Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

It's been a long time since the Book of Love
I can't count the tears of a life with no love
   -- Led Zeppelin, "Rock and Roll"

Woke up way earlier than usual, after not enough sleep, and wasn't sure why. Then I looked at my medication log and figured it was probably the Ultram wearing off that woke me. I actually feel much better than yesterday -- my lower back still hurts, but I walk with a normal motion now. It feels "fragile", but my body is basically working (and I haven't taken more drugs yet this morning to get this far). Not sure yet whether I'll be up to leaping about behind a guitar tomorrow evening, but at least I should be able to play standing up.

With fibromyalgia, pain levels are relative. It's not, "does anything hurt?"; rather it's, "am I hurting much more than usual?"

I've had a couple of tunes chasing each other around my brain for the past couple of days. That "Closing Time" song that has the line, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end", and Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll". Last week I had "Edi Be Þu, Heven-Queenë" stuck in my head, which was kind of cool because it's a neat tune, but kind of annoying because I could only remember one verse and disconnected fragments of the others, and I wasn't where I could look up the lyrics to refresh my memory. (Hmm. I hope the non-ASCII characters display correctly. Guess I'll find out in a minute or two.)

About that car "repair" yesterday -- when I checked the car before, I noted that the radiator fan turned freely but there was still a confusing noise that showed up later. (Electric fan -- it wasn't running the first time I listened.) Well, silly me, I overlooked the second fan! It turns out that there are some wires that are routed through the cowling of that fan (yuck!), and that's where the funny noise was coming from: things are mashed in enough that the fan blades were hitting those wires. So there I was trying to figure out what could be causing the symptoms I observed (car abruptly stopped running; turning the key made a sound like it was Really About To Catch Any Moment Now Really but never actually started firing; poking at it and moving a fuse around made it start for about three seconds and quit again), wondering whether it was a fuel delivery problem or what -- maybe I'd lost the fuel pump? I was trying to figure out where the fuel pump was by tracing the fuel line (I dunno what the fuel pump looks like...) when I noticed the second fan. And the slightly chewed ends of the fan blades. That led me to the wires. Whooooops.

So I tucked the cable around a clip to get it out of direct contact with the fan, and separated the individual wires so they were no longer shorting where they'd lost their insulation, and got the car to start again. This afternoon, if I have the energy, I should get out the toolbox and try for a more stable fix -- maybe remove the cowling to give me more room to position the wires safely, and try to get some electrical tape into the tiny space I can reach. Thing is, you know how when a car breaks down one's impulse is to open the hood and look at it even if you don't know enough about cars for that to be useful? That's more or less what I was doing -- I don't know engines, but I was frustrated and feeling stubborn, so I figured I'd start treating it as any other complex system and see how much of it I could make sense of while waiting to feel rational enough to figure out a sensible thing to do, whom to call, whatever. So I described my fix as, "I don't know anything about cars, so I was faking it. But as long as I had the car fooled into thinking I fixed it, I'm okay, right?"

Note that I have absolutely no idea (yet) what those wires go to.

And that reminded me of another thought that comes up every so often, about "faking it". If you're halfway good at faking things, and you fake something long enough, you get good at faking that skill. Do it longer, and at some point you're no longer faking. I've done that in a few different ways musically. One year it's, "I don't know what I'm doing; I'm just trying to play something that doesn't sound wrong," then it becomes, "I don't really know this, but I can play something that sounds convincing," and eventually, "Yeah, I can do that." Finally it gets to where other people are telling me how good I am and asking for pointers, and somewhere along the line what I was doing stopped being "faking it" and became "doing it for real", and I'll have no idea when that line was crossed.

Call it a learning style crossed with a self-image issue. After all, "making it up as I go along" is really just as valid a phrase to describe it as "faking it" once I get past the very first stage, right?

I've done it with things other than music, as well. And I know other people who acquire skills this way, though I don't know whether they think of it in the same terms. One friend comes to mind who used to work in a high-energy physics lab. His boss would ask, "Can you make a $foo?" and he'd answer, "Sure!", then run off to the library to find out just what the heck a $foo was. He pointed out that if the boss had asked, "Do you know how to make a $foo?" he would have had to answer, "No," but his boss never asked that question. He asked "can you", and my friend's answer was, "Of course I can; I can make anything. I just need to start with research." He learned a lot of cool stuff in that job, and entertained a bunch of us with descriptions of it. (Then he got a job in a place with Secrets, and couldn't tell us as much of the fun stuff he was doing.)

What's funny is that I feel just fine about diving into some types of projects that way, and completely insecure about others. I fashioned a knob for the end of a guitar tuner completely from scratch out of brass, but I'm afraid to take apart the kitchen faucet. I poke under the hood of a smashed up car to get it started again, and even replaced the alternator on my last car, but I ask someone else to adjust the parking brake cable or change the spark plugs. I'll carve metal with a Dremmel tool, but I'm too insecure artistically to carve wood with a knife. (I'm not afraid of the knife; I'm afraid of not being able to make the shape I want.) I'll carve a new nut for a guitar, or adjust the height of the bridge on a mandolin, but I don't want to touch the truss rod adjustment. I don't always understand myself.

Probably the most dramatic example of this is how I learned to cook. But this is already over a hundred lines long (the source is -- what you see depends on the size of your browser window, of course), so I'll tell that later.

Now I should take advantage of not hurting quite as much, and get stuff done.

Steve Wheeler in rec.music.filk: "I *like* stereotypes. If you cross your eyes just right, the letters seem to jump off the page."