Last time I posted, I was hitting the treadmill. Unfortunately, shortly after hitting the treadmill I found out that I’d wildly overestimated my treadmill-hitting abilities; I walked myself right into a great big flare-up. So back to PT I went. It’s all very three steps forward, two steps back.

I’ve joined something called “Health Month” with some buddies from Metafilter, and so far it’s been good. The deal is this: you make up a bunch of rules that you want to follow for a month. (You can put up with just about anything for a month, right?) You start with ten “life points”. If you meet your goals, you get rewarded with “fruit”. If you don’t, you lose a life point. You can heal yourself or your friends with the fruit. It is astonishing how motivated a person can be by imaginary fruit.

After feeling like I’d crashed and burned with a walking-related goal in May — plus feeling pretty dragged down by that historically crummy spring weather — I decided that June was the month of doing things that are fun. Some of my rules were “play the banjo four times a week”, “study contact juggling twice a week”, and “spend twenty minutes twice a week making something”. This is one of the better ideas I’ve had in a while.

I’d put my banjo aside for a few weeks when I’d become busy, and when the busyness was over I’d fallen out of the habit of practicing. Truth is, I was intimidated at the prospect of having to face up to how crummy I sounded when I hadn’t been practicing. (See also: “I don’t know if that thing in the fridge has gone bad yet, so let’s keep it there until there’s no question.”) It took about a week and a half to scrape most of the rust off of my feeble clawhammering skills. That’s a lot less time than I was expecting. I still make a lot of mistakes, but today I ripped out a version of “Cripple Creek” that actually sounded pretty good to me. Hot damn. Now that I’m entering a two-month Low Sculpin Availability Period*, I’m counting on Health Month to remind me to make time to keep playing.

* hat tip to Siderea

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One of the many reasons I’m glad to have married Josh is that it is lovely to live with someone who has some musical experience and understands what the process sounds like. You know, when you’re working on a skill or putting together a song, it sounds like a hot mess for a while. Attention is a limiting factor. Maybe you get the left hand mostly down and then start working on the right hand but now the left hand goes all to hell. There’s often a point at which you have to sound worse before you can get better. It’s pretty disheartening. If you’re less lucky than I am now, this is when some non-musician in the house pops his head through the doorframe and volunteers that you totally stink. I’m not completely without sympathy for that position; there’s a reason why I usually close all the windows when I’m practicing. But I’m glad to live without any more of those godawful heartsink moments. It’s not easy to forget those.

Cam: “Am I bugging the hell out of you?”
Josh: “You’re fine.”
Cam: “You’ll tell me if I start bugging you?”
Josh: “Yep. You’re fine.”

Josh is notably laid-back, it’s true, but I do chalk this one up to his having experience with playing and learning music. I’m not notably laid-back, but Josh can play his bass as much as he likes without bothering me a bit. I like it.