unless I know that there’s enough time to finish it. It annoys me to imagine that I might have to abandon the task in the middle and go on to something else. So I fart-arse around doing nothing instead, waiting (sometimes weeks) until the day when there are enough contiguous free hours to dive in with an appropriate amount of one-eyed obessiveness.
There are two problems with this. The first is that, obviously, those contiguous hours don’t come up nearly as often as an equivalent number of discontiguous ones might. So in waiting for the five hours together that I need to finish a particular job, I might waste ten hours that pass in ones or twos. Also, even when those big bundles of hours do come along, I find that I’m get really shitty by the third or fourth hour. I tend to work very intensely at whatever I’m doing, and I burn out pretty quickly. Dividing the task up into smaller allotments would make a lot of sense.
The problem has been how to overcome my reluctance to start working, and my reluctance to stop once I’ve begun. My answer is to schedule my day in total defiance of every Bohemian ideal I might have once held up. It’s sad, but it has to be done. I’ve got my electronic device to help me with a reminder beep when it’s time to start, and time to stop.
I have all these fantasies (looking intently at PDA screen): “Now, just my daily half-hour on the website and I’ll have finished for the day”, or “Aha, it’s time for my half-hour-a-week of car maintenance” or “Gosh, time to change the air filter on my bass amplifier again? How the year flies!” Which contrasts with my usual effort: “Now, do I have time to do the dishes” (looks at filthy pile with vermin at play) “Nah, that’ll take ages. What’s on telly?”
So far, I’ve adhered to my new plan with pious zeal. It’s been about four hours.
77835939
Woes Financial
It’s my first winter in Melbourne. Just when I thought that my bank balance had started to level out from the vertiginous drop that it was describing towards the beginning of the year, I find that my diary is suddenly empty again. Even the latter day saviour, my five hours of teaching a week, is about to dry up for three long weeks of school holidays. My one gig for this week just got cancelled, which would be fine if there were lots of gigs coming up. There aren’t.
Apparently all global upheavals can be associated with particular economic conditions. It could be that my current economic conditions might cause an upheaval of their own. Namely, that I might become openly proactive about generating income, perhaps for the first time. It’s easy enough to be complacent as long as money continues taking care of itself. Right now money, suffice it to say, isn’t. And it’s shitting me.
77690898
Issues
A compulsive need to preserve dignity can be a real liability sometimes. An ability and/or desire and/or at least willingness to humiliate oneself must be an asset in all sorts of social and/or professional situations. Self-effacement, for instance, is a blunt weapon in the hands of one who has long been culpably negligent when it comes to taking the piss out of himself.
77640325
100 Pages a Day
It doesn’t sound like that much to read. In fact, it’s not that much, and I can do it fairly readily on a one-off basis. When the book is dense, though (Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes) and when I’m busting to finish it before my exam on Friday and when I have to read 100+ pages every day for about a week to accomplish that, the act of reading becomes less of a pleasant pastime. My brain starts to behave in strange ways. My flow of consciousness starts to imitate the author’s way of writing. My body starts to resent the time spent dedicated to my mind at it’s (my body’s) expense, and starts twitching and aching and demanding food and water at ever-decreasing intervals. The pages crawl by with the speed of centuries. I’m plagued by the conviction that I’m not going to remember 95% of what I’m reading (probably true) and that it would be irrelevant to the exam questions even if I did (also probably true). Still, only another two days before this exam, and I can start reading another book for another exam instead, thus at least changing the tenor of the annoying voice in my head.
77554152
GFGWB Day
I don’t think that I’m the only one. There must be people all over the globe who can’t see George W. Bush’s face on TV without crying out in a spontaneous, Tourette’s-like burst: “Get fucked, George W. Bush!”
Perhaps we could get together and form a global movement, recruiting an ever-increasing army of supporters. Eventually, every time W. shows his mug, there will rise from city and suburbs a primal howl along the lines of that which greets a contentious holding-the-ball decision at Colonial Stadium, only on a global scale. Surely then he’d have to get the message.
77453389
Procrastination
The end of lectures and the beginning of exams opens up a whole host of opportunites for putting off the inevitable. Whereas before I knew exactly what work I had to complete before what deadlines, now it has become easy to convince myself that I have plenty of time, which is the key to successful procrastination. Witness the last two hours of meaningless web surfing, made marginally functional only by the fact that I managed to figure out what I need to do to transfer my South Australian licence over to a Victorian one, something else that I’ve been procrastinating over for the last six months. Not that I’ve gone so far as to actually change it over, mind you. I’m a bit concerned that, when I bought my van, I didn’t actually go into VicRoads and do the licencing business myself. I left that in the hands of the dealer, despite having had a nasty experience in the past with a dealer who did the wrong thing. Hopefully it’s all okay, but fear of discovering the worst is a powerful motivator for avoiding a venture into government bureaucracy.
On another note, I played a gig last night with a 28-piece big band, at a function which could have been catered for quite happily by five well-trained musicians. The budget for the music probably ran to around $10,000, I think, which makes me all the more inclined to revisit my ideas about forming a band to cater to these sorts of functions. For all the whinging of the music industry doomsayers, there’s still plenty of money around if a group of motivated musos is prepared to position themselves properly.
77287686
Back
I’m in the process of reassembling bits of my life after the seismic shocks that have passed through it over the last four months or so by virtue of an unexpected romance and my return to academia. I’ve been pretty proud of the relative grace with which I’ve been able to accommodate these tectonic shifts in my lifestyle, but of course, they (the tectonic shifts) did open up the odd fissure into which slid a few of the important projects that I was working on before, my weblog being one of them. I can’t make any guarantees, but I feel as if I’m almost in a position now where my effort might become a little more concerted. And the blog idea is really too cool to just give up on.
Tonight I’ve begun drafting a manifesto with which I hope to rally enthusiasm amongst the prospective members of a new band that I’m planning to start up. If it all sounds a bit serious and businesslike to be taking place in the jazz world, it’s not a coincidence. I’ve decided that I’m a bit (a lot) over the whole casual attitude of the jazz scene, and that with a lot of talent and a bit of corporate-esque motivation, it might actually be possible for a bunch of musos to make a decent living. Time will tell.