up

The dizziness seems to be going away when I sit up in bed now, and when I lie down. It gave up when I decided it was five seconds of being high for free. Now sitting up in bed is reserved strictly for wee-hours angst, as it should be. (My brain has actually learned on this one, that I will no longer lend credence to the things it tells me at this hour. It can't be trusted.) Sitting up was my signature achievement, though. 

In sixth grade, we were still feeling the bad effects from Jack Kennedy's physical fitness mania, setting aside a portion of the year for The President's Fitness Thing, whatever they called it, which was a wall-to-wall exposition of Everything Kip Can't Do. They had a distance written down that I should be able to throw a softball, and I couldn't, and how many pushups I should be able to do, how far I should be able to jump, and other whimsical markers of inadequacy. (It didn't help that I was most of a year younger than the rest of the class, physically, and farther than that emotionally.) 

So for a week or a year or however long it was, every moment outside was spent being subnormal, much to the amusement of the bullies I'd been sharing classrooms with since second grade. Coach has your back, though. If anything happens, he'll make you run laps around the playground for a while. 

The surprise was the situps. Someone had decided, with 100% obvious objectivity, that the goal was 100 situps. Don't worry, a guy'll hold your ankles! I don't know what made this happen, whether it was one insult too many or what, but I did 100 situps. Objectively did them all, with an adult counting each one. I made it to 100 and stopped. No power on Earth could have made me do another. And after that, I was cool. I was the king of the classroom. I made it!

 Just kidding. I don't think there was an echo or a dead cat bounce. Situps were quietly removed from the list of things to make fun of me for, and that was that. Nothing else changed. Years later, I was an older college student (not much older, I was about 23 to start), and I had to take a PE class, something I'd successfully avoided since high school (see: being threatened in the locker room). I still couldn't "run" a mile, but I knew deep inside that I was going to blow them away on the situps. Except I didn't. I did a handful and then turned my attention to the exercise of breathing without losing my last three meals. Oh, well. I guess I had 100 in me, total. 

Another twenty years after that, I was a member of the Male Chorus in The Mikado, really liking the inadvertent discovery that at least some of my fellow thespians had imperfect graydar and thought I was maybe pushing thirty. I didn't fool myself that I looked good, but please don't fault me for feeling good that I didn't look used up yet. 

Anyway, the chat among Us Regular College Guys somehow turned to situps. Bryan said he could do X number. Fred maybe suggested a higher figure. Then they looked at me. I could have done the Old thing, and told them all about my grade school triumph, being careful to describe the motor cars on the street and the popular TV shows of the day. I didn't. Instead, I said "I arrange my day ahead of time so that I don't have to sit up," and that was the Right Answer, because I can talk to the young people. I speak their language! 

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going sideways

I posted a couple of times this year, but they went sideways, and not in a great way. I wrote two short posts and didn't notice that they went into the wrong account and were posted into a parallel universe where they didn't get any comments either. The one I keep thinking about is about my cool tip for practicing, which is "turn the tablet sideways."

Figure 1: The tablet (tabloid)

I impressed Dad with this, several years ago, by showing that a screen which showed a whole page in a reduction somewhere between full size and miniature score sized, so that he could read Ravel right off the tablet. Of course, that also meant far fewer lines visible at a time, and this was enough of a handicap, I thought, that I mostly didn't avail myself of it, except for PDFs of music that were Landscape orientated. 

Recently, though, my eyes prevailed upon my hands to turn it sideways during some tough passages, and I found a new world, actually. I didn't realize it at first, because I was trying to see it at that size and still keep scrolling while playing up to speed. Yeah, THAT COULD WORK. 

Figre 2: The tablet (landscape)

 Contrariwise, what works for me is the Zen state of having two or three lines (if squinching a little gets me more) and not leaving them. Practice those measures and keep doing them for a while. Do it until you can't hide that one error you keep making from yourself and then deal with that by (say it with me) taking the measure apart as far down as necessary to make the brain understand what happens in it. 

That means playing the hands separately. That means if you have to use both hands to play one of the hands' parts a few times, you do that, until your fingers know the exact choreography of the dance from this white key to that black key and you begin to perceive the topography of the playing field as both massive and as if viewed from far above. It's like the old saying: Practice Makes Incrementally Better.

I feel a strange excitement now when I reach to rotate the tablet to oblong view. It's like my eyes are better. It's like I don't have to rush from one measure to the next.

And, by the greatest of fortune, I find that I now enjoy playing passages over and over. I have an excuse now: I'm practicing. 

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