Towards learning to dance

The dance analog of this post on learning how to play guitar just struck me. Creation and versatility, not emulation.

I suppose this is why I'm fairly comfortable thinking of myself as a dancer, whereas I'm not at all comfortable with thinking of myself as (or other people calling me) a musician. I'm not even close to able to express my own feelings or ideas (musical or otherwise) through music. As far as guitar goes, I am the equivalent of someone who has watched a bunch of instructional YouTube dance videos and has learned from them how to execute a handful of patterns. I don't think of myself as being able to "play guitar"; I can just play some songs on a guitar. And I really enjoy playing them, no doubt -- but I wish I wasn't so limited to such a select few songs, in the specific keys and arrangements in which I learned them.

But with dance, I *like* learning the equivalent of scales, chords and miscellaneous theory; it's intrinsically enjoyable to me, to discuss and play around with the nuts and bolts of dance. I love exploring lead/follow connection and working on body control and movement, with no particular end result in mind other than getting better at moving myself and hearing/moving my partner. And it seems that this, as in guitar, is how you gain the freedom to express yourself. Knowing your way around your instrument.

Towards learning to play guitar

I have started learning chords. It is hard, since almost nothing I know relating to music (or dance, for that matter) lives in my explicit memory. Chords names, unfortunately, must. I'm also trying to learn my way around my instrument a little -- scales (so far only the major scale) and just playing around with random tunes by ear, and... well... actually trying to remember what note each string is (this information refuses to stay in my brain for some reason... I guess because I never use it :|).

Up until now, all I've done is basically trained my muscles to produce a handful of songs, generally using tabs as instructions. (Even the song that I managed to figure out by ear: I wrote each bit down in tab form as I figured it out, and then learned each section using my crappy tab-like notes.) This, to me, has very little relation to knowing how to play an instrument. I want to be able to play a new song given a set of chord names, and I want to be able to improvise a melody over some set of chords being played.

So these two endeavours, learning names for things and learning my way around my instrument, are my current strategy for trying to learn how to actually play. I think part of the reason I never worked at either of these things before is that there are no discrete tasks with immediate payoffs at the end, as is the case with trying to learn individual songs. But now I am determined! By the end of the summer, I want to have considerably improved on both fronts. I just wish there was some good way to quantify and track my progress. :|

This Is Your Brain on Music (Part I)

This is a book I bought years ago because of my interest in cognition, my love of music, and the fact that my curiosity about how we experience music and why was driving me crazy. For some reason (probably because I'd bought another half-dozen books at the same time), I started reading it then, but didn't get that far before I got distracted by shiny things and forgot about it.

Recently, in my theory development class, we've been talking about design and perception, and music (the way we perceive it, and our preferences relating to it) came up; it reminded me of this book. My music- and dance-related experiences over the last couple of years have made my fascination with this subject much greater than it was even when I bought the book, so I was eager to pick it up again and start reading it from the beginning. Here are a couple of passages from the introduction that resonated with me in a way they couldn't possibly have when I first read them years ago:

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths become tomorrow's disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d'art.

After I finished undergrad, during my final years of which I focused on molecular genetics and spent most of my non-classtime waking hours working on my school's team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, I -- by no means deliberately -- gradually stepped back from the nitty gritty technical side of synthetic biology, and found myself spending more of my time focused on running and developing my team. Having receded from the land of the hardcore technical side of science, I came to realize that I am (would it be ironic to say "at heart"?) a scientist, in terms of the way I see and think about the world, the questions I'm given to asking, and the way I evaluate information on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, I'd become much more immersed in a world of art. Of music, and of dance, and of expression of whatever is alive inside us, trying to get out. And, feeling almost like two completely different people in each of them, I've all the while had a hard time reconciling these two worlds of Science and Art. I'm still not sure how I can do so in a practical sense (or whether I can), but reading that passage was strangely comforting; it made me feel more like a single person.

