would anyone be up for an accountability club where we post goals whenever we want to accomplish something, and someone else can claim to be your buddy and ping you when you’re supposed to have done that thing?
i’m wanting to do this because i wonder if having multiple people in the thread with visible goals will help me with some hobby goals i have. i just don’t want to necessarily ask people to hold me accountable for things that doesn’t seem like it really matters, you know what i mean?
i can flesh out the instructions (maybe some rules around how to notify and ping), but i wonder if this might help anyone else, if you’re interested! reply, let me know, and i’ll get started on it~
we’re putting things into place now for the thread, so please keep posting here if you’d like to be included! it’ll be opt-in since we don’t want to clog others’ forum experience.
This is going to sound silly, but one day I woke up and I was in my 40s and my hair was turning gray and my face was becoming wrinkled and I realized: this is me. This is my life. This is the thing I’ve been waiting for, like a man waiting for a train at a far station and the train came and left and came and left again and I’m still here, waiting. For what, I realized. There’s no special train or different train or magic train, there’s just me here, now, and one day the final train will come.
So I thought about that. I thought about all the places I’d like to see, the foods I’d like to eat, buildings I’d like to walk through. And I thought about sounds. The ones I’d like to hear but also the ones I’d like to make for others to hear. As a kind of reminder to myself that I am here, after all. On this planet in this universe. A quiet kind of swirl like the first cleaning of your paint brush in the jar of water that Mom gave you when you were a child. The color swirls away and disappears, but it’s still in there and you know that because you saw it and because you put it there. And the swirl was beautiful.
That’s the human answer.
The technical answer is that I used to play rock guitar as a kid and then I put away childish things. But lately I thought I might try again because though I’m perhaps too old, I’m also as young as I’m ever going to be. And there’s a guy named Chris Brooks who’s written ten etudes for shred guitar, and since I think my country (America) is on the brink of civil war or, at best, a really terrible year full of racism, religious zealotry, and cruelty, I need a distraction.
And so I thought: maybe I’ll learn those etudes.
And also some piano etudes by Philip Glass because why not.
TL;DR: In order to help manage my stress in what I predict will be a very unrestful Year of the Snake, 10 Arpeggio Etudes for Shred Guitar and 10 Etudes for piano by Philip Glass.
I love this. I really enjoyed your response here and was pleasantly surprised when I saw it posted on your site too. Well deserved posterity for such lovely framing.
