Learning music and stoicism

I attempted to do music, mostly by myself, mostly because with internet you can find legal or illegal sources of information. Since I started this I took as many wrong turns as I could, heading all-in until I hit the wall. Turning back to do the same error in another direction. Every one of these mistakes didn't make me a better player, it did force me to taste anger and frustration, helplessness, impatience .. many kind of 'negative' emotions. Every time I realized I was just betting far too much, far too long on the wrong horse, so I stopped doing so.
Years of dead-ends teaches you to appreciate real progress, as tiny as it can be. It also removes the self. You don't try to be right, you just poke the universe, and listen carefully for the answer. Ahh too much unnecessary details. The thing is, I cared too much about my suppositions and not about the object, that's what causes anger. Later, I randomly stumbled upon the Wikipedia page about Stoicis, which says:

The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.

This resonates with my experience in failures, and a personal appeal towards Aikido, fluidity, circles, Qi Gong, some ideas discussed in system building, like "fail early, fail often", iteration time.Somehow you have to 'have faith', love those potential judgement errors; but not so much you forget to correct them when they start to show up. Those are you internal map, perception, of the world, and learning would be akin to adjust this map closer to reality, if I may say so. Adding bits of resolution to increase sensitivity towards things you couldn't perceive before.

I'm not sure I'm finished with this topic.

Patchwork English

I tend to think and speak in English quite easily since a few years. Around early 2Ks I spent an awful amount of time watching instructional material like musical instrument master classes, software tutorials, my first non-dubbed movies too. Few years back I went virtually abroad using Omegle, I was constantly in sync with America's Time Zone; this was the new epic TV show era (lost, prison break, whatever), I even watched Jay Leno twice. Live chat with north american was alright, some thought I wasn't European, some just said my English was really great. But.. writing is a whole different game. I'm amazed by my lack of grammar knowledge, my failed metaphors, abuse of almost common Latin-rooted nouns,  abuse of these boringly-long-adjective-driven-verb-free sentences, lucky-guess spelling and an overall limited vocabulary that ends up really repetitive.
As an excuse I can almost say the same for my native languages .. I never learned properly, my brain is good at grabbing pompous idioms that impress people. I come across a lot of great writers/bloggers I hope I'd incorporate some of their skills. In the meantime I visit etymonline.com 5 times a day on average which helps too.

Ciao

onlisp - part 0

My last workplace wasn't a treehugger heaven, so I slipped few printing jobs between the colorful waste they call 'work'. One of them was a full print of the famous 'On Lisp' book by Paul Graham. B&W, 4 pages per sheet, laser printed, decent paper and ~300 pages long.

(defun read(book)

    (read (cadr book))