Ukulele Day 5, and my kids - Amazing Grace

Yes, I did not update the past two days. I also did not record myself. Is a daily recording really necessary? Here's today's recording:

No, I will not apologize, nor offer excuses.

Instead, I offer these insights into my process of learning the ukulele:

I am working on a few short term goals at this point. The first goal is to be able to play the C, G and F chords cleanly. The second is to be able to switch between them quickly. A slightly longer term goal is to be able to switch between them cleanly without looking at what I am doing.

A medium term goal is to accompany myself while singing in church. I'm not sure how long I need for this, but I plan to volunteer as soon as I feel comfortable. 

My long term goal is to be comfortable enough to improvise in front of an audience.

My super-long term goal is to charm the birds out of the trees and make people fall over dead from listening to how awesome I am.

Enough of goals, on to what I've learned: I already knew this, but I am gaining a practical knowledge of just how many songs one can play using just these three chords. And I plan to exercise that knowledge on my path to expertise.

I want to build up calluses on my finger tips as well, so that I can endure playing more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time. I'm not sure whether or not it is a goal by itself, but I'm sure it's coming about with the daily practice. For now, my left index finger constantly feels like I have just attempted to catch a frisbee only to have it bounce off of my finger tip. My middle and ring fingers feel like that happened yesterday, and my pinky finger is wondering how long before the pain arrives.

I have found (after a conversation with a friend) that I don't usually need to press as hard as I do, so I can let up on my index finger. But sometimes I do need to press hard, so I need to figure out how to conserve my fingertips until I've got so much fingertip stamina that I go around pressing all the buttons for everyone. One thing that helps with this is practicing at night. I find that if I am strumming softly, I also tend to press the strings with my left hand more softly. If only I can get my left hand to relax the same way when I am strumming loudly. 

I have found that watching YouTube videos of people doing awesome things on an ukulele is not a good idea. It's like sitting down with a pocket knife and a stick on a moonlit night to whittle a moon lander. I need to take in enough to keep the dream alive, but not so much that I get discouraged.

I have found that ukulele is not properly pronounced "you-kuh-lay-lee", but rather "oo-koo-lay-lay." Pronouncing it this way makes me feel like I have joined the in crowd. It also encourages me that at least now I can spell it correctly.

It is fun to do something new and challenging. I mean, yeah, raising kids is challenging, no doubt. My friend Rick and I were having lunch with Quinten a few weeks ago. Quinten got up and announced that he was going to the bathroom. My heart swelled with pride as I told Rick, "It is such a relief that he can finally go to the bathroom by himself. It makes me believe that being a full-time parent won't last forever." 

Front teeth are optional.

Then Quinten's voice soared from the bathroom, "I'm poo-ping!" Rick laughed as I stood up to go wipe clean the anus of another human being. 

As you can see from his picture, Quinten is in the process of losing his baby teeth. Last week the dentist offered to take out those two front ones, as they were a bit wiggly. Quinten's reaction, as I understood it, was "Yank 'em, baby!" That same day he and Maxine started their week-long spring break. I swear that Quinten has been at least 50% naughtier since loosing these teeth. I have a few hypotheses to explain this behavior:

1) The front teeth contain some sort of gland that regulates behavior. Without these glands, kids just go nuts.

2) The weight loss in his head has freed up some extra energy, which he is using to cause trouble.

3) It is only May, but he is already excited for Christmas. (Yeah, that's a link to the Spike Jones song.)

4) He is used to a routine. An extremely subtle part of the routine is how the inside of his mouth feels to his tongue. Whenever his tongue feels that huge gap, it tells his subconscious that something important is missing, and maybe mommy and daddy will disappear forever if he doesn't do something to anchor us to the here and now. So he does.

5) He is completely aware that his cuteness factor has leapt to heights it has not seen since he was an infant, and could get away with vomiting all over everyone and pooping in his pants because he was so cute. He knows that at this moment in his life, he can get away with anything. ANYTHING. So he does.

Maxine, on the other hand, has recently lost the canine teeth that flank the two top front teeth. The sight of her reminds me that I once had a camp counselor who called me "Chipmonk." But the glasses are the big game changer.

See what I mean?

Suddenly she went from being my little girl to looking like a high school student! More and more often I feel that I am catching glimpses of the beautiful woman that she will one day become. Beautiful and funny. She is still willing to hold my hand in public, and I treasure every moment that happens, because I am worried that it won't last much longer. It is no longer acceptable sometimes when her friends are around, though I never push it. 

