204th day sober. Last night besides getting 20 Ebay things listed, I packed the three things that needed to be shipped and got some practice in. I'm trying to almost rebuild the way I play, in light of the "Wedge Breathing" technique espoused by Bobby Shew.
Bobby Shew talks about people playing too much "up here" by which he means upper chest and mouth/head, trying to do too much with the lips. I think that's what I've been doing, too - tightening up too much and using too much mouthpiece pressure to try to compensate for it. I was able to play over high C easily then I started to tighten up, relaxed and took a break and was able to get up that high *again* which is a really good sign. I'm also starting to get back into doing exercises and I have the definite impression that I need to be really physically fit to play trumpet well.
I was up around 2 this afternoon, and Ebay's really slowed down due to it being Thanksgiving Week. I headed for the post office at 5, dropped off the three things, and did some shopping at 99 Ranch including a couple big bottles of Diet 7-Up because tomorrow, I plan to try getting my covid booster at CVS and if it's anything like the 2nd vaccination, I'll be sick in bed for about a day and a half, and I'll really appreciate that diet 7-Up.
There's tons of traffic out there, I mean it's really nuts. I guess this is how it was in the before times? Maybe it was tons of people leaving town for the week and deciding Monday's a good day to do it? I'll have to see how bad traffic is tomorrow.
Before taking off I did my usual reading on Reddit and found an AMA (Ask Me Anything) by Dara Horn https://www.darahorn.com/ on r/Jewish and wowwwww...... I've already overspent for this week but I just might have to buy this book. It only took her a handful of college degrees to arrive at something I've been, I think, narrowing down on recently. Which is that a dominant culture hates "the other" and will do its best to kill "the other" off, whereupon it's time to romanticize "the other" now that members of "the other" are conveniently all dead or at least expelled to far, far away.
There's actually an Israeli tour guide on YouTube whose videos comes up for me pretty frequently, and in one he says he (normally, in non-virus times) spends half the year giving tours of Holocaust sites in Europe, Germany mostly I think, and half the year in Israel giving tours there. So, as he put it, half the year talking about Hitler and half the year talking about Jesus. I should put in a comment that he's essentially spending both halves of his time talking about people who white people did, and do, consider their savior.
The AMA by author Dara Horn has disappeared now. So, also, have a ton of links on Google to her articles and books. But I was still able to find her home page. And just the little I was able to skim this afternoon is eye-opening. Like Golda Meir saying something like, "We can all be dead and be loved, or we can be alive and be disliked". That might actually be a standard saying.
Here's another good link about what she's all about: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/people-love-dead-jews-david-mikics
I will say that in Hawaii, the same kind of thing goes on with Hawaiians, what few are left. People love dead Hawaiians. The live ones, the ones who should be getting their Hawaiian Homestead lands, should be getting decent education (not just the elite; descendants of royals, who have their own school) and healthcare, not so much.
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