Ooh, Shiny! The Art of Learning New Things
Late last year, I accidentally started learning the guitar. I didn’t mean to. See, we were cleaning up for the holidays, and my spouse’s guitar has been sitting on a stand in the corner of the living room, looking decorative and getting dusty. He picked it up to dust it and ended up plucking away on it, for the first time in a couple of years. Then I stole it and started plucking away on it. Then we started looking up chords for Christmas songs so we could sing and play together. Four weeks later, I bought my own guitar. Of course, a month after that I got hit by this year’s Death!Cold and have had no energy to practice until just these last few days. But in the intervening time, I built my calluses, learned all the common chords, can muddle my way through a couple of songs, learned the blues scale, and am working through some basic bluegrass stuff. It’s intoxicating, learning a new thing. Last year it was French. Spouse and I decided to brush up on our rusty high-school French, mostly by way of reading Harry Potter et la Chambre des secrets out loud during our commute. It worked surprisingly well. We got to the point of carrying on conversations with each other, and just barely making ourselves understood during a trip to Montreal, before running out of steam. But I haven’t lost everything. I’m still quite a bit better at reading French, and slightly better…