In The Now

Moron Guitar

by hadaad

Did I tell you that I quit guitar lessons?

I did. I pulled Lily out of guitar too. She wasn’t practicing or really getting it and I wasn’t practicing. My motivation was low, low. It didn’t feel like I was making any progress at all and I just didn’t feel like it.

Because I am who I am, I obsessed over this. I tried to figure out why I lost motivation. Then I started looking at articles online about how to practice, what to practice to get better, and, most recently, how to pick a guitar teacher.

I’m not going to trash my guitar teacher. The failures were more my fault than they were his. My nebulous goal of “learn to play the guitar” couldn’t have helped him in developing a lesson plan or even in giving me things to work on. So, he taught me songs. And then there was Lily. I was happy to take lessons with her but I think it held me back because of just how much the teacher had to concentrate on her during the lesson.

For my birthday, I got a fancy new guitar. I was a little overwhelmed when I got it. It’s no great feat of humility to say I can’t play the guitar. I didn’t feel guilty about the money spent on the guitar. It didn’t put us in the poor-house, between gift cards and small amounts I’d been saving since Christmas. It’s just a really nice guitar and it deserves someone who can play.

Lesson learned, I signed up for lessons at the place I got the guitar. But, with my new research in hand, I had to come up with a plan. A mission statement, for lack of a better term, for my new teacher. I realized that it’s his job to teach me what I want to learn but the onus is on me to figure out what that is and communicate that to him.

Figuring out that that was my job was the easy part. The hard part was in figuring out what I wanted out of guitar playing. I hear amazing things all the time and I want to be able to do them. From finger-style like Tony McManus to shredding solos like you’d hear on an Iron Maiden song. Not to mention all the cool and amazing things you hear from jazz guys like Stanley Jordan or blues guys like Robert Cray.

But one of the important things in learning like this is that if you go too broad, it’s hard to master anything. So I had to go for a critical few. Once I thought about it enough, I decided where I want to be. I want to be able to put on a backing track and improvise. I want to be able to create solos and play them. I want to be able to just play like that. So, I took that, a list of my capabilities, my guitar, a case of the jitters, and a small hope with me to my first guitar lesson with the new guitar teacher.

By the end of the first lesson, he’d convinced me that, not only can I learn to play, I can already play just a little. He laid down a rhythm section and, with a few pointers from him and knowledge of the A-minor pentatonic scale, I played.

I’m not going to say that it was innovative or beautiful stuff that I would be proud to play in front of a crowd. But it was playing. And it was music. And it was fun. He gave me some fingering exercises to work on to improve my familiarity with the scale, and improve my technique. I struggled with those exercises, but they’re coming more easily. In the intervening weeks, I’ve learned how to move around the neck to use different keys. We’ve worked on rhythm, learning how to play a 12-bar blues — in the beginning, it was just in the first position, but we worked on moving that around the neck. I’ve learned a small amount of the theory of improvisation, like the A-A-B-A sequence to give a sort of shape to what I am playing. Again, my technique isn’t where I want it to be, but I have ideas, I can practice, and I’m having fun.

Considering that guitar is something that I started partially because it was something that I couldn’t do and had no leg up for any reason, I really like where I’m going with it.

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June 6, 2013

Dear Joe Hill,

by hadaad

I recently picked up the audiobook of your new novel NOS4A2. I liked the play on words and once I’d read the synopsis, I was hooked. I didn’t get to your book right away as I was reading 1Q84.
Finally, though, I sped through your book, listening to it on commutes, during lulls in the day, and when I was putting my kids to bed.
I suspect that you face comparisons to your father at an extremely alarming rate and, while I can’t promise that I won’t bring him up in this letter at all, I’m not going to make any bold claims about who’s better or any passing the torch or young lion/old lion cliches. I promise.
I expected, when I picked this book up, that there would be adventure, there would be horror, and there would be characters I could care about. The adventure and the horror I got in spades. It was maybe a little more heavily tilted towards horror but I also expected that to a certain degree.
I was afraid, for a little bit, that I was going to despise your protagonist. I sat with her through her teen years, those horrible times when she was so self-centred, and when she ran away from her mom and found trouble, I expected her to learn something from that experience. When she didn’t, I got mad at her. I probably got mad at you. Where was my storybook character who didn’t learn from the mistakes she’d made? That probably should have been my first clue that you were developing characters I cared about. Eventually, I think I saw what you were doing, though, and by the end of the book, she’d fully redeemed herself and it was good.
I cared about Wayne. I suffered along with him in that car and understood all the horrible things that he couldn’t about what was happening to him. When Vic brought him back but only partly, and he had those dreams and all those thoughts, it broke my heart a little. Okay, more than a little. So yeah, I’ll go ahead and say that you wrote characters that I care about.
In the end, this book delivered everything I wanted it to and more. Given that this is the first thing of yours that I’ve read, I can only hope there’s more.
Thank you for an amazing read,
A new fan.

