I haven’t made a decent post in a while, and i’d apologize if I did that sort of thing, but I don’t so I won’t. It’s sort of crazy how fast this semester has progressed; I’m already almost half way through it, and I’ve only got one more ‘fall semester’ after this one. I’m not sure what kind of classes i’ll be taking next semester, but the realization that I can spend the rest of my college career taking only 12 hours a semester is kind of relaxing.
I spent a bit of time trying to juggle today, but it didn’t really work for me. I always give the balls a few tosses, lose control somewhere after the third or fourth throw, and then just give up. Oh well. It’d be nice to juggle, and it does provide me with amusement when I make a few sucessful steps, but the frustration involved in the learning process or enough to make me give up some times. Thinking about it now, there’s a sort of potential energy curve involved with learning things. If takes ‘mental energy’ to learn a process or ability, but once you’ve learned it, you gain a ton of energy because the process can be applied many places.
The point I’m trying to make with this idea is that learning new things is kind of like escape energy in nuclear decay. It takes a certain amount of activation energy to get the beta particle out of the nucleus, but once it escapes it radiates a ton of energy. The same is true for something like learning an instrument. It takes patients and forebearance to learn to play an instrument, but once you do learn to play it all of that patience is payed off in full and then some, because you can derive enjoyment out of your newfound ability to play the kazoo or whatever instrument you choose.
I play the guitar. I’ve played it since the end of my sophomore year in high school, which would be about four and a half years. I haven’t practiced any where near as much as I should, which means I can kinda sort play a few songs, but most of what I do is just messing around in the pentatonic scale. I wish I’d learn some other scales, but the only one I really know is the pentatonic minor so that’s all I play. I’ve been told that my guitar solos have kind of a twanygy, country-blues kind of sound to them, and I guess they do but whattyagonna do. When I started playing the guitar, I wanted to be able to belt out metallica style guitar solos. Wild, fast expressions of my inner temperment and spirit. Squealing, screaming, powerful and hauntingly melodic songs of ghosts and banshees. Instead I can pluck out the humming ditty of a buck toothed guy with a banjo. I mean, I’ll take what I can get, but I could have at least got the groove of a beatnik or something. I don’t even have the slightest southern accent.