It's Only A Paper Rose

I'm not sure if I'm going to make my original goal of three performable songs by September. (If I went with "end of September", maybe, but the intention was "by the end of summer", and I'm pretty sure the bulk of September is firmly in fall.) If everyone will pardon my bad manners, I'm going to take this moment to flip a gigantic bird at every single jerk who posts "Mr. Jones" as an "easy beginner guitar!" song. The chords are easy, yes, and the riff is relatively simple, but it's fast enough that it's taken me two months of near-daily practice to get up to anything resembling speed. And not only is the strum pattern syncopated, every fifteenth and sixteenth measure uses a different one that I haven't worked out yet. AND that's not even counting the melody line, which comes in on a triplet and only gets weirder from there. AND AND AND the chords on the tab that I found online were completely wrong, along with half the lyrics being misspelled, so of course I had to sit down and do them up myself. (Come on, Google, I expect better from the first hit you bring up.)

And yet I'm still determined to learn it - even more so, now that I've actually played it through (albeit shakily) a couple of times. A certain amount of that is sheer stubbornness, plus the whole "I've come this far, might as well see it through" aspect; but I also just really, really like the song. It's got such a sweet blend of desperation and pathos and naivete and tragedy and worldliness. The singer seems to understand that the fame that he wants so badly is ultimately insubstantial and only likely to lead to misery, and yet he still wants it so badly. In a lot of ways it reminds me of my visit to Los Angeles back in 2004; I'd grown up hearing about what a shithole the place was and how underneath all the glitz and glamour its values were so awful, and sort of wondered for a long time why anyone would actually want to live there. But then I went there, and saw a little bit of the glitz and glamour for myself, and suddenly understood better - it may be gilded, but the gilding is so shiny, you almost can't help yourself.

Anyway, that one might be a bit late. But with a little work I think I can polish up both "Warmer Climate" and "The Scientist". I'm especially looking forward to revisiting the latter when I learn a bit of picking; it sounds okay just strummed, but I think some picking will give it a little more variety.

Now to work up the courage to actually record and *shudder* watch myself...

Obviously I'm a little new at guitar maintenance. I'd heard that you were supposed to change strings when they start to sound "muddy"; however, I wasn't 100% certain exactly how that sounded compared to fresh ones. And it didn't help that Kalia is new enough that I'd only ever heard the strings she came with.

Still, even to my untrained ear, the notes didn't seem to be ringing out properly, so I figured I should go ahead and change them, even if I wasn't 100% certain it was necessary. Part of the reason I was hesitant is that string-changing is kind of a pain in the ass...well, not "kind of". It is a pain in the ass. But it's also probably the best way to get to know your instrument intimately. Improperly finished slots in the nut that cause string bindings, loose tuning machines, pegs that don't stay in (or are jammed in so tightly you can't get them out without pliers)...it all comes to light when you change the strings. (Not unlike the first time caring for your partner when they get really ill, come to think of it...)

And that's how I came to be sitting on the floor under the lamp futzing with the string winder when I felt something crawling on my bare foot. I didn't think a whole lot of it - it's bug season in Arizona, and I'd just been poking at some harmless bug or other that had eventually crawled under the lamp. Figuring it was just my earlier friend come to play again, I lifted the neck of my guitar...and found a GIANT FUCKING SCORPION sitting there going "Yo, sup."

My immediate fear (that he would crawl up my pant leg - suddenly I'm beginning to see the attraction of skinny jeans despite being a solid boot-cut girl) fortunately turned out to be unfounded, as he promptly made his way up my leg on the outside of my jeans. Doing my best to move smoothly despite the sudden jolt of adrenaline, I grabbed the bit of cardboard that my strings came in, brushed him off my leg, and asked Brian to keep an eye on him while I got the vacuum cleaner. Apparently they're actually relatively docile, compared to other stinging insects - he didn't even go into fighting stance until Brian poked at him with my yoga mat. I sucked him up with the vacuum cleaner, took him outside, and dumped him over the side of the railing; we've been having tons of tiny little ants all over our garden, so maybe he'll do some good out there.

