Nice things

Everybody has a love-hate relationship with nice things. They’re nice, for sure, and they can be fun, good for learning, and nice to look at.

This week, I started with a nice thing. The thumbnail picture is of my clarinet, which I went into a practice room with on Tuesday morning. The weather that day was pretty unfortunate, it was dry and cold, so I had some lotion on my hands when I was putting it together. I gripped the upper portion a little too hard, and a nub came off the key that you can see up there. Now, it’s wobbling around.

I got sick of the wobbling around pretty fast, so I put a rubber band on it to try to keep it in place until I could get a proper repair done. Unfortunately, I neglected to realize that the chemical usually used to coat rubber bands tarnishes silver really badly after a long period of contact, so now I have a black ring where the rubber band was.

With those silver-plated keys, it seems like the nicer something is, the more likely it is to go wrong. It’s the extreme of Murphy’s Law — not only will anything that can go wrong go wrong, but if the stakes are higher, things that you didn’t know could go wrong will find a way to go wrong.

I’ve had this for about two years now, and it’s been really great. I got it brand new (which is definitely not something that I think even most Buffet R13 owners get to say about theirs…), and while I might be pulled out too far and playing on a low-pitch mouthpiece during a concert, or too picky about the quality of my reeds, or slightly out-of-time during a solo because I’m nervous or I lost count or I’ve never seen a conductor indicate two consecutive fermatas like that before — this is the thing that brings me the most joy in my life out of all the things. I’m a big fan of the wooden stick.

Sometimes, I feel a little bad about how nice it is, especially when I realize that people that are better at me than this (and who I really respect) have instruments that are not quite as top-tier. I can only try to get better so that I can support all those people with my nice thing.

As soon as I had my problem moment on Tuesday, I emailed a nearby good & reputable instrument repair shop and got a quote on a repair and a time frame (relatively cheap and short, I guess this happens all the time, but as a non-professional, I can never be too sure what I’m getting myself into).

I gave it to them yesterday, but still used it in rehearsals all week (that left-hand key is only really used for the sucky middle B fingering, which I always tried to avoid anyway because it sounds pretty bad and requires a lot of force down on that key to even get it to sound — my professor had a piece of paper under the other end of the mechanism on her clarinet to fix that, but I didn’t want to think that much about it).

It sounded great all through those rehearsals, even with the floppy key and the black mark.

With all hope, I should be able to pick it up again in about an hour or two and bring it back home in time for a concert by an acapella group that one of my friends is a member of. I’ve got to be supportive to both people who expect me to clarinet nicely around them and to friends who know I enjoy music.

Balancing it all is very fun.

So, at the end of the day (or, especially, at the end of the week), broken keys and black marks might suck to look at, but you just have to keep playing it anyway knowing that everything is still fine in the long-term.

The key that’s broken might even have you creatively inserting the good middle B fingering into passages where you would otherwise have given up and used the bad one.

…

This week, I had my last clarinet lesson for the semester, since my lessons were longer than the recommended length & I had perfect attendance all through the semester. I exhausted all my lesson time almost a whole month before I could have. It’s a little sad, since those lessons also make pretty good therapy sessions (not that I pour all the problems in my life out to the professor, but, you know, a music is worth a thousand words).

In other news, we’re a month out until I’m traveling from the Flower City, ROC, to the City of Azaleas, capital of the ROC.

Just now are me and my group partners actually starting to understand and work on the project that the class is supposed to be entirely about.

Our language lectures have already officially ended, but we’re still sort of meeting in secret with the Chinese professor for a few minutes before & after the language lecture that me and one other person had already had immediately after anyway (circumstantially also with the exact same Chinese professor).

I’m looking for travel plans outside of the things we’re planning to do as a class. One of the professors will be there guiding a lot of tour activities, but I’d really like to see something other than city (although I think we might be going to Yangmingshan, not sure, I haven’t checked the itinerary in several months…).

One member of our group here made the suggestion that we all pop on the 高鐵 and bullet over to Chiayi County to enjoy the oolong tea before climate change brings acid rain to Taiwan’s former most famous export (and, you know, nobody told me to end that sentence that way, but it’s true).

At the moment, I’m expecting to bring just a backpack, the clothes on my back, and enough money to buy a commemorative shirt at every notable landmark that I visit. Especially the venerable Drinking Water Museum, which I somehow found a scan of a parking ticket for on the Internet (kind of interesting!).

And you know that if I have the slightest second of free time to go to Computex, that might happen, especially if international cool guy Lai Ching-te shows his face there again like he did last year (I’m leaving a lot of links today).

Image credit Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Although I don’t consider myself enough of a “technology enthusiast” to really enjoy Computex, I’d like to see an event as large and as famous as this one just to say that I did.

And I should limit how much I talk about my lack of interest for consumer technology, because part of it might imply that I don’t care about today’s technology industry at all, and I need to ace this Wednesday’s coming job interview, otherwise employment for the rest of the year will become a much more difficult task to handle.

I’m sleeping less every night, and crossing my fingers so hard they’re bruised enough to look tarnished, kind of like the rubber bands on the silver-plated R13 keys.

I mean, I’m joking. I just might vomit in a minute or two. I have a presentation to practice.

I also have a lab report due tomorrow evening, so I should definitely start putting my writing skills to a more productive purpose for at least the next few dozen minutes…

…augh. With all hope, the real proverbial black tarnish should be removed from the left-hand B key of my spring semester by the end of the week. Hope to be back then!

I’ve got a week to handle and some polishing to do.

下個星期見！