... I was going to include another excerpt here (actually, the one that I wanted to comment on in the first place), but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Bottled feelings

I feel like I understand art a little better today. I've rambled on before about how the things (energies? passions?) that are alive inside a person can force themselves out in the form of art... music, movement... or other activities, like working hard for some kind of cause. In a couple of ways I get this a little more now than I did before...

Expression through dance is something I can relate to since I feel it all the time: when I hear the right music (which could even just be music in my head :P), there's this need to let this thing out of me, which can only be released through movement.

The visual art thing, on the other hand, I didn't really get. As intrinsically enjoyable as the act of drawing is for me, I'm rarely compelled to do it in the first place. But for perhaps the first time ever, I recently had a taste of that compulsion: I went out to a lake one evening with a bunch of friends. The moon was a huge, orange crescent hanging low in the black sky. As we stood around by the lake, looking at the stars, we realized the moon was getting lower on the horizon. Soon enough it had reached the lake itself, and I stood there, captivated, unable to look away as this orange crescent moon sank into the water like a ship on fire. Something about this nearly moved me to tears, and it felt like the ship was drawing the breath out of me and taking it with it as it sank. I couldn't bring myself to move until long after the last point of light had vanished on the horizon, and I desperately wished that I could capture what I'd just experienced... preserve it somehow, in the form of a painting.

Of course, I am in no way a painter, and it would be terrible to destroy that experience as it exists in my memory by seeing whatever awful rendering I might produce on paper, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Even my written description just now, which I tried to gloss over as much as possible (while still getting the gist of it across) in order to avoid this very thing, has kind of sullied my memory of the event. :| In any case, even if my inability to express myself through these means stops me from actually doing it, I've now at least had a glimpse of what it's like to want to express myself through visual art.

In this case, the desire to capture a moment made me want to create art: to take my experience of that event and turn it into a physical object so I could have it later, maybe share it with others. In the past, I've been driven by various emotions to write things -- sometimes poetry, sometimes other things -- and it has mostly been because of a need to take whatever I was feeling at the time and get it out of me. To reach in and grab hold of it and pull it out and get rid of it, so I could stop experiencing whatever feeling of unrest was roiling inside me. And aside from looking at what I've just pulled out only long enough to see that it is indeed the thing, in its entirety, that I wanted to get rid of, that's generally the end of it, and I don't deal with the thing any further.

But today, for some reason, I read some things I'd written a while back, during a time when I felt quite different than I do these days. Even though I remember a lot of things from that time, even some events in plenty of detail, I generally can't recall the specific feelings I had. Perhaps it's akin to the way you might remember the face of someone you once knew long ago; you might have a rough picture, but it's hazy and doesn't capture the details -- the features that make that person distinct from others with the same sort of look. Yet if you actually see the person, they're immediately recognizable, even alongside other, similar-looking people. In the same way, though I could no longer remember my feelings from these past times, as I read these things that I'd once written, everything I'd been experiencing at the time came crashing over me again. Nuances of emotion that I still wouldn't know how to begin describing in plain words. Somehow I didn't expect that reading these things could put those feelings back into me, even in spite of how irrelevant they are to the present. That is, given how things are now, it doesn't even make sense that I should be able to feel these things from these other times.

It's as if, in writing each of those things, I distilled that immediate experience out of me and bottled it like a drug... and all it takes to once again experience everything I'd managed to draw out of myself back then is to sip from that little bottle.

I suppose, then, that if another person has had experiences similar enough to that from which a given drug was distilled, they too can be affected by it; this is perhaps what makes art resonate with certain people but not others. This would certainly explain why until a few years ago I had very little appreciation for the arts: I hadn't even begun to live yet.

Why trying is good

Holy frig. Like, holy frig. So last week, I started trying to learn a song. I am lame and don't know chords (other than, like, the five-to-ten most generic ones), and aside from the mainstream, strummy sort of songs you play on an acoustic (which tend to consist of maybe ten generic chords total), the handful of other songs I've ever learned were all from tabs. Unfortunately, tabs are virtually impossible to find for most Brazilian music, and I can never make sense of any chords I can find. :| So that left learning this song by ear (and by the handful of fingerings you can see in the video, hehe). Which seemed like it'd be... really, really freaking hard... when I listened to it, but I really, really wanted to learn it, so I tried. And after working at it a little bit more each day since this past Sunday, today I finally finished! :D!

