like in a dream

I sat in front of the corner store where I get my coffee every day--sounds bougie, but it's only a buck if you bring your own mug--and I remembered something that reminded me of something else that led to something else.

First, I got up at about 8:15 this morning--using "natural rising" as my mom called it in her convent days--and did some yoga before walking down to the store. I've fallen into this nice routine in the past couple weeks, but I'm always fiddling with my morning rituals such that they never actually become rituals. But I remembered something that some loathsome impish man once told me (a teacher at Price Elementary on the south side of Chicago): you should wake with enough time such that you have an hour of get-ready/downtime before you have to leave. An hour. Before work. I'm going to try to keep this timeframe in mind however my routine shifts, but for me it's more an issue of keeping to just an hour, not more.

And this line of thinking made me think of a TED talk or a NYT article--ironically, I can't remember--that posited that unstructured periods of "rest" help the brain process and store the information it's taken in and helps the brain access more remote memories--almost like dreaming but more grounded in reality.

And that made me think about meditation. To me, that's the goal and benefit of meditation, which I got back into this week. And the M-word shouldn't be confused with a particular practice or theology but just as a period of consciously giving your brain rest so it can defragment itself. I think we all do this in different ways but are rarely aware of it. For me, I think I got good at it through playing the piano--improvising specifically--and now consciously try to access that state whenever I can: sitting, walking, biking, and even driving. This week, I feel more centered and am having an easier time accessing this space. Last week, I felt like I was just running from one thing to the next and couldn't see the forest for the trees.

And this led me to think about procrastination, which I define as "avoiding doing things that are difficult". To me it feels like a mental block, like I can't even imagine doing whatever it is right now. And this block like a cancer grows. So if you avoid doing the dishes (which I do), then you avoid other dumb things that seem unimportant but really are. The action is more of a symbol than discrete act, symbolizing our ability to overcome our shortcomings. Writing music takes a lot of different abilities, and when I ignore the ones that are difficult to me, it comes out sounding 2-dimensional. The best music springs forth through a perfect collaboration of all the parts of the brain (or all the brains in the band) and then engages all the parts of the audience.

Gotta do the dumb things I gotta do.

Little by little, I'm regaining consciousness. It only takes one night to lose but takes so long to get back. Tomorrow begins tonight, but tonight began this morning. It's a cycle, and you can either be on the spiral-track elevator going up or down.

I'm still adamant about having a clean space: having a clearer mind today, I had the mental energy to wrangle the space. I got up late (again) and drank my coffee with my oatmeal breakfast. There's something so pure and simple about oatmeal (even with the brown sugar, salt, walnuts, and curry that I add). After a weekend of some of the best food, my body is content with simplicity. So oatmeal, homemade bread, rice, and potatoes have been the main ingredients in my diet today. And a hot chocolate and a hot cinnamon milk. But in general, simple.

I did music things this morning but nothing really focused or productive. I am getting distracted by the idea of covering songs at the Gallery Cabaret open mic on Sunday nights. I would really like to be a better performer, but at the same time, I know it doesn't come as easily to me as to some. And so it's a question of whether or not it's worth it. Right now, I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to work up a couple songs and do them this Sunday. Probably the Elliott Smith song I posted yesterday and maybe another Nine Inch Nails song. The one I did last week seemed to go over well--or not at all.

And so I played the guitar a lot today and the fingers on my left hand are a little tender. They'll toughen up. And in the process of playing, I keep getting to know my software better. In a way, I can excuse whatever I do, no matter how tangential, as long as I learn more about the world of Ableton Live.

In fact, the last tangent of the day was making a quick cover of a Daft Punk song. You can hear it here.

I took a great walk to the beach today. Since my phone is dead, I charged up my digital camera. Turns out it can take movies. That will probably prove to be a better option for future youtube piano performances. But for now, I just have a couple images. I highly recommend spending time at the beach in the winter. Here, the beach has been extended about 50 feet by the ice. So far. We'll see how far it gets by February. It's not ice like you'd think, though. As you can see in the picture, it's like dirty ice balls that have been swimming in the lake that have frozen together. It was like walking on another planet. And intensely windy.

The last two nights, I got sucked in by the tv. Being weakened by the weekend, I was not strong enough to resist. And I rediscovered South Park. So funny. Tonight, I only watched one episode. Good thing we have cable; it's always on one of three channels.

All for now. I think tomorrow holds big things. Remind me to talk about time.

Oh yeah, read this.

PART I: night
I'm developing musical habits. I guess that could mean that I'm developing a style.
And, actually, come to think of it, I rather like it. I always tend to start with all the possibilities, but I keep choosing this particular set over and over. And there's still plenty of room for variety and improvisation.

The most recent video I made does not fit this style. It's more representative of me reaching beyond myself, pulling in more atonality, experimenting. And I like to listen to it, but it's not really *me*. I am not my preferences; I don't want to express my preferences. But likes and dislikes are a treasure map to what's buried on a desert island.

I don't want to give away all my good ideas before they're ready.

PART II: morning
I had the feeling last night that I had an important realization that I wanted to write about, but I could not remember what it was. Turns out, it's memory. I listened to a podcast on the way up here that described what researchers at Stanford are learning about how we learn, and the most salient detail that remains with me is how different parts of the brain remember different things. We like to forget (or ignore) that there are different types of learning, but there are several: factual memory (hippocampus), emotional memory (amygdala), habit memory (basal ganglia), perception (cerebral cortex), and motor memory (cerebellum).

So, as if I didn't know this about myself, our ability to remember emotions is different than our ability to remember facts; we can remember the emotion but forget the details surrounding those emotions. The story of my life. And probably everyone's. Because those two functions are in separate regions, an event can trigger an emotion even when the original event and the emotion are no longer associated together.

Even more amusing: our motor abilities are controlled by a different region than our higher brain functions. That's why we can ride a bike even when we're stupid drunk. Not that anyone would ever do that.


So, we're carrying around all these memories that we don't even consider part of our memory. I guess they would be our subconsciousness. But there are at least three different brain parts that seem to correspond to subconscious memories: amygdala, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. The emotional memories in the amygdala are probably the most exciting/powerful/frightening: lodes of data to mine.

All for now. I'm headed back to Chicago for NYE this afternoon. I have some resolutions to make before then.