Damn.

[chaoswolf]

I think the display on Matrix is about to die.....(it's an old laptop. I'm not suprised. Doubtful mdlbear will let me play with his new toy, which he said would be the ressurection of Argo).


The following text has been cut for vulgarity and lots of excessive uber pissed-off-ness. Parents are evil. I'm not saying that I don't love my parents. That's not true. I love them both dearly. My problem is that they won't listen to me whenever I feel that something is beyond my comprehension. They tell me to work on it and to get help, but I am an extremely quiet person who hates asking for help. It's something that I don't ask for much because I know asking for it is not going to change who I am. On the other paw, as if asking for anything will change the way I think. I lack competence in my ability to work on something that I haven't even seen since the end of Spring '05 and have an entire year to make up before that incomplete turns into an F. I don't give a vrelt's behind if mdlbear said it took him "years of practice" before he got good at it. I personally am of the belief that people are musically gifted. I also believe that the "musically gifted" part applies to different insturments for different people. My insturment seems to be the dumbek drum, which actually is a hell of a lot easier to play than this damned guitar.

I see the incomplete as my failiure to convey the situation effectively to the proffessor but also his unwillingness to accept the fact that this did happen and that my concentration was shot to shit. I would perhaps feel better if the assignments were capable of being recorded/taken home, but he said he will not let me do this. I have asked a counselor (in an email several moments ago) if I could perhaps get him to talk to this jackass prof & see what he can do to fix the situation. I would rather not deal with this evil blockheaded shit any longer if I don't have to. It's possible the counselor won't be able to do much for me, so I guess that means I should start practicing.

I hate the guitar. I respect people who play it. I just feel that it's not my insturment after all.

Comments

If the dumbek is your instrument, play it proudly

[capplor.livejournal.com]

You don't have to play guitar because your father plays it, or program computers because your father programs. (Although, for the record, I'd not want to judge your abilities at anything from how well you learn from a parent. To me you seem better with computers than 80% of the folk out there. You just live with someone better than 99.99%)

Re: If the dumbek is your instrument, play it proudly

[chaoswolf]

Then how to get around this guitar problem with the incomplete?

Re: If the dumbek is your instrument, play it proudly

[capplor.livejournal.com]

That is a different problem, and I'm afraid out of my area of expertise. Ask your advisor? Ideally, you should have seen it coming and dropped the course before it came to that, but hindsight is easy.

[mdlbear]

You should start practicing. I will do whatever is in my power, including playing the pieces on keyboard so you can hear what they sound like, and helping you with chords and fingerings. You can do this -- I'm just a mediocre guitar player who's had a lot of years to practice without having much of it stick. I was comparing notes with filker0 and he agreed with me that what the audience hears as flashy guitar work is mostly just being sloppy.

[chaoswolf]

You make it look too fucking easy! I thought I could take this because of you. I thought I could take Unix because of you too.

I was wrong about Unix, and I'm probably wrong about this too.

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

Easy, girl. Breathe. Breath deep, tummy-breaths. Sit somewhere comfortable. Relax. Breathe deeeeeeeep, deeep into your tummy. Let yourself calm down before tackling this logically.

[chaoswolf]

Hang logic. There's no point in it anyway.

[mdlbear]

Oh, and yes I'll let you use the new laptop; remind me tomorrow to back up the Windows partition and set you up with a Linux account on it. Turns out Callie's going to be away that weekend, so I probably won't need it for recording. I may end up taking the mac from work.

[chaoswolf]

I will try to remind you.

[skunk-goddess13.livejournal.com]

I think the guitar is just a hard thing to play. I don't think its you. So I wouldn't quit if I were you

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is going to be helpful to you now, but it may well be later -- and you might surprise me. So here goes.

When one is very smart and very talented, one can often skate through life never having to put in the painstaking hard work, skull sweat and motor skill practice that most people have to do to achieve anything.

I never learned calculus because when I took it in high school, I was simply too lazy to put in the work. I haven't missed it much. But if I had put that energy in and learned calculus, this would have given me the discipline to tackle some of the higher maths -- and THAT knowledge, especially of advanced statistics, might have made the difference later in finishing rather than failing my doctorate.

What I did do in high school was distance running. Thirty to fifty miles a week, on top of a full school schedule. Because I was fanatic about stretching properly, I did not suffer any serious injuries -- but that level of physical exercise HURTS. It's very unfun, very obnoxious, and any number of times I was tempted to, in the words of a favorite cartoonist, "quit and get tanked."

However, I stuck with it. That high school experience -- that endurance of pain and unpleasantness -- has literally saved my life over and over again. Those few really bad times in my life where I had to reach down deep inside to do what had to be done despite the overwhelming pain, I had something there to grab on to.

I would strongly encourage you to take up something intellectually difficult like Unix, or involving complex motor skills like the guitar -- perhaps something that you would be the first in your family to learn -- just for the value of wrestling with and mastering something that is uniquely yours.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

It's really a shame (in a lot of ways) that Stripes is no longer with us. He was the first person I ever met who really was great in reducing guitar to simple, understandable steps. I really wish I'd kept it up, after he died. But I also realize musical instruments and I have a cognitive dissonance between us.

Of course, I was never really good at math, either. I always got A's in it (except for calculus, which I just couldn't get, and wasn't helped by a teacher who kept saying "don't try to understand it, just do it!", but that was simple hard work, involving a lot of swear and pounding of forehead, rather than talent and ability. (Mathematics is not to be confused with something like, say, geometry, which was a logic problem, rather than manipulation of numbers, and I actually enjoyed.)

Not changing who you are

[05-silvermaple.livejournal.com]

Ah, serious philosophical and emotional problem. I heard you say "asking for help...is not going to change who I am."

"Who you are" is changing all the time. You are making your soul, making yourself, all the time. I have seen you change. One of the ways you are changing is that you can, in some cases, ask for help. You asked for my help at Michigan, to talk to that dance teacher for you. It worked that time. It won't always work, but sometimes it does. You are getting better at asking for help than you were before.

You also change by imitating those you love, like we all do. You try new things, and fail, and try again, and quit, and try something else, and succeed. You get interested in something, then you lose interest. We all do these things. It is the process of life.

Reality is harsh - you can't talk your way out of some things. Reasons don't make a difference. There are just some things that you only get to do by doing them badly for a while, at first. I could help at Michigan by talking to that teacher. But if you were learning to ride a bicycle, say, no one talking to anyone could help if you fell off and got bruised - you'd just have to get back on.

But college is not reality; it is a limited subset of reality, a kind of game people agree to play, where people prove they are persistent by finishing things, and prove they are social by getting along with people they don't like, and quite often prove they are good learners by learning something *in spite of* the hurdles that college puts in front of them. You find out what you love that way.

About the incomplete. In my opinion, playing guitar was never meant as something to be graded in school. Music is for life, not for school. Now you are more worried about the incomplete than about the guitar playing. That's a shame! I wonder what you will decide to do. I have confidence that you will work something out.