dissection with a laser beam

I saw a delightful band tonight and knew I had to buy their CD as soon as the first song was over. I haven't been seeing nearly as much music as I would like to lately, and despite being hungover and exhausted, I trudged over and I am ever glad that I did. (Linguistics HW be damned!...er, postponed.)

But this slice of freshness puts me in this spot that I come back to time and again. After I saw the Slackers for the first time back in the day, I huddled the entire night penning ska songs into the early morning hours. (Complete with horrific intersessions of toasting.) God knows the mountains of slam poetry written after the entrancement of Unspoken Heard and the fury of angry acoustic ditties after the first night Ani Difranco and I spent together speak to this habit. The closest I've ever come to actually following through with learning how to play music (besides my unsuccessful foray into the violin as an eight-year-old) was a stint scouring the internet for how-to information and taping chord diagrams to my walls, borrowed guitar in hand.

So now I'm stuck trying to figure out if I'll ever be able to learn anything new. It's all excuses of course, ones that I've wound and rewound until the circulation stops in my toes, but I declare that if and when I go teach english abroad (I'm thinking 2008 or 2009) I will make it a priority to learn piano or guitar, or really any musical instrument. Because, hell, just because I sing off-key doesn't mean that I can't make that sound good somehow. And even more importantly, I have a heck of a lot to say.