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May 28, 2013

Blog Lassitude

by hadaad

My handy-dandy blog-roll notification (aka Tammy’s blog tells me that it has been 5 weeks since the last time I blogged.

Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, since I’m almost positive there is causation there, it has been 5 weeks to the day since the end of my self-imposed 20-day blogaday challenge.

I have been thinking about why I haven’t been blogging and struggling with the idea that anything I wrote would be almost pointless. Sure, I know that there are pointless blog posts all over the place. People write blog posts about farting at the gym and think nothing more of it. Others spend days poring over their posts until they are shined up and ready for publication.

I guess I probably fall closer to the gym-fart blog posts than the other side. I like my posts a little rougher. Not just because it keeps me from having to edit them too much but because I think both that I write a fairly coherent first draft and that you get a better sense of me when I leave it the way I wrote it the first time.

That said, I still struggle with the relevance of this blog. I’ve written some technical things that have helped some people. I’ve written things about my mom that have helped to keep her in my heart. I have written about my marriage and my children which help you all learn about me and what’s important. I’ve written personal anecdotes, both because they were amusing to me and because it’ll be interesting to read them in 30 years’ time and discover how much my perceptions have changed.

I’m trying to decide how much of my neglect for this space is dictated by a) my level of busy-ness, b) current events making the things I post about seem irrelevant, and c) just not wanting to do it. I like the space I’ve carved out here, even if it isn’t as visited as I may sometimes wish, and I like the things that I’ve written. The thing I need to figure out is: do I like the things I’ve written more than I dislike motivating myself to write them?

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April 23, 2013

Sharp-Dressed Man

by hadaad

There were long stretches during my university career that I didn’t particularly like who I was. I had basis for this in the form of a romantic attachment that I formed that didn’t work out. I’m sure most of the rest was in my head. However, there are two very overt examples that reinforced what I believed. I can look back at one and think about it with a little distance and realize that maybe I talked myself into letting it get me down. I may fully tell you, one day, about the time God beat me out for a girl but now is not that time. No, tonight, I will tell you about the other time that my ego, my machismo, and my self image took a hit. And this time, I tell you, I have evidence to back up my case.
I’d never intended to sign up for a bachelor auction. But there are times when people can talk you into things. If I had it to do over again, I would have stuck to the inside of my shell like I had every other time with the exception of the one time that I got hypnotized. Still, I guess I just let myself get talked into signing up.
I figured that the fact that I was the second one up wasn’t a good sign. Still, I had a little bit of an insurance policy. Shelley, Dylan’s wife, had a friend who would put up a minimal bid for me in the event that no other offers were sent up. Obviously, I would pay her back but in the end it wasn’t necessary. Someone bid on me.
That was nice, even if the bid was for less than the gift certificate that came along with this hunk of masculinity.
Maybe the girl was just interested in charity. Maybe she was angry at her boyfriend. I really don’t know. I do know that she had a boyfriend. Or at least that’s what she told me to beg out of the date. I’m not saying that I’m the height of amusing or even all that great a guy but she didn’t even want the gift certificate. She got out of there fast after making her excuses. I’m guessing that she was kind and trying to get the bidding going and was surprised when it turned out that she was the winner.
In the end, I treated myself to some Chinese food and consoled myself with the fact that at least mine wasn’t the lowest bid in the entire auction. That was the poor sap who went ahead of me in the auction. He went for a paltry ten bucks.

