Inward...and Beyond!

Spent this last week doing nothing related to taiko except thinking about it. It was good. Sometimes you need to back off the constant physical part of things and think about the mental and theoretical of it. It was also good that I was concentrating on work stuff, since we need to bring in this new class and a part of that is making about a billion photocopies in the xerox room, which provides plenty of time for inward thinking. Today it was just me and Janet and we talked some, and she gave me lots to think about. Also we worked some on chekere, which was my request, so there's more to work on. Also working on becoming a better taiko player. She always tells me nice things about me, but really, I want to become even better. There are always those things that are not always explicit in playing, or performance or solos. The little tweaks we all make in ourselves that make us better players, or better teachers, or better PR people, or just better people. I need to work on those things. All of them.

I've also been taking on some equipment-maintenance projects for Maze. I like it. I made my own down stand the other week, which sounds complicated, but wasn't. I think that in a lot of taiko groups the equipment-person just rises to the sruface like grease in soup, even if they didn't actually set out to be the equipment-person. Did you know that during college I was a "maintenance technician," which is just a fancy word for handy(wo)man? My dad, through example, as well as teaching us, showed us kids how to interact with and tinker with the physical world. We've joked about the merits of duct tape and wire, and how you can fix anything with those things, but really, the mystery of how things work, or don't work, and how to fix them is not as shrouded as you'd think. The world is a logical place, and having someone to show you that logic is, well--magical. Anyhow, I took on some more down stand-making projects as well as taiko reheading, which, after my own taiko making experience, sounds like fun to me. I might actually get to use Janet's space at RCW when it become available, which I'm sure my downstairs neighbor is totally thrilled about, even if she doesn't know it yet.