Looks like TheSnipe is late getting Sunday’s audio done again so here I am to save the day! And to top things off, I even brought a chick with me!

In this weeks’ installment, I awarded points for a fabulous contest and even mentioned some current news instead of just babbling on all self-referential like.

Some links that have to do with the audio program, for your easy perusal:

The audio file itself
A link to the Nintendo Wii’s website
The 4-20 Snitchers
3M Safety Glass
A Shark being Eaten by an Octopus
My Zombie Movie

And another movie that wasn’t mentioned that all should watch: C is for Cookie

Well, I got a random email forward one day and I decided to sign up… and as of a few nights ago, it’s official - I’m a zombie in the upcoming film Meat Market 3.

Not just a regular zombie. A midground zombie. I’m not a blurry background zombie nor am I a closeup zombie. I’m midground, baby, without any close-ups.

I actually shot a few scenes so far; hopefully I don’t wind up on the cutting room floor. I beleive I’ll get called back to do some more shoots sometime next month.

I gots a lame ol’ picture of me by the time I got back home, too. I’ll have more soon. :)

I think I can nicely sum up my history of hobbies by saying “read Fozzie’s article.” Thankfully, though, I’ve had a few hobbies that I’ve stuck with that have really changed my life.

The first I’ll list is programming… Just programming in general. Maristar, don’t read that C++ book, it’s all about web programming now! My most recent joy has been teaching myself, from scratch, PHP… MySQL… PostgreSQL… Java… CSS… HTML… XML… And the result? It’s what you see here. I figure I’ve written so many lines of code and done so many modifications, this really isn’t Wordpress anymore. Best part about this hobby, is that I can pick it up and tap out three lines of code, any time of the day. Doesn’t require special software or instruments; all I need is a web connection and a keyboard. I’m really super proud of this hobby, because I started with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the basics of code and knew nothing about syntax or specifics.

Second joy of mine is, of course, flying. I don’t know how much more detailed I can get than that; I just love hopping into that seat and getting some *real* fresh air at a few thousand feet. I realized while flying, that people simply don’t build cities in beautiful, scenic locations. Yes, some cities are more scenic than others.. And some cities may absolutely take the cake… But no city is located in as beautiful a territory as the steep mountains, cliffs, snowlines, and deep ravines that you see when you’re flying over the wilderness.

Making up my tri-force of hobbies is guitar. I had a friend teach me some basic chords and now I can play any song that uses said chords - which is almost the entire Barenaked Ladies catalogue, and most of the alternative- and harder-rock stuff from the 1990’s. If I might start doing a handstand on top of my incredibly tall horse who is perched on the highest mountain in all the world, I have an incredibly good sense of rhythm and have fine control over my guitar and the few basic chords I know. I have no doubt that if I had time (read: less programming and flying) that I could learn pentatonic scales and improving my picking repetoire beyond the “Smells like Teen Spirit” guitar solo.

Maristar has the right idea though - as life gets more hectic, as careers and family and “serious stuff” like painting your house and installing new plumbing starts getting priority - our hobbies fade away until we’re left with one.

For me, that’ll probably end up being beer.

Oh lordie yes, format the whole accursed lot and start over. I keep doing that with my life. When I was a child, there was this fairytale I read once, called something like, “The magic paintbrush”. This little boy gets a magic paintbrush, and whenever he paints a picture with it, the picture looks like the most realistically beautiful thing ever. But then, a sinister aspect - if he finishes the picture, whatever he has drawn will come to life or come to pass. So he draws a cat, and it slinks off the page, or a butterfly, and it flies away. To try and balance the benefits of the brush with the unfortunate after effects, he stops finishing his pictures.

Similarly, I stop doing almost everything I start before it’s done. I’m not sure what I’m afraid will happen - perhaps that I’ll become so ensconsed it whatever it is that it’ll develop a life of its own. I usually get really far into it before I can it though - far enough into it that people shout a lot, and wave their hands, when they found out I’ve kicked it into touch. If it’s something that important, I’ll usually revisit it later. Like a dog to its own vomit, back I trot for more. When have I done things like this?

Three and a half years into a four-year Bachelors degree, I walked off campus to do something else. Two years later I went back and did the final three months to get my degree. Six months into learning to drive, I got stopped by a police woman with PMT and an attitude problem for some stupid learner mistake, and because the savage little powermonger was having a bad day (may she roast) she gave me a citation and ordered me into court with my documents. I abandoned learning to drive for a few months, wasting the money from my first lessons, but then went back and threw a bunch of cash at it again and passed my driving test.

I never stayed in a job longer than 18 months, but kept going back to freelancing in between times for 12 years - now I’m back at it again. I’m not entirely sure what the hell it is I’m looking for in this life, but I’ll surely pass it by three times and fall over it before I recognise it.

Here’s the question though, is it because I’m a feckless waster, or an unchallenged genius?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved learning. Not so much the sit-in-the-classroom-and-discuss-boring-theories-for-hours approach, but independent learning.

For instance, my family couldn’t afford to get piano lessons for me, so I went to a thrift store and bought some instructional music books. I can still play out of my dusty old level 5 piano book - I don’t play with all the fingers in the right places, and I’m sure I make mistakes, but I practiced the hell out of it. I can still play most of the songs by heart.

I’ve always loved languages too. In grade 6 I found some book on spanish and french, and started organizing lessons to teach my friends. Of course, the fact that I knew nothing and just had a book, didn’t make these “lessons” very successful. But then I got myself kicked out the library at lunch hours for an evil plan of revenge on a girl who called my friend a bitch, and I had to find some outdoor activities instead.

This is a bit sick…but I almost even bought some calculus books just so I could teach it to myself. It’s something I still want to learn.