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April 23, 2013

Sleeping on the Job

by hadaad

Sleep when you’re dead. Come on. Come out. So what if you’re tired? It’s just for a little while. I know you have to work in the morning. but you can make it up on the weekend.
These tried and true sayings have been thrown around since the dawn of time to make people do things and stay up later than they meant to. So it should come as no surprise that I succumbed to their siren call on more than one occasion.
Around Christmas time, when I was working at the bleach factory, my university friends were all out of school with nothing on the agenda but celebration. Another semester was done and they were left with too much time on their hands. And the cascade of out-of-town students meant that some of them had nobody else to celebrate with than those of us who were not beholden to some finals schedule to determine our availability.
So I found myself dragged out on weeknights, to the occasional bar, to the more frequent coffee session or movie. And I was tired. All the time.
One night, after a movie, my car died at Rob’s house (see, it did happen a lot) and I didn’t finish dropping off various friends until three or four in the morning. So, it made perfect sense to me to stay up and go to work rather than sleep a couple of hours and wake up crusty and unhappy. I made myself stay awake with various tactics uncovered in the deepest jungles of South America. Either that or I played hockey on the Sega Genesis.
Whatever the motivation, I was able to stay awake long enough to have a shower and get in the car for work.
I worked that day, unhappy, tired, and unmotivated, but the bleach didn’t stop coming because I wasn’t feeling it.
I did notice that things were a little weird. I would blank out and panic that I was behind on my bottles because I was not on top of things, only to realize that I wasn’t behind at all. Or a pallet would be closer to finished than I expected. It didn’t make sense to me, but I made it through that day without any major incidents. (Or minor, I think.)
It wasn’t until later that I realised that I’d fallen asleep on the job. But that I had kept working. The truth is, a person could almost do all of that job by reflex. It isn’t much more than muscle memory to check bottles for leaks, throw six of them into a box and push it through the tape machine, then when there were three boxes, to go throw them onto the pallet. So it is feasible that I did fall asleep and work through it. I was certainly tired enough to do it.
I’m not entirely convinced that that’s the reality and sixteen years is too long for me to pretend I can one hundred per cent guarantee that’s what happened but it makes sense and is a better story than that I’m blocking some essential truth of that day out.
After that, I did try to make a point of getting enough sleep for the next day of work. I wish I could tell you that I got a solid at least 6 hours, but hey, you can sleep when you’re dead. Or at least, you can make it up on the weekend.

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April 22, 2013

A Shank Apart

by hadaad

A steel-toed boot is supposed to provide safety. A chance to work without the concern that one’s toes are going to be squished by the first thing that falls on them. I’ve had plenty of opportunities, mostly in my late teens and my early twenties, to put that theory to the test. Several pallets, joints of pipe, shovels, rocks, tires, and nearly a safe have tried and failed to pierce the protective cups over my piggies.
With the safe, I’m glad the toes didn’t have to try and protect my feet. I was working laying floor for a friend’s dad. They were moving a safe with a pallet jack, having a great deal of difficulty. This wasn’t some namby-pamby politically correct safe that used electronics to keep your money safe. No, this was an impenetrable block of near-solid steel, weighing in at way more than I would care to guess. They were moving it off the floor so they could bring the floor up and lay a new one. But the safe slipped off the pallet jack.
Trying to be helpful, I jumped in.
“I’ve got it,” I said, leaning toward it to catch it with my hands.
Their cries of alarm weren’t needed as I rethought my helpfulness and jerked my hands back, jumping clear just in time. The safe slammed into the floor, cracking the linoleum we were to lift up the next day.
If I hadn’t made it clear of that, probably I wouldn’t be typing this right now, since my fingers would be useless bags of meat at the end of my hands.