Some parts aren't quite right, and I still can't play it very well, but man! The first time I played it through from start to finish, after I reached the last note I could not stop grinning. I can't believe I actually did it! I listen to the original song, and I'm like, "Whaaaat, I learned that *by ear*?? Whaaaaaaat??" I'm so happy!! Seriously, forget grades or awards or scholarships -- I don't think I've *ever* felt this kind of sense of accomplishment. I feel like a little kid who just made their first-ever Play-Doh man. :D (One arm is falling off.)

Thinking back, there have been a couple of other times I set about learning something that I thought I was crazy to try, given my pitiful skill level (they include the third song I ever learned, and this one). But I did learn them (yay tabs!), and, bit by bit, they were much less impossible than they seemed at first. And then this! So my Important Lesson of the Day is: trying to do things you think you're crazy for attempting is The Best! :D Either you keep trying until you eventually succeed (and you get to be super happy about it!), or you learn a whole bunch through your effortful attempts and at least you know tried your best. :]

So yay! Lack of tabs can't stop me now! :D! There are so many songs I want to learn now... Although, man, it's *insanely* hard to pick out the notes for chords when all of the strings are sounded at once. D: But... I guess it'll get easier as I gain familiarity with the different chords.

Now to apply my Important Lesson to life in general... :o! I want more of this awesome feeling!

August 16, 2009

The things that live inside us

I was cleaning off an old hard drive from a desktop I used years ago, and I came across a whole bunch of files I thought I'd lost. Among these were some various art-ish things, which, according to the file info, are from about ten years ago (it still blows my mind when I recall something that falls into my "years ago" mental category, and it turns out that it was a *decade* ago o_o!). Nostalgia impels me to share some of them here. (Bem, na verdade, eu omito os desenhos pro quais eu estou a mais nostálgica, rsrs... mas em todo caso...)

These ones are scans of some things I did in my grade 9 art class:

I think we had to paint these using fake flowers as a reference, hehe.

I think this was based on a photo from National Geographic.

I don't remember working on this one at all, but I must have used a photo for reference here as well.

This one my brother drew (bonus points if you recognize the character!), and I scanned his drawing for my first-ever attempt at colouring something on the computer... using a mouse. :| I'm pretty sure it took me forever, and I think in the end the only part I was happy with was the right shoulder. Haha..

Some random little images:

The bottom ones were probably playing around with my tablet, once I got one.

This may be the only piece of fan art I ever produced. It was for a webcomic that I'm sure has long since ceased to exist.

After some point, I think I just sketched random crap now and then:

I think I pretty much didn't draw at all after around this time. It's kind of strange, because I definitely enjoyed doing it. But... it's weird: thinking back, even though I recall liking doing stuff like this, I can't imagine the feeling of actually *wanting* to do it. You know, the sort of state you're in when you're thinking something like "Ooh, I know! I'm going to do X!", just before you actually go and do it. Being compelled to do something. It's something I used to struggle with, actually -- rarely (if ever) having that feeling of wanting to do specific things, in an immediate sense (as opposed to hypothetically). That's not to say that there weren't lots of things I enjoyed once I was doing them... but I think my tendency was to sort of idly drift into doing things, rather than actively seeking out the activity. Or some external stimulus would make me suddenly want to do something, instead of the inclination spontaneously coming from me.

I guess this is the reason why, for a long time, the only things I really did for fun either were passive (e.g., reading, watching anime/tv/movies, listening to music) or inherently prompted further continuous action (e.g., video games). Perhaps one exception to this was designing and making graphics/layouts for sites. Inexplicably, I used to really like making layouts. (Sadly, I couldn't find any of them on that old hard drive... I guess they're gone forever. :( ) Maybe it had something to do with the combination of aesthetics and functionality -- that the thought of using them afterwards (and actually getting to *see*, on a regular basis, the nice-looking thing I made, unlike with most art I might have produced) made me want to do it. But yeah, it really used to bother me, this general lack of internal desire or motivation to do things I enjoyed.

