(no subject)
I seem to have not updated.For three months. I swear, it wasn't intentional.
At first nothing was happening, so there seemed to be no point in updating, and then everything happened at once.
So a list! Who doesn't love a list? All the perks of prose broken down into an easy-to-read format.
1) I moved out. I'm now further in east london, in a lovely flat with a couple of friends and a big bed that is never infiltrated by a cat trying to be let out of the window. It's much closer to work, I can cook what I like and it is generally good. I've been here for nearly two weeks now.
2) I had guitar lessons for all of three weeks. A nice young man named Tom who consisted almost entirely of knitted cap, slogan t-shirt and cigarette smoke came to my house and helped me out a lot. Sadly he was not willing to follow me further east, and I just don't want to go back to Romford after work. But it was really useful - I learnt a lot about guitar playing and reconsidered the way I think about music. He has an amazing and infuriating ability to be able to hear something and just play it. I'm not sure I'll be able to do that, but I definitely need to be able to play by ear. The fallibility of tabs on the internet alone shows it is important.
3) Which is why it makes no sense whatsoever for me to start learning music theory again because so much of it is related to reading music. Yes, learning about perfect 4ths and so forth is excellent for guitar, but I need to HEAR what they SOUND LIKE. Not just look at a stave and understand that those two notes have an interval of however many.
4) I've been learning to play eels and british sea power, mostly because I know the songs well enough to feel ok about obsessively practising chord changes in the songs, because that is my main shameful weakness.
5) I had a very nice birthday which involved getting drunk and eating thai food and getting some rather good presents.
6) I've been on a course on and off for work. I have mixed feelings about this - on the one hand I know a lot of the stuff anyway, because it is designed to be on in the first few weeks of work, and I've been there six months. On the other hand we leave at four, I get my travel paid and it's far more tolerable than many other things. My class consists almost entirely of Asian middle-aged ladies, all of whom are very nice. They think of me as the smart one, which is a role I am more than happy to fill. The getting home early also made it possible for me to finish the grade three theory workbook in a week.
7) Tedious bureaucratic stuff - I have to make up about eleven hours by the end of March. This is at a time when I have to go on a week and a half course, meaning I have nine working days to do this. not going to happen. I have to have an informal interview because I've had five sick days in six months. And they've made the wages department redundant and outsourced it to Southhampton, which I'm sure won't go badly at all.
At first nothing was happening, so there seemed to be no point in updating, and then everything happened at once.
So a list! Who doesn't love a list? All the perks of prose broken down into an easy-to-read format.
1) I moved out. I'm now further in east london, in a lovely flat with a couple of friends and a big bed that is never infiltrated by a cat trying to be let out of the window. It's much closer to work, I can cook what I like and it is generally good. I've been here for nearly two weeks now.
2) I had guitar lessons for all of three weeks. A nice young man named Tom who consisted almost entirely of knitted cap, slogan t-shirt and cigarette smoke came to my house and helped me out a lot. Sadly he was not willing to follow me further east, and I just don't want to go back to Romford after work. But it was really useful - I learnt a lot about guitar playing and reconsidered the way I think about music. He has an amazing and infuriating ability to be able to hear something and just play it. I'm not sure I'll be able to do that, but I definitely need to be able to play by ear. The fallibility of tabs on the internet alone shows it is important.
3) Which is why it makes no sense whatsoever for me to start learning music theory again because so much of it is related to reading music. Yes, learning about perfect 4ths and so forth is excellent for guitar, but I need to HEAR what they SOUND LIKE. Not just look at a stave and understand that those two notes have an interval of however many.
4) I've been learning to play eels and british sea power, mostly because I know the songs well enough to feel ok about obsessively practising chord changes in the songs, because that is my main shameful weakness.
5) I had a very nice birthday which involved getting drunk and eating thai food and getting some rather good presents.
6) I've been on a course on and off for work. I have mixed feelings about this - on the one hand I know a lot of the stuff anyway, because it is designed to be on in the first few weeks of work, and I've been there six months. On the other hand we leave at four, I get my travel paid and it's far more tolerable than many other things. My class consists almost entirely of Asian middle-aged ladies, all of whom are very nice. They think of me as the smart one, which is a role I am more than happy to fill. The getting home early also made it possible for me to finish the grade three theory workbook in a week.
7) Tedious bureaucratic stuff - I have to make up about eleven hours by the end of March. This is at a time when I have to go on a week and a half course, meaning I have nine working days to do this. not going to happen. I have to have an informal interview because I've had five sick days in six months. And they've made the wages department redundant and outsourced it to Southhampton, which I'm sure won't go badly at all.