Then I promptly sat down and had an attack of the heebie-jeebies. Normally I try to live and let live where bugs are concerned, and spiders (of the non-venomous variety) don't bother me one bit. Even centipedes and scorpions I'll just try to catch and relocate outside. But it was ON MY FOOT. Eugh. I'm just glad I looked and saw what it was before trying to brush it off with my hand.

Once that was done with, though, I finished restringing Kalia, and was pleased to immediately hear a very large difference in tone - much brighter and more bell-like. Additionally, she's a beautifully finished guitar; I didn't have a single string bind while I was tuning them, the pegs all came out easily (and stayed in when replaced), and the action on the tuning machines was smooth as silk. I can see why Takamine's Japanese guitars are so generally sought-after; it absolutely feels like a quality instrument made with pride in craftsmanship.

As to the actual playing...I've gotten one simple song pretty well down (if not recorded) towards my goal of three by September. As for a second, I've been spending a lot of time working on the riff for Mr. Jones. It's a simple chord structure but a tricky strum pattern and an especially tricky melody line (thank you, jazz improv lessons!); plus it goes FAST, with almost no time to switch between chords. I very much want to have it in my reportoire, though; in addition to being a good song to show off a bit, I think it'd be great fun to perform - there's that odd dissonance between the happy bouncy hook and the minor key chords, which so nicely reflects the tragic dissonance of the lyrics (so much longing for something so ultimately empty). It's definitely going to be a while before it's ready, though, so I'm looking for something in-between to learn in the meantime...I'm kind of leaning towards an acoustic version of Coldplay's "The Scientist", since the focus is on the lyrics and you can play it fairly simply, but I'm open to other suggestions. What's a relatively simple song you think might sound good on an acoustic?

More highlights from our vacation, both positive and negative:

• Getting over that goddamn cold. It ended up taking about three days for Brian and I to get past the worst of it, and even for a few days after that we were coughing up (to quote my mother's least-favorite kids' song) great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts. Frelling viral infections. We didn't make it out to Seward like we'd hoped, but fortunately we had enough energy to get around a bit before leaving Anchorage.

• Finding my guitar. Big props to Mammoth Music for not only having better service and a bigger selection of instruments than anywhere in Arizona, but also actually living up to their "lower-than-online" pricing guarantee. I have no idea how they manage it, given the additional shipping costs and other hassles that are endemic to an Alaska-located business, but they do. And the lack of sales tax doesn't hurt either. Now to spend the next decade getting to be as good a player as Kalia deserves...

• Making it out to Potter Marsh with my grandmother. It wasn't the most wonderful timing ever (it was cloudy and cold with that constant Arctic-style wind blowing), but the scenery there is gorgeous no matter what the weather, and there was a family of beautiful Sandhill Cranes showing off their graceful food-seeking ballet for the tourists along the boardwalk. The chick especially was the prettiest shade of red-brown and looked so fluffy and snuggly. Well worth the hunching down against the wind for. (I've got some pictures of the scenery that I promised my brother I'd send him...perhaps I'll post them. We'll see, though; they're just iPhone pictures, so not fantastic or anything.)

• Truly and honestly throwing out my back for the first time. And I don't even get an awesome "I was lifting a car off of a small child" or "I was dragging a generator along an icy mountain path and it slid down and hit me" story to go with it; I was just coughing so badly with that damn cold that, on my first day up and out of bed, all the muscles around my lower back and diaphragm started twinging and then seizing up when I tried to use them. Fortunately the worst was over after the first day, but it's been intermittently sore since then, and the lugging around of baggage as well as a three-mile walk Friday to get Brian some medication combined with schlepping my guitar all the way down concourse C of Sea-Tac yesterday seems to have gotten one side of it especially bad again (only one minor seizure, but still). I've got a massage scheduled for Tuesday, and I think once it's better it's back to daily yoga again. Because, seriously...ow.

