It was definitely the trombone.
I have been erratically trying to learn Spanish for ages now (current status: know a lot of words and a fair amount of grammar, can laboriously construct comprehensible sentence, am completely unable to comprehend normal speech) and am now working on "comprehensible input". The theory is that if you just listen to/watch enough content with people speaking reaallllly slooowly and pointing at whatever they're talking about so you can figure out what's going on, you will internalize the language and will eventually understand normal speech.
On the one hand, this seems too easy. On the other hand, I've been trying to get an hour a day of input for a month or so now, and my god it's boring. At this rate, the things I'm relying on say I should be conversational in about two or three years, which seems depressingly slow except the other methods I've been trying weren't working either.
I've hired a Spanish tutor through italki and overall it's been great for leveling up - the problem I just articulated is the connection quality on our videocalls is fuzzy enough that it's not as good for listening comprehension which is my biggest need at the moment.
Speaking of boring, I'm starting to wilt from taking Hawaii driving. It's almost always boring, except when it's terrifying. Really trying to get her to the point where she can just be the driver when we go somewhere, but currently she is still terrified by other cars, so we are not to meaningful traffic yet.
I find that watching tv and movies in the language I'm learning is really helpful - it's fun, it's easy to make myself do it, and I end up being exposed to diverse vocabulary. Chrome has a "language learner" (I guess it's now called "language reactor") extension, which allows you to add dual language subtitles to Netflix shows. So, you can listen to the dialogue and follow along in English, while you also read/confirm it in Spanish. When I was doing this, I would pause the show a lot to practice the dialogue, and then I would get to be this really dramatic person in another language.
This year I resolve to buy fewer types of food ingredients. I would have a tidier, more streamlined pantry if I didn't try to cook different cuisines, but just stuck with one.
I guess I could compromise with very limited diversification. Like, Korean food + spaghetti and meatballs, or + lentil soup, because those would both be hard to give up.
Or wait, cornbread. Or chili. Okay, let me think about this some more.
3: I am a big believer in driving lessons from anyone but your parents. A paid instructor is good, but also anyone where the personal relationship isn't such a big thing. Some of it is about tension, but even if your relationship with your parents isn't tense, they grab your attention like no one else can, and that's really bad for focusing on the road.
4: I had tried that sort of thing (that is, normal TV with subtitles) and it didn't seem to be much help for me. But I am a very text dominant person: if I'm reading, I'm not listening at all.
7: I would love to pawn this off on someone else. It's very annoying that it's not offered through the schools here, and I haven't found the bandwidth to locate a private driving school and make a case for going in that direction. Also it would kind of mean picking a confrontation, because no one else perceives this as being a problem, so it would have a bit of rejection coming from me.
I would have assumed you'd want audio and visual to both be in the new language? What's the advantage to making your brain keep both languages processing simultaneously?
I've done pretty well with Duolingo for Spanish, but I had three years in high school and three college courses. I'm re-learning more than learning. I finally caved in and gave them money. The ads were all for point and click games and had a video of someone playing the game in such a stupid way that I was starting to feel insulted.
I really should put in an effort at improving on my terrible command of French. I think "comprehensible input" might be the way to go.
French would be nice. I'm embarrassed not to speak it now that I have a passport in the language. My current strategy, of hacking through about a page of Stendhal at bedtime before losing consciousness, isn't very efficient.
I successfully ordered a restaurant meal in French one time. Such is the height of my powers.
1 watch Spanish language films! Almodavar, Buñuel, Erice...
Even if your Spanish comprehension doesn't improve (and it should) you'll have watched some great fucking movies
Last year I watched so many French films that I often found I wasn't reading the subtitles (high school and college French). I didn't fully realize this until I was watching an early Celine Sciamma film that was about a bunch of kids and while I could understand just about everything when adults were talking to each other or to their kids I couldn't understand a single thing when the kids were talking amongst themselves and someone pointed out that must have been because they were using verlan.
Not me. Too many tuba players already in my extended family.
17: Bande de filles? I haven't seen it yet but it's interesting that she now says it was a flawed depiction of its chosen subject.