I have been telling myself that many girls reach the point at which they scream, "I hate you," at their parents (I'm betting on her mother being the main recipient, because it's just like that), preparing my heart to continue loving her no matter what. So far so good. 

So Maxine and Quinten are my main audience. I want them to not only see me do something not that well, but not be ashamed to do it in front of others. Right now they have no grasp of the internet, and no idea how permanent and public this is, but someday they will. And in the mean time, I will make my efforts here more visible and public as I go.

Ukulele Day 2 - Because He Lives

So today I recorded a song, "Because He Lives." I had run through it a few times, and decided to keep my first take. If you just can't stand the sound of someone practicing, I suggest you skip this one.


This goes against most of my instincts. I'm listening to the audio as I write this, and wincing mightily. Like most, if not all people, I don't like to put work out there that is not the best I can do. And my instincts tell me that I can do better than this.

But I can't. The me of right now just can't do any better. I expect the me of tomorrow to be better. If I were to spend another 30 minutes working on it, the me of right now might actually be a tiny bit better, but it wouldn't be the me of this very moment.

And my purpose is to show how I am progressing. If I'm already awesome, how can I get better? So you get it as is: struggling to find my singing pitch, hair down, mosquito net snag and all.

This is fun!

Ukulele Day 1

Recently I decided that I wanted my kids to see me learn something new. I wanted them to see me struggle with something, be not very good at it, then get better as I spent time working on it. As this idea was brewing, the ukulele somehow got added to the mix. My birthday was coming, and so I started asking my family to get me an ukulele for my birthday present. My wife has no time for shopping, and my kids are, frankly speaking, incompetent. Love 'em to death, can't count on them to buy a musical instrument worth more than two dollars.

So as my birthday approached, loomed, arrived and passed, I altered my approach, and simply asked for permission to buy an ukulele for myself. Permission was granted, and I started looking around and talking with people who know of these things. One of my coworkers, Conor Doran, came through for me. He was (and still is) in the market to buy himself a semi-acoustic ukulele, and knows where all the best shops are. So on May 3rd, 2016 he walked into the office with one for me!

It's an M2 concert-sized ukulele, and I find it to be not only adorable, but to have a most lovely tone. Well, lovely when played properly anyway. I spent 20 or 30 minutes with a chord chart written out by Conor (and modified after a Google search). Then I recorded this little video.

I am no longer sure if the ukulele is the ideal demonstration of learning a new skill for my children. It seems to me that I picked it up ridiculously quickly. I mean, sure, my finger tips hurt like heck, and it takes ages to change between chords, and I can't quite manage to pin the right strings down properly without blocking wrong strings. But I actually manage to get some pretty sounds out of this thing on the first day of playing!

I realized that part of what we are seeing here is hundreds, if not thousands of hours of musical practice on other instruments and with my voice. The lessons I've learned in various choirs and bands, playing trumpet, piano, euphonium, trombone and recorder have carried through. My body is used to the idea that little coordinated muscle movements can lead to sounds that are either pleasant or unpleasant to hear.

I'm going to stick with this, because I have had a repressed desire to learn the guitar ever since I was a teenager. My brother Chris learned, and got to be pretty good. My excuse for not learning was an operation on my left wrist*, which limited my flexibility. When I tried holding a guitar, it was extremely uncomfortable, and I was very much in to being comfortable as a teenager. 

The ukulele is a little uncomfortable for me to hold, but it is closer to my body than the neck of a guitar, and it is as light as a feather (from a large, wooden bird). My 20 and 30 minute bouts of playing have not caused any discomfort in my wrist, but my fingertips are taking a beating.

So the video above was made in the afternoon. That evening I had a long walk home after dinner. My walk was along Kwanganlie Beach, with a nice wide boardwalk. As I was walking I decided to practice the ukulele as I went. It is so light that it doesn't even need a strap! I could only remember the fingering for the C and G chords, so that's what I practiced: just getting them to sound clean and clear, and switching between them.

I'm excited to have an instrument which I can use to accompany myself!

*Osteonecrosis of the lunate, you know what I'm talkin' about?

Work in Progress

There are dishes in the sink, I am getting dressed for work in between sentences, and the house is a mess, so I thought I would write a Roblog post. I have to leave for work in 20 minutes, and will have a two hour lunch break today, but I intend to finish this post before the end of the day.

Let's start with random pictures. I may not taking as many pictures as perhaps I should be, but that is okay. I am enjoying the experience, and living it moment to moment.