• Visiting bookstores. Lots of bookstores, especially used-book ones. We have one in town, but it's really not very well managed, and this area of Arizona isn't exactly what you'd call literary, so there aren't many other options. I was especially amused because I'd brought along my Nook specifically because I figured it'd be good for traveling, what with not having to pack along heavy physical books and all...and then I ended up buying so many physical books that I had to mail them to myself to save on luggage weight, and didn't end up using my Nook at all. I guess I'm ultimately just a book troglodyte. Sigh. Highlights include Title Wave in Anchorage, which has grown from a tiny location in a strip mall to damn near B&N size since I first started going there in high school; Left Bank books in Seattle, which specialized in anarchist literature and therefore had some very entertaining "yes we know, property is theft, but please do not steal" signs; and the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, who had a great staff and one of the most entertaining organizational systems I've ever seen - I had no idea that there was an entire subcategory of food mysteries, or that they could be broken down to sub-sub-categories (wine mysteries, baking mysteries, chocolate mysteries, you name it). amanda_lodden, I recommend stopping in if you haven't been there already.

• Playing guitar with my mother. Even though I can't yet do much more than strum out basic chords. There's just something primally satisfying about inter-generational art creation, I think.

• Seeing our friends Chris & Jeanne for the first time since leaving Juneau. Their son, who was barely a few weeks old when we left, has grown into an absolutely adorable blonde-haired blue-eyed cherub. (Seriously, I don't even think of kids as "cute", and even I was like "Damn, you guys need to rent him out to Hallmark or something.") It helped that he was also surprisingly quiet and well-behaved, though I wasn't too surprised on that front - when I first met Jeanne, she'd recently adopted Sadie, a half-wild three-year-old yellow-lab mix who'd come from a bad home and had numerous behavioral issues; since then, Jeanne's worked with her tirelessly and patiently, and now she's one of the most loving, polite, and well-behaved (if still enthusiastic) ten-year-old dogs you can imagine. So it's probably not surprising Jeanne's kid would be equally well-trained.

• Going out for sushi at Seong's. Man, I've missed good sushi. Plus we went with Monica, whom I don't really talk to often anymore - she refuses to learn to use a computer, and I don't really do phone conversations aside from the quick "hey, where are you, let's meet up" sort, so it was good to see her again. Even if hanging out for a while only served to illustrate how we've grown apart - she's very much a happy-go-lucky small-town kind of girl, perfectly happy to live with her parents and keep working the same job she's worked since high school, secure that tomorrow will generally be the same as today. (Which is not to cast aspersions on her many good points - there's a reason she was probably my best friend for the years while I was living in Juneau. Her sweetness, compassion, and generally cheerful demeanor are all beyond reproach, and while she and I would occasionally get into arguments about her lack of discernment with regards to taste or people, it does mean that she's one of the least-judgmental people I've ever met. And there's something to be said for that.)

• Seeing Justin again, and having him invite us over to his apartment for dinner. While planning is admittedly not his strong suit, what his meal lacked in cohesion it made up for in enthusiasm. Appetizers: Olives, cheese, bread, artichoke hearts and...blueberries? Sure, why not? And who needs ice in their drinks anyway?

• Learning to play Spoons at our wonderful friends Robert and Olga's lovely home. Brian still owes them a poem, though I doubt they'll ever manage to collect. He's like a conversational ninja at avoiding things he doesn't want to talk about.

• Realizing I'd lost my keys, panicking about getting the car back (we'd left it at Adam's, who was going to be in San Diego the weekend we came back, so he'd given me one of his apartment keys so we could go in and get the car key), and calling Adam to work something out only to discover that was going to be in town anyway so he could give us a ride back to his place and save us the $60 on cab fare it would've taken to get to his apartment from the airport. Then, when we actually got there, having him hand me my key ring, which had apparently fallen out of my bag when he took us to the airport in the first place. (So instead we spent the $60 on chicken and waffles, his late-lunch of choice.) Great-friend award handed out promptly.

