Fedora's suspend-resume is awesome. I can actually throw my laptop closed and into my bag at a moment's notice, however, takes forever. And sometimes doesn't work (I'm going to start keeping track). Ubuntu was the other way around. I wonder why. Time to gather data so I can figure out how to ask these questions.

Yesterday ended up being a day for music, with interruptions only for dinner at pika and watching the (hilarious) semifinals of the MIT 100k competition which my friend Amanda is running. Kevin had a gig at Wally's last night and I went in, got a coke, sat down, and then they started playing Trinkle Trinkle (a fiendishly difficult Monk piece I can't even listen to) and my jaw dropped and stayed open for the next two hours (I had to leave early to catch the train home).

Armed with a crash skim through my book on jazz theory, I went in going "okay, now I'm going to try to figure this out!" The entirety of insightful writing from my notebook follows.

head ---> ZOMGWTFBBQ ---> head

...yeah, that would be for some value of "insightful." I don't think I've ever seen a string bass strummed to produce chords before - that was pretty cool. I was also struck by how much people didn't play - I think solo classical piano gave me the assumption that you have to be playing something interesting and complicated All The Time. You'd think that 7 years with long rests in the cello section would have taught me otherwise.

I'm going to need to figure out how to memorize more tunes (how the heck did they play for so long without sheet music or a fake book?) and how to hear myself while other people are playing while listening to them at the same time (there were some really cool back-and-forths between the piano and the drummer) and how to figure out how solos get passed around between musicians. I'm starting to pull out things I learned from doing improv theatre and see if I can translate them to music.

Now that I can listen to jazz for extended periods of time without going "aah! It's awesome but it hurts!*" I'm trying to start understanding what I'm listening to. Right now, I'm cursing whenever the camera cuts away from Bill Evans's hands because I can't hear** half the notes I'm trying to transcribe and how else am I supposed to know what they are?

*The same kind of mental pain that happens when you turn on hearing aids you haven't worn for months and go "AAH! Noises that I can't differentiate!" It's not loud, it's not physical pain... it's... mental dissonance? Floods of unprocessable input.

*Notes are generally grouped into 3 categories for me, from low to high: (1) can hear and identify, (2) can hear but can't differentiate - I just know "there's a really high note playing somewhere" and (3) have no idea that a sound was made. Which notes are in which category depends on the instrument, listening environment, how awake I am, and so on. The vast majority of what Bill Evans does in that video falls in category (2), but enough are in (1) that I can sort of pick out bits and try to extrapolate the "there was a high note here" stuff for when the ratio of (2) to (1) isn't too high. I don't know what I'm missing for (3).