I think that, by and large, I'm only really compelled do things that make me feel something. Looking at and using layouts I'd made kind-of-sort-of-almost falls into that category (probably due to the aesthetic aspects), but loosely. Better, more recent examples would be playing guitar (and singing), or horseback riding (a hugely physical kind of "feeling" here -- I guess you could call it exhilaration), or dancing. Both playing music and dancing are able to stir up all kinds of things in me, and those things can vary greatly depending on the type of music or dancing. (I won't even begin to try to describe the incredible array of things dance is capable of evoking in me... it adds a whole other dimension to the already vast spectrum of what music alone can do.) So on the one hand, they can elicit strong feelings from me. But on the other hand, if I'm already feeling something, they also provide a means of getting it out of me.

Hm, then I guess writing belongs on my list as well. I thought of it in the context of expression of emotion, but in truth I suppose the writing example means that the whole making/letting-me-feel-stuff thing goes beyond emotions. For instance, if I have some kind of complex idea(s) that I want to communicate (or even just sort out for myself), not only is writing immensely helpful in shaping it into something coherent that effectively conveys the idea, but it's also incredibly satisfying to reach the point in composing a piece of writing where everything fits. The various ideas are all there, expressed clearly and concisely with natural progression and flow, and everything is tied together nicely into something that says just what you want it to say. It's this wonderful sort of mental release, to finally be able to take this mysterious, complex thing that was alive in your head, and to put it out there into the world in a faithful representation of what it was inside of you. [In a way, the process of constructing that understandable representation is satisfying in the same way formulating proofs is (or was), at least for me; the solution, or some part of it, just comes to you in a flash, and at first you don't yet know what it is -- it's there in your head, and you can see it, and you know (or think) that it's the thing you were looking for, but it takes some time to examine it, to tease it apart until you recognize in its amorphous form familiar subcomponents, and finally how they all fit together. And there's this huge satisfaction that comes from taking those subcomponents, putting them together, on paper, in the way you observed them to relate in your mind, and seeing that, yes!, everything fits, and you've got exactly the thing that initially came to you in that flash.]

I suppose, in general then, it's all about achieving that release that comes from effective expression: from getting whatever is alive inside of you out into the world. Whether it's heartbreak coming out as song, ideas as an essay, pent-up energy as a sprint down the hall, or anger as a throat-rending scream, we each pick the most effective means we have for getting things out of us. In one of my classes a few weeks ago, the prof raised the question of "what is passion?", and I think that it may be these live things inside us, trying to burst their way out.

On the other side of the coin, I guess this is really what allows us to connect with other people as well. To see, there in front of you, produced by another person, a manifestation of the very thing that's alive within you -- to read it in their words, to feel it in the movement of their body; how can you not feel closer to a person, knowing the same thing lives inside you both? It's amazing how the way a person expresses themselves can excite things in you, even if neither of you knew it was there, and even to the point where what was once sleeping within you finally resounds so strongly that you're moved to give voice to it as well. And the positive feedback that can happen: given how satisfying it is to express these live things, it's no wonder we like to surround ourselves with people who share the same passions. They keep them alive in us and make them stronger.

As I said, I used to feel empty in this sense... like I didn't have any of these live things of my own, moving me to do things. Even though other people could transiently excite certain things in me (and a myriad of things at that, with how diverse my interests are), it would never last long beyond the direct influences of those other people, and, left to my own devices, I'd invariably go back to not feeling like doing anything. I'm really glad that in the last few years various people helped to awaken different things in me, and that these things grew strong enough that they've stayed alive in me even without these people around anymore.