• Getting Brian's father's rifles back. Not realizing exactly how lax Arizona's gun laws are, he'd left them with Chris & Jeanne, who were kind enough to keep them stored rather than sell them on - especially kind, given both how tiny their old house was and how valuable the rifles were (one's a fairly high-end Remington with a very nice scope on it, and the other hasn't been produced for nearly half a century - Brian thinks it belonged to his grandfather). Being the wonderful people they are, they were happy to let us take them back with us; and while getting them back was a cast-iron pain in the ass (we had to buy a gigantic locking rifle case, and declare them with TSA, not to mention the extra piece was enough to tip us over from "can pretty well carry the baggage on our own" to "need to hire a Sherpa guide", my least favorite way to travel) the sentimental value was enough to make it worth it. Also, it led to an amusing exchange at Sea-Tac; we were in line to speak with a customer service agent when their screener (quite a smart position to have, by the way - she was questioning people who were waiting in line and directing the lower-maintenance ones to check themselves in at a kiosk, for instance) came by and asked "What are you folks needing?" Ticking the points off on his fingers, Brian replies "Flying standby, checking bags, and checking firearms." (I helpfully add, "Yeah, we're those people.") She sort of blinked for a moment, then laughed and went "Yeah, okay, you're in the right line." On the other hand, the agent herself was friendly and quick and surprisingly enthusiastic about helping us with all of the moving parts of our trip - she was all "I love working with organized people!" I shudder to think what sorts of travel nightmares she must deal with regularly.

• Returning to find that our house-sitter had managed to keep the house clean and all three cats and our plants alive and happy, our landlord had replaced the flooring in the kitchen and master bath, and Dexter hadn't even gotten all depressed and fat like he has the other couple of times we've been gone for two weeks. (Having two younger cats to chase him around the house probably helped a lot.)

• Really, it's good to be home. I have missed the cooler weather and green in the PNW and I think we'll probably move there soon, but traveling wears on you after a while. And there is that perverse part of me that just adores the heat and all the sun, even though it means slathering on the sunscreen before you go out. But mostly I think it's just nice to be in our wonderful home surrounded by our things. Even if the cats seem absolutely determined to remind us that they were hiding in the bushes when Bast handed out brains. (No, Leo, just because there's another bird outside does not mean that the glass door has magically disappeared and you can pounce on it...sigh...)

• Note to travelers who have airline-employee friends: Do not try to fly to Anchorage standby in the middle of June. Between tourists and seasonal employees, your chances of finding a flight not sold out or overbooked is small, and even if you do, there will be forty other people flying standby trying for the eight available seats on said flight. Yes, even if it had fifty-two open seats three days prior. Just don't do it.

• That said, there are far worse places to be stuck than Seattle. Especially now that the light rail will get you downtown and back for $11 for two people in roughly the same amount of time it would take to drive down there and find parking. Seriously in love with the public transit there.

• Also in love with the food. Not that that's anything new, but between the menus at Japonessa and Serious Pie (not to mention the bevy of amazing treats to be had at Pike Place Market) Brian was basically all "...fuck. I'm going to have to get a job here in town, aren't I?"

• Joking aside, I think we've pretty much decided that's where we're headed in a year or two. It's not that I mind the desert, precisely - I like Bisbee, and God knows it's nice not to have to deal with weather-related depression for three months of the year. But I don't think I'd realized exactly how much I'd missed the Pacific Northwest until we were walking around in the cloudy grey weather, drinking overpriced espresso and watching all the people power-walking around us while glued to their smartphones, dropping in and out of the numerous independent bookstores and alternative fashion boutiques, picking up snacks from the street carts and smiling at the panhandlers...yeah, okay. So it's just where I belong. So sue me.

• Many thanks to thewronghands for coming and having lunch with us on such short notice. It was neat to get to meet you, and I hope we can hang out more in the future.