The less-known safety feature of steel-toed boots, less-known but still incredibly important, if not as important as the toes, is the shank that protects the bottom of the foot. Yes, the modern worker can work in peace, stepping over broken glass, nails, anything, without any concern that the bottom of his foot will be punctured, since the ever-reliable shank is embedded in his footwear, giving its very shape to preserve his foot.
The smart way to get down from a rack of pipe, when working at the pipeyard, was to grab a lower level’s 2×4 and swing down to the ground. However, we were all virile young men and the 2×4 method was slower than just hauling up and jumping off the rack. Which is what we did. And it was stupid.
I’m the first of our group to have gotten injured leaping from the rack but I doubt I was the last. I was in a hurry to catch up to Ray, who was my crewmate at that point, and get into the truck. I don’t know if we’d been called in to load or unload a truck, or if it was just time to get in for lunch, but I didn’t want to hold up the show, so I jumped down. I hit the ground with a point of pain welling in my foot. Improbably, I had pierced the bottom of my foot.
I lifted my foot off the ground and with it came a short piece of 2×4, embedded in the sole of my boot, the point jabbing uncomfortably into the bottom of my foot. It took considerable effort to pull the piece of wood off my foot and it wasn’t until I got into the truck when I noticed a piece of metal sticking out the front of my boot.
I’d hit the nail with so much force that the shank of the boot had been split in half and the seam on the front of the boot, made out of the same material as the sole of the boot, had been split, so forceful was the displacement of the shank’s front half.
After that, I bought a new pair of boots, for sure, and if I still leapt from the rack sometimes, it wasn’t very often and I always checked the ground for stray pieces of 2×4, with or without nails.

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April 22, 2013

80-Pound Bake

by hadaad

I’ve never been good at admitting incompetence. I like to imagine that if I put my mind to it, I can accomplish anything. I just have to try hard enough.
There are two exceptions to this rule, apparently.
The first is calculus. Calculus and I are old enemies. Granted, it was co-ordinate geometry before I went to University. Geometry with its calculations that came, seemingly, out of nowhere. Quadratic equations where guessing was as good as going through the steps for me. University cleared that all up for me, and I fell in love with geometry, where an angle could be bisected with a compass and a straight edge. There was something seriously Sherlock Holmesian about the detection that went on in that class. Calculus, though, despite my half-hearted efforts, eluded me, and continues to elude me, to this day.
It’s a good thing that Calc was not required to graduate from Lethbridge in Computer Science, because it was not something I could either do or even bring myself to try at the end.
The other thing I could not do, even though I put every effort — good efforts, too — into, and that was to successfully navigate a bake at Tim Horton Donuts.
I know, it’s not the sort of thing that most people have tried, and even if they have, failing at something like that isn’t a thing that would stick in most people’s craw. But it did mine. I failed at it and, while I had the good grace to quit before they punched my ticket, I can take a hint and I knew that if I didn’t pick up my socks they were going to kick me to the proverbial curb.
I don’t know what it was about baking that so stymied me. I could do the individual steps for each type of donut. I had that stuff down. The donuts I made were good — way better than the pre-fab stuff they shove down your gullet nowadays — but it just took me longer. And not a little bit longer. We’re talking four to five hours longer than your average baker.
The one positive about working there was the girls. It was nice, after working a bunch of jobs in the industrial sector, to work at a place where girls were. It was also nice to have people to talk to when I was at the end of a long shift. I did get a date out of it, but I don’t know if Sandy was more uncomfortable or if I was. We went out and played pool, which she was happy to do, but I think I probably had more fun on that date than she did. She kept talking about her ex-boyfriend and the things they got up to. I don’t know if it was supposed to intrigue me, but it was a massive turnoff. We didn’t go out again after that.
Another girl, Sherry, was an interesting one. She was five to ten years older than I was, and I remembered her from a temp-job I’d had a couple years before, taking inventory at a clothing store. Sherry and I had some interesting conversations. She gave me a hard time, I gave it right back. Some weeks after the last time I saw her, another baker, Cathy, told me that Sherry had been avoiding me because she was interested but in a relationship with another man and didn’t want to jeopardize that. I could understand that.
A funny story goes along with Cathy. Unlike me, she was a serious baker. She took the occasional shift at Tim Horton Donuts when she had the time, usually on the weekends, but she had a full-time job at the local grocery.
The grocery was on strike, complaining about wages or hours or something. I was young, stupid, and I wanted to cross the line. So I did. And Cathy was in the line. I heard it from her, let me tell you. I made some stupid one-liner about how I was breaking up the union by buying some batteries or something equally lame.
My own tenure at the Donut shop, as I said, didn’t last. I’m not happy at a job unless I can hold my own, and as I said, at Tim Horton Donuts, I was definitely over-matched.