So, as far as art goes... I think if I were to be an artist, I'd be an artist of emotion. Even though I enjoy drawing once I'm doing it, I'm not compelled to do it under everyday circumstances. I guess the act itself, though enjoyable, isn't enough so that it alone would move me to do it, and I don't get all that much out of looking at the final product myself (maybe I'd want to do it for a gift or something...). And since my skill isn't great enough to faithfully produce the things that come to mind when I'm compelled to give voice to my emotions, these days I instead turn to the languages in which I have somewhat more fluency, like writing, music and dance.

So... hard...

I really need to learn some music theory... chord composition and such... learn to recognize different kinds of chords by ear, and learn how to pick what fingering to use for each chord (short of brute-force trial and error to see what combinations work best). There are a lot of songs that I want to learn on guitar, but so far the few songs I've learned have all been from tabs (aside from a handful of mainstream songs that use only super-generic chords). Even sites that give chords along with the lyrics, plus fingering diagrams for the chords, don't help me that much, since I still don't know which variations/fingerings to use, let alone which strings to pluck. Bah. And for the songs I've been wanting to learn this past year+, basically no tabs exist (that I've been able to find, anyway). ... This is probably why I've learned pretty much nothing new in many months. It's frustrating when I think about it, because once I have a tab, it generally doesn't take me that long until I've committed it to memory; playing it fluidly is a different story, but at least at that point I have something to practice instead of learn.

Sigh...

So I've begun trying to figure out a song by ear, tabbing it out as I go. This is the first time I've attempted (beyond like five minutes) to do this, so who knows how long it will take me... For a lot of the chords, it's hard to pick out what notes they consist of. I really like this particular arrangement though, so I am determined...

A glassless window

I have found the solution to my problem: blues dancing.

Oh man. I tried it for the first time ever, and... wow. Just wow. Maybe there's more structure to it than I realize, but it feels like pure musicality. It's like you can do whatever you want. Well, the guy can do whatever he wants, and the girl can do... whatever the guy wants. :P

Like I said, me being a complete n00b, maybe there's more to it than I realize, but it seemed like (for the girl) it's pure following... Like, you *can't* dance it at all if you're not following properly -- if you're not really *listening* to your lead. Feeling his every movement.

As a more experienced follow pointed out to me near the beginning of the night, this does mean that it can be absolutely horrible if the guy either doesn't know how to lead well or feels the music in some strange way that you can't pick up on. But with a good lead...

Wow.

It can feel incredibly organic... even raw, depending on the music. But beyond that... there's something so intimate about a dance that relies entirely on amazing connection between lead and follow. For me, feeling someone's movement -- really feeling it -- has a stronger effect on me than even hearing them play music, or reading something they've written, or seeing something they've drawn. All of these things are like a window into a part of a person that otherwise remains invisible. A part that reflects the essence of them as a person. It always affects me, to be able to peer into such a window and to see what's there inside of them, pushing its way to the surface through a pen, or through an instrument... through movement.

Even to watch a person's movement can be incredibly powerful, but to feel it and move with it is something else entirely. Can two people be connected more closely -- more directly -- than through movement of their bodies? Structured dances with specific patterns can be amazingly fun, and you can certainly express yourself through them (though often by playing around with the patterns...). But performing specific, learned motions in prescribed patterns is like singing a song that someone else has written: maybe it perfectly conveys what you want to express (and to the extent that it does, it can be a wonderful window... but who can tell if it does?), but it isn't the same as writing your own song. Moving however you feel like moving is like making your own music; partner dancing in an unstructured style is like jamming. Only strip away the instruments, strip away the distance, make the music not the connection itself but the matrix through which two people can move together as one... More than any other dance I've tried, blues is like this. And it's incredible.

Music through movement

I have no self control. It's getting to be a real problem in my dancing, I think, but I'm too afraid to ask any leads about it for fear that they'll confirm my suspicions. Instead, I am going to try to work on it under the assumption that it is indeed a problem.