• One of the nifty places we found was Emerald City Guitars, who live up to their slogan of "Vintage/Used/Funky". They had an honest-to-God 1951 Gibson SJ-200 on the wall that was worth more than our car; after Brian turned on the charm, they were perfectly willing to let him play it, along with a 1958 Martin D-18 that looked like it had been beat to hell but had the most amazing rich full tone. They also had a 2006 Gibson Songwriter in fine condition that I just fell in love with - rosewood, but with something in the worksmanship that gave it a surprisingly balanced sound with all the deep bass of rosewood but still plenty full midrange and bright highs. Also some of the best dressing I've come across; not a single ping from the string binding in the nut when I tuned it. Not a bad deal at two grand, either; I don't suppose anyone wants to buy me an early birthday present? *bats eyelashes*

• Finally in Anchorage, thanks to a last-minute rescue by my mother. And, of course, we've both got the traditional you-just-flew-into-a-cold-and-wet-climate-in-a-pressurized-tuna-can-recycling-air-from-all-the-people-you-heard-coughing cold. Fortunately Mum keeps a bottle of NyQuil handy, because this happens every damn time we come to visit. Hoping that it lets up soon, though, because we're only here until Sundayish (we hope) and I'd like to see more than just the inside of my mother's condo. (Not that it isn't a lovely condo. But.) So, back to sleep for me.

About a year ago, the convertible that cyranocyrano gave me finally hit the "more money than I could justify immediately spending on it" stage with regards to maintenance. Between parts and labor, it was going to need something like $1600 worth of repairs - new sensor for the speedometer, new brakes, new power steering assembly, new tie rods, probably some other things I'm not remembering. I thought about saving for it, but ended up waffling for nearly a year; I don't need a car of my own in our current job/home situation, and whenever the opportunity came up, there were other things I/we wanted to spend the money on. Rebuilding our home theater system. A nice Christmas. Brian's guitar. Visiting Alaska.

For whatever reason, what pushed me into action was the realization that, if I personally had the $1600 right now, even without Brian's feelings to consider, I would absolutely spend it on a guitar rather than fix the car. Combined with the sense of guilt for letting it sit unused for so long, I finally bit the bullet, took a picture with my phone, and posted an ad on Craigslist.

I actually got a surprising number of responses, considering that the car was damn near 20 years old, in need of serious maintenance, and I was asking $800 for it. I admit, I was a little worried it wouldn't even start after a year of sitting...but it turned right over with a jump start. (God bless Japanese engineering.) The battery was flat, but the kid I ended up selling it to didn't mind - I offered to knock the price of a battery off the purchase price, so he bought a battery, I sold him the car for $680, and we were both happy.

I admit I had my doubts about said kid at the start - he kept almost-disappearing communication-wise, and didn't come by when he said he was going to; a couple of times I was ready to write him off as another Craigslist flake. But it turned out that he was just young, combined with a tricky transportation situation and a lot of family obligations. I ended up going out to Sierra Vista to get him and his cousin (who works on cars and put the new battery in for us). It was kind of awkward socially at first; they were both a little shy and didn't say much, and I'm told that I can be intimidating, especially to young men who...er...have yet to really get their lives together. But after a few failed conversational gambits, I pulled out my ice-breaker trump card: "What's your biggest pet peeve?" The kid's cousin actually came up with one that I'd never heard before, but I could totally see: "The sound someone's teeth make when they scrape against a fork." And after that things were a little easier. Which I was glad for, since I discovered that you have to sign the title in the presence of a notary in Arizona, and finding one was something of a mini-adventure all its own.

Anyway, it's done now, and while I'm not sorry about it (and I'm especially pleased that it was over relatively quickly - my previous experience with selling an older car was a much more drawn-out and annoying occurrence), I admit to a certain amount of wistfulness. She was far from a perfect car, but she was the convertible that I asked for and that someone special to me gave me at a time when I was feeling very alone and isolated, and I had a lot of good times driving her around. But, as said friend pointed out when I texted him saying I was going to miss the car, "She'll make a beautiful guitar."

