Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Way back when, when that first clever multicellular organism came up with the idea of breathing, there were a few holdouts. “Breathing!?” they said. “That’s a stupid idea. We’ve been being born and then flopping around dying for generations! If it was good enough for our ancestors, it’s good enough for us!” And then they’d flop around and die. Now no sign of them remains on the planet.

But the breathers? They took over. Their descendants (which includes us!) are everywhere.

Way back when, breathing was the future.

Now? Free refills is the future.

And the future is now.

This week’s Training Tiger Woods piece arose differently from how I normally write my pieces. I noticed that the three pieces I put up as daily Refills concerning the ski instructor certification exam I took earlier this week very much fit thematically with what Jerry and I have been talking about at TTW. So I combined those three pieces into one and then rewrote it to give it a flow more fitting with what we’re writing about over there.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the kind of thing that informs my resolute insistence that Free Refills is not a blog. Blogs tend to be decisively about the now, hence the convention of reverse chronology (which, yes, I am currently following). But I wouldn’t publish things if I didn’t find them valuable, and I operate under the assumption that others might as well. There’s some good stuff here that I don’t want to disappear beneath the sands of time. Making sure that doesn’t happen is part of my work here.

There’s going to be some evolution. Watch this space.

What’s interesting and actually a little frustrating, though, is that it’s not entirely clear to me that those movements I describe aren’t actually scales and arpeggios. I admit a bias against the certifying group’s methods, the vast over-intellectualizing of the endeavor. I have enough musical training that I strongly believe in the value of theory, but I’ve noticed time and again that people sufficiently committed to theory begin to lose themselves in it. It’s as though they forget that practice almost always guides theory, and when it doesn’t–for example, 20th century serial music–the result might be intellectually satisfying, but lacks the aesthetic and intuitive grace that drove progression in the field in the first place.

Clearly, I need to be careful here. If I allow my bias against intellectualizing kinesthetic skills to blind me to practices that form the foundation of skiing technique, then both I and my students miss out. On the other hand, if I buy in and begin to deliver lessons built on theory, I risk losing access to what has been my driving focus as an instructor, which is to deliver lessons to my novice and beginning students that get them to experience skiing as fun.

Maybe that’s my takeaway from the past few days. It’s been interesting, and maybe I learned a lot–we’ll see–but I haven’t really been having fun. By analogy: too many scales and arpeggios, too much theory, and nowhere near enough music.

This week, I participated in an introductory certification exam run by the national certifying association for ski instructors. I struggle with the association’s methods. They have built an edifice of theory around a complicated physical activity and then insist that everyone else needs to do the same. But I do not believe that a vast intellectualized structure of words is how anyone actually learns a complicated physical task. This is not my experience.

Unfortunately, professional advancement in the field is dependent on their imprimatur, which makes their methods self-justifying.

One of the skills that they test us on is the wedge turn, which is the way that beginners learn to turn their skis. On Monday, I watched one of the examiners do a series of wedge turns, and his were the best I’ve ever seen. He was a paragon of balance and relaxed execution in the movement. Now, the wedge turn is a simple and effective way for beginners to learn to turn, but it’s also fundamentally inefficient, which is why intermediates learn to turn parallel and quickly leave the wedge behind.

To achieve such smoothness in wedge turns, the examiner clearly has devoted many, many hours to their study and practice. Now, for this to be worthwhile, the wedge turn (and the one-legged J-turn and the uphill arc and all the other skills and movements they test us on) have to be the equivalent of scales and arpeggios, that is, foundational to skiing technique, and thus we should practice them no matter how far up the ladder we advance as skiers.

But I strongly suspect that what I witnessed was not a concert pianist practicing scales and arpeggios as a foundation to higher-level technique. I think I was watching a concert pianist who has, for some perverse reason, committed a vast collection of children’s pieces to his performance repertoire, then concertizes them, and then insists that anyone who doesn’t do the same isn’t really a pianist.

I don’t know that someone who can play Beethoven really needs to be able to play the hell out of “Hot Cross Buns.”

Much of what I know about learning is informed by my experiences learning to play music back in my youth.

When learning an instrument, once you get past the very rudiments of technique, you’ll be given scales and arpeggios to learn. Scales and arpeggios are pretty boring to practice, but any instructor worth her salt will tell you that they’re the foundation of musical technique. It’s a practice that never goes away. Even concertizing musicians work on scales and arpeggios.