I just watched La Vie d'Adèle ten years after everyone was talking about it, and yeah, wow, it was indeed well done and there was indeed something exploitative and gross running through its heart.
Did I ever tell you all the sad and pathetic tale of peep and the many driving tests? Perhaps the most pathetic of all my tales of woe.
24: Well, if you insist.
This was in Maryland in 1979-1980 - the driving test was in a very simple course. You drove forward into the course, and then drove in reverse a little, and then drove into a parking space and then back out of it and drove onto a stop sign and turn right and then parallel parked, and then drove to a stop sign, and that was it. The only remotely challenging part was the parallel parking- you could be failed for hitting the curb or not getting close enough to the curb.
The first time my mom took me to take the driving test I failed in a normal way - I was very nervous parallel parking and hit the curb, and the tester failed me for that. So, I practiced parallel parking more, and my mom took me to the test again and this time I did a beautiful parallel parking job, and I was so happy as I drove up to the stop sign at the end of the course, and my mom made a hand signal to me to stop. And the tester failed me because my mom cheated by signaling to me. I was distraught and dumbfounded, my mom was furious and guilt ridden, but the tester was self-righteous and unperturbed. That was a long sad uncomfortable drive home.
Soon, I decided I was over the trauma, and decided that this wasn't really a big deal since now I knew I could handle the parallel parking, and so once again my mom drove me to the test. I was relaxed and confident and drove the car forward and then went into reverse and somehow veered way to the left nearly going off the road into the BMV building while the tester screamed at me and grabbed the wheel. Needless to say, I had failed again.
How to you parallel park without hitting the curb?
I mean, they have cameras and computers now. But not in 1980. You couldn't know you were close to the curb until you hit it.
I'm getting so much gastric pain that I might have to do dry January.
OT: Richard Kind in the movie within the show.
30: Thanks, heebie! But you're supposed to beg me to tell the rest of the story. Aren't you wondering if I ever got my driver's license? Or if the shame led me to flee the country and join the Foreign Legion?
My sister failed several times in a wine due to anxiety. In Maine you need to be unaccompanied. I went with my driving instructor in the back seat. In MA, they were allowed to be in the car as long as they don't talk. She knew exactly what would be on the test, and I had practiced the specific route already, so I passed on the first try.
I'm learning about Long Island because I'm going there in a couple of weeks.
There was no wine involved. I guess Apple doesn't like the sate of Maine.
34:"wine" ? Not picking on you for a typo, it's just that the only plausible word I can think of is "row" and that's very different from "wine".
I think my sister had to go through a rotary. My test was much simpler, more like peep's.
I had to take the driving test on the regular streets. But the town had only one stop light.
It was a regular street for me too. I was worried that ai had failed, because ai went through a yellow light, but it changed from green to yellow when I was already in the intersection.
I've made it back to 2006, and apparently there was an abstinence-only fund money, courtesy of the Bush Administration, that was intended to promote abstinence in anyone unmarried up to 29 years old. I marveled at the time that my own tax money was being used to discourage me from having sex.
Also the midterm elections went well that year.
Maybe someone took the grant and invented incels?
Or those cartoons where all the female characters look alarmingly young and have huge breasts?
Le trombonist, c'est moi. Still loving it, still not meaningfully cutting into my political awareness with it. I guess it's my 2025 resolution, sure, though I'm proud I got it started in random early December instead.
OH YES! Duh, sorry for the mix up. Of course it's you.
Is the abstinence fund still around, I wonder?
My resolution is to not have my car need to go to the body shop. Early February 2024 I was rear-ended. November 2024, someone hit my car in the parking lot. A tap to the rear quarter panel is 4k. Hoping I don't see the body shop this year.
Only for couples who'd been married a long time
49: Don't the polls show kids are having less sex?
32: Well, obviously no one cares, but I'll tell the end of the story since it is the part that is sort of relevant to the previous conversation. After my latest fiasco, my mom decided that maybe her presence wasn't helping me. She found a driving school and paid for me to have a lesson and for an instructor to take me to the BMV for the test. And I passed.
