I find myself with a couple of hours to kill, and nothing really introspective to post about at the moment. So I took a look at the suggestion box (remember that? it's still open for suggestions, btw) to see if anything struck my fancy there.

Most of what's in there (that I haven't already written about) is stuff I'm not sure I could really discuss at length (Irish laws with 9 grades of marriage? WTF? I didn't even know there were such things), but I was inspired by the one asking me about my experience with linux/BSD. As a die-hard Apple geek these days, a lot of people don't realize that my experience with various computer systems is actually rather eclectic, especially since I'm no longer running my own servers and posting about the trials and tribulations associated with being a hobbyist sys admin.

(And if you don't understand the ^Hs in the subject, you're probably not going to be interested in the rest of this post, either.)

( extreme geekery within )

Tags: geek, suggestion box
frame of mind: geeky
listening to: Tori Amos: i i e e e

Currently it's 4:19 on March 31st. I thought I would make note of this, as I have no idea how long it will take me to write this entry, given my current mental state.

Anyway. This is one from the Suggestion Box. The original request was for me to write about "tv shows," like what shows I watch, what I like, what I tend to find myself watching, etc. The only problem with this request is that while I do own a TV set, it's not actually connected to anything that would give it any kind of reception. No cable, no satellite, no antenna. It has a VCR and a PS2 plugged into it. I had cable for a couple of years, but when Comcast decided to raise their rates, and I evaluated how much I actually used it (about an hour every three to four months), I decided it was time to nix the cable and get DSL.

I would like to note here that canceling cable was not the cause of me not watching much television. It was simply one of many effects.

When I was growing up, my parents put quite a few limits on the amount of time we could watch TV. On weekend mornings, it couldn't be on before 7am or after 10am. There were similar limits on watching in the afternoon and evenings. Never on weekday mornings. No TV during dinner.

So while I did have shows that I preferred to watch regularly (mostly cartoons or things like You Can't Do That On Television), I never had entire days parked in front of the TV set. I found other things to do. I practiced the piano. I played on the computer. I read. I played outside. I went swimming, or rode my bike, or futzed around down by the creek. I built forts in the back yard with the picnic table and some old blankets.

There were no similar restrictions on computer use. There were the obligatory "school/work uses get priority over entertainment" restrictions, but those were about it.

When I was a teenager, my interest in the computer picked up quite a bit. Starting around the time I turned 14, I became far more interested in talking to people online than in watching television, and since the TV and the computer weren't in the same room, I couldn't do both at once. There were times I couldn't use the computer, so I'd sometimes watch TV then, but it was far more likely that I'd go off to my room and read at those points, since I was already rather irritated with most of the crap that appeared on the tube. There was more evening TV I was interested in at that point, but a good portion of it happened after I was supposed to go to bed anyway (Like ER). There wasn't a single show on TV that I liked enough to stop talking online just to go watch it. If I didn't happen to be talking to someone, no problem, let's shut the computer down and go watch it. But I wouldn't interrupt conversations to do it.

Slight tangent: My parents divorced when I was 13. Mom's the one who had the computer with the modem and the two phone lines. We had a computer at dad's house, but it wasn't online. So I could only get online when I was at my mom's house. When I was at my dad's house, I was more likely to be reading or playing games on the computer than watching TV, though there was definitely more TV-viewing happening for me over there. When he moved in with my stepmom, there were times when I actually got in trouble for playing on the computer or reading instead of watching sitcoms with the family, but by that point I had lost nearly all interest in the television, and didn't like what they were choosing to watch. Unless it was ER or Frasier.

When I moved into my own place, we had Internet access but no TV reception. There was a VCR, but that was it. And this didn't bother me in the slightest. There really wasn't anything on that I wanted to watch anyway. I moved a few times after that, and either didn't have TV reception or just didn't bother watching it.

When I first moved downtown, my roommate got cable. I still didn't bother watching it. When I moved into my current place, I did get cable, but I still didn't watch it. By this point, I was just so unused to watching TV that I simply didn't bother anymore.