After all of that, I was almost ready to throw in the towel for the day, but I'd promised Allison (one of my new coworkers who unfortunately quit early on due to family problems - really a shame, as she was an excellent worker in addition to our getting on well) cocktails and a movie. As it turned out, she wasn't even able to come over until later that evening, so I had time for a shower and a nap, after which I felt far more human. And I'm glad I didn't cancel - we had a fantastic time watching Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and having appropriately candy-colored cocktails, and on the whole it ended up being a net positive energy-wise. (Social situations are often hit-and-miss for me, depending on the people involved in my mood...I guess that's why I always score right in the middle on those introvert/extrovert tests.) And while we were waiting for her husband to come pick her up, she asked me to play something on my guitar, and since I was slightly tipsy, I played her the one (very simple) song I can actually sort of play decently. And rather than saying "Oh, that's a really easy song" or "You've been practicing that for a month now, why can't you play it perfectly?" she actually cheered and seemed really impressed.

It was a nice reminder that not everyone lives inside my head.

As evidenced by the new icon, I feel like I'm hitting the next stage in the guitar-learning process. Don't get me wrong, I'm still firmly in the "raw beginner" category (and probably will be for the next year at least), but it's starting to feel more comfortable, and not just in the "my fingers hurt less" sense. I'd say that it's starting to feel more right to be playing guitar regularly, but that's not it exactly - oddly, it's felt surprisingly "right" since I started this (possibly because my mother played on and off while I grew up, so it felt more odd to go years *without* hearing guitar music regularly). It's more that I've started looking at it less as a separate instrument and more as an extension of myself - I plan things around practice time, and when I make travel plans one of the first things I look at is how I'm going to get my guitar there, too. Really, it's not unlike settling into a relationship that you've realized is going to be long-term.

I'm still incredibly pleased with Mary Jane the $100 Yard-Sale Ibanez. Especially after taking her to the music shop in Sierra Vista for an adjustment, she plays very nicely and has a surprisingly good tone. I've been doing a fair amount of research on guitars in general, and one of the things that people mention occasionally is that cheaper guitars aren't necessarily worse than more expensive ones; mostly it's the fit and finish (which you can redress by taking it to a good luthier for dressing) and consistency in quality that's lacking. Hence why, unless you're ordering a $2000 Gibson (*cough*), it's extremely important to actually play a guitar before you buy it. In any case, MJ seems to have been on the upper end of the bell curve, and I'm thankful for that.

Which doesn't mean I'm not eyeing other options for possibly trading up. Last weekend Brian and I went up to Tucson and played a whole mess of guitars; I got to hear the difference between a number of different woods as well as what an acoustic-electric sounds like when it's plugged in to an acoustic amp. (Mostly? Like a louder acoustic. I bet you never would've guessed that.) Probably the richest sound came from an $800 Takamine, with a cedar top and rosewood sides; apparently cedar gives a very warm sound and rosewood very rich deep bass (at the expense of some brightness in the treble). However, I'm not sure I'd want to go with cedar, since it's apparently a fairly soft wood that picks up dings and scratches easily. This Vineyard felt very comfortable and had that nice richness of rosewood; I was surprised when the shop owner told me it was a jumbo body, but when I compared it to my Ibanez it was absolutely bigger. I tried a Luna Butterfly, which was very pretty, but I didn't think much of the sound - maple seems to give very bright highs and almost no bass. I also tried their Dragonfly, but being spruce and mahogany, it sounded almost exactly like MJ. Certainly a nice tone, though - mahogany seems to give a very balanced sound between lows and highs.

At one point Brian tried a used Gibson that they had on sale for $1700; it was marked as a Hummingbird, but didn't have the fancy pick-guard, so it was probably from their "Hummingbird Pro" line (apparently those use slightly less cosmetically-perfect wood and don't have the painted pick guard but are supposed to be similar in every other way). It certainly sounded nice, but I avoided playing it as I didn't really want to end up deciding I wanted a $1,700 guitar. So now, of course, I've been eyeing the regular Hummingbirds, which go for rather more than that. I guess by the time I've busked enough to earn the purchase price, I'll be about ready skill-wise to play a $3,000 guitar...

