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Currently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: 10. Dropped 14 degrees between 6:00 and 11:00 p.m., back up a degree from 11:00 to midnight. The wind was rattling the windows a few minutes ago. I feel like the rising air pressure (jumped 0.5 kPa between 7:00 and 8:00, and a total of 1.7 kPA between 6:00 and midnight; still going up) is pressing on my ear drums. I don't know if that's possible.
A few weeks ago, a piano that L.'s father picked up for me (or us; there is some controversy on this point, not that it makes any difference) on a job a few years ago was finally installed in our living room (it having taken us some years to finally acquire a living room in which to install it). I guess objectively it is as close to as crappily made a piano as you'll find (it's a spinet piano, with a noisy drop action), and it has been horribly abused, but I think it sounds remarkably good for all that. I actually kind of like its inconsistencies of tone; it makes the notes that sound good sound really good.
So I've been getting back into practicing. It's kind of funny, there has only been probably less than a year of my life in which I was really serious about practicing piano (a bit toward the end of my time taking lessons, toward the end of highschool, when I'd come to the end of my Royal Conservatory road and it was Grade 9 or bust, and I ended up busting, and then a lot during my first year at university, when the open practice rooms late at night saved me for a while), and that was going on twenty years ago, and now I might be serious about it for the rest of my life. Maybe it'll happen that way with poetry sometime, too; who knows. Anyway, I was reading this essay concerning sports and "character-building" today, and this passage, concerning football, resonated with my relation to the piano:
"Over time, I came to understand that the objective of the game, on the deepest level, wasn't to score spectacular touchdowns or make bone-smashing tackles or block kicks. The game was much more about practice than about the Saturday-afternoon contests. And practice was about trying to do something over and over again, failing and failing, and then finally succeeding part way."
I like playing stuff I can play for people who want to hear it, but ever since I was a little kid I've felt like that wasn't the point, and it has frustrated me that other people generally didn't seem to see it that way.
It occurs to me that something similar may be the most basic source of my frustration as a philosophy teacher. (One of my students told me in the spring, when I was being damn near killed by Nietzsche, that he likes that I seem to be struggling with the texts along with them. Not many students like that.)
Oh yeah, by the way: did you know that the mobile version of Wikipedia is not blacked out today? So, you can still use Wikipedia today if a) you get your internet from a phone, or b) you know how to use the internet.
A few weeks ago, a piano that L.'s father picked up for me (or us; there is some controversy on this point, not that it makes any difference) on a job a few years ago was finally installed in our living room (it having taken us some years to finally acquire a living room in which to install it). I guess objectively it is as close to as crappily made a piano as you'll find (it's a spinet piano, with a noisy drop action), and it has been horribly abused, but I think it sounds remarkably good for all that. I actually kind of like its inconsistencies of tone; it makes the notes that sound good sound really good.
So I've been getting back into practicing. It's kind of funny, there has only been probably less than a year of my life in which I was really serious about practicing piano (a bit toward the end of my time taking lessons, toward the end of highschool, when I'd come to the end of my Royal Conservatory road and it was Grade 9 or bust, and I ended up busting, and then a lot during my first year at university, when the open practice rooms late at night saved me for a while), and that was going on twenty years ago, and now I might be serious about it for the rest of my life. Maybe it'll happen that way with poetry sometime, too; who knows. Anyway, I was reading this essay concerning sports and "character-building" today, and this passage, concerning football, resonated with my relation to the piano:
"Over time, I came to understand that the objective of the game, on the deepest level, wasn't to score spectacular touchdowns or make bone-smashing tackles or block kicks. The game was much more about practice than about the Saturday-afternoon contests. And practice was about trying to do something over and over again, failing and failing, and then finally succeeding part way."
I like playing stuff I can play for people who want to hear it, but ever since I was a little kid I've felt like that wasn't the point, and it has frustrated me that other people generally didn't seem to see it that way.
It occurs to me that something similar may be the most basic source of my frustration as a philosophy teacher. (One of my students told me in the spring, when I was being damn near killed by Nietzsche, that he likes that I seem to be struggling with the texts along with them. Not many students like that.)
Oh yeah, by the way: did you know that the mobile version of Wikipedia is not blacked out today? So, you can still use Wikipedia today if a) you get your internet from a phone, or b) you know how to use the internet.