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April 20, 2013

A One-Legged Man in a Kicking Contest

by hadaad

Misconceptions have a habit of dropping dead to the ground when confronted by the cold reality of the truth.
I’d just finished a job at Canadian Tire, having taken a moral stand and started at Venger Electrostatic Paint Company. Jason, a neighbour from down the road, and another neigbour from a neigbourhood a couple of blocks away worked there. My first trip with Venger was to West Edmonton mall where we painted a couple of doorways and the poles for the vending machines for those carts you can rent. Unless I’m way off base, they’re still there and they haven’t been painted since that day.
There were some colourful characters there. A couple of younger guys who were very hard-working and who spent every ounce of energy that was not spent directly on prepping surfaces for paint giving each other grief. I mean every second of the day, any silence not filled with the sounds of their verbal sparring was spent in shocked recovery or respectful silence because what someone had said was just that amazing.
I’m sure they thought they were destined for a comedy troupe or a spot on a sitcom. But it was diverting enough and made the hours pass.
The misconception I’d spoken of before walked through the door sometime into my second week, when I was prepping a Safeway display counter for a liberal coating of salmon. Or was it coral? I’m not sure but something in a conservative pink.
Hlynn (yes that was his name) was a painter who’d spent the last two weeks in Saskatchewan, painting office fixtures for some company who was Venger’s second-biggest client.
The reason Hlynn was such an enigma, such a colossal paradox was not because he was a mormon. As a person, he was a nice guy. Very up-front and outgoing. He never tried to preach to us. I think that any of that he’d had in him had been removed over the years he’d worked for Venger. That was weird enough in and of itself. Venger did not lend itself to the savouriest of characters and for a guy like Hlynn to last there more than a couple of months, he would have had to be stronger in his faith and his convictions than most people I know.
I had been working with a painter named Brad. He was a ridiculous perfectionist when it came to painting. I mean, it makes sense. If you don’t do it right, you get to go back on the company’s dime and fix it. So he didn’t leave a site until he was sure how it would look. Not just while he was working. Not just when he was done, but how it would look when the paint had dried and completed its flashing process.
For those of you ignorant of painting, flashing is the process where paint pulls back a bit as it dries. If the coverage isn’t proper, the edges of the paint can pull back over a couple of coats and look uneven. Nothing is more frustrating for a crew getting paid seven dollars an hour than to be given shit because the painter didn’t account for flashing and all the work that had been done had to be redone. We were paid regardless but the attitudes of the bosses became much less positive when we returned from a trip to another province where we had to redo all that we had done before.
Brad had been through that more than once, and, as was said, he would not leave a site until he was sure that we wouldn’t be called back.
Being on a crew with Hlynn was completely different. He wanted to get the job done and he wanted to get back home. I guess maybe he wasn’t as comfortable around the Venger people as he made out to be. Or maybe he just really liked his wife. I suppose that is a reasonable thing. But he would do his coats of paint and we would leave. It was nice to get out when I thought the job would be done, but we did get a lot of call backs. The bosses didn’t seem to ride Hlynn as hard about that as they did the other painters. I couldn’t figure out if it was because of his religion, because one of them was his family, or something like that.
It wasn’t until one of my last couple days that the truth came to light. It made everything so obvious. His ambivalence toward the quality of the final product. The bosses’ understanding. His seeming ineptitude.
And when I found out the truth, a thing I had always understood to be true was shattered.
One could indeed be a painter if he was colour-blind. He just couldn’t be a good painter.