Enter graphxgrrl. She likes Buffy. At the time it was still on the air. She started having weekly Buffy nights. I enjoyed the show, though still mostly went for the social occasion rather than the TV content. I did record a large amount of Buffy for myself, the_misha, and tiggrrl so we could catch up, but otherwise my own TV still didn't get much use. And once I'd recorded all the Buffy I needed to record, I think the TV was turned on a grand total of once between then and when I finally cancelled it in favor of DSL, and that was when the Colombia exploded.

These days, on the occasions I'm around a TV, I've found that I can either pay attention to what it's playing, or the people around me, but not both. Unless the point of having it on is to actually watch what's on it, I'd rather have it turned off. The "using TV as background noise" thing just doesn't work for me.

So there you have it. I didn't promise excitement.

Tags: suggestion box
frame of mind: tired

A couple of quickies from the Suggestion Box related to last night's post that I didn't manage to fit in.

What's with the trampoline?

Well, it's definitely more fun for our audience if we're running around, goofing off, and generally making fools of ourselves on stage. Jeff likes to do things like stand on the kick drum. There's certain points in the show where Jeff, Misha, and I all bounce in tandem. When we have room for it, we bring the trampolines to assist with the bouncing and the general silliness. :)

I would like to know if you ever write music?

Yes, I do. I haven't had a lot of practice at it yet, so none of my songs have seen the lights of the stage at this point, but I've written a few and there's a couple that Jeff is interested in using for TKT. They'll probably wind up as co-writes by the time they're finished, since that way weak spots can be improved before other people hear them. Right now they're on the back burner since we don't plan to use them on the CD we're currently recording.

Tags: suggestion box

So a couple of people have suggested that I talk about various aspects of my relationship with music. Since it's such an important part of my life these days, I figured I'd start with that. I'll even try to do this chronologically to keep from confusing people too much. ;)

You can deal with not having a cut tag. :P

I grew up with music. My dad listened to classic rock. My mom listened to folk and classical music. My older sister listened to pop music like Journey and Styx. My brother listened to things like The Police and Prince. Different styles were all around me, and I liked quite a bit of what all of them listened to.

When I was 6, my brother had been playing piano for about 6 years, and I thought he was pretty good. I wanted to be able to play like that! It sounded like fun! So my mom let me take piano lessons. It was fun at first, but like most kids, my attention span wasn't great, and I really didn't like practicing. Still, I kept with it, but I was never as good as I thought I should be.

In the 4th grade, they started letting us join the school band. There wasn't a place in the band for a piano player, though, so I took up flute. I don't remember why I picked flute, exactly, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. Of course, that didn't last all that long... I played it for a quarter, got frustrated, and gave it up. Flute is actually a very difficult instrument to learn. I didn't figure that out until later. The fingerings don't make as much sense as most of the other popular wind instruments, and since the sound is generated by blowing over a hole instead of into it, playing the flute takes a lot of lung power which I frankly didn't have. (I have far more admiration for accomplished flute players now than I would if I'd never tried to play one myself.)

I sulked around for another quarter and was generally cranky (actually the crankiness had nothing to do with not being in the band; that's another story for [maybe] another time), until someone (my mom, teacher, or band teacher; I forget which... maybe all three of them) convinced me to try the band again with a different instrument. This time I picked clarinet. Clarinet was easier for me than flute had been. The fingerings make more sense, and while the reed is hard to get used to, it's not as hard as trying to get a decent sound by blowing over a hole. I was comfortable enough with the clarinet to continue playing it through the end of the 6th grade, and at some point my parents went ahead and purchased the one they'd been renting for me. I still have it. I've even taken it out and tried to play it a couple of times in the past few years. ;)

There was one problem with the clarinet, though. For the life of me, I couldn't play well in the upper register. I kept trying, but it squeaked so horribly when I did, or else I couldn't get it to make any sound at all. Maybe I needed a different reed. If I did, no one ever thought to suggest that to me at the time. Sometime during the 6th grade, the band teacher really started getting on my case about it. Of course, with no instruction on how to improve, being told to improve was that much more frustrating.