47: No worries! I'm just thrilled that LB corrected you re the instrument. I need Core Unfogged to be rock-solid on my new hobby.
The nice thing about starting a new musical instrument is I'm up against fifth graders. The girl who takes lessons before me is *much* worse than me, and I feel great about it.
Do you do the sad trombone sound as she comes out?
57: It's a memorable instrument! Both very cool that you're starting something new in adulthood, and an instrument with a whole lot of presence? Drama? Not sure what to call it. But taking up the guitar would have been a very meaningful and mentally healthy thing to do, music is an important part of human life, but ordinary. Taking up the trombone is a statement.
What I'm saying is, post progress updates. Impressive or not, either way.
59.1: This is helpful! I've been telling myself I chose it in part because of its demands on breath and body, not just fingers, but thinking of it as more of a dramatic gesture feels closer to the mark. Small drama, but drama nevertheless.
Progress update: I have enough notes now to bumble through arbitrary melodies so long as they're in Bb or Eb. Also so long as they don't go beyond about a tenth, and so long as the higher notes happen in the first minute or so because my embouchure decays rapidly, and also so long as they don't mind being played alarmingly loud. My specialty is hymns in New Orleans second line style, but terrible. What a Deafening Friend We Have in Jesus sort of thing.
60: I heard this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X7xhIWxY-A on the radio the other day, and I thought of you!
Progress statements are good, more power to you for doing it, but videos of of Deafening Jesus with your friend the tuba player and a teenager on the 5-gallon bucket percussion would be even better
You know what would benefit from an enthusiastic even if primitive horn section? Street protests. Every time over the last decade or two I've been marching for something I've thought the protest needed more music.
Oh and 54, describe the instructor please. My kid's driving instructur, a short guy with bad posture and mediocre grooming, lost some records leading to a minor but time-consuming problem. I found where he lived and was about to have a car boot delivered to explain my point of view to him when I realized that his car also served his wife and kids.
My dad's ex, 3 maybe 4 sigma bad behavior and a psych degree, currently garners income by stamping whatever forms drunken drivers need to demonstrate that they're reform-minded after a "course". There was a radio spot about the reform-demonstrating process, it mentioned her in the context of this administrative step, my aunt (from the other side, no immediate connection to my dad but has heard the dstories of swordplay) heard it and then mentioned her to me, leading to a comic reaction from me and a hearty laugh from my aunt because she had never seen that facial expression before. I am suspicious of driving instructors now, maybe I should become one to be the change, but I don't really like driving.
I didn't know it was possible to have anyone else in the car aside from the tester. Maybe California doesn't allow it.
I passed on the first try. No parallel parking that I remember but I did practice it. I was marked down for not looking left and right in a sufficiently obvious way* at an intersection with no stop signs in any direction but that wasn't considered a fail. The instructor got distracted watching some kids chase another kid down a side street.
*At least, I believed I looked well enough.
65 is right. Plus a couple of drums.
I failed my first driving test because I didn't yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. It's how I learned the rule.
66: I think lots of them are retired cops. Could be some were "retired for cause"?
We had driving instructors associated with our high school -- and when my kids learned to drive, I found out that they don't do that any more. Which seems to me like a huge mistake.
When I finished my driving lessons, the instructor took me aside and wanted me to know that he was confident that, if I kept working at it, I could someday learn to drive.
I didn't have a proper test. If you passed driver's ed, you could automatically trade in your permit for a license when you turned 16. Driver's ed included a driving test, but it was more like you go out 3-4 times with the teacher, and more if he decides you haven't passed yet. I remember him getting on my case about being fully stopped vs slightly rolling. Until your momentum shifts your body weight backwards onto the seat, you're still rolling, even if you have the momentary sensation of being stopped.
Oh and 54, describe the instructor please
Sorry, this was well over 40 years ago. I just have a vague memory that it was a youngish black guy.
I didn't know it was possible to have anyone else in the car aside from the tester.
No one else was allowed in the car in Maryland at that time anyway.
Oh, I guess now I can tell my driver's ed teacher story! Hurray!
