Category — Guitar Hero

When I walked into the room, I was quite nervous.  I felt like one of those little kids you see walking to school with their enormous instrument — like the instrument is walking them instead of the other way around.  I felt shut up inside myself, like a collapsible telescope — making everything feel very far away.

Before I left the house, Josh reminded me of the ChickieNob’s excellent advice to be the scariest thing in the room:

I once asked her how she was so brave.  She thought about it and said, “I try to be the scarier thing.  When I’m scared, I either scream to scare the other thing, or I try to freak the other thing out so that it isn’t the scariest thing in the room.  I am.”

I had to remind myself that the jam session was fairly low stakes.  Not seeing any recording equipment in plain sight, I had to assume that if I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed myself in front of these five other women and that was the end of it.  I could drop in once, and if I didn’t like it, never had to come back.

At least half of the women in the room were eons ahead of me, skill-wise.  But half were comfortably back where I was, just learning how to read tab, a little shaky on some chords.  They ended up changing around the song list and luckily I could roll with it because (1) I knew the new song and (2) it had fairly simple chords.

There was another song we covered which was currently outside my abilities, though I promised to learn it for next time.  Instead, I provided the vocals.  I will preface this by saying that the last time I  sung in front of anyone (beyond my current guitar teacher or Josh or the twins) was at my wedding, almost ten years ago.  Yes, I’ve sung “Happy Birthday” in a crowd, and I played Beatles RockBand once at Lindsay’s house, but the last time I got up and had eyes on me and sang was the night before my wedding (“They Can’t Take That Away From Me”).  That too felt fairly low stakes since we were all doped up on love and the people in the room were fairly forgiving of the bride making a fool of herself.

Which is not to say that I’m terrified to sing.  I may not have a fantastic voice, but I can generally stay on key and I enjoy singing.  I sang on the movies.  I’m fine with that because I don’t need to face you while you’re listening to it.  Whereas, if we’re in the same room, and I can see your eyes on me, I am massively self-conscious.

But I thought about being the scariest thing in the room.  Who knows when another opportunity will present itself where I can just have fun without any thought to how terrible I sound.

So I belted out that Anna Nalick song.  And for two hours in a shag-carpeted practice room, hanging out with five women I’ve never met before, I didn’t feel like a middle-aged writer with grey streaks in her hair.

I felt like a rock star.

I walked out, swinging my guitar case like I imagine Joan Jett does when she’s walking into the airport to board a flight to her next gig, feeling a bit like a rock star.

Back when I taught at the university level, my students were often older than I was.  Sometimes it was only a year or two difference, and that was sort of awkward.  One of my students was in a punk band, and I would sometimes go to this club to hear him play.  And then I’d have to go home and grade his papers.  Some of my students were much older; one woman who stands out in my head is this woman who was in her 40’s and had returned to school to get her college degree.  She stayed after one day to talk to me about how strange she felt about me being her teacher.  On one hand, she could clearly see that I had more degrees and had information to impart.  But on the other, I hadn’t even been born when she was already married and having kids.  So … there was that.

I thought it was a little silly how internally distraught she seemed during this talk.  We had a low-stakes relationship — I was just her teacher.  We didn’t even see each other after the semester ended.  It wasn’t as if we were dating and constantly having to navigate melding two different stages of life.

Oh, and then I got a guitar teacher who is 9 years younger than I am and noooooooooooooooooow I get it.

On one hand, I still believe that age ain’t nothing but a number.  He has the information, I need the information, and I am paying him to give me the information.  It doesn’t matter if he’s older or younger than me; all I need him to do is teach me guitar.

And yes, I am incredibly conscious of the fact that I have grey streaks in my hair.  And my boob is resting on top of my guitar.  And did I mention the fact that I have poor bladder control when I sneeze?  And while this guy isn’t exactly a teenager, he’s all young and hopeful.

Maybe it is the hopeful part that I’m envying.  He’s still in that place where you look at how you want your life to unfold … AND YOU EXPECT THAT IT WILL HAPPEN CLOSE TO THAT.  Do you remember that place?  When I talk to him or the other people who work at the school, they talk about their future as if it will happen.  While they may privately have doubts that their rock band is going to strike it big, they project confidence that also shows the opposite: that they think there is every possibility in the world that their rock band will strike it big.

