frets are for chumps.

I'm still learning the violin! It's great. It's an absurd instrument, but as long as I'm willing to spend 10 minutes trying to get the same 6 notes right, gratification is near-instant. My teacher says that's the great thing about teaching adults: we understand that repetition is not exciting, but that's how you learn stuff.

(Years ago a guy taught a first-aid class at the dojo, and he had this defensive/defusing banter down about how we were all going to hate him by the end because of the repetition. I went up to him at the break and said, "I see why you need that elsewhere, but you should understand that you're teaching a roomful of people who have quite literally spent decades doing the same movements over and over, and we get it. You can relax a bit." Which he didn't, very much, but I tried.)

I have a 5-day work conference in San Diego in May, and I don't really want to go a week without playing, so I'll bring the violin along and hope the practice mute and the normal hotel soundproofing work well enough that I can practice without complaints.

I'm at the point in Volume 1 of the Suzuki Method where the music gets more interesting, because "It's by Bach, instead of Suzuki." In this case it's Minuet #1, and YouTube is full of people playing it who clearly had it under their belts quite some time ago, if you're interested. I just play it over and over, mostly in bits and pieces, doggedly trying again and again until I get it better.

My fingers have a memory of their own. I'll play a passage, make an identifiable new mistake, decide to fix it on the next run-through, only to have my fingers make the same mistake. This is where I hit a wall performing as a classical guitarist, not just that I didn't practice enough (which was certainly true) but that my fingers just...didn't do what I told them to do, and it was worse with performance nerves.

Some years back, Anna read or saw a story from someone with autism, who said that they would tell their body to do something, like "raise my right hand," and instead their body just came out with some randomized action. Anna asked J if he ever felt that way, and without looking up, said "Yeah. All the time."

So it happens that trying to play an actual instrument with fine motor control might be my only analogue to his physical experience. (I can definitely be sensorily overwhelmed, but not in quite the same way, and I can power through it if that's what's needed.)

Did I mention I actually went to physical therapy for my left thumb? My thumbs took some heavy hurting from aikido, and then I fell on my left hand a while back walking the dog, which didn't matter much until I tried keeping my left thumb from clamping onto the violin neck. One of many differences about the violin is that you are not using the left thumb to press on the neck to counteract the force of pushing your fingers down on the string. This is the opposite of the guitar, so I was trying to keep my thumb away from the neck, at the same time as these accumulated injuries pulled in the opposite direction, and then that really hurt. PT's been so helpful, I forgot to make more appointments.

I was doing some reading this weekend and learned that:

• Aaron Copland's Rodeo was actually a ballet score;
• he was kind of in a hurry, so "Hoe-Down" (known to earlier generations as "the music from 'Beef. It's What's For Dinner.'") is a pretty direct orchestration of a fiddle tune called "Bonaparte's Retreat";
• actually, it's an orchestration of the 1941ish transcription of a single 1937 recording of one guy's way of playing a song he called "Bonaparte's Retreat."
• (It kind of keeps going, but I'll spare you.)

I did eventually track down some sheet music for it, and it's...well beyond my level right now, even if I were willing to alter my violin tuning. For an exploration of the subject, I refer the reader to the Bluegrass Intelligencer article "Old-Time Music Permanently Revokes All Song Titles."