On her lap.

You know why.

Probably won’t hit Arch too hard.

I take it you haven’t stopped yet.

I mean, you may not have permission, but you have agency.

Most Motorolas.

Pixels have been unreliable in my anecdotal experience.

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Because everyone else is too but they have the highest stakes and the least agency so the lazy option is to blame them.

Because of people like you.

I think you’re failing to give anywhere near enough credit to formal music education. Lots of Dunning-Kruger going on here.

Maybe you had bad teachers. However, you don’t know the reasons behind their methods either.

Maybe your clarinet teacher was working to the priorities of that student. Maybe that student SPECIFICALLY struggled with reading notation and the teacher was looking to bridge the gap by using repertoire the student would like. Furthermore, you pay a clarinet teacher for clarinet lessons, not for dictation practice. Maybe that clarinet teacher tutors other students on dictation and is being paid by that student specifically for clarinet.

Did that clarinet student understand intervals? Basic fingering patterns on the clarinet? Half step vs whole steps? Did they have literally any of the foundational knowledge to approach melodic dictation? You don’t know.

You might as well say “Doctors focus on all this extra stuff you don’t need. All you have to have to survive is oxygen flowing to your brain.” Or “LLMs are conscious because they form grammatically correct word salad”… Okay that one hits home a bit hard.

Here’s an exercise for you.

Sit down with your instrument and choose exactly one pitch, and then tell me a story with it. Fill 5 minutes, and don’t bore me.

Now explain to me every choice you made about what you did with that pitch every time you played it and every silence when you didn’t play it.

Now justify every one of those choices by comparing it to a similar choice made by another musician - with citations I can verify. Remember that music is communication. With no frame of reference common to both parties, communication is impossible. Spell out that frame of reference.

Now, justify the form of your composition by aligning it to a historical form. If it doesn’t align, start over. Do that at the composition level, then again at the thematic level, the phrase level, and the motivic level.

Remember, one pitch.

When you have the tools to do that, then you can talk to me about the process of learning to do music. Until then, have some respect for the people who know what they’re doing, because right now you don’t.

1. It’s normal for all social media, particularly anything requiring a camera.

2. Your niece knows and participates in it. So do her friends. So do your brother and his wife.

3. Those aren’t women messaging you.

4. You are a in very, very small minority who don’t just accept this as how life is now. When they think nobody is looking, most people feed this sex addiction with most of their free time.

I mean, sterile ice seems useful maybe probably?

You don’t need more than 200 miles of range if you are using roads in the United States.

So, 260 advertised.

You just don’t.

Pretty much the conclusion I came to.

EV motorcycles exist. Zero reason to ride a gas one in a neighborhood.

Because fluency in your native language is a basic human skill that should be a minimum for functional adulthood, maybe? Because it’s not my job to congratulate you for existing?

Damn. People want to be coddled on everything these days.

You sure are, big boy

Not in the context of any jobs that a person of any intelligence would consider “walkable”, no.

Since that’s what we were talking about, I presumed you were smart enough to understand that “walkable jobs” would exclude all of the things you just asked me about. I apologize for making undue assumptions about you.

An organization with some structure might be a better fit.

Community theater? They always need stagehands, set builders, etc.

Same for community bands and orchestras. A librarian or personnel manager for a group like that is as good as gold.

Conservancy? Help protect your local wild lands?

Find a cause you care about and an organization that works for its benefit and call them to offer some of your time.

If your job makes you take a welder home with you at night, you need a new job.

I’m being filmed without my consent by corporations everywhere I go