Sadly, I don’t have the time, money, or energy to take on these new skills and hobbies like I used to. My clarinet, my art supplies, Weasel’s “learn C++” book all sit littered around my desk covered in dust. As my career takes over, my hobbies and social life fall away.

As far as hobbies go, all I really have right now is a book club that I never get to go to because I get called in from work, and this website - *tumbleweed goes by*. Admittedly, that is VERY sad.

Hopefully, this will be temporary - I think our time and ambition tends to peak in waves. Nevertheless, I believe it is lack of resources (and perhaps too many interests) as opposed to motivation that prevent my continuing with hobbies.

It’s all helpful in the end. You never know what weird skill might help you out down the road, whether it be with a career or just in life. Even if you don’t get too far into an interest, having knowledge or a little experience in something can get you far.

Here’s something I can get into. Bass Guitar. I figure that its not going to be everyday I get to talk about something that I love almost as much as I love breathing air, so I had better take advantage of it.

I started playing about five and a half years ago, and I’ve played almost every day for at least a few hours. Over the last five years I have spent so much time playing bass it would make your ass hurt. Whenever I learn a new trick, I play until my hands cramp up, and really, after playing for five years, it takes about 8 solid hours of straight playing to get my hands sore. I taught myself, and like Fozzie, I used some tabs, struggled through, trained my ears, and trained my fingers.

And if there is one thing that I’ve learned from all that playing it is this: Sticking with it pays off. Furthermore, sticking with bass playing in particular pays off. Because playing bass guitar really well automatically makes you the sexiest motherfucker in the room. I’m serious. When you get fluent in the low-end, high-end pussy just falls out of the sky… and right onto your face. And for all you females out there… there is nothing sexier to any man, than a woman who can bust out some serious funk. You could be a 400lb, stinky, acne-riddled, ex-convict, and as long as you could make those 4 strings sing, you are going to get some action.

But that’s not the only reason one should walk the path of the bottom end. There is a certain spirituality involved in the pursuit of the bass. The more I think about it, the more I feel like some sort of monk. I worship the Low-E,A,D,G. I wait for the second comming of Jaco, and sing his praises. I sit cross-legged, bass in my lap, and meditate on what I have learned througout the day.

I walk the path of the lowest tones. I have come far, and I must push myself daily to go farther. And I salute all those who walk the path with me, be they funky or flunky, or somewhere in between. Walk with me, brothers and sisters, and let the music heal your soul.

Monuments of failure.

That’s what surrounds me. Piles upon piles of models, books, gadgets, all kinds of crap I thought for sure I was seriously going to “get into” but then stuff got complicated and I threw my hands up in frustration, or something shiny came along and I lost all interest.

It’s been that way since I was a kid, really. I’d buy a little model that took like an hour to put together, and I’d slap it together and say “Well, that was easy.” So I’d then ask for the biggest model that the hobby shop had for my birthday, thinking I needed a bit more of a challenge and that the little model was fun, so a big model would be big fun.

Turns out it didn’t work like that.

I’d get the new model, with its inch-thick book of instructions, and set to work in earnest. Everything would go fine for a little while. I’d cut the pieces out and sand down the edges as I put together the small constructions detailed in the first few pages. The sense of accomplishment was huge, till I took a look and realized that I had been at it for 3 afternoons and had only completed 3 pages of a 55 page instruction book. Generally the model was then stuck in a corner to collect dust, waiting patiently for me to get back to it. Usually the only things that ever made it back out of the box were the glue and bits of the model that I could graft onto other toys to make them look bad ass.

I’ve not attempted to put together a model in quite a while, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my fabulous knack for failure. Last year’s attempt at a new hobby was foreign language.

I got it into my head that I would just up and learn Japanese. I mean, how hard could it be? So I got some online info and charts on the basic alphabet, and learned those fairly easy and had a good time doing it. That’s when the aforementioned affliction reared its head and I went and spent about 300 dollars on books, flash cards, various work books, not to mention “extended demos” of thousands of dollars worth of language software. I jumped into these things and again had a pretty good time and did well enough to be able to read words as long as they were spelled with the 80 letter alphabet and not the 5000+ character kanji list, and I could tell people that I was going shopping at the tokyo shopping district.

Then I moved on to serious kanji and vocabulary study and things got hard. So for about the last 4 months the books have remained steadfast my shelf, the software’s icons remain unclicked, and the flash cards have not flashed. I still would like to learn Japanese, but every time I try my eyes glaze over and I give up. Besides, I have a new hobby.

This christmas I got the toy that all the cool kids want: a bass guitar. Now right off the bat, I realized this was going to be hard. It should be noted that I am afflicted with this weird thumb thing that cause me not to be able to get any pressure when trying to press things between my thumb and forefinger. You know when you make the universal “OK” sign? I couldn’t kill a fly if I pinched it in that way, which has a tendency to affect the way I have to grip the neck. Not to mention that my fingers are a little short which makes the top string a little tricky for me. I made a solid effort at rocking out straight away, but instead could not even manage to play Twinkle Twinkle.

Unfazed, however, I’ve been able to keep the effort up by not trying to rush it. I generally play around with it three or four days a week for a few hours. Since I completely forgot how to read music after 8th grade, I rely mostly on bass tabs which is kind of like playing-by-numbers. After 4 months I can play Stone Temple Pilots - Plush, White Stripes - I’m Finding it hard to be a Gentleman and the low bit on Seven Nation Army, The Star Spangled Banner, Pink Floyd - Money, Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun, and the cool part of Beethoven’s Fur Elise without staring at my hands or a book. Probably not great progress, but I’m not in too big a hurry.

So here’s hoping that I have finally found something I can stick with. I’ll let you know if I end up using any bits of my bass to make my toys look bad ass.