Ah well. For now I'm perfectly pleased with Mary Jane, and with her there's the added bonus of not being too heartbroken if she picks up a few dings.

It's taken a few days, but my G-C-G-C drills are finally approaching playable speed. Not necessarily *fast* speed, but enough that I can limp my way convincingly through a song. It's a nice feeling - for a couple of days I was wondering if I'd ever get there.

I've also decided to take my mother's advice and find a song to learn, so as not to get too tired of just doing drills. Thanks to Ultimate-Guitar.com's extensive tabulature archive, I've managed to pick out the simplified chords to my very first pop song; with a bit more messing around, I came up with the bones of an arrangement that I think might be playable without boring everyone to tears. Now to practice it until it becomes second-nature and I can start working on the performance aspects, and I'll be that much farther along on my goal. (I just hope it doesn't sound too silly sung an octave higher than the original.)

I think I'll also record my version. Not that YouTube doesn't already have a bazillion amateur guitarists recording covers of pop songs, but it'd be a convenient way to prove that I'm making progress. And besides, do any of them have blue hair?

Also, since when can I play guitar for an hour straight before my fingers start to hurt? I guess the daily practicing really is paying off.

So my chords (at least, the four that I know) are getting pretty solid, and I'm starting to approach something resembling playable speed between them. But the change that's killing me is going from G major to C major and back, since in the standard configuration they have almost nothing in common with each other and require completely repositioning your hand. I spend about twenty minutes drilling between the two with no measurable increase in speed.

So I get the bright idea to call my mother, since she's been playing guitar far longer than I have (even though she's not really doing it actively at the moment), and ask if she knows any tricks for speeding up the process. Sure enough, she tells me to do C major, then just move my second and third fingers up one string and catch the high E with my pinky, and behold! G major! And this version requires rather less hand-contorting, too. Admittedly, my pinky isn't super-strong yet, but the chromatic scales I've been playing mean I at least have some callus there.

'Course, after all of five minutes going back and forth in the new configuration, my fretting hand is sore in a whole new way. Ah, the joys of musicianship...

(Also, calluses? Best Thing Ever for guitar playing. Even if I do keep thinking that I have band-aids on the tips of my left fingers - the sensation is not unlike that.)

My scales are actually approaching recognizable at this point. Still working on not having to look at the fretboard, as well as only catching the one string at a time, but I'm improving on both fronts.

I'm also finally able to get my chords to ring out nicely on the first-or-second go. So now the big goal is being able to switch between them at something resembling playable speed.

Fingers are definitely toughening, and I'm developing enough muscle in my pinky to hold down the thicker strings properly. Related, I had no idea it was possible for your fingertips to be numb *and* hurting at the same time. Ow.

Thinking about investing in a gig bag with backpack straps. Amazon has one for less than $20 that's decently well-reviewed. A couple of folks commented on the lack of padding, and of course there's the fact that zippers eventually break, but given that [a] my guitar's hardly anything I'm overly worried about protecting and [b] that's a great price, I'm thinking I'll nab it - it'd be nice to be able to strap it on and head downtown on my bike. I need some more picks and possibly a string winder, too. And Brian can use some new strings for the Frankenfender.

Strumming away still makes me feel like a hippie, and probably will until I get to the point where I can perform regularly. (Note that that's not a derogatory statement coming from me - my parents were pretty close to the hippie generation, and in their twenties played together in a band called Peace Rose that sang raising-environmental-awareness songs, fer chrissakes. It's just the strongest association I have with amateur acoustic-guitar playing.) So of course when I found these picks I had to order a set. And, in keeping with the theme, I've decided to call my guitar Mary Jane. :D

Meanwhile, it looks like I've picked up the new hobby just in time - I just got the "business is slowing so we probably won't need you again until fall" email from my second job, and Cristina's been making noises about reducing my hours on the first one (though so far she's been only marginally successful, thanks to a crazy week with the rest of the employees). So I should have plenty of time to practice daily. I think I'm going to make it my goal to be reasonably skilled and have a repertoire of between three and ten songs that I can perform without embarrassing myself by the end of the summer. (I'd set a more firm number but I don't know how long it'll take me to get to the song-performing point, or how long it'll take me to learn said songs when I do.) Wish me luck, everyone - though, more importantly, wish that my enthusiasm doesn't run out.