Beginning musicians work on simple pieces of music, too, to begin to put technique into practice. If you played a classical instrument as a child, or if you’ve ever been to a little kid’s recital, you know the kind of pieces I mean, the ones written by music educators and collected into books with names like “Delightful Easy Piano Pieces Vol. 14.” They’re tolerably inoffensive and completely forgettable. These pieces give students with limited technique the opportunity to do something that is (more or less) making music. Learning these pieces is useful, in that it’s a bridge to higher-level pieces, but they’re not something anyone really wants to listen to–again, if you’ve been to a kids’ recital, you know exactly what I mean. These pieces are learned because they’re useful, and then set aside.

Though the foundation can be strengthened, it never stops being the foundation. What is built atop that foundation, though, changes as the underlying skill increases.

Your Great Idea doesn’t make any sense, some recalcitrant souls say.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Try, as best you can, to imagine the world as it was before you heard about the Great Idea. (And I know this is tough. Something once seen is impossible to unsee. But try.) In this world, you are thirsty and you want a beverage, let’s say a cup of coffee. So you go to a coffee shop and order a cup of coffee. The barista (whose love you are doubtless trying to win) takes your money and gives you a cup with coffee in it. You drink your coffee from the cup and then either return it so they can wash it (if ceramic) or else you throw it away (if paper). This is how the world worked before the Great Idea.

Now imagine you have this mug. The mug entitles the bearer to free refills. You want a cup of coffee. You take your mug to the coffee shop and ask for a cup of coffee. The barista (whose love you are doubtless trying to win) takes your mug and fills it with coffee and gives it to you. You thank her. She smiles warmly at you. The sky is blue. Birds are singing outside. You sip your coffee and it’s delicious.

Now then, try to tell me that the latter scenario isn’t the one that makes vastly more sense.

I didn’t post the link to Friday’s TTW piece. You can find it here. While you’re over there, you should read Jerry’s latest, too.

(I really need to learn how to automate posting these things to the homepage.)

I woke up last night at eleven fifty-something, a time I never wake up. I had to pee, so I got up and went to the bathroom. During those moments of relieving repose (which all of us know so well), I realized I’d forgotten to publish. “Well,” I said to myself, “I guess my streak is over.”

I went back into the bedroom. The red glow of the clock read 11:56. I thought about it for a moment. I actually had a piece ready to go, I’d just forgotten to publish it. On the other hand, burying myself back under the covers was very tempting.

“Fuck it,” I said, and walked into my office. I published with two minutes to spare.

I’ve been feeling recently that I’m kind of just going through the motions with my writing. That I’m essentially wasting my time, pretending that the work is important, using my current approach as a distraction from digging into something deeper. And honestly that may all be true. But I think again to that moment, eleven fifty-something, a time I never wake up, and of a swirl of energy given voice, whispering in my ear: “Wake up. Going through the motions is better than no motion at all.”

A few recalcitrant souls will fight with me about it. “But a business has no incentive to honor the mug!” they’ll cry.

“It’s not about incentives,” I’ll reply. “The mug entitles the bearer to free refills. That’s what makes it such a great idea.”

“But then they should get the money from the idea!”

“No way. It was my idea.”

“But the idea doesn’t make any sense!”

Ah. Now that’s an argument that merits a bit more discussion.

1. I was pleased to see that my skills at dealing with the kinds of things that can throw me off energetically have improved over the past year. This time last year, I was sleeping regularly through the night (which hadn’t been true in many, many years), but the stimulation of Vegas was too much for me, and I didn’t sleep a whole lot while I was there. This year, Vegas’ crazy energy affected me less; I had no real problem sleeping. That’s a hugely positive development.

2. This is my third year in a row and fourth overall of traveling to Vegas for the MLK weekend tournament, and this is the sparsest I’ve seen the crowds. Usually the NFL playoffs bring people out in droves. Hypothesis: fewer people visiting Vegas is a leading indicator of trouble in the economy. People only go to Vegas when they feel they can afford to throw some money away. So if we’re in a recession by the election, well, you heard it here first.

3. I’ve been to Las Vegas many, many times, and I’ve been pretty naive about just how common prostitutes are there. I can think of exactly one time that I’ve ever been approached–I guess I haven’t given off the vibe that I’m looking for that kind of thing.

   Now, there’s no shortage of women in Las Vegas who dress like hookers. You see packs of drunk girls in short, short dresses and high, high heels tottering towards the nightclubs all the time. But that’s the thing: they travel in packs. No woman who isn’t working puts on that short, short dress and those high, high heels to go hang out by herself after midnight in a casino bar.

   And once you start to notice those dressed-to-catch-the-eye, disinterestedly-playing-video-poker-while-sipping-a-cocktail-by-herself women, you realize they’re everywhere.

4. At my age, the energetic cost of a weekend-long soccer tournament is substantial. It’s only worth it if it’s really fun.