Jam and Ice Cream

Here's the part about jam.

Yesterday I went to my first-ever "jam session," and I must say it is a very fulfilling experience.  I spend much of my time trying to find background tracks or trying to arrange my own backup band.  The first is almost always impossible if you want to play anything other than a twelve-bar blues, and the second is quite difficult considering I know almost nothing about jazz piano.  Or jazz bass.  Or jazz drums.

So it's pretty amazing to stand in a room with some great musicians and just be able to say "Hey, why don't we play this?"  And then you give them chords and all of a sudden you're playing it.

Jam sessions also give you motivation to work on your instrument.  I found that in jazz band, I was challenged so infrequently that I hardly ever practiced.  After a couple of tries I could play almost everything I needed to.  So why practice?  But with a jam session, you have no idea what you'll end up playing.  The prospect of future jam sessions encourages you to further your own capabilities, and that's why after finishing this blog post, I intend to go practice trombone, something I haven't done for about a year (despite being in two bands and an orchestra for the past ten months.)

Here's the part about ice cream.

Sometimes, everything just goes wrong.  When that happens, ice cream makes things better.  If that doesn't happen, you're not eating enough ice cream.

I'm not going to launch into a rant about what, exactly, went wrong.  I'll summarize it briefly: because the course registration date for my post-secondary institution was completely unaffected by my grades, I wound up with a very late registration date, and as such I was essentially able to register for none of the courses I wanted to take.

After a little bit of ranting and some internal finger-pointing, I calmed down, did what I could to alleviate the situation, got on the waitlist for everything available, and ate some ice cream.

I suppose what's hard about life is that you don't know what you don't know, and no one ever tells you.  Probably because they think you know that you don't know it.  I find myself now in a situation that I could have prevented.  Naturally, I didn't find out that I could have prevented it until it was too late.

Ask questions.  You never know what you don't know.

Given that I just ate an ice cream bar, practicing trombone is probably not a great idea right now.

That much, I know.
~TheSequenceKitten