Tuesday evening things

 * the part is in for my car so I'm going to drop it off tomorrow. They have PINKIE PROMISED me that I will have it back before midday Thursday because I have a check up at my doctor's then. 

I hope I do not come to regret this, but I also want the car Friday because if I can motivate myself to finish the stuff on spatial statistics, I am going to go do something Friday - either go to Denison or maybe just run back out to that neat little antique store in Bennington I went to a few weeks back. 

* Also, I could take some books down to Sundrop to see if they want them and will give me store credit. I was in there Saturday and found they had a crafts section and I have all those quilting/knitting/crochet books still that were either duplicates or ones I decided I did not want any more - and if I can get a few bucks towards, I don't know, a nice "permanent" edition (hardbound) of one of the classics I love, that would be good.

* They also carry some music books; they had two big bound books from the 1930s of piano sheet music. the "Scribner Radio Music Library." There were apparently 9 volumes published; they had 2 and 4 (2 is "modern" composers but since it's the 1930s, "modern" includes Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. 4 is pieces from operas). I bought them both - $10 each - because I couldn't buy 2 and leave 4, it would be like leaving behind one of a "bonded pair" of cats at a shelter and only adopting one.

I've looked a bit in volume 2; I tried a bit of the famous Hungarian Dance #5 by Brahms but it's a bit fast for me. Maybe I keep working on it though. I also tried, this evening the Andante Cantabile (in transcription form; I knew it best as a string piece) of Tchaikovsky's Quartet op. 11. That one I can pick through more to my satisfaction without a lot of work, so I think I will work most on that. (the really fast notes - 32nd, I think - I still can't play fast enough, but it might get there)

 

I like having them though. This kind of thing used to be more of a thing, I think; there used to be more of this kind of "aspirational" stuff. Certainly, I think years ago, people strove more to learn an instrument. I have read some people posit that as radio got better and better, and pre-recorded music wound up in reach of even very average people, people became content to let the "pros" do it and not go to the effort of learning.

And yes, there is sometimes a bit of snobbery around people learning to play music; I once had an orchestra teacher tell me I was wasting my time and his with the clarinet - I wasn't good enough and with my other classes I didn't have enough time (according to him) to practice. That actually led to me giving it up after having played for five years or so. 

I do think it's an unpleasant attitude - though one I find fighting in myself - that "if you're not great at something why bother doing it?" or "if you can't be THE BEST, why bother?" I sometimes feel that way about my knitting or quilting - I am not very innovative, with my quilts I mostly do very simple designs that are geometric (lots of squares). I don't design my own stuff. And I know: I tend to play it safe because I have limited time to work, and I don't want to spend hours on a failed experiment. 

Anyway: these books like something my paternal grandfather could have owned (except, as far as I know, he did not play the piano. But he did write poetry - I have a printout from a scan of an old magazine of his "To the Steger"

My parents owned a LOT of classical records; I think my father was the big classical-music fan - probably from his own parents. And I kind of absorbed that by osmosis. 

* And yeah, we're drawing up on the fourth anniversary of losing him. It's a lot less painful now, of course, but I still miss him. When I was having all the car trouble recently, when I was having my house worked on last year, it would have been so nice to have been able to get advice.

I also thought today of something he said to me a couple years before he died - this was when he was already having a lot of mobility problems and pain from arthritis - anyway, as I was getting ready to go back home (go down to catch the train), he commented "the house seems more lively when you visit" and remembering that broke my heart a little again. 

* Driving home today, I had to slow way down. I take First, which is a north-south two lane street. I go south on it to go home. Well, today, a Chickasaw Telephone Company truck was coming north in the other lane - they have a parking area just off to the west of First. And he signaled he had to turn across my lane of traffic to pull in to the parking area. Well, I'm not gonna argue with a bucket truck, and anyway, it was easier for me to slow up than to make him and the traffic behind him wait. But. There was a guy in a pickup coming a bit faster than the speed limit (40) but he seemed well enough back.

Well, he kept coming fast. And I saw him in my rearview mirror and tensed: does he see me? is he gonna stop? (because it took a little time for the phone company guy to maneuver his truck into the parking area, I get it, it's not easy given the topography). Well, Pickup Truck Guy drove AT FULL SPEED practically up to my bumper and then slammed on the brakes.

Okay, I thought, maybe he's trying to intimidate me, or maybe he just wasn't paying attention, whatever. But then, once I got going again, he was practically riding my bumper. And when I got up to the stoplight (which turned red), he did the "run up to my bumper and stop very short" thing again

And I got nervous: am I gonna get road-raged? I figured if he followed me I'd just not go home, just keep driving and if I had to, go to the police department (I think there's still a substation about five blocks from my house) or the fire department (which is even closer). He didn't, but there have been a couple ugly road-rage cases in my area recently (though one of them sounds like a love triangle, perhaps - it's suggested that the perpetrator beat up the new boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend and it wasn't really road rage). 

He didn't follow me but it did make me nervous.

And yeah - I've heard reports that road rage is going up, and other confrontational behaviors are. And it makes me feel kind of....stupid? maybe? because I remember about this time in 2020 thinking about "when it's safe to go back out, when there's a vaccine or a good treatment and the pandemic ebbs, people are gonna be so grateful, and maybe this will finally bring us together" and ha ha no, it just made us worse. 

And I don't know how we fix it. And it's a hard time to try to be a kind or "soft" person in this world - I've gotten spoken over more often, I've had people push past me in places like stores acting like I'm not there, I've seen more people in angry screaming fights in public and I just don't know. I don't know how to exist in this world and it kind of scares me. (I have hypotheses about how and when all this got started, but I'm not sharing them). 

* It doesn't help that it's just terribly hot and humid. I'm sure that makes people who are inclined to be angry; it makes me, who is inclined to be a little sad during the summer anyway, sadder.