Doing the Impossible
Dec. 6th, 2025 05:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spryngDayjob has been nonstop and will likely remain so right up until Christmas break. I am all day every day performing data processing that you'd think would be perfect for AI, but apparently breaks its little brain. So I get to do the brain-numbing dull stuff while genAI gets to write books / create art and my boss keeps asking me why I can't just apply AI harder and that about sums up everything that makes me ragey re the current AI debate.
It's dull, tedious stuff, but I'm trying to keep it from infiltrating the rest of my life. I borrowed my mother's guitar around Thanksgiving, got it restringed (it'd been sitting in a closet for 5+ years), and have been learning the absolute basics in my downtime. Aside from ukulele, I've never played a stringed instrument before... honestly, aside from piano, I've never really been an instrument player in general. Choir was my thing, so I feel like I'm "learning" to read and play music all over again.
Also wow, they weren't kidding when they said your fingers would hurt learning guitar. I definitely got close to blisters forming one day, ouch.
A few years ago I decided to learn French because the language had always eluded me and now I can read most French and am starting to pick it up spoken. Last year I decided to master bread baking because that, too, had been something I always failed at before; now I can retrieve the starter from the fridge and have fresh-baked bread the next day that even the kids prefer to store-bought. Now I'm picking up guitar after long ago accepting I'd never understand it... but I'm starting to.
I should probably just make a list of all the things I thought I'd never be able to do and cross them off one by one. Some of them are more impossible than others (cartwheels, at this age and size?), but others are absolutely possible (pull ups, car maintenance). I love being almost 40 and not only still learning new skills, but disproving old assumptions about myself. I wish I had more time to tackle it all, but I'll have to just do one thing at a time for now.
Maybe I can work on getting the skill to a level like the sourdough starter -- something I can pull out when I need it, or just when I want it. Piano is almost there; I've certainly just plunked down and played a piece to chill several times this week. It's also nice to have things I can do, but I'm not necessarily good at, so I'll never have the urge to try to monetize it. I just want to be that family member who can pull out an instrument and play a song, you know?
That's a good goal.
And who knows, maybe I'll actually understand music theory eventually, too. Another seemingly impossible thing.
It's dull, tedious stuff, but I'm trying to keep it from infiltrating the rest of my life. I borrowed my mother's guitar around Thanksgiving, got it restringed (it'd been sitting in a closet for 5+ years), and have been learning the absolute basics in my downtime. Aside from ukulele, I've never played a stringed instrument before... honestly, aside from piano, I've never really been an instrument player in general. Choir was my thing, so I feel like I'm "learning" to read and play music all over again.
Also wow, they weren't kidding when they said your fingers would hurt learning guitar. I definitely got close to blisters forming one day, ouch.
A few years ago I decided to learn French because the language had always eluded me and now I can read most French and am starting to pick it up spoken. Last year I decided to master bread baking because that, too, had been something I always failed at before; now I can retrieve the starter from the fridge and have fresh-baked bread the next day that even the kids prefer to store-bought. Now I'm picking up guitar after long ago accepting I'd never understand it... but I'm starting to.
I should probably just make a list of all the things I thought I'd never be able to do and cross them off one by one. Some of them are more impossible than others (cartwheels, at this age and size?), but others are absolutely possible (pull ups, car maintenance). I love being almost 40 and not only still learning new skills, but disproving old assumptions about myself. I wish I had more time to tackle it all, but I'll have to just do one thing at a time for now.
Maybe I can work on getting the skill to a level like the sourdough starter -- something I can pull out when I need it, or just when I want it. Piano is almost there; I've certainly just plunked down and played a piece to chill several times this week. It's also nice to have things I can do, but I'm not necessarily good at, so I'll never have the urge to try to monetize it. I just want to be that family member who can pull out an instrument and play a song, you know?
That's a good goal.
And who knows, maybe I'll actually understand music theory eventually, too. Another seemingly impossible thing.