First picture with Grandpa and Grandma. Who will win this contest of wills?

Maxine calls it a lunch bag. My Dad calls it a hat.
Grandpa Sack Lunch Sack Hat?

In a week of eating out, the first meal I cooked wasSunday breakfast:
banana, bacon pancakes. Lured Mom and Dad right over!

Mom was very amused that I could include Dad's good side
in a selfie with both of us.

Monday morning, 7 a.m., on the way to take Horyon to the
subway for work. That shiny thing in the background is a sunrise.
Or so I've been told.

Maxine posing in a slightly dangerous place.

Quinten working on his commando skills.

So my parents are here in Busan, and I have been asked a few times how I feel. Answering that question is like describing the pattern a leaf makes as it swirls its way down a meandering stream: the complicated motions you see on the surface only hint at what is happening just a few inches underneath. Nevertheless, I will attempt to share some of the currents with you.

So that was yesterday, I think. Today, November 18th, 2015, was hard, but it ended well.

My parents left this evening for their hotel and said goodbye to the kids, not knowing when they would next meet. Tomorrow I will take a train with them to Seoul before the kids come home from school. We will spend the night near the airport, and in the morning I will see them off. It will be hard, but it will just be me and them, and Goodbye is old acquaintance for us; not exactly welcome, but tolerated. After all, Goodbye often comes after some of the best times, when we have been living with the joy and spirit that precede the anticipated goodbye.

For Quinten and Maxine, Goodbye is mean bastard who rips Grandma and Grandpa away.

[Sorry this feels incomplete; that's where I stopped writing on November 18th, 2015, and for some reason I never got back to it. I'm keeping that publishing date, because that's when I wrote it.]

Not My Usual Style

Last week at our Life Group meeting there were just two of us, Izette and myself. We talked about many things, among them the idea of changing our meeting day from Monday to Friday. Because after all, who really likes Monday morning for anything? Judging by our lackluster attendance, no one in particular.

Today I was first joined by one of our newer members, Anel. She is in a difficult situation because her husband works in a different city, and she works here in Busan. Their three-year-old son stays with her husband and his family, so she sees him whenever the family brings him to Busan. She is worried about her son's English, as well as his faith.

I asked her the obvious question: Why doesn't she live with her family, and just stay in Busan Wednesday through Friday, the days she works? She told me that she would miss our church and this Life Group.

It is not my usual style to give advice, but ignoring this would have felt like criminal negligence.

"You should be living there and just coming to Busan for work!" I told her. "Just last week we were discussing moving our group day to Friday, which would let you continue. You would still miss Sunday services, but the sermon is posted on YouTube every week. Matthew gave the sermon yesterday and said that half of the sermon takes place in Life Groups! Here!"

The pieces all seem to fit together: her in-laws are welcoming and kind, just not proficient in English. Her son needs her, and she needs to be with him. And while there may not be an English church there now, Anel may be the seed of a new church in that community some day, but not if she keeps hiding here.

I don't know how it feels when the Holy Spirit works in other people. The Bible is not very descriptive on that sort of thing, focusing more on actions and results. But today I felt that the Holy Spirit moved in me, pushing me to advise a woman who I have only known for a couple of months to make a major change in her life pattern. It is not my usual style to give advice, but sometimes we have to move beyond what we are used to.

Wordz

Like water from a rock in the desert,
      the words seem to spring up from nowhere.
Look what I've made!  How clever I am!
I forget that every word in the cistern of my skull
     was first poured in from elsewhere:
          from a book, a movie, a friend, a teacher.
And I should never be quick to write off
     the fountain of words from which I first sipped;

When my son and I said,
     in the exact same tone of voice
          at the exact same time,
               "Now THAT'S a mosquito!"
I realized that I was not the only one turning into his father.
I realized that a childhood spent
     swigging the words of my mother,
     guzzling the words of my father,
Would lead to me pouring out this inevitable concoction today.

So here's to your words,
     may you always pour and drink well.


So after writing my post, 30 minutes or it's free I became aware of an event called Wordz Only, put on by my coworker, Kenneth May. I really wanted to be part of it. I had little to no idea what to expect from it, but I wanted to be in it. And a poem sort of bubbled its way up out of my head. The story about Quinten just wanted to be written. I thought it would be a Roblog post, and it may still be part of one (along with me saying something just like Horyon's father,) but not right now.

