squeak squeak squeak

I'm enjoying my violin, which sounds mostly tolerable and only occasionally appalling. It's often said the violin family are the instruments best able to mimic the human voice, and at the right moments, my violin certainly sounds just like the voice of someone in extreme torment. At other moments, it sings the unhappy keening of a cat in heat: truly a versatile instrument!

I do come to the violin with several advantages over 5th-grade children in the 80s:

1. Decades of experience teaching me that difficult things are difficult, and the only rational response is to accept that you're a beginner and practice a lot.
2. 25(!) years of playing guitar, which is, from a broad physics perspective, identical to the violin.

#2 may not be entirely obvious, but they share more terminology than not. The strings start at the head, wrapping around the tuning pegs (which are often just called tuners on a guitar, where they are also geared, as on the violin's larger siblings); pass over the nut and continue down the neck, over the fingerboard to the bridge and ending in the tailpiece. There are also top/back/sides, and, one of my favorite names, purfling.

I know all this because (a) I learn stuff easily enough that it's my all-consuming hobby; (b) when I first picked up the guitar, I had a copy of The Guitar Handbook, which, along with a string-winder, should be issued to every new guitarist; and (c) the Internet.

One handy thing the guitar has are frets, metal bars on the fingerboard which show you where to put your fingers. The violin presents you with an undifferentiated expanse of black. You get to learn, probably by ear-abusive trial and error, the muscle memory of where your fingers go.

Happily, the frets on a fretted instrument (guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, etc.) are not placed and spaced by accident, nor even by art, but by the glories of science! The quick version is that the frets get predictably closer together as the string gets shorter and the pitch gets higher. The violin is quite a bit shorter than the guitar, but I've been playing guitar a long, long time and I have a pretty good feel for where the frets should be.

...leaving me free to observe how cramped my fingers are.

Here are the things that have to go right for a violin to make some basic, passable music:

• The bow must be at the right tension.
• The bow must have the right amount of rosin on it.
• You must be applying the right amount of pressure on the bow.
• The right amount of pressure is different on the ends and the middle.
• You must be moving the bow at the right speed.
• You must be moving the bow perpendicular to the strings.
• You must place your fingers precisely on the unmarked fingerboard, with a margin of error that is essentially zero.
• You must do all of these things at the same time and coordinated with each other.

This leaves out how you hold the bow, angle of the violin, and various other body mechanics.

Sooo, yeah. That's why I'm taking violin lessons. Should keep me off the streets for a while.

I bought a violin.

I'm not entirely sure why I do these things. It goes from "hey, that looks like fun" and progresses to "those movements look almost entirely alien to my body" and finally peak at "student violins aren't very expensive at all," and only afterward do I remember that when we were choosing instruments back in 5th grade, I avoided the violin because everyone said it was relatively difficult. I chose the trumpet, instead.

Now that I've become acquainted with the violin's 17th-century technology--no joke, it's like the Plimoth Plantation of musical instruments--I see that in the general case, everyone was more or less correct.

In my specific case, however, I chose the trumpet and then also had braces for 4 years, and these were the old-school braces where they glue caltrops onto (most relevantly) your incisors for the duration, which amped up the difficulty of the trumpet to where its only competition would have been other horns.

I often do things because they're challenging--

Hmm. It's possible I only do things when they're challenging, unless there's no other choice.

I have my reasons, I guess.

part of the problem.

We've lived in this house well over 4 years now, and the neighborhood is changing. I don't know how much it was accelerating before we adopted Leela last year; now that I have a roommate who will literally start jumping up and down and barking at me if not walked soon enough after eating, I see the change very clearly. Houses do change hands, it's true, but mostly what I see is Latino families moving out.

I'd never bothered to think about it, but it takes a much longer time to move out than to move in. Moving in, your new place ingests whatever boxes and couches you've chosen to bring with you, and you put the bed together and unpack a couple pots and then you're officially living there.

Moving out, especially as a tenant, should just be the mirror end of the process, but instead it drags on and on. Maybe your housemate leaves some stuff behind. Maybe you like your new girlfriend more than she hates your couch. Stuff has to be Freecycled, or put out through Craigslist, or left out on the curb. If you're using the Friends & Family Moving Company, just moving stuff takes days and days, depending on when your someone's co-worker or relative has a truck available. Then the place has to be cleaned up enough to get the security deposit back.

So it takes a week or two or three, and the dog routes are arbitrary enough that I rarely pass a house less than once every week or two. The people on the streets are more white and Asian, with some black and Southeast Asian. More dogs and babies being walked; fewer poorly-behaved, stir-crazy dogs barrelling into their deadbolt-weight screen doors as we go past. Cars become newer, unmodified, European: Mini, Fiat, BMW, Volvo, Audi.

The problem with gentrification is that it's an inevitable outcome of having cities where people can buy and sell real estate. The Latino couple who raised their kids in this house, before retiring to Gilroy to be full-time absentee slumlords, were going to sell the house, one way or another. There was no scenario in which that didn't happen. Probably flippers wouldn't have bought it--too much work for too little profit--but the way it had appreciated, its days as a run-down low-income rental property were over.

The neighborhood does better when the homes are cared for: after the two very exciting police incidents in the first few months, our intersection is quieter, and seems to be calmer every time Anna has some dismal trees removed, or has a fence put up, or engineers the window replacements, or gets the house painted.

The evenings smell less and less like delicious Mexican food, though. We're losing so much diversity, and I don't know where it ends up.

I'm betting it's gonna be messy.