When the 6th grade was over, I was finished with the clarinet. But... 7th grade was coming up, and in 7th grade they have jazz band. I knew I wanted to do jazz band. My brother graduated high school when I finished the 6th grade, and so for the past 6 years I'd been hearing him play piano in the jazz band. I had even started to like jazz music. And damn he was good; he even won scholarships for his playing. He had also started to show me how to read chords (as opposed to sheet music) and I'd started taking more jazz-oriented piano lessons in preparation.

I still wanted play a wind instrument, even though I knew I wouldn't be playing in the concert band that year, and I'd be playing piano in the jazz band. I figured I'd learn, and then by the 8th grade I'd be comfortable enough with it to play in the concert band. This time I picked tenor sax. My tastes had changed over the previous couple of years (probably from listening to all that jazz), and the tenor sax had a really mellow sound that I really liked. Most sax players learned alto (at least at first), and I like the idea of starting someplace different.

Over the summer before 7th grade, my mom paid one of my brother's high school band-mates to give me sax lessons. It was fun. I enjoyed it a lot. I was really getting into it. Then for some reason, it was decided that since I wasn't going to be actually playing it in the band that year, it was too expensive to rent the instrument anymore, and I had to give it up. And that was the end of it. After six weeks, I couldn't play sax anymore... just when I'd really started to enjoy it. I'd never enjoyed playing flute or clarinet like I enjoyed the sax.

7th grade, jazz band on piano as expected, though it was more difficult than I thought it would be. However, we didn't have a bass player... so some of the time, I'd play keyboard bass. That was fun, and fairly easy. One note at a time. Much more my speed. (Okay, so I was a bit of a slacker.) Continued more of the same in the 8th grade. During this time, I started thinking that I'd like to learn something that might be later useful in a band that's not part of the school... bass or guitar. I couldn't decide which for a while. Finally, I came to the conclusion that since I enjoyed playing keyboard bass more than I enjoyed jazz piano, and since way more people seem to learn the guitar than learn the bass, I was going to learn the bass.

My parents were divorced when I was in junior high, and were of differing opinions about whether I should be allowed to learn the bass. My mom didn't like the idea. My dad, on the other hand, didn't see any reason to not let me learn, so he was the one to buy me a bass guitar and start paying for bass lessons. Around the beginning of my Freshman year in high school, I started the lessons over at Skip's with Erik Kleven. He had a hard time finding appropriate material for me to learn, since I could already read music just fine and didn't need any training in theory, just in technique. He wound up teaching me from an exercise book and then later giving me some sheet music to learn. He also started me on some ear training, having me listen to music and learn/write out the bass line. Meanwhile, in school, I was playing piano in one of the high school's jazz bands, and had taken up percussion (xylophone, glockenspiel, etc) for the concert band.

In the summer before my Sophomore year, I participated in the Stairway to Stardom program. This was a good experience, and mostly I think we were actually pretty good for a group of kids with little experience and a 12-year-old (!) lead singer. I think we should have done better than we actually did at the final concert, and probably would have if she hadn't started our "main" song a bit sharp and if the techs had turned on the background vocal mics like they were supposed to. I still have a VHS tape of our performance and a cassette tape of the recording session we did later around somewhere, but you'd have to get me good & drunk to get me to let you hear them. ;)

Through the rest of high school, I played bass in the jazz band instead of piano. I still mostly played percussion in concert band. In my Sophomore and Junior years, I made the district honor band doing percussion as well. My Senior year was actually only a semester long (I graduated midterm) but I continued to play in the jazz band for the second semester, since they needed a bass player. I made honor band that year as well, but since I was also working, I had difficulty making rehearsals for that, so I resigned the position at the request of the director. I played a little bit of upright bass during my Junior and Senior years as well for the concert band.

In the semester that I went to college, I played upright bass in the concert band. I didn't make the college jazz band, but I did play in a combo. The high point of my college music career was The Infamous College Band Trip. (And yes, for those of you who have never seen my natural hair color, that's it in those pictures.)