I sent the first version to Kenneth, and he suggested that I try using "imagistic language instead of composing statements." Good advice. I ended up adding the first line, about water from the rock, and the idea of words being like water that we drink suddenly came into focus, and ended up permeating the entire piece. I have tweaked it and added bits and taken out bits, and even now it is not the same as what I read yesterday. But this is the version that is going up on the internet, so it's about as finished as it's going to get.

I told Horyon that I wanted to go to an event on Saturday night, but I didn't tell her that I would be reading something until the day of Wordz Only. When she found out, she was excited and wanted to come with me. We had a good evening, and spent a lot of time talking both before and after. It was fun for both of us, though there were some pieces (including mine) that she didn't understand. To be fair, there were some pieces that I did not so much understand as experience. It was a nice break from the concrete language that I use during the work week.

Back to Habits

Sunday I officially signed on to Busan's Biggest Loser #5, a diet competition based on the television show. I checked my weight: 103.5 kg (228 lbs). I have been stalled at this weight for about five months now, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Considering that seven months ago I weighed in at 117 kg (257 lbs). holding steady is a good thing; the usual pattern after weight loss is to gain some, if not all of it back.  So something had definitely changed.

I decided to join BBL5 about four days before the first weigh-in, and remembered that the organizer, Mike, had told me that previously contestants spent a lot of money on buffets before the contest started. After all, the more weight you have to lose, the more you can lose, right? So I decided to take a page from that playbook:

I ate a lot of tasty bread. The local French Bakery (featuring a real, live French guy you can see working in the second story kitchen) makes a lovely olive bread stuffed with cheese. (Give me a second to clean the drool off of my keyboard.) There is a corner stand that sells boneless fried chicken on a stick, with sweet chili sauce, please! There are coffee drinks that are prepared with all manner of sweet ingredients and whipped cream on the top. And candy bars. I drank four cans of Pepsi that week, as well as drinking cola with a meal. The worst was at meal time, when I ate until I was full, then ate just a bit more.

Until April I was drinking only a can or two of Pepsi a week, but the rest of those habits were totally mine. Then I did the juice thing, and dropped that down to once a month, and then as a mixer. My eating habits changed as my stomach got smaller, and I consciously avoided the larger portions I was accustomed to. Eventually I became accustomed to smaller portions, and stopped thinking about it at all.

So last week I broke all the "rules" and went back to my old habits. When I mentioned this in the office, one of my coworkers asked me, "Doesn't it feel good?"

My immediate answer was "No. I feel gross."

"I mean the taste, in your mouth!"

"Yeah, that's good for the first drink, and the first few bites. But as I drink cola and stuff myself with food, I just start to feel yucky. I've been doing it for just two days now, and I feel like a big block of lard."

It occurred to me that I must have felt that way all the time when I ate that way all the time, I just never noticed. I like to think that if I had noticed myself feeling that nasty, I would have lost weight just to avoid that feeling, but I would not wish that constant awareness of one's body on my worst enemy.

Just imagine if you were aware of every bit of discomfort in your body: even mosquito bites would be intolerable. A broken leg would drive you to madness if you could never get comfortable with the pain. I understand that some people with autism are acutely aware of the feeling of their clothes against their body. Time to move to a tropical country with a high tolerance for scant clothing.

Being comfortable with your current condition is a survival skill, but being uncomfortable with it is the path to progress.

I am on the path to progress. I have dropped one of the three kilograms I picked up last week just by reverting to my old new habits: eating less, fewer carbs, more vegetables. Today I made vegetable juice, hoping to spend a few days on a juice fast. I have enough to get me through tomorrow and into the next day, but unfortunately I tried to juice a peach pit. Bit mistake, juicer out of commision.  I will make the juice last a couple of days and try to get a replacement part soon, but in the mean time it is more raw veggies, more exercise, and no more tasty olive bread for me.

Oh yeah, we went to Gumi for Chuseok. Here are some pictures.

A cousin's home

The church built on the site of my father-in-law's home

Heading up Gumo Mountain

No, we are not walking all that way up.

Entrance to a Buddhist Temple

Maxine and I further up the mountain

This was a good trip, and deserves its own write-up, but this will have to do: the last time I went to Gumi was in 2002, I think, the Chuseok after we got married. I vowed to never again make that trip during Chuseok, as the traffic was so terrible. It took us 2.5 hours to get there, and six to get back. This time both legs of the journey were about the same. Korean highway driving is still no fun, but at least it wasn't bumper-to-bumper.