Hello again

Nigh on four months since the last time I updated this thing. Can’t say I’m sur­prised, really. I’m noto­ri­ous for start­ing a blog then either not really updat­ing it or doing so reg­u­larly at first, then slip­ping into irreg­u­larly, before finally falling to spo­radic to not at all.

I should change this.

I think part of the prob­lem is some­thing I’ve recently come to real­ize about myself: I can only have two hob­bies at once, and one of them is always play­ing gui­tar. Stay with me here.

I’ve been play­ing gui­tar for, oh, 14 or 15 years now. Offi­cially half my life. Clearly, that’s not going to stop any time soon, bar­ring any phys­i­cal rea­son (paral­y­sis, loss of finger/hand/arm in a tragic farm acci­dent, which is unlikely, con­sid­er­ing my cur­rent level of farm activ­ity; which is to say, none). When I went to Iraq, I left my gui­tar and went about 6 months before I just couldn’t take it any­more and ordered an acoustic gui­tar so cheap that ship­ping to the APO was $10 more than the price of the gui­tar itself. I still have that guitar.

So we have gui­tar play­ing. What’s my other hobby, you ask? Well, that varies. Which is part of the prob­lem. See, the whole “only two hob­bies at a time, one of which is gui­tar” rule was decided upon after I noticed this habit in myself. It was not arbi­trar­ily decided upon to help with my per­sonal time man­age­ment (which sucks, by the way). One day, I just noticed that my inter­ests change peri­od­i­cally and I only do that one thing for a period of time. Then, for no appar­ent rea­son, that activ­ity falls out of favor for me, and I move on to some­thing else or just start watch­ing a lot of movies.

Paint­ing, draw­ing, carv­ing wood, pro­gram­ming (in either a lan­guage I know or try­ing to learn a new one), pho­tog­ra­phy, lutherie, writ­ing. All of these are things that I have attempted, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and sub­se­quently aban­doned. I will go back to them peri­od­i­cally and pick them back up, but so far noth­ing has even come close to touch­ing the tenure of play­ing guitar.

Cur­rently I’m think­ing of going back to writ­ing. I’m not sure I have enough patience for a novel, but short sto­ries might be doable. My prob­lem is sit­ting down and actu­ally doing it. We shall see how it goes.

The only other news is that I’m work­ing on a ser­vice that allows you to tweet a word and get the def­i­n­i­tion sent to you. I real­ized how this might be use­ful when I was read­ing at the bar and came across an unfa­mil­iar word. Not to toot my wordy horn, but that doesn’t hap­pen too often. At the time, though, I didn’t have a way to look up the def­i­n­i­tion. So I thought, “What if there was a way that I can tweet the word and have it sent to me in a direct mes­sage?” The direct mes­sage is impor­tant because I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones and I do every­thing via text mes­sage. My Twit­ter account (@hallowdmachine, if you’re inter­ested) is set so DMs are sent to my phone in a text mes­sage. So, I’m work­ing on that. I hope it will work like I want it to. The details are for another post. As is my expe­ri­ence last night see­ing Lucero at the Jew­ish Mother.