A guitar is a beautifully romantic theoretical nerd.

Playing music on a guitar is a juxtaposition of nerdly intellect and romantic sensualism. I found out through experience. (boy was that guitar a mess afterwards ha!)

I first started playing guitar when I started my physiotherapy degree.

On first picking it up, I succeeded only in making the guitar sound like a box of disgruntled cats being shaken like a cassonette to the tune of Eye of the Tiger. It retrospect, why would it not? Poor tuning, block chords, heavy strums, poor rhythm and badly sung covers: I sucked hard.
(an aside, I find rhythm do be the hardest word to spell in the English language)

But, there were odd transient moments when I really enjoyed what came out of the guitar. In these moments, it seemed to sing to me. I tried to reproduce these moments.

I failed miserably.

So how could I discover the secret to making a guitar sing?

With that question, my fate was sealed: I started on a journey of musical discovery.

First, I needed to know how to find the good, non-disgruntled cat notes. So I studied music theory. This process was mechanical, unemotional, sexless and nerdily scientific. I had note pads filled with messes of numbers, cartoon fret-boards with circled chord shapes and scales, chord progressions with superimposed melody lines...in my head, my guitar began to look like a maze of numbers.

But, the results were starting to come: the singing moments were more frequent and the disgrunteld cat moments rarer. This success added to my need for discovery and I began to become a smidge obsessed.

I felt my nerdly musical obsession was crystalised with one moment: I was sitting in a physio lecture and furiously taking notes. A friend glanced over at my note pad with a look of confusion and asked incredulously 'what lecture and you listening to?' She had seen my outwardly insane-looking scrawlings. After pulling myself out of my concentration-enduced coma, I could only answer "I'm figuring out music."

So I was a little insane for a while.

But it really started to come together. Once I could autonomously avoid the disgruntled-cat notes on the fretboard, I was free to listen to my music. This was when learning guitar changed from being a mental exercise to being a romantic meeting of mind and melody.

The world of non-disgruntled cat notes was deeper than I first thought. I discovered that non-disgruntled cat melodies carry their own stories and these stories are set to context by the accompanying chord progressions expressed as other melodic stories of bass and harmony. The intimacies of each story could be expressed by the note's timbre, volume and rhythmic approach (being ahead of or behind the beat). I discovered that changes to any of these factors create musical drama.

This romantic beauty side of music is in contrast to the theoretical nerd side. It is expressive, sensual and requires more than an IQ.

But neither can exist with out the other.

Guitar: a beautiful nerd.

Sleepy Sunday Truffle on a Dime

1. Mix 1lb hyperactive-brother & pooch into early morning dozing till awake and bleerily looking at Fox 8 through rubbed eyes
2. Stir in 4oz of contended-to-have-chickens-under-wings Susan to TV sofa and need with bare hands till soft and warmly cosy
   
3. Abruptly add 1 dollop father till 3/4 mixture is ready to head on 100k bike
   
4. Separate male ingredients and bake till exhaustion (skin will be lightly brown with a hint of scarlet)
5. Recombine males with mixture and add 1 tablespoon of mum's cooking (fight the temptation to taste here!)
6. Let rest for afternoon before reheating for evening's entertainment
7. Ice carefully with some final calories on top
   
8. Sprinkle Australian Idol and Rove to garnish
9. Serves 4-5 routinely.
   

I'm finally patient enough to read novels

And I'm happy about it.

For most of my life, I've found reading a novel a challenge because

1. I never would read for longer than 1 hour continuously because I would become restless and
2. I had no idea how to find novels that I might enjoy.
   

I think 2. contributed to 1. heavily. I would be stir-crazy because I was reading novels I wasn't really into!

But that all changed when about a year ago I was reading a magazine and found a list of Stephen King's favourite books read in 2006. This was a revelation to me: why not let a fantastic author illuminate captivating titles rather than taking ill-judged stabs in the dark? I started reading my way through his list and began to discover that novels are the perfect way to transport you into the mind of an entirely different person. And unlike my prior attempts, which saw me reading a bunch of crime/detective thriller pap, I've been having no trouble reading in big old solid blocks of time - this is particularly easy when wrapped in 1 x cosy doona and when serenaded by pitter-pattering rain on window sill.

Now I can't get enough - especially when the novel gets me inside the mind of someone quite different to me or anyone I know well. For example, I particularly enjoyed Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which gave me a insight into the mind of someone with autistic spectrum disorder.

Currently, I am reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, which tells the story of the 9 year-old son of the Nazi Commandant running Auschwitz. Haven't come across anyone like that around Brisbane.

I've always been prone to a bit of arm-chair psychology and this sort of stuff is highly stimulating for the reclining leather chair-prescribing shrink that pontificates endlessly inside me.

I managed to read 6 novels last month, but am back at clinic this month. Heavens know that saps the aura right off your ectoplasm. After a day of constant learning and dealing with people, watching Australian Idol can be mentally challenging, let alone mustering the energy to imagine a world dictated by some words on a page...

Anyhoo, I have a new position statement to issue to the public: reading is cool.

My Impending Baldness

I am losing my hair in the good old pattern way. Give me 5 years and I will be getting it cut close all over. 10 years and I will be stock-piling scalp wax to enhance my sexy Captain Picard-like shiny dome. An aside: how cool is Patrick Stewart?

I knew it was noticeable when a hairdresser took thinning scissors to the sides without asking - she had assumed I was cool with evening the sides out to be like that top! That was a very funny moment for me.

One Greek hairdresser noted "is shame: so thick on side, but not so much on top." She then shared with me her husband's story and how he has found great relief with a shampoo that has slowed his shedding dramatically.

But you know, I can't be stuffed. I'll be doing a civic duty as "short back and sides" will take on a new, far less-taxing meaning for my hairdressers!

And at least I know that women that show interest in my will be after me personality!

To Blog or not to Blog?

Today I was invited to Facebook by a friend and decided to sign up and enter the world of on-line exposure. So after patiently sifting through the entry forms and clicking multiple "I agree to Terms & Conditions" boxes without actually reading the Terms & Conditions, I now have a FB and also a Blog.

You can automatically search your e-mail address book to see whom of them have FaceBooks. It is a strange thing to go through your e-mail contacts (including friends, workmates, classmates and acquaintances) and see who of them a) you want to have on your FaceBook and b) would not think you a weirdo stalker by adding them ("Love me! Love me!!). Also, were some invitations obligatory?

After that, I was to create my FaceBook profile. It dawned on me that this little page was to act as a summary of me to date and perhaps this could be of certain importance. Not that I am religious, but if Judgement Day were tomorrow, whatever deity is actually raining Hell upon us might decide that reading millions of Blog and FaceBook profiles might be a good way to shortcut the red-tape at the Pearly Gates. But then I'm not religious, so that idea faded quickly.

So I added a photo, for which I chose a sexy pic of me at a triathlon, which in no way shows my impending baldness or pot-belly, and then set about trying to describe my interests and activities in a way that makes me appear appealing but trying not to embellish too much. (I have at some point read a book by Pulitzer Prize winner, but is it too much to say I am into French existential literature?)

I did notice I have a distinct attraction to 80's pop-culture. Power ballads, Sylvester Stallone, Transformers the Movie (cartoon) and Big Trouble in Little China all featured in my favourites.

Some of the contacts I selected to add as Friends agreed to my proposal and so my Facebook is now decorated with their pictures. I immediately noticed how many strikingly attractive girls I know! Why did I only notice this when seeing their pictures on the Internet?

But now what to do with my Facebook? I have some friends, some nice pictures and a few comments, but what do you do now? Am I cooler now that I have a Facebook?

Time will tell..