If you had asked me when I was their age about my future, I would have told you that kids were a given.  That when we felt ready, we’d just have a little sex and pop them out — 1, 2, and 3.  I would have told you that I’d publish books in the same way.  I’d just write them, send them off to my agent and — 1, 2, 3, and so on — they’d pop onto the shelves at the bookstore (if you had asked me back when I was their age, Kindles were unfathomable.  A book without paper?  Preposterous!).

And now, when I talk about my future, I sort of shrug at it and preface everything with an “I hope.”  I don’t take anything as a given anymore, and that’s a much scarier place to stand than where I was when I was my teacher’s age.  That ground felt stable.  This ground feel slippery.  I used to believe that where I was standing was solid; now I know from my own life or observing my friend’s lives that the ground can give out at any second.

That it’s all quicksand posing as concrete.

I recently had to buy new shoes, and I decided on a pair of 10-hole, steel-toed Docs.  I’ve worn Docs since high school and I’m partial to the steel-toed ones because (1) I once jokingly kicked someone and broke skin with them so they make me feel like they’re a good self-defense item and (2) they keep their shape vs. the non-steel ones that sort of start sagging over time.  I’ve always owned the 3-hole version.  I coveted boots while in college but didn’t think I could pull them off.  I felt like you had to have a certain attitude to pull off Doc boots, and I lacked that attitude.

It felt a little bit like guitar — a now or never proposition — and it was silly not to check them off my list; such a small thing.  When they arrived, I put them on and stomped around the house, and Josh joked that this was part of my mid-life crisis.  Later that night, I started bawling because I felt like I was trying to reclaim something with the shoes; go back in time, pretend I’m still in college, be that believing person again.  That I was trapped inside a Leonard Cohen song and “everybody knows” and it just looks like the equivalent of a comb-over.  My comb-over shoes.

I wouldn’t want to go back in time either.  I wouldn’t want to have to fight through everything again to get where I am today.  I bring the twins to my guitar lessons and they sit on the floor and watch.  I have two books out, so that part came true too.  I’m sure this just confirms what people my teacher’s age suspects — that you can have it all.  They see me with my twins and my books and it’s proof that this future can come true.  Isn’t that why we also find comfort in reading about people’s pregnancies or adoptions as much as it also pains us?  It’s proof that it does happen; and if it happened for them, it could happen for us. (Because, if you truly believed that it couldn’t happen at all, it would make more sense to stop trying to conceive or adopt, right?)

The thing is, back when I was my teacher’s age, it didn’t even occur to me that there could be a story in there.  I saw a mother out with her kids and I took it on face-value.  That she wanted kids, she had sex, she popped them out, end of story.  It didn’t even occur to me that while that may be true for some people, for other people, there is a story that you can’t tell from clues on the outside at all.

You see someone with a limb missing and you know there is a story somewhere there.  You see a woman without a child and you have no idea that there’s a plotline buried underneath the scene unfolding.

So, not really about learning guitar, which is both frustrating and fun.  But it’s the background story that is going on in my head as I learn chords.

I’m aware that those of you who are older than me are probably laughing at my age crisis, knowing full well what stage comes next.  But the thing is, just like my guitar teacher still believes he’s standing on solid ground, I can’t fathom what happens next.  Maybe you return to a place of believing again.  Maybe you discover how to turn that quicksand into concrete.  I don’t really want to know what happens next.  I just wish I also didn’t remember how I felt before.

How do you feel about aging?  Is age nothing but a number?  Do you ever feel self-conscious when you’re around younger people?  Are you glad you’re older and not as trusting of the future?  Do you wish you could go back to being that believing person again?

A few days ago, I wanted to talk to Josh and I wanted the kids out of the room.  First, I asked the ChickieNob politely.  Then I told the ChickieNob to get out of the room.  Finally, I told the ChickieNob that I had to tell her father something terrifying and if she overheard it, she would have nightmares for months so could she please, for the love, get out of the room so I could tell her father this without damaging her delicate psyche?