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April 18, 2013

One Hundred Pallets a Day

by hadaad

As my time at Flo-Pak was stretching along, Wayne, the cigar-smoking, lame-footed shop manager was coming to realize that I wasn’t the average run-of-the-mill zombie putting in minimum work for the pay. He had increased my wage on my first day and now he was grooming me for taking over.
He’d put me in charge of mixing the bleach and cleaners and had me in charge of a night crew. But that was in the past. I’d asked to be relieved of those duties (mostly because they didn’t result in increased pay for increased responsibilities — apart, that is, from a 50-cent-an-hour shift differential). He moved me back to where I was comfortable on the main bleach line. But he still had plans for me.
“You know, Liam,” he told me one day while I slaved away putting bleach in boxes, “one day, we’re going to get a rotary line in here.” He got a faraway, almost dreamy look, something I’d never seen from him — hope. “With a rotary line, we can just keep filling bottles. The line would never be still and we could clear a hundred pallets a day.”
I had a hard time matching his excitement. For one, it was never my dream to spend my life pushing bleach out of a warehouse. For another, when I had been on night shift, I spent part of my time on a forklift, moving pallets of bleach from the line to the warehouse. That made it 50 pallets a day, running two shifts, and we had nowhere near enough space for that. I didn’t want to think of the logistics of storing twice that in the same amount of space.
Still, it was his dream and I didn’t see any reason to burst his bubble. So I went along with it, asking questions about the rotary line. He was all about it. He’d get two guys, one to box the bleach and one to palletize it. It would be glorious. They could switch off, but they would be two of the same kind of person. People who were willing to work hard for the money they took home. I knew where he was going, particularly since he’d asked me the fateful question about the next forty years just a few days prior.
“One of those guys could be you,” he said. I’m not sure if he came out and said it because he thought I wanted him to ask me, or if he honestly thought I didn’t know where he was going with his story of burly men doing manly, burly work, but he laid it all out there, a suitor with his heart on his sleeve.
I couldn’t be completely dishonest with him. I thought that if he wanted to make his home a palace of bleach, that was good for him, but it wasn’t my dream. I told him that I would try, but that I didn’t know how much time I would be able to give the company, with my back problems and my desire for something more mentally challenging. He knew I was planning on going to school, but I think he thought that he could entice me away from scholastic endeavours with the promise of a $9.00 per hour job with all the bleach and fabric softener I could use. Maybe if I’d been one of those European grandmothers who cleaned everything with bleach, it would have been worth it but I knew there was a career in an office just waiting for me and I wanted to seize that. So, I dashed Wayne’s dreams of my indentured servitude but until the day I quit, he was still talking about his pie-in-the-sky dream of one hundred pallets a day.

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April 17, 2013

405 Error Loading Spring Resources

by hadaad

I find, as I get more experience programming, that the times when I’m laid up for a half a day or more with an issue are more rare than they were when I was greener. However, the problems, when I do run into them, are more insidious and a heck of a lot harder to pin down.
Today’s problem was brought to you in the form of a 405 error when the page loaded and attempted to fetch javascript and css files. I looked into the configuration. That’s always where things like this reside. I want to say that I learned a lot about the ways that resources are loaded and the different configuration options that can be used. Maybe strategies that could circumvent the problem. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, I spent the afternoon backing out changes and reintroducing them one by one.
Eventually, and it’s funny because I backed out and reintroduced every change and it was the last possible file, the one that had me saying, “No way it could be this one,” when I finally figured out what was going on.
In a controller, annotated with @RequestMapping, the method was specified, but the value was not. It was also nat specified at the class level. So it is my conclusion that Spring chose to use the no-value RequestMapping method as a catch-all for requests that were not specified by other controllers and RequestMapping methods. That means that any get request couched in a <script> or <style> tag as well. And since the method in question was a POST handler and no such GET method was specified (it was, but it had the value attribute filled in), I got the 405 error for the implicit get of the <script> and <style> tags.
So, if you, like me, search these kinds of things before getting into serious debugging, keep in mind to check out your request mappings. It could save you a pile of time playing with source control.

[tl;dr: if you're getting 405 errors in a spring web application, check that all RequestMapping-annotated controller methods have a value, either at the method level or at the class level]

[Note: has this post helped you out? Please let me know in the comments. It will keep posts like this one coming. Thanks -- L]

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