Procedural Disillusionment

Good to see the other returning with yet another awesome post. I think I need the other here in order for me to get off my lazy ass and blog. It's inspiring I tells ya!

You know what I keep forgetting? That I keep thinking that I need huge chunks of time to blog. That's not true, especially since I hardly have much to say these days anyway. So in little breaks, be it 20-30 mins I should blog a lot more. I certainly hope that doesn't become an empty gesture.

So it's happened again. After trying to play my electric guitar like an acoustic (damn you Michael Hedges), I have lost fine pick control. I can strum fine, but single notes in quick succession stop me dead in my tracks and I have a habit of continually dropping my pick. In the break I shall endeavour to give equal practice to both finger picking techniques as well as my fine pick control. It's not cool, I worked so hard in the summer holidays to play thunderous notes a plenty without resorting to legato, and after a lot of work I hard them down (even with a 16th note feel), and now I am tres shite. It's ridiculous. I'm just too lazy to pick up a 1mm plectum off the shelf! I grew out my middle and ring finger nails for the express purpose of hybrid picking ala Eric Johnson, buy now I just use those as my secondary picking fingers and my middle nail as a makeshift pick, it's not cool!!

Got Advanced Tax Law essay out of the way early, and handed it in 4 days before it was due. My other piece of assessment is on the backburner, since the whole class was given an extension. However, I must get it done before the week is out since I have a take home exam next week. Seriously, what the hell is the point in a take home exam? As if people aren't just going to get into groups and copy each other like mad fiends. It's just a group assignment handed in individually in the end! It's my first one, and what astounds me is that people who have done them before say it's quite possible to fail!!

Also want to buy an electro/acoustic guitar soon. Hopefully cheap and nasty (preferably second hand) because in all honesty they do sound "fuller" and more authentic than the expensive and new pieces of carbon fibre insanity. However, I do have my eyes on that Kaki King Ovation Roundback copy.

My MP3 player died, and I am still waiting on that to be fixed, so I am without music at school which SUCKS horribly. Speaking of music, everyone must listen to Blindfolds Aside by Protest The Hero. Apparently this whole new scene is called Mathcore, and it's about technically complex, atonal music and I am just loving it. I hate irregular time signatures in drumming (as Dream Theater attests), but when the guitar lines follow the irregularity, it is just amazing to hear. These guys must be commended, I don't know how on Earth they can remember all the variation on rhythm, but they are young guys that can play their instruments well and I think that's something horrifically missing in the mainstream music scene these days (especially punk, which these guys belong to).

As mentioned by the other, he has the brilliant plan of learning a classical instrument. This scares me. Classical instrumentalists are absolute freaks when it comes to music theory and playing techniques and general music practice. They're just too damned good. So hopefully I can scam as much technique as I can off him! If I ever went classical, I would go Niccolo Paganini and hit the violin (yes I know, just so I can use pizzicato techniques and just play it like a guitar)!

I really am looking forward to this break. It's a shame it's only two weeks, since I am really sick of university. I've also come to learn that Motor Ace broke up after the release of their last album. I am disgusted with Australian Radio practices, who gave no promotion and barely any airplay to the new album (which in some way contributed to the breakup). But that's just crap on their part. I think on the whole, Australian music sucks. It's pretentious and inaccessible, and basically just a wanky way for an artist to indulge their stupid eccentricities. Motor Ace was the only great Australian ROCK band of the 90's and millennium. People complained that nobody supports Australian music, well they had a good chance with this album and they did not do it, so they can go and screw themselves!

I had to go to college for an interview the other day and it was shocking. There's hardly any teachers around from when I was there (granted I left four years ago and none of my teachers were young). But that's not what frightened me, it was the kind of students that we now have there. It's basically turned into the south side of the Bronx and I'd just like to know what the hell is going on. Is there no individuality in today's youth? They're just a homogenous group of losers. However, I did take a tour around the music dept there and I saw a goth girl who was engaging in what I call "show off fake tapping" where you just fret all six strings with the right hand, and just engage in some legato nonsense with the left hand wherever. I was impressed though, it is an advanced technique, and to see a girl wield it in a tasteful manner was quite the turn on!

My bathroom has been re-tiled and I can use it again so I'm quite happy with that! You seriously don't know how many times I have to get up during the middle of the night to take a leak, I feel like an old man. Oh god, I also just realised how old I was when I went back to college. Granted, I do look extremely young for my age, but compared to all these other people I just felt so uncomfortable, like I was surrounded by children. Now I think about all these new sports stars and what not who are like children of 1988, and in some cases 1990, and me, being a child of 1984 (the last great year in world history for births, due to the other and I) just feel so superfluous, and it's really not a great feeling to have.

I can't let this happen, and I'll do everything in my God given power to make sure that I'm not rendered redundant in this awfully competitive world, no matter what it takes. Maybe in my head I still feel so relatively young. But in all my maturity, all my experience, all I've seen, it just doesn't feel right.

Crapola, this is a big post, so I think I'll end it here for tonight folks. Have a nice day! And I'm certain that after my take home exam, I'll have a lot more to say (I hope)!