Why didn’t I decide to learn theremin? Something so exotic the fewest people know if you’re playing well. I was thinking uillean pipes for a while, but those are expensive, and have a 2-year waiting list when you order them. And besides, there are tons of uillean pipes geeks out there.

Of course, now I find out that every instrument is expensive, except tin whistle. More on tin whistles some other time.

So I picked cello. Right now, I have a cheap Chinese-made rental cello with a spike that doesn’t want to come out. So my cello equipment goes like, cello, bow, case, flat-nosed pliers.

What I’m referring to as a spike here is that spike-like metal bit that sticks out the bottom of the cello and holds it up at the right level. For all I know, “spike” could even be the proper term.

Usually I leave it sticking out a little ways so I can get a grip on it. But yesterday when I sat down to practice it had gone all the way in and so I sat there, cursing and breaking fingernails, trying to get ahold of this little protrusion of metal until finally giving up and looking for the flat-nosed pliers.

Which of course have gone AWOL. Not in the drawer of odds and ends in the entry way. Not in the drawer of chaos in the kitchen. Meaning I have to go all the way to my shop in the cellar to look for a pair. Found them, pulled the spike out to the proper length, practiced.

This morning, I noticed the pliers next to my PC in the office, no idea how they got there.

Anyway. Tonight is cello lesson night. I appear to have reached the point in my musical development where I can now have musical breakdowns, and I’ve been having some. No doubt there will be another one tonight.

You know – I reach a level with a tune, where I feel I have it down, maybe I know it by heart or can get through it with no big mistakes. Then a new element is added – the teacher says something like “stop moving around so much,” or “try playing more expressively, varying intensity, instead of playing every note the same,” and this new factor causes the tune to collapse into its individual elements again.

Then, basically, you start over and put those elements back together again, but when you finish, you find yourself at a higher level. I remarked on this to my teacher who said, “yeah, don’t feel bad, it happens to everyone.”

And I suppose it does. Things progress until you reach a deadlock of one kind or another, then some crisis breaks the stasis, everything collapses, but if you can manage to get it all back together, you end up on a higher level. Perhaps.

If you can manage to get it back together.

In which Melly promotes condom use.

Creepy QOD at michele’s place.

Alpha, I think, would do a nude scene if it was integral to the plot. But just in case I’m wrong, I waited until she left town on a business trip to post this:

Scene: Upstairs shower. [Cue famous "Psycho" violin track]

Alpha: [singing away, bare naked] “…itchy-itchy ya-ya ga-ga, voulez-vous… EEEK!”
Miguel: [Tying tie] “Oh sorry, I scare you, honey?”

It is far too easy to scare people here, at least my wife’s family. Nine times out of ten, someone shrieks when I walk into a room.

In my family, scaring each other was our primary method of communicating our affection, so you’d think I’d thrive in my present environment, but it’s just too easy.

When I was a boy, I remember my mother turning off all the lights in the house and hiding in the closet, wearing a rubber ape mask, when she knew my father would be returning from work.

Mother: “Wraah! Booga-booga!”
Father: “Jesus Christ, Marge!”

I guess we loved each other. My father also used to darken the house and make my younger siblings and me look for him. Whoever found him got to get scared.

For some reason I will never fathom, my brother and sister enjoyed being scared.

Brother: “…8, 9, 10 ready or not, here we come!”
Sister: “He headed down the hall, let’s go.”
Miguel: “Good idea! You guys go first, I’ll, uh, check here in the entry way in case he doubled back. [whistle, whistle] Hm, not in the closet. Not in the vase…”
Father: [In some distant room down the hall] “Wraah!”
Brother and sister: “EEEEK!”
Miguel: “Ah, find him, did you? I’ll just turn on the lights then…”

I am posting this today because I was reminded in an AIM conversation with Spacecheese this morning of one of the perks of being an oldest child: putting your siblings up to things. Spacecheese was wondering whether he should do something.

feralmig: sure go ahead.
feralmig: do it, space.
angrygordon: what the hell.
feralmig: “it’ll be funny”
angrygordon: hahahah
angrygordon: those quotation marks are not encouraging

When we were little, I got my brother to break all the windows in a barn by telling him birds could fly into the panes and hurt themselves. Then I got him to break out every last piece of glass, so the birds wouldn’t cut themselves on the sharp bits.

It wasn’t just a little kid phase, either. Traveling through Austria with relatives prior to my wedding here, I convinced my sister to climb a rickety trellis to a second-storey balcony at our hotel after we got locked out late one night. We’d been drinking lots of schnapps at some pizzeria [the evil midget waitress there kept bringing us doubles, whether or not we ordered].

My siblings are growing more sophisticated as they get older, but I bet I can still make them do stuff, because I am more sophisticated too. We’ll see this summer when I visit the family.

What did you do to your siblings?

Scene: Gamma’s day care place.
Little Boy: “Mom! It’s Gamma!”
Mom: “Lift your foot so I can take off your shoe, honey.”
Little Boy: “Hi, Gamma!”
Gamma: “Hi!”
Little Boy: “Is that Beta with you?”
Gamma: “Yes.”
Beta: [Editor's note: in an "ironic" tone of voice] “I’m famous.”
Little Boy: “We got here at the same time!”
Gamma: “We arrived simultaneously.”
Miguel: [???simultaneously???]
Little Boy: [???simultaneously???]

Man, the cleaning lady at the U.N. this morning had B.O., I’m telling you, she was pungent!

I suppose I would be too, if I had to clean house for the entire world.

An Austrian friend of mine lives abroad alot, due to her husband’s profession, and complaining is her default mode. The spent a year in Alabama, which all of us know is a wonderful place, and she complained about a number of things there, including the fact that the classiest restaurant far and wide was a steak house at the local mall, the lack of decent beer, a funny American attitude towards most of the finer things in life including alcoholic beverage in particular wine, the construction of American homes – including the fact that, where she was, the houses were built without rain gutters so the water just sort of flowed off the sides of the house when it rained; weather that was too hot or too cold, the fact that there was a church of one kind or another on nearly every block in town, the poor quality of schools in general and the particular fact that long division is taught differently in America than it is in Austria, and that her child’s teacher refused to accept correct results if they were arrived at using the Austrian method.

This is just a small fraction of her list, remember.

Now she is in Belgium, where all the men have pot bellies and red noses, and where the season of winter (“at least this year,” she fairly remarks) doesn’t really exist, just sort of a nasty transitional season between fall and spring, making paying for the mounting of winter tires on your car a waste of money.

And so on. Awful country, Belgium. At least if you overlook the fact that good food can be had there (I mean, Belgians invented French fries, for godssake), and most houses are built with rain gutters.

Not to mention the beer.