http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2022-01-02T14:00:46Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#27cfbcef9124158597d7feacea763ba088f7e753 2022-01-02T14:00:46Z January 2, 2022. The turnover of the year is a nice motivational tool to make changes, and there are different kinds of changes. When people talk about New Year's resolutions, they're usually talking about changing habits, or default behaviors. The main thing I want to work on this year is being more physically present in every moment. I'm making it a game, where I break my actions down to small things: open dishwasher, put spoon in, close dishwasher; and I count how many things I can do in a row before I mess up and have to do something twice. This includes typing without having to hit backspace all the time.

Another kind of change you can make is in your priorities for living. The last couple years I've been thinking more about death, which generally feels like a relief. But the closer I get to understanding it, the more I see that I really don't want to die -- I want to continue living with no responsibilities. So that's my number one priority from here on: to minimize the number of things I have to do. Part of this is that I'll probably be blogging less, especially on hot-button subjects. Or, as I wrote last month in this thread: I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.

One thing I did in 2021 was get better at playing piano. I just follow whatever is fun to do with the keys, and I've ended up putting at least 50 hours into polyrhythms, before putting one hour into chord changes. My usual style is to park my fingers on the same keys for an entire piece and improvise. I have my favorite chords that I come back to, and over time I develop melodies and patterns that I come back to.

Over the holidays, I had a brief housesit at a house with a real piano. It's a bit out of tune, some of the keys are half-dead, and my recording system is super lo-fi, but it still sounds better than MIDI on my digital keyboard. So I recorded some stuff and ended up with three decent tracks. I call them Faewater, Jam in F, and Sunburst.

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