mihi (for me)
Just a small warning that there's a long rant ahead.
I just played my trumpet for the first time in nearly 2 years. That's the longest I've gone without playing it since I started back in 1995 (5th grade.)
I can't even begin to explain how freaking good it felt.
I pulled out my Arban's book, all the music I ever got from Spirit of Atlanta Drum and Bugle Corps, and my flip-folder and mini-folders full of marching band music from high school. It was almost as though I never stopped playing (except for the fact that my chops wore out after only about 30 minutes whereas I used to be able to practice for 12 hours a day with hour long breaks in between 4 hour blocks.) I thought it would make this pitiful 'pfffthhht' sound when I first tried to produce a note, but I made a clear, strong, low C, as I intended to do. I got giddy. Doodled around doing some chromatics exercizes. At first my fingers were a little clumsy with the sequences, but they remembered after a minute. I was really putting my basal ganglia (part of the brain if you didn't know) to work, executing habituated motor and cognitive 'programs' or 'scripts' associated with the trumpet. Hey, lookie there, I just made starting back playing my trumpet relevant to what were talked about in biological psychology on Monday.
The rush of feelings I got from playing through the Little Shop of Horrors show from my freshman year of high school, or the Beatles show from my Junior year...the vivid memories of being in the stands in Sharp Stadium while I jazzed through Jungle Boogie and Lucretia Mac Evil...man, I can't even explain it. But (here I go with the neuroscience dorkiness again) I understand a lot better another thing we were talking about in biopsych on Monday: the connection between sensory input and emotion. Sensory input ranging from the smell of the valve oil, the feel of the mouthpiece on my lips, or hearing the songs...all of those sensations have very strong emtions and vivid memories attached to them, and they're all good.
Creating music is a way to make yourself happy without depending upon anyone else in the world. You don't even have to have a sheet of music in front of you to do it (which in a sense is depending upon someone else but not in the sense to which I am referring,) you can just start jammin', try to figure out songs you've heard before by doodling around, or just play notes in euphonic sequence. It doesn't matter what you do, but it all feels good. Ask any kid with one of those toy xylophones or a recorder, they'll tell you it's lots of fun to make up songs on it, even though they have no real idea what they're doing. They're just making music, though usually it sounds more like noise to the adults around, but hey, suum cuique, any type of music worshiped by someone is going to sound like noise to someone else in the world.
Recently, I've been made painfully aware of how much people depend on others for their happiness. It's a common theme everywhere, but especially among the people I know across the country it seems, at least in the past few months. I know I have been guilty several times of being completely reliant on someone in order to maintain happiness (and in fact one of the people who has demonstrated dependence lately is one of those people on whom I used to be dependent.) Any relationship I've ever been in, anyone I've ever been in love with, I've always focused on them as my source of happiness and purpose in life. Thinking about that now, jaded and cynical about life and love in particular, I see how terrible that is. You have to be able to make yourself happy and be relatively self-sufficient, or else you and your relationship are doomed from the start. That goes for friendships as well as romantic involvement. Hindsight is 20/20, eh?
Well, I'm figuring out how to make myself happy on my own. Figuring out what gives me a purpose to get out of bed in the morning, and it damn well isn't another person and I pray to godbuddallah that it never is again. I don't want to lose track of me by getting caught up in another person ever again.
Kinda odd tangent there, but the reason I stopped playing my trumpet was because of someone else. I let a little part of me die for another person almost 2 years ago. I didn't see it as that at the time, but that person made me decide that spending time with them was more important than continuing to play my trumpet, something that has always made me happy. And, of course, that person did bring me happiness for a while, but once things changed I was back to being more depressed than I was before I met said person. There have been other things I've stopped doing because of getting caught up in other people. Yoga is another example. People are more addictive than drugs and love is a god damned disease. And we don't even realize it while we are victims. It takes getting dumped or losing a friend to realize how we just can't get along and be happy without that other person in our lives. It's pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I love my friends and family and wouldn't want to give them up for anything. I just don't want to get to that point again where I forget what I'm doing with my life and put my happiness in someone else's hands. For now, making music will suffice to make me happy :-)
And I don't mean to offend, I know there are others out there who are huge advocates of being in love (I used to be one, used to think I'd be a lot better off with a long-term boyfriend, but what I was really looking for was a fix for the social addiction.)
P.S. check out my awesome new icon.
P.P.S. and now I'm going to stop editing the shit out of this because I keep thinking about how specific people may react to what goes on in my head.
