DAY 56: Community Quarantine

    ACHING FINGERS- I was in the mood for the guitar last night. I played for an hour or so. Unfortunately this stressed my digits and I woke up with hurting finger joints.

    I play the guitar only when I'm in the mood and I usually binge at it. It's undisciplined and that is why my playing has not improved. This is a bad habit

   The correct practice is to play a few minutes of targeted technique a day. Five minutes a day can improve playing more than playing for hours in a single day. But I hate playing scales, arpeggios, skips, exercises. I'd rather play a lovely melodic piece than be tortured with repetitions. 

   This is why formal training is important in playing an instrument. I was enrolled by my sister to a music studio a few decades ago. The problem was I already knew how to play and going back to the basics bored the hell out of me. 

 

   I could already pick out tunes by ear and learning to read a score was something I thought was not important then.

   I lasted four sessions. I regretted it. If I had continued, things would have been different. Now, I read music scores like a pre-school reading the KJB. Painstakingly very slow.

    I got older, got bored with pop music,  turned to the classical guitar. 

   I played classical guitar using intuitive finger positioning that I acquired from playing chords and finger style folk guitar, which I have become good at ( I think so), only to find out thats not how it's done in classical guitar. Wrong techniques hinders playing complicated pieces and more importantly, damage the hand and finger joints.

   I have to unlearn all what I thought was proper and then relearn almost from the scratch. This, in my middle age. 

    An example, there is the rule in classical right hand finger motion (the picking fingers) that as much as possible no one finger should play the same note twice or more. I thought this was a crazy rule because heavy metal guitar players can play at the speed of light using only two finger to hold a pick.

    That is until I self learned tremolo. Those triplets is almost impossible to play with one finger. Also, I found out heavy metals players were noobish when compared to players like Paco Delucia and the gypsy Carlos Montoya.

   I have no delusions. I am happy to be able to play easy to intermediate pieces. But there are times that I wish I could play some of Bach's advanced pieces, but these require proficiency in complicated playing techniques which takes a lifetime to master. 

   Maybe I will, maybe not. 

    SAP LIST- I saw the list of SAP recipients posted on Facebook. I noticed that there were entries with the same surnames and addresses from our sitio. This was the same with the other sitios in San Isidro. 

    Obviously these people are related. I don't know how to make of this but at a glance, this is suspect. Of the number of deserving families why did they not at least scattered the money to other families. Why give four to three person from the same family? The barangay officials who gave the list will have explaining to do to his constituents. 

    The masterlist is in the open and people will think what I am thinking now, not good.

   Another thing is that not a soul was chosen from our purok. There are six or seven purok in our sitio and resident from uno and dos are the original inhabitants here. I and my neighbors from dos are titled lot owners while those from purok tres down are informal settlers that occupied the rice field behind purok dos in late 90s to early 2000s. 

   They think that we from purok dos didn't need the financial aid. But there are those who do, they just lumped us together into a class without really checking. 

  ARATILES- The aratiles fruits are ripening and in a few days the number of birds that  congregate here will double or triple. I have stopped feeding them becuase their numbers grew and I don't want our house to be overrun with birds.

  I will have to provide water for them. 

  COCOPEAT- Our house used to be surrounded by coconut trees. Some died others I terminated because they grew thin and tall, a hazzard during typhoons. 

  I dug up the decaying stumped and collected the compost.