A speculative mind

  I have heard it said that the difference between being a professional musician and an amateur musician is this: An amateur musician practices until they get it right. A professional musician practices until they cannot get it wrong . That makes some kind of sense to me. They were talking about classical musicians, but I wondered about other kinds of musicians and for that matter other kinds of artists. I, myself am an amateur actor. The idea of practicing a scene until you could not get it wrong, just doesn’t work. You can practice memorizing your lines until you can’t get them wrong, but you don’t have to be a professional to do that. And memorizing lines is only about ten percent of what it takes to be an actor. To be a professional actor does take training. There are not many professional actors who simply lucked into a career. It takes work. It takes practice too, but not the kind of practice that a musician engages in. You don’t go over and over a particular part or scene ...

  Confession: I was a bed wetter. I wet the bed on most nights up until I was at least five-years-old. My mom tried various things to deal with this: a rubberized sheet under my sheet, no water late at night; I even remember maybe taking some medication. The doctor said it was a combination of being a heavy sleeper with a small bladder. In retrospect, the doctor seems like he was a sensible man (though if I did take pills for it, I have to wonder what was in those pills). What my mom and dad absolutely did not do, was to make me feel shame about this. I didn’t think too much about this at the time. I was blissfully unaware that many children were traumatized by bed wetting and by their family’s reaction to it. This is yet another reason for me to be very grateful for the parents I had. They did not punish me for wetting the bed. I seem to remember getting a nickel for every night I managed not to wet the bed. Logically, as a tool, this is no more effective than punishment. Neithe...

  I have been listening to a lot of radio interviews lately. There is one phrase that I have been hearing a lot. The interviewer will ask a question and then the interviewee will say “That’s a great question,” or some variant of “ that’s a good,” “great,” or “interesting question.” Are they trying to suck up to the person doing the interview? The subsequent answer usually shows me that in was not in fact a “great question.” It is usually a very average or obvious question. It seems to me the interviewee is just stalling for time while they think up a response. I think it is sort of the equivalent of saying “uh” or “um” as your brain is stalling to catch up. One time my friends and I played a game where someone starts a story and then you are supposed to continue it as long as you can, but as soon as you say “uh” or “um,” you are done. Most of us only lasted about thirty or forty-five seconds or so (me worst of all). But my wife got on a roll and just kept going. I think we had to...

  Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is a remarkable book. The narrator tells us he was born in Bombay on the stroke of midnight on August 15 th , 1947, the very moment of India’s independence from Britain. The kid’s name is Saleem, but we don’t find that out for a long while. He is one of a thousand or so children born in India on that date, birthed in the first couple of hours of Independence Day.   These children, Midnight’s Children, all seem to have a connection with one another. This book is a kids-eye-view of the history of India and Pakistan from independence through the late 1970’s. But it actually starts earlier with the story of his grandparents and parents. Their turbulent relationships amid the turbulence their country is going through. After Saleem’s birth, the turbulence continues on both counts. The story is also a fantasy because there are things that happen that we would call supernatural. But, is it fantasy? Do those fantastical things really happen,...

  Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree is a cozy fantasy. We follow a very large female orc named Viv who has decided to make a career change. She has hung up her sword-for-hire and decided to open a coffee shop. She had tasted coffee in a far-off land while she had been busy doing her sword work. It was a life-changing moment. One final job, whose purpose was to retrieve a magic stone that would bring luck (which she suspected she would need. I mean, who doesn’t need luck when starting a small business?) and she was off across the country to find the perfect place for her shop, and to reinvent her life.   The town where she has decided to set up shop, Thune, has all sorts of magical and mythical creatures in residence: ratkins, gnomes, hobs, succubae, and a variety of humans from every walk of life. But none of them had ever heard of coffee. This was not surprising. Viv had never heard of it until she stumbled across it in that far-away land. With her life savings, she pur...

  I do theater, community theater. It is one of my main hobbies, although that seems too weak a word to describe one’s art. Not a hobby then; a passion. My fellow thespians and I do not get paid for this art, but we take it as seriously as if we were being paid. And sometimes we get to be a part of something special. I remember when it was proposed to our theatre company that we should perform The Diary of Anne Frank,  I was not thrilled at the idea. My thinking was that it is depressing, and everyone knows how it is going to end. Where is the joy in bringing that to the stage? But I kept my mouth shut, and one of our members decided to direct the show. She had one casting session for the adults in the play, and another separate one for the young girls. I was cast as Otto Frank, Anne’s father. I went to the casting call for the girls: Anne and her sister Margot. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Dozens and dozens of little girls flooded the studio theater for the auditio...

  My wife and I were talking about some app or other the other day, and we were commenting about how we didn’t fully understand how to do whatever it was we were trying to do, and I said that we were analog people living in a digital world. How did this come to be? Surely it was not always so. We are both participants in social media. My job relies on tech. I work at a computer and have to master several kinds of software to do my work. I was an early user of the personal computer, and understood PCs fairly well . . . in the 1990’s. But the world moved on. Computers improved on at an exponential pace. It was no longer so easy to diagnose and fix thing when the hardware or software did unexpected things. I used to know how much memory, how much speed you needed to have a system with average competence. My knowledge of those numbers went out the window sometime in the 2000’s and I had to start relying on software specifications to tell me what I needed. Now they are just numbers, a...