In general, but especially when I haven't been dancing for a while, I can't control myself. Or, perhaps more accurately, I can't contain myself. If the music is really good, it seizes me by the feet (even if I'm almost collapsing with exhaustion), and I can't stop it. It just takes me on this ride, and I am at the mercy of the music. I haven't seen myself dance in a long time, but I am vaguely aware that my salsa continues to resemble salsa less and less the more I dance, and it's because of this. My friend told me the other day, "It looks like Danielle dancing", whatever that means. :|!

In any case, I'm not so much concerned about whether or not I look ridiculous, because it's absurdly fun (and, really, who wants to sacrifice fun for looking "good"? :P), but it's hurting my following. For the most part, I think (or hope) I follow alright despite whatever insanity the music and my feet are plotting together, but sometimes my weight happens to be momentarily on the foot opposite to the one it should be on for what the guy's trying to lead, at the exact moment that it *really* needs to be on the foot he expects (otherwise I just autocorrect as I go into the move). This is pretty rare, but happened a couple of times this weekend and kind of took me by surprise. I'm not sure how I can avoid this, short of not dancing to the rhythm I'm hearing and instead always sticking to the 1,2,3,5,6,7 (or 2,3,4,6,7,8, as the case may be), and... well, I'm not going to do that.

More common a scenario is that my body (not just my feet) is doing something with the music that's... let's say "suboptimal"... for what the guy is trying to lead. He can still lead it, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it must feel something like dancing with a wild creature that needs to be constantly reined in.

Worse is when the music makes me play with timing, but the dude either doesn't, or does something different/incompatible (timing-wise). Timing incompatibility deals Instant Death to following. :(

Beyond all this, I've become aware that, even when a dance isn't riddled with the above occurrences, I tend to dance with the music. Not my partner. Sure, my dance with the music is subject to constraints (i.e., the patterns the guy is leading), but in general the music forces itself to the forefront of my attention, and it's the main thing I'm aware of. It's incredibly difficult for me to disengage from the music -- to mentally block it out and stop listening altogether. When I do, however, I think my following improves dramatically; I can actually listen to my lead instead of him having to battle the music for control of me. It's such a different experience, listening to the guy instead of the music. I feel his movements and play off them, and it's so smooth... it's really nice. But without the music, it's like dancing in black and white instead of technicolour.

Now and then I have a dance in which I have no trouble dancing *with* my partner while still hearing the music... and it's really, really fun, having that kind of connection. Sometimes these are the rare instances of the guy feeling the music the same way I do, but I think it's more often that the guy just *exudes* the way he feels the music, so I can feel it through him and hear in the music what he's hearing. If that's the case, maybe I can remedy all of these issues not by consciously trying to contain myself (futility!), but by making a point of trying to hear the music through my partner instead of the speakers.

Brasil II: São Paulo

I have returned to the land of snow! Boo... I'd planned to blog about my trip while I was on it, but I guess I ended up feeling more like doing stuff than writing about what I was doing (shock). And now that I'm back... well, there are many bits and pieces that I want to write about, so I will do just that: write about bits and pieces when the inclination strikes me.

I hadn't particularly wanted to go to São Paulo, but since I was already flying through, I figured I may as well spend a couple of nights there. En route from the metro to my hostel, I covered over half the length of Rua Teodoro Sampaio -- and man oh man, I have never seen so many music stores in my life. Not just in one place, either: I'm pretty sure the total number of music stores I've seen over the course of my entire life has at least tripled just from walking down that street. Musical instrument stores, I mean. It's insane. Not to mention awesome. Guitars, drums (of every type and size), violins, guitars, cavaquinhos, berimbaus, guitars, pianos, pandeiros, guitars... oh yeah, and then there were the guitars. I still can't believe I made it through this gauntlet of beautiful, shiny temptation without buying a new guitar... Especially since I spent a good couple hours in various stores trying out several. I'd been told while in Rio (to my surprise) that guitars are actually a lot more expensive in Brasil than in Canada, so I'd already sort of pre-decided specifically not to buy one... but in retrospect a lot of the prices, in this area at least, were actually alright... a supply/demand thing, I suppose? In a store I visited in Salvador, the same model of one guitar I'd really liked was a good R$200 (~$125 CAD) more expensive. I almost wish I'd just gone ahead and bought it... would've been really nice to have a guitar to play while I was there. But yeah, I don't even want to think about what hauling a guitar around, in addition to my bag(s), would've been like... definitely didn't pack *quite* light enough for that.