I just played my trumpet for the first time in nearly 2 years. That's the longest I've gone without playing it since I started back in 1995 (5th grade.)
I can't even begin to explain how freaking good it felt.
I pulled out my Arban's book, all the music I ever got from Spirit of Atlanta Drum and Bugle Corps, and my flip-folder and mini-folders full of marching band music from high school. It was almost as though I never stopped playing (except for the fact that my chops wore out after only about 30 minutes whereas I used to be able to practice for 12 hours a day with hour long breaks in between 4 hour blocks.) I thought it would make this pitiful 'pfffthhht' sound when I first tried to produce a note, but I made a clear, strong, low C, as I intended to do. I got giddy. Doodled around doing some chromatics exercizes. At first my fingers were a little clumsy with the sequences, but they remembered after a minute. I was really putting my basal ganglia (part of the brain if you didn't know) to work, executing habituated motor and cognitive 'programs' or 'scripts' associated with the trumpet. Hey, lookie there, I just made starting back playing my trumpet relevant to what were talked about in biological psychology on Monday.
The rush of feelings I got from playing through the Little Shop of Horrors show from my freshman year of high school, or the Beatles show from my Junior year...the vivid memories of being in the stands in Sharp Stadium while I jazzed through Jungle Boogie and Lucretia Mac Evil...man, I can't even explain it. But (here I go with the neuroscience dorkiness again) I understand a lot better another thing we were talking about in biopsych on Monday: the connection between sensory input and emotion. Sensory input ranging from the smell of the valve oil, the feel of the mouthpiece on my lips, or hearing the songs...all of those sensations have very strong emtions and vivid memories attached to them, and they're all good.
Creating music is a way to make yourself happy without depending upon anyone else in the world. You don't even have to have a sheet of music in front of you to do it (which in a sense is depending upon someone else but not in the sense to which I am referring,) you can just start jammin', try to figure out songs you've heard before by doodling around, or just play notes in euphonic sequence. It doesn't matter what you do, but it all feels good. Ask any kid with one of those toy xylophones or a recorder, they'll tell you it's lots of fun to make up songs on it, even though they have no real idea what they're doing. They're just making music, though usually it sounds more like noise to the adults around, but hey, suum cuique, any type of music worshiped by someone is going to sound like noise to someone else in the world.
Recently, I've been made painfully aware of how much people depend on others for their happiness. It's a common theme everywhere, but especially among the people I know across the country it seems, at least in the past few months. I know I have been guilty several times of being completely reliant on someone in order to maintain happiness (and in fact one of the people who has demonstrated dependence lately is one of those people on whom I used to be dependent.) Any relationship I've ever been in, anyone I've ever been in love with, I've always focused on them as my source of happiness and purpose in life. Thinking about that now, jaded and cynical about life and love in particular, I see how terrible that is. You have to be able to make yourself happy and be relatively self-sufficient, or else you and your relationship are doomed from the start. That goes for friendships as well as romantic involvement. Hindsight is 20/20, eh?
Well, I'm figuring out how to make myself happy on my own. Figuring out what gives me a purpose to get out of bed in the morning, and it damn well isn't another person and I pray to godbuddallah that it never is again. I don't want to lose track of me by getting caught up in another person ever again.
Kinda odd tangent there, but the reason I stopped playing my trumpet was because of someone else. I let a little part of me die for another person almost 2 years ago. I didn't see it as that at the time, but that person made me decide that spending time with them was more important than continuing to play my trumpet, something that has always made me happy. And, of course, that person did bring me happiness for a while, but once things changed I was back to being more depressed than I was before I met said person. There have been other things I've stopped doing because of getting caught up in other people. Yoga is another example. People are more addictive than drugs and love is a god damned disease. And we don't even realize it while we are victims. It takes getting dumped or losing a friend to realize how we just can't get along and be happy without that other person in our lives. It's pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I love my friends and family and wouldn't want to give them up for anything. I just don't want to get to that point again where I forget what I'm doing with my life and put my happiness in someone else's hands. For now, making music will suffice to make me happy :-)
And I don't mean to offend, I know there are others out there who are huge advocates of being in love (I used to be one, used to think I'd be a lot better off with a long-term boyfriend, but what I was really looking for was a fix for the social addiction.)
P.S. check out my awesome new icon.
P.P.S. and now I'm going to stop editing the shit out of this because I keep thinking about how specific people may react to what goes on in my head.