Vegetabling

I've failed the moonwalking 30 day trial splendidly. I'm approximately 4 days into a 30 day trial of failing to moonwalk but I'm considering failing that too today.

On the bright side, I've started studying Chinese a bit again and I think I watched half the shows in the universe this afternoon alone, noodling around on guitar at the same time to trick myself into not feeling useless. Finally I felt so guilty for being unproductive that I did a set of push-ups. If I were half as Jewish as my grandma wants me to be, I'd probably feel guilty enough to punish myself, maybe by refusing myself that third cup of sugar also known as coffee. But perhaps I'm Jewish enough after all; I've decided to watch another episode of Dexter to make myself feel even more guilty.

Back to the not so bright side ("the dark side" sounds a bit too sinister and "the dull side" makes me think of bludgeons), I haven't studied French in three days or so, pretty much since I picked up Chinese. It's frustrating, not being able to keep up with everything I want to do...or rather everything that at the end of the day I wish I'd done. I wonder if anyone has managed to get those two to consistently coincide.

We went to 新街口 the other day and Yuan Yuan got me a new steel-string acoustic guitar. I've been ravaging it on my bed hourly since then (my bed doubles as an L-shaped set of chairs around the room). It sounds really nice to my unwashed ears but I always have my doubts when buying a new instrument. The guy in the store, that is, any guy that works in any guitar store, can make any old thing sound awesome. He can get a tasty blues solo out of a pick alone, and you should see him play the carpet. Meanwhile, I always forget every song I've ever learned the minute I walk into the store. The combination of those two makes choosing a new guitar a process full of eyebrow gymnastics, baa's and meh's. Either way, I'm now equipped with a sweet (if possibly fake) Great Divide that's going to appear in some YouTube videos as soon as I've finished reading and watching everything on the Internet.

Hmm...maybe if I get a job at a guitar store I won't have to practice anymore, I'll just automatically be awesome, or at least awesome to other people.

Practice

I think it's time to start practicing guitar again. I've pretty much abandoned serious practicing since I realized I'll never have the patience to become half as fast as Yngwie or Steve or John or even Jimmy, who's the best even if he wasn't the fastest. But practicing seems to be correlated with improvement. Time to investigate that correlation.

Moonwalking practice is going pretty well, or so claims the wall-length mirror on the wall-length wall in my student's house. My student claims otherwise but I think I see the gliding coming through. I wish I could set a 5 second time delay on the mirror so I could see myself from my student's intertial frame of reference. Mirror scientists, you know what to do.

I've been suffering from a cold the last few days, though suffering is a wild exaggeration. More like perpetually inconvenienced. Meaning my nose opens its floodgates during the day to prevent bihandular typing, seals the doors with a vacuum seal at night to prevent shnobular breathing and my throat houses an evil little perpetual tickling machine which the laws of physics have yet to assuage. The only thing that's been out of the ordinary with this cold is that this time I'm being a good boy and taking some medicine. I have no idea what the medicine is; it was sent over by Yuan Yuan's mom, all I know is that it's blue. I also know that I haven't turned blue yet myself, though I've yet to inquire whether that's a good or bad sign. I'm also taking the usual anti-cold concoction prescribed by Professor Karlsson on the Roof: copious amounts of candy and faulty thermometers.