Absolute wrong tactic: she perked up and moved closer saying, “you’re going to talk about something terrifying?  I’d love to hear!”

There are things the ChickieNob doesn’t like, but few things that scare her.  We were hiking in the woods and we came across this snake, and the natural instinct would be to jump backwards, but she moves closer.  She loves haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, and monsters.  She always picks the roller coaster, the steepest part of the hill for sledding, and marches straight into the ocean.

At 6-years-old, she is absolutely positive that she is going to be a bass player in an all-girl band (this all-girl band includes her brother because — as she rolls her eyes — he’s her twin and she guesses that he should be included).  At the music school, she announced to the cashier working in the store where I bought some guitar picks that she needed a 3/4 electric bass — a silver one — and an amp.  She needed the amp to go extra loud because she was going to “rock out.”  She told the boy that she was going to form the band with some other kindergarteners, and casually dropped that they were going to be bigger than Green Day.  And I believe her.  She has me convinced.  She has this swagger when she walks and she is fearless.

I once asked her how she was so brave.  She thought about it and said, “I try to be the scarier thing.  When I’m scared, I either scream to scare the other thing, or I try to freak the other thing out so that it isn’t the scariest thing in the room.  I am.”

Let’s juxtapose my timidity with the ChickieNob.  Before the first lesson, I sat on a piano bench outside the music room with my stomach in knots.  She danced around and I silently stressed out about how bad I was going to be.  I kept reminding myself that there was nothing at stake.  If I sucked, I sucked, but it wasn’t like high school where I’d be getting a grade and it would direct my future.  This was supposed to be fun, but it was making me a stress case.

My teacher came to fetch me and the twins, and I walked back to the practice room.  We talked about form and posture.  I was deeply aware that my enormous boobs were resting over the top of the guitar due to the way I was sitting hunched over.  We talked about what I hoped to accomplish with these guitar lessons (you mean, beyond the ability to ROCK OUT?  Oh, then I guess I’m looking to play some stadium shows.  You know, that sort of thing).  And what sort of music I like to listen to and hope to play.

I have a bunch of old papers and sheet music books in my guitar case, and I took one out to show him that I had taken guitar lessons from this school when I was a child.  Underneath it was the book I had been working on when I quit and he picked it up.  “Did you know that this is the book that they use for first years at Peabody?  You were playing from this when you quit?”  We flipped through my old teacher’s notes on songs and I felt so enormously sad.

I felt like I really wasted something by being so damn scared of everything.  When I quit, I chalked it up to wanting long nails (and to be able to wear polish) and not spend time practicing.  But I also know that a lot of it had to do with the anxiety I felt playing for anyone.  I’m not talking about performances — I mean, just playing for my old piano or guitar teachers.  I was so worried that I’d mess up and spent those lessons as a kid with my stomach in knots.

Josh and I joked before my current lessons began that I’d have to ask the new teacher to face the wall while I played so he wasn’t looking at me, and I would have if (1) I wasn’t concerned with also appearing sane and (2) the Blair Witch Project sort of ruined the whole face-the-wall thing for me.  I can count the number of times I have ever played piano for Josh, and in all of those cases, I was drunk and inhibition-free.

In quitting, I stopped feeling that anxiety.  But when I look at those old books, I also look at what I missed out on due to the fact that I made myself feel so terrified over something that was — again — low stakes.  So what if I messed up, especially when it was just me and my teacher?  What if it took longer than expected to master a song?  I was really really good — I have the notes from my teacher to prove it — and I had literally no self-confidence.  And I’m not even talking about having the self-confidence of the ChickieNob who, at age six, would literally be able to command the stage in a stadium and get people to rock out for two hours.  I didn’t even have the self-confidence to play in my own living room.

I walked out of my first class elated simply because I had gotten through it.  I had picked up my guitar and played a few chords in front of another human being.  I have had three classes now, and while I can’t say that I have picked up much of the ChickieNob’s swagger, I am now able to play for Josh every night.  I am playing for my teacher and when I mess up, I just laugh and say, “start over.”  It’s not that I’ve gotten rid of that internal voice that keeps telling me that I could suck.  But I am working on being the scarier thing in the room.

