Old Post Update

Today I imported in some old posts from my private journal that I thought should be shared with the whole world! (Or at least the 2 people who will ever read this blog.) This includes all posts from 3/29/09 and earlier.

Miniature Astronauts and Underground Fires

I had some crazy dreams last night.

I was on a spaceship orbiting Earth (or a similar planet) and half of the group went outside. They were doing surprisingly well for not having put on space suits. But then something happened and they got shrunk to about Smurf size. They got stuck outside and came up to the glass window, banging on it and yelling to be let in. One of the guys in the ship with me freaked out and thought we were under attack. He tried to shoot them through the glass with a strange harpoon-ish weapon. It broke the glass and half of the little guys were thrown off. They were hanging onto each other trying to climb back up to the window sill, which could slide up like a normal house window. They managed to get most of the women and children up onto the sill before the guy at the front lost his grip and they all fell towards Earth. Then I was one of them and I was falling miles and miles down to the ground. I was panicking and staring in amazement at how huge the Earth was. I was trying to figure out what we could do, but I couldn't think straight. I think I couldn't breath because of the rush of thin air. I continued falling for a minute or two before passing out.

Next thing I knew I was walking along a forest trail at a park. My dad and our dog Maggie was a little ways ahead on the path. Suddenly I noticed there was an open fire in a pit just to the side of the trail. I looked around, but no one seemed to be camping there, and I thought it was very irresponsible for someone to have lit a fire and then just left it burning. Another guy came along the trail and together we decided we'd just smother it with leaves and dirt and stamp it out. We did this, but then a few yards further on, up a slope, we saw three smaller fires burning up from the ground. As we moved up the little hill, we encountered more and more small fires that seemed to be coming from inside the hill itself. Obviously there was some sort of cave or burrow in the hill that was on fire, and we couldn't stop it. I ran to get the ranger from his cabin on the other side of the hill. It was the guy who guarded the gap in the wall in the movie Stardust. He and a woman ranger came around to look at what was going on. The old man started to climb the hill, and the woman told me not to worry, he used to go to Iceland and stop geysers or something. I climbed up too to see if I could help. At one point I felt the ground shake and I jumped out the way just as fire shot out of the ground like a volcano. Then there was a little girl stuck on the top of the hill. I helped her down to her family, but as I was helping her down the hill was more like a pile of blankets and couch cusions like a fort we used to build in the basement. Finally my Dad showed up to see what was going on and I had to keep Maggie from sniffing around the burning holes in the hill.

Then suddenly I was at home watching TV. I saw Carl Winslow from Family Matters doing the splits in spandex tights in some dancing-with-the-stars-esque reality show, and someone said "See Daddy, he can still do it, why can't you?"

Then I woke up.

Frankie Manning

Frankie Manning died today. He was just a month away from celebrating his 95th birthday at a huge swing event in New York. I always hoped I would get a chance to meet him or at least take a workshop with him before he was gone. Well, it's too late now. I hope when I'm old, I'm still dancing, doing what I love, like him. And I hope at least a handful of people remember me from my dance classes and think that I gave them something worthwhile.

Rainy Day

Today was a windy, rainy day. When I went out to lunch, I was miserable. I zipped up my jacket and squinted my eyes and got upset about being wet. On my way back, I just decided to smile. Suddenly, the rain was fun. And for some bizzare reason that made me want to start a weblog.

Rainy day, dream away
Ah let the sun take a holiday
Flowers bathe an' ah see the children play
Lay back and groove on a rainy day.
- Jimi Hendrix

Jazz Lessons

I started on Clarinet in 5th grade and played up until my 2nd year of college. I'm actually pretty good. Not phenomenal, but pretty good. I never took music theory or paid much attention to scales and chords and the like. I'm good at playing what's written on the page, not thinking about it so much.

I've always wanted to be able to play jazz. It just looks like so much fun. And I know I can improvise, I'm a dancer. I've done tap improv in front of audiences before no sweat. So I started taking jazz lessons, assuming it would come naturally to me without too much effort on my part. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

I don't understand 1/2 of what my teacher says. He assumes I know a lot more music theory than I do, seeing as I've been playing music so long. He says "B minor 7 chord" and slaps four fingers down on the piano, and I think "uuhhhhhhhhnngggggh" as my fingers randomly flutter around. I don't know the chord, I can barely remember how to play B-major. My fingers know how to do it, but I don't know what notes I'm playing. Or how to make it minor. And extracting the chord from that makes my head explode. I freeze up, try a couple wrong notes, freeze up again. I try to start slowly.

"Ok, B... B... ok, this is B. Do notes go up or down? Up, so the next one is A. No, C. How many flats in B? No wait, sharps. How many sharps? Like 5, or 6? C has gotta be one of them, ok, so C#. B, C#, A, no D. D#? Aha! D# is the 3rd. OK, if I can just remember that long enough to calculate the 5th and 7th, I'll have a chord. Oh shit... minor?"

All of that takes my teacher about 0.1 seconds to figure out. He just knows it. And while he's rattling on about how to go up the chord on a pivot to the 3rd of the next chord, play chromatically down to the root, then scale tones down and enclose the 7th, I'm still going "uhhhhhnnnnggghhh... is F# the 5th?" It's frustrating, for both of us. I can tell he feels like I am wasting both of our time, and I totally agree with him. The only way I'll get this stuff is to practice. But I don't. Ever. Not sometimes, or rarely, but never. I just can't seem to find time. I have a couple free hours during the week, and all I want to do with them is sit on the couch with a beer and a movie and try not to think about what time I have to get up in the morning. I feel like I am so far behind where he expects me to be, there's no way to catch up. It's like I'm trying to surf, but the wave is already past me so there's nothing to ride, and I'm just drowning in it's wake.

I've tried several times to work up the courage to quit. But every week I go I feel miserable and guilty, and then I think "OK, this week I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna practice every day, and I'm gonna get this stuff" but I never do. I want to. I want to be good at this, I want to be able to jam with a swing band at a dance and just have fun with it. I miss playing. But I hate feeling like a beginner again. I'd forgotten how hard it is to be a beginner at anything. It's easier when you're in school because everyone's a beginner together, but now it's just me, and I feel pathetic.

I'm going to practice tonight.