Blues dancing! (and TWO sets of free dance workshops this weekend!)

The other day I heard about something called "blues dancing" for the first time. No idea what it was. So I checked it out on YouTube, and man! I am now desperate to try this myself. Man oh man! I'm sure there must be some kind of structure to it, like with any partner dance (all those that I know of, anyway :|), but it *looks* so natural. Like pure musicality. It must feel so amazing to dance. *_*!

Watching that clip makes me think of something my brother wrote about what his favourite music is: "Whatever music makes me feel like I've just been punched in the soul. IN THE SOUL." Haha... Okay, maybe that quote isn't *entirely* applicable, but I like it. :P Seriously though, when I listen to a really good song, some parts just kill me -- like the climax of an amazing guitar solo... or a trombone just slinking its way in at the perfect moment... or a single, repeated note of a piano breaking a near-silence after a slow dénouement... I only wish I could properly describe the feeling I get. It's a physical reaction: it just grabs hold of me by the heart, and I have to fight the urge to writhe with the amazingness of the music. It's almost like cringing, only really, really good...

Okay, epic fail at describing it, but oh well. In any case, actually *dancing* to those awesome parts of music is even better. Orders of magnitude better. I mean dancing *to* them. Like a build-up comes, and then *pah!* -- you hit the accent, hard, right when the drums do. Soooooo good... Man, now I want to dance -- I was thinking of salsa here (to add the the three different genres of the songs I was thinking of above). Hehe. Anyway, blues dancing looks like it's full of that kind of thing. Actually dancing the music. Estou morrendo de vontade de tentar!

I'd looked around online, right after I heard of it, for blues dancing in Toronto, and didn't come up with much. But (coincidentally?) yesterday I started seeing something about a blues group on Facebook, wanting to promote blues dancing in Toronto! And today they announced that they're organizing a social in January!! :D!! WINNNN! So ridiculously excited for it. :D

Something else I'm excited for is this Sunday: City Dance Corps recently moved to a new location, and they're having an open house with free classes from noon to 5 pm! They're offering a whole bunch of styles, including house (!), which looks insanely hard but also ridiculously fun, and I've been wanting to try it for a while now. If that wasn't enough, I came across another all-afternoon free-lesson event, also this Sunday: the Tré Armstrong Give-Back Free Dance Workshop, which will not only include house (!), but also pop 'n' lock (!!) and capoeira (!!!!). I would wish these events were on different days so I could go to both, but this Sunday would be my only chance anyway: I'm already missing all the Christmas and Boxing Day salsa parties because I leave for Brasil next Monday. :]

The piano tuner

My grandma recently sent me her piano. She'd been wanting to get rid of it for quite a while, and last week it finally ended up in our living room. None of us play (I took lessons for a few months when I was like... in grade three), but this means I'm going to learn.

It's very rare that I hear music being played in person these days. In the past year I'd gotten used to being around it a lot, and it was so, so great. For me, finally being around people who played music all the time was like... like in those Claritin commercials, where that hazy layer gets peeled off the screen and suddenly the whole world is in the most vivid colour.

It's been a few months now since I've had that in my life, and that haze gradually settled back in. I only just realized this because, right now, there is a piano tuner downstairs who was plunking away for the past couple of hours, making my new piano sound like it should. And now, listening to her play bits and pieces of random things to test it out is making me want to cry. I'd forgotten what this felt like, this thing that surges up inside me. This thing that, once the silence resumes, vanishes almost as quickly as it came.

A felicidade é como a pluma

Que o vento vai levando pelo ar

Voa tão leve

Mas tem a vida breve

Precisa que haja vento sem parar