getting there!

After about 9 months of violin, much of the noise sounds like music!

It's still a ridiculous instrument, sensitive to the smallest misstep in timing, or barely-perceptible muscle tension. It's a lot like singing that way, where you get these odd tips that are often not physically possible--my favorite is "sing while opening more space between your upper and lower molars"--but using that image, you can get your body into the right position. "Relax your sternohyoid muscles" is not helpful feedback for most of us.

My new teacher told me about "leading tones," which may have been in that second semester of Music Theory that I dropped out of. In the violin context, it means that certain notes--predictably, thank heavens--get played at a slightly higher pitch than normal, which amounts to placing your finger a millimeter or two higher than you would normally. In science-y terms, if you would normally play a B at 493.88 Hz, unless the next note is C, in which case you might play it at 494.5 Hz. He said, "Our brains make it sound better that way," and it did explain some passages whose correct intonation has escaped me.

On the other hand, it is a tremendous sense of accomplishment to actually get better at playing the violin, because the violin does not help you in the slightest.

cures for insomnia

Paradise Lost is...slow. Not with Moby-Dicks's virtuosity, but in a run-of-the-mill way that you can expect when reading epic poetry as a 21st-century modern. My last study of poetry was half a lifetime ago, and even my private school knows better than to push their freshmen too far beyond Shakespeare, so to the extent I ever knew that blank verse is unrhymed (usually) iambic pentameter, I forgot. (I did not forget that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, probably because I had a few years of studying theater before switching gears to computer science.) I may need to switch back to The Iliad, which offers some surprises, even though I know much of what there is to know (in English) about its background and storyline. Maybe because it's been so influential, Paradise Lost isn't promising anything interesting, when I have consumed many books and podcasts covering the poem, and its historicultural associates, from all kinds of angles.

It is a very refined turgidity, though. The scrupulously identical meter of each line, without no regard to sentence or speaker, is exhausting.

On the other hand, simply anticipating reading Milton, on the way to sleep, seems to help me sleep. So, hey. Mission accomplished.

Father's Day

We went to the Father's Day breakfast at the lake, and I ate a couple of pancakes and some orange juice, thus proving that age does not magically bestow wisdom. It's been a sleepy afternoon.

It's been a fine decade of parenting J, though of course he'll take some more time to grasp and accept the extent of my father-figure presence in his life. His biological father is a walking storm of issues--in his Magnanimous Mode, he said he could pick J up at the lake, allowing that I "might have some fatherly feelings" for the boy--who, like a toddler enforcing his ownership of a toy he doesn't actually like, guards his "father" place in J's world by assertion rather than by, I dunno, being a good father.

Fatherhood has granted me some priceless, heart-warming moments.

Around age 6ish, I was driving J somewhere by myself and he was angry I hadn't brought an iPad for him (or whatever), and he yelled "AAAAGH! YOU'RE THE WORST DAD, I MEAN STEPDAD, EVER!!".

But the all-time winner, even though it's second-hand:

One of J's birthday parties was at the place in Half Moon Bay where he took pony-riding lessons for a few years. His oldest friend, the son of Anna's oldest friend, met Bio-Dad, who introduced himself as J's father.

"I thought Chris was J's father."

And that's what happens when you don't show up.

shift.

I'm getting a new violin teacher, since the current one is moving to Austin for a 2-year residency with her string quartet. I had my first lesson with the new guy this weekend, and it looks like a good change: he's less dedicated to Classical Violin™, and I suspect has more experience teaching adults.

(Teaching adults is definitely a newer thing for the previous teacher, who compulsively tuned my violin at the start of every lesson--at the recital I discovered that this is normal, since of course most kids can't do it, especially for violin--and slipped uncontrollably into the "we" voice at times. She's Canadian, and very nice, and it doesn't bug me that much overall, so it hasn't been worth trying to change.)

Teacher #2 seems totally cool with my "close enough for rock 'n roll" tuning that one would expect from a guitar player (unlike many other instruments, the standard guitar tuning mathematically cannot be perfect, and then also my actual violin playing is the real tuning challenge, not whether my strings are in 100% perfect fifths), and his coaching feels more useful generally.

Evidently he also likes Nordic fiddle music! These guys, for example, who have a new album out:

And was interested to hear about a new band (Dreamers' Circus), as well as not one but two weird Swedish instruments which are not the nyckelharpa: the 5-course modern cittern, and the träskofiol, which of course is a large wooden shoe with violin fittings tacked on. So I'm feeling like he's better suited to help me reach my goal of playing folk music in bars.