What fear would you like to get past?  What fear has limited you?

I’ve mentioned on and off that I want to take guitar lessons.  It’s something I gave up as a teenager, and I’m barely functional on the instrument.  I am pretty much limited to “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Charlie and the MTA.”  I cannot restring my own guitar and that apparently makes me a pussy.  In my head, I’m Kelley Deal of the Breeders, except without a twin, band, or swingy hair.  Oh, and with an acoustic guitar instead of an electric one.  But, you know, same thing.

But in my head, I also have this mental block — that art classes and music lessons and the like are for kids.  And I missed that boat.  Now, if I want to learn something new, I am expected to take cooking lessons or yoga.  It seems like there is a clear line — noticeable if you look at the course offerings for adults in the county catalog — between activities that are for kids (beginner fine arts classes and tutoring) and adults (fix your car or manage your finances).

My cousin and I were walking around Harvard recently and it suddenly hit me that I’m never going to go to Harvard.  I know, I’m a little slow on the uptake (perhaps why I didn’t get into Harvard), but I realized that I was going to die and never have that experience.  Yes, I could dedicate myself to that goal; move up to Boston and take a night class or whatever they have open to the general public.  But it was this moment where I started to feel as if my life was speeding down a bowling alley-like lane towards death with all these unfinished dreams scattered in the gutters like shattered bowling balls.

And it terrified me.

Because you only get to live once.  And I don’t want to get to the end of my life and say, “holy fuck, I totally forgot that I wanted to learn [fill in the blank] and now it’s too late.”

Becoming a kick-ass guitar player a la Joan Jett is one of those gutter ball dreams.  It’s not even about performing — I don’t need to play for anyone else.  I just want to know in my head before I die that I fucking rocked that guitar hardcore.

One of the beauties of being in your 30s is that you have a confidence that you didn’t have in your 20s to grab life by the balls (and apply pressure for good measure — not enjoyable pressure, but the kind that makes the guy wince a little).  And I decided that I didn’t care if all the other students at the music school were 12-years-old with retainers and homework.  I was going to take music classes too.

We went to the music school earlier this week to sign up for my lessons.  And the guy was a little confused, but he kept saying, “yeah, that’s cool” as he furrowed his brow, as if he was trying to convince me that he believed that it was super cool for a woman with greying hair and bladder control issues when she sneezes (perhaps he didn’t know per se about the bladder control issues, but he could suspect) to come to the school and rock out.  I am starting with my acoustic guitar and once I’ve proven to Josh that I’m not going to flake out on this, he is going to get me an electric one.

I am joking about this, but I’m scared.  I don’t feel like I have the luxury to walk away from this again.  I can’t be so cocky this time unless I’m willing to leave the guitar dream in the gutter.  I feel old.  I’m 9 years older than my teacher.  I feel slow.  I worry that I won’t have time to practice.  I worry that even with practice, you won’t be able to tell that I’ve been working hard.  I worry that I’ll be the joke at the school — that the guys will laugh about me once I leave for the day; that old chick who thinks she’s ever going to be good at this.

But too many friends have cancer, and Josh and I often wonder aloud how we reached an age where multiple friends have cancer.  Where is moves from being an anomaly to something that happens.  And maybe I need to borrow from their mortality to remember that life is short.  Even when you get to the ripe old age of 90, life is short.  And if things should change for me tomorrow, I’d want to know that even if I didn’t achieve all my goals, at least I was working towards them and had taken to heart the gravity of unfinished business.

I start my guitar lessons this week, and I plan to blog about them once in a while.  Just because it’s a chance to subject you to painful sound clips of me playing “Sister Goldenhair” while crooning along.  Thank G-d I self-hosted so I could do this to you. Just because I need to be held to knocking down bowling pins rather than being dragged past the gutter balls of life.  Just because I need to feel like a rock star instead of grey-haired writer.  Just because y’all know about my bladder-control-while-sneezing issues and those boys have no clue.  Oh, and because I’m going to fucking rock that guitar hardcore.

What skill do you wish you had learned?