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Broadsword and a Ukulele

Broadsword and ukulele

My Tai Chi teacher recent­ly added the Yang style broadsword to the cur­ricu­lum. I’d be lying if I said I was­n’t ecsta­t­ic, as I’ve wait­ed quite a while to learn a weapon form. There’s some­thing roman­tic and exot­ic about wield­ing one of the four great Chinese weapons. I find it delight­ful­ly iron­ic that it’s a gwei­lo who’s cat­alyzed such an inter­est in my own cul­ture. Take THAT, my racist and sex­ist Chinese ances­tors.

As for the ukulele, one day I found out how inex­pen­sive they can be and bought one right away. It’s a Mahalo Les Paul style ukulele (right down to the square tun­ing pegs) with an extend­ed neck for high­er reg­is­ter notes. In many ways, the ukulele is the per­fect instru­ment for me right now; cheap, easy enough that I can teach myself1, and not too hard on the fin­gers2.

It feels fuck­ing fan­tas­tic to be play­ing music in some form again. I did years of piano and flute lessons in ele­men­tary school to high school, and took a very long hia­tus from then till now. And that was most­ly in band, when I could­n’t choose the music I want­ed to play. Now I can play the songs I like, and the advan­tage is that I’ve prob­a­bly heard them a few hun­dred times so I already know them inside-out.

With my years of music lessons and per­for­mances from my youth, it’s not like I’m learn­ing music from scratch, I’m sim­ply fig­ur­ing out how to apply what I already know about tone, pos­ture, tun­ing, vol­ume, fin­ger­ing3, tim­ing, and into­na­tion, to anoth­er instru­ment. Admittedly, it’s been very slow going, and it’s like I’m learn­ing a new lan­guage as I train my fin­gers to achieve a dex­ter­i­ty that was nev­er there before.

The inter­est­ing thing is that my last few years prac­tic­ing Tai Chi has helped me learn the ukulele. In my Tai Chi class, I’ve gained the patience and per­se­ver­ance required to prac­tice the same moves over and over again until they become a nat­ur­al part of my mus­cle mem­o­ry. In the begin­ning, it was a lot of con­cen­tra­tion spent just try­ing to remem­ber what to do next in the form, but now that I don’t need to think about them when I prac­tice, my con­cen­tra­tion goes into fine-tun­ing the lit­tle details. The same prin­ci­ples can be applied to the ukulele (or any instru­ment, for that mat­ter), and I’m try­ing to get to the point where I don’t need to think about what my fin­gers should be doing, and just con­cen­trate on play­ing with the right kind of expres­sive­ness.

Which is why I have a broadsword and a ukulele rest­ing on the wall next to my desk. Any time I need a break, I pick up one of them and prac­tice for a few min­utes.

  1. Because I real­ly don’t have time for anoth­er time-con­sum­ing hob­by [↩]
  2. The strings are nylon, instead of the met­al of gui­tars, so the cal­lous­es aren’t as bad. The health of my hands is also an impor­tant thing to me. [↩]
  3. Though the fin­ger­ing for a stringed instru­ment is real­ly dif­fer­ent from piano and flute. [↩]

Nod

In my last year of high school — which was also my first year at that school, so no one real­ly knew me — I had a cre­ative English class. We were giv­en 15 min­utes of free writ­ing time at the begin­ning of each class, of which I most­ly spent mak­ing ver­bal doo­dles to any kind of cin­e­ma stim­u­la­tion I had recent­ly seen at the time. Around then, it would have been quotes from Monty Python and lines from Casino. Anyone could put a CD in the stereo for every­one to hear, so one week I put my most recent mix in.

In the mid­dle was Creep by Radiohead , and anoth­er guy in class sud­den­ly exclaimed, “A great song!”, amidst the silence of our work­ing minds. Everyone looked at him, then at me, and I felt a red­ness flush on my face.

That was fol­lowed by One by Metallica, and again he said, “Another great song!”, and the same chain of events hap­pened as last time.

He was that edgy kid with bleached blond hair and always got in trou­ble for wear­ing walk­ing shoes with his uni­form. He did his own thing, had his own tastes, and fit in with the crowds he want­ed, not nec­es­sar­i­ly the crowds that want­ed him. I was that awk­ward kid who had no real friends, had a mop for hair, and a per­pet­u­al­ly tac­i­turn demeanour. To have him acknowl­edge my taste for two songs in a row had sud­den­ly giv­en me some kind of street cred because he was far more pop­u­lar than me.

Some of the oth­er kids start­ed look­ing at me dif­fer­ent­ly from then on.

Letters to Girls Mothers

I’ve been try­ing to write a let­ter to her moth­er. Something like this:

I was going to stop by on my last trip to Toronto, but part of me real­ized it may have made things com­pli­cat­ed, since it’d be the first time since we stopped talk­ing to each oth­er. Not that I was scared you would take a side, but because I did­n’t want you to think I was forc­ing that deci­sion on you.

All I want to say is that I miss all of you ter­ri­bly, she was spe­cial, and it’s a pity things did­n’t work out. But it was much beyond our con­trol. I don’t know if either of us will ever grow out of these dif­fer­ences that hold us back.

The last time I came to vis­it, it was almost 2pm on a Tuesday and you were both at work. I scratched a note on the back of a notepad to let you know I stopped by, and she told me you liked me so much, you stuck it on your fridge. That always meant a lot.

Thanks for every­thing.

But all of it comes out sound­ing defen­sive. I wish I could explain how I’m not angry but sad, which is a tes­ta­ment to how great they were. I can’t fig­ure out how to put the ball in their court, to let them know that if they’re okay with it, and she’s okay with it, we can still be friends. I real­ly don’t know how appro­pri­ate that would be any­way.

Sometimes, the hard­est part of giv­ing up the girls is giv­ing up their par­ents too.