After college... I kind of forgot about music for a while. Life rather sucked, I was doing tech support full time, and I really didn't enjoy myself much in the next few years.

Fast forward to the year 2001. Since I was a teenager, I'd been a serial monogamist. Well, okay, I tried polyamory for a while, but realized I really didn't have the mindset for it at the time. Other than that I'd been a serial monogamist... and I wasn't happy about it. I noticed that I'd been going through several cycles in my relationships, and I was determined to put a stop to that. So first I knew I needed to be single for a while, and second I knew I needed to make some actual friends, and third I knew I needed to find something to do that I enjoyed doing.

That something turned out to be music.

Some of you already know the story about how I met the_misha and then became a member of RazorLily. Some of you were even there. :) I'm not really going to get into it here, because the details about how I found them don't really matter. What matters is that in September of 2001, I joined a band and started playing bass again for the first time since my brief stint in college. It had been just over five years.

Playing music again... I felt new life. I felt renewed. I finally felt like I'd found myself, hidden in an activity I'd known how to do since childhood, but had forgotten existed. Finally, I felt like I knew who I was. A musician.

Playing live became the thrill of my life. Every show was a burst of energy and freedom. More than that, playing again gave me a whole new appreciation for listening to music... and feeling it. Even with all the drama that happened among the members of the band (it always seemed to be us vs. them... "us" being the_misha and me, "them" being the rest of the band), when we were actually playing on stage, it was all forgotten in the euphoria.

Shortly before RazorLily burst into flames a year later (cuz who didn't see that coming... except, perhaps, the other members of the band), Jeff asked me to audition for The Kimberly Trip. Their bassist at the time was leaving. He wanted me to be sure about what was going to happen with RazorLily first, though, so I didn't go right away. Instead, I called him when I was on my way home from leaving the band.

I auditioned, the rest of the band was impressed, they wanted to hire me. Only... the interim bass player they'd found (a good friend of Jeff's) was going to stick around longer than they thought he was going to. The "couple of weeks" that he intended to play with them turned into a year.

During that year, I went to as many of their shows as possible. I really loved the music; it wasn't just a matter of me trying to look good by showing an interest. I tried to find other activities to keep me busy, though the extra free time I had tended to get old. I missed playing. I started Peachfish with the_misha and tiggrrl (and we later added bridgeweaver to the lineup when he moved out here), and while the creation of music was exhilarating, it still wasn't the same as playing live.

In the summer of 2003, Jeff told me that Simon was finally leaving. He had finally gotten to the point where The Kimberly Trip was playing more than he was able to play with them. And they wanted me to come join the band.

I feel like I'm living a dream these days. So much of my life is devoted to music and the band. It's utterly fantastic. And even now, with all the practice and recording and writing music together we do, if we go several weeks between shows I still get anxious to play again. Every live show is still a thrill. My life is still lost in the euphoria I feel when I'm playing in front of an audience. In fact... it's even more so now, with the number of faces I see at nearly every show, and the new faces I see each time.

I do something that other people enjoy listening to. I participate in something creative on a regular basis. And that is a magical thing.

Tags: suggestion box

I suspect this will turn into a meme, but that is by no means my intent.

I've been feeling less than prolific lately. Looking over the last few months of public posts, I've seen little more than links, quotes, and quizzes. There's been the occasional exception, but those are few and far between. But then when I try to think of something interesting to write about, all I can come up with are mundane posts about my daily existence, and then they tend to be either friends-locked or filtered for content.

So I'm taking suggestions. Reply to this post with something you'd like me to post about. Try to pick something that I might actually be able to talk about, since if I don't know the subject, I can't really write about it. ;) If you can't think of anything either, have a look at my interests and see if anything strikes your fancy. You're welcome to reply with as many topics as you like, though please keep one topic per comment for easier bookkeeping. ;)

I reserve the right to take as long as I want to get to your request, or not post it at all, but I'm going to reply to the comments with links to the appropriate posts as I write them, or I'll let you know if I don't plan to write about it publicly at all.

Anonymous requests are welcome as well, and I'll be unscreening any non-spam as I get it.

Tags: suggestion box