Month of Music Summary

November’s resolution was about finding more joy in playing music. I like music, but I can be lazy—or, to phrase it in a way that might land me a TED talk, "efficient." I get a lot of pleasure from singing and playing piano. I do not get a lot of pleasure from the part where you have to practice note by note to get better.

If we're considering the principle of diminishing returns, I've been keeping up a success streak for years. I sit down at the piano when I feel like it, get halfway through deciphering a catchy soundtrack, make up the rest, and move on with my day. It’s like telling someone about a book when you’ve only read the back cover – there’ll be new additions to the storyline, sure, but the spirit of the book still gets through.

This month, I pushed myself into reading sheet music for piano, finally learning guitar, and experimenting with percussive guitar techniques.

But shocking as it may sound, November turned out to be an extremely busy month. I think holidays do it on purpose. Thanksgiving sits at the end of November like a sniper, giving you three peaceful weeks to believe you have time. You do not have time. You have never had time. By the time you realize this, you're already committed to four dinners and a pie you don't know how to make.

Among the holidays, Valentine's Day is the one we can thank the most for not even bothering to RSVP and just showing up mid-month like a hostage no one's coming for. Its indifference was clear from the start, when it chose those terrible, chalky candy hearts as its signature confection. A holiday whose defining food tastes like flavored aspirin has very little leverage to try and upset the system.

So, consistency-wise, this month earned a solid B+. I missed a few days of practice, but not most.

I tried percussive guitar on three separate days, and each time I gave myself new blood blisters. This is not an exaggeration for effect. I was genuinely injuring myself in pursuit of sounding like a drummer and a guitarist at the same time, which, in retrospect, is the kind of ambition that should have been a red flag.

"Finally" still never came for the guitar. I spent the first half of the month playing fairly religiously. I learned more chords. They are halting and clumsy, and you may derive more joy from watching someone parallel park for ten minutes, but they do allow me to play more songs.  I am in the stage where simply sitting differently can make me offset every chord by one or more frets.

It doesn't sound great.

Unfortunately, I discovered this while trying to play in front of a handsome man. He was very polite about it. I may never emotionally recover.

I was given a guitar pick, which I rather liked. Because I liked it, I kept it in my pocket for safekeeping. This was a mistake. Pockets are where things are sent to die. That pick is now in some washing machine or wedged into the gap between my car door and seat, living out its days alongside faded receipts and a pistachio shell.

Piano was where this month truly brought me joy. I took lessons as a child and learned a few pieces. Some fun, some "impressive"… In the way that anything a cute child does is impressive, which is to say, my ski-jump nose and chubby cheeks were the main features of my musical performance. Today, those musical pieces exist only in fragments, like archaeological ruins of a more disciplined era.

Maybe one day I'll learn something from one of these...

It's been over a decade since I felt like I had a repertoire—a word that implies I'm the kind of person who gets asked to perform at dinner parties, which I'm not, but a girl can dream. Still, I wanted to be ready should someone say, "Hey, there's a piano in this hospital lobby! Can you play something?" This has never happened to me. But it COULD.

I wasn't really trying to rebuild that repertoire this month. But in the last days of November, I sort of blinked and realized I had four songs fairly set. Granted, my list is short. The songs are also short. And easy. I'm not out here learning Rachmaninoff - a seven-minute piece with four flats and triplet runs is a relationship. I'm just not ready for that. But my list qualifies as a list. That's big news. That's exciting news. And that's news that will keep me practicing music note by note, even though the month is up.