Thanks to a quick Google and mollsex's icon-making capabilities, I have a guitar icon! I may have to steal some of the others later when I get further along, but for now, this one pretty perfectly sums up how I feel, plonking away at a chromatic scale. Peace and love, baby.

The story of how I came to find myself plonking out scales is a bit odd. My mother played guitar all through my growing-up years, but while she tried a couple of times to teach me, a combination of her oversize guitar being far too big for me to play comfortably and her own lack of musical-teaching skills (sorry, Mum) meant that we never got very far. Occasionally, especially when I started taking voice lessons, I thought that I should give it a go, since it'd be useful for accompanying myself and mean I might actually be able to do something on an open mic night somewhere. But lack of an instrument combined with my usual fear of doing anything that I might actually turn out to be good at (long story) did their work, and I got this far without ever learning. Brian, similarly, has said more than once that he'd like to learn (especially when we played Guitar Hero together some years back), but nothing ever came of it.

Then, just Saturday as we were driving to Tucson and listening to the radio, I said something about how it was a shame we never got around to learning. He kind of went "Yeah..." and that was that. The excuses had already all been made, there wasn't much point in going into it again.

Fast forward through Saturday, which was lovely. Sunday morning we wake up at our friend Adam's place and decide to head to The B Line, a nifty little restaurant on 4th Avenue in Tucson, for breakfast. However, when we arrive at 4th Avenue, we discover that they've got the entire street dug up to put in trolley tracks, so getting across it to the restaurant is proving to be a bit of a trick. Fortunately it's a nice day, so we just wander down the several blocks until we find the end of the construction, cross, and come back along the other side of the street.

Along the way, we notice some of the fencing has clothing hung up on it. We follow the trail until we find a yard sale going on at one of the little houses on a side street, which seems to be inhabited by several cute hippie girls. We poke around a bit, I find a neat pair of wedge sandals that fit well, and then lo and behold there are two guitars right up on the porch - a Fender Stratocaster and an Ibanez six-string acoustic.

The acoustic is slightly dinged, but in fairly decent shape; one of the girls plays it a bit, and it has a really lovely tone. The Strat is dusty, but looks like it hasn't even been played. They're asking $100 each, so we decide to go have breakfast and think about it. Brian Googles the model of the electric, and discovers that they regularly sell for $300-$400 used. (The Ibenez changes hands for around $50 to $80 on eBay, but given the hassle of shipping $100 isn't a bad price.) So we have a chat about the difference between the things we'd kind of like to do and the things we'd really like to do, and the difficulty of learning new skills, and the importance of making an investment in dreams rather than just letting them remain insubstantial.

On the way back, both guitars are there, and the cute hippie girls are happy to take a cheque. So we carry our new guitars to the car and head off to a Guitar Center to get cases and strings and make sure nothing's wrong with them. (Turns out that the Strat may just be a Stratocaster neck on a different body; the guitar guys didn't recognize the body and the knobs had been wired in backwards. But according to them, the neck alone was in great shape and well worth the $100 we paid, so yay. Brian's taken to referring to it as his Frankenfender.) And now I have a guitar, so I'm working on teaching myself to play it.

The weirdest bit? I thought I'd be scared shitless and convincing myself to keep at it would be an uphill battle (much like writing has been), but I'm actually really excited about it. Maybe I've finally managed to divorce the "learning something new now" from the "OMG there will be expectations down the line!" narrative that usually pervades my thinking. Or maybe I just haven't gotten to the uphill-battle part yet. But even though I haven't gotten any farther than plucking out some scales and basic chords, and even though my fingertips hurt like crazy, and even though just holding the damn thing correctly still feels awkward, I'm really enjoying myself.

Maybe it's finally just the right time.