Also I transferred all of 2006, which included the beginning rocky parts of dating Jammies, dating unsatisfactory guys before Jammies, finishing my dissertation, graduating, moving to Heebieville, and starting my job at Heebie U. That was a big year.
I really need to tell my Arrakis driver's license story (as well as that of a friend's which is one of the best expat stories I've heard here) but that will have to wait until I've sobered up it being our Friday night here
25 is hilarious, both because of peep's story itself and what it says about how easy Maryland's license requirements are. As a DC resident, I'm obliged to hate and fear Maryland drivers.
As for my direction of personal growth, I'm not thinking of it as a resolution, but a few come to mind.
1. For the first time in 20 years, I'm in the middle of a French novel. I've watched shows and movies, but that's different; subtitles, body language, etc. I bought the book on a whim as a tourist 12 years ago, didn't get around to it until now, but am finally putting up or shutting up.
2. Writing fiction. I did the National Novel Writing Month challenge in November (on my own, not through the official organization, since it's a shitshow). The result was 51,000+ words of a fantasy/horror story, plus some unrelated shorter fiction. I don't know what's next or if anything's going to come of it, but good for me for doing something new and creative.
3. Housing changes. We've been planning renovations for years. The Trump administration makes them riskier/less likely. But we might have to make other living space changes anyway, because middle school is approaching and the middle school we hope to get the kid into, a public charter school, is a long way away through city traffic.
77: a friend of mine stationed in Oman for a bit tried to get his local driving licence and failed the test seven times in a row, culminating in a failure because he had an obscured windscreen (it was dirty) at which point a local friend drew him aside and said "you do realise that the examiner is waiting for you to offer him a bribe, right?" Which he paid, and passed.
25 is great
79 I may have told this story before but a few years before I arrived in Arrakis it used to be possible for Americans to just show their state driver's license and pay a nominal fee in order to obtain a driver's license here. Then some Fremen prince studying in the US had to take a state driving test to get his license and after that so did Americans in Arrakis. I objected and tried to do it the old way and was told to speak to the police captain. All the police captains here seem to look like Saddam Hussein, the moustache, the uniform, the demeanor; it did not go well, I had to take the test. So, the first time I took it on a manual with a car I was unfamiliar with. I thought for sure I'd pass, the other test taker was some poor young Indian dude fresh off the plane who seemed to know no more than a dozen words in English - not one of which was "go," "stop," "straight," "left," or "right." The policeman administering the test actually had to grab the wheel a couple of times. Unfortunately for me the first couple of times the car lurched when I stepped on the brakes, not being familiar with it, and he also had me go through an insane number of roundabouts these not being a thing where I grew up and was used to driving. The second time I decided to just take it on an automatic even though I intended to get a manual (and have done). I think I was helped by having the other test taker be a young Fremen who I hit it off with while we were waiting to take the test, something that may have been noticed by the policeman. Also, no lurching.
This leads me to one of the greatest expat stories I've heard here. A good friend of mine who arrived here a few years before I did and just a month or so after the new driver's license policy was instituted also objected and he's the type to really argue the point. He was also told to speak to the police captain. So as the captain is about to tell him to fuck off he's looking at my friend's documents and sees his driver's license is from Kentucky, "are you from Kentucky?" he asks, "born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky" my friend replies. At which point the captain exclaims, "I love Kentucky Fried Chicken!" stamps and signs his driver's license application and then makes a motion like he's eating a drumstick and says, "I am lion eating chicken."
IIRC, and this was a few years ago so I may have the details wrong, a friend of mine discovered that if you have a New Zealand driving licence, you are OK to drive in the UK (and vice versa). And not only that, importantly, but you can get a New Zealand driving licence by sitting your test in the Cook Islands.
This he did (because he happened to be there).
The Cook Islands are not large. The test consists, by his account, of "Right. Now, I want you to drive down The Road, stopping at The Traffic Light, turn left at The Junction, and keep your eyes open for The Car, The Lorry, and The Scooter." He proceeded until after about forty minutes he had driven all the way round the island and was back at the test centre, at which point he passed.