srshea -> RE: How old am I here on the foro? (Mar. 18 2009 12:37:15)
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I’m closing in on 37, myself. It kinda feels like a “boring” age too me, stuck between milestones, and over the past year, whenever I’ve been asked how old I am, I’ve actually had to think for a second and add it up in my head, never quite remembering if I’m 36 or 37 (“Let’s see, I know it starts with an “S”…). Regarding the diversity of the membership here and the varying approaches to communication that culture/language/age can sometimes bring into play: I think it’s all to the good to know where people are coming from, literally and figuratively. So I really enjoy learning a lot of these “personal” details. It’s also just plain interesting to me. Overall thoughts/attitudes about age/aging: I’m into it. Aging, that is. Childhood was a drag; teens and twenties weren’t much of an improvement. I just find myself becoming a lot more balanced, relaxed and generally well adjusted as I get older. Whenever I encounter old friends that I haven’t seen in a long time things generally fall into two categories. There are the people with whom I only end up having those “Hey, remember the old days” interactions, and with whom I don’t really have anything new to talk about . This tends to be really boring and often depressing. Then there the people with whom I can find a comforting shared historical connection, but still find new and interesting things to share and discuss, building on the past, seeing where we’ve gone in our lives, etc. This is always a lot more interesting/inspiring/humbling/satisfying, etc. I encounter a lot of people around my age who feel a lot of stuck-in-between ambivalence about where they are in their lives, and I always like to remind them that, on the whole, I think we’re a lot more interesting than we were when we were 21 (apologies to the whippersnappers here [8D]) . Age as it pertains to flamenco: I’ve heard a number of people here mention that they really wish that they could have started playing when they were kids and such. I can certainly relate to that, and I really would like to have a bit more of a head start than I do right now, but I’m actually kind of glad that I came to flamenco when I did (about two and a half years ago). I don’t know that I would have had the discipline to approach it with the seriousness, and the respect of the traditions of the form, that it requires if I had started when I was sixteen or whatever. I got a lot of catching up to do, but I really feel like I’m coming to this at the right time in my life… Flamenco ambitions: I really want to learn to accompany. A couple of weeks ago I was working on an alegrias with a dancer, and another dancer sat down and started singing some standard stuff, “Tiri ti tran” and so forth. She’s not really a singer and it was all pretty rough and just a fooling around kind of deal. So, I was definitely not “officially” accompanying here, but it was still just the faintest hint of what it must be like to do so: trying to take in both the dancing and the singing, following the melody of the singing and changing the chords in relation to what I was hearing and anticipating in the song, instead of just playing what I’ve memorized on my own. It was all I could do to keep from leaping out of my seat and running around screaming from all the excitement, and it was an absolute lightbulb-moment for me: “Aaahhh. THIS is what I want to be doing!” So, I’ve definitely got my work cut out for me. I know I don’t have any real hope of actually getting truly good at it, but I hope to someday be able to pull off some simple, basic accompaniment stuff that is dependable and works. I think I’m slowly crawling in that direction. The process thus far has been really humbling and hard, but ultimately I’m really enjoying it and it’s exactly what I want to be doing right now…. Oh, and I can relate to Ricardo's crying jags. I once cried watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow!
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