My greatest failure
Almost four decades ago, I first laid hands on a computer. It's a proper antique now: mere kilobytes of memory, no network connection, audio cassettes as a data storage mechanism. It was about as user friendly as a bear trap; if you didn't know the exact arcane command to type, it would just sit there and tell you ?SYNTAX ERROR over and over again like some inscrutable oracle.
And yet, as soon as my fingers hit the cheap plastic keyboard, I felt the potential within. I knew there were worlds in there, and I felt compelled to explore them.
At the time I did not have the merest inkling that this would turn into a career. Barely anybody knew what a "computer" even was, or why you would want to own one. The internet was the merest science fiction, not dreamt of in my philosophy.
I now make a good living out of doing the same thing I've been doing since I was eleven years old: trying to figure these things out and make them work.
The scale has expanded somewhat, but the essential experience has stayed the same: I have a knack for this stuff, which seems to be rare, and I have been able to make a good living out of it. All of this is due to blind luck; I emerged into the adult world with nothing more than a reasonable command of Latin verb conjugation and no clue about anything else. Proper career guidance was not involved.
In a corner of my bedroom, there sits a perfectly functional electric guitar. It's an entry-level model to be sure, but it is perfectly serviceable. I've had people check.
Electric guitars are the mainstay of probably at least 90% of the music I listen to, and I listen to a lot of music. I love how ridiculously versatile and expressive it is.
I have tried to play it and failed many, many times.
I imagine that when people like Kanami or Khn picked up a guitar for the first time, they felt a similar thrill that I felt when I turned on an 8-bit micro in that dusty classroom and it purred like a kitten.
This is for me.
In contrast, whenever I pick it up, it feels like trying to manhandle a tiger. It feels heavy and uncomfortable in my arms. The strings feel sharp and unpleasant. Instead of sounding purposeful and clear, the sounds it makes are mere amplifications of my own hesitation.
Just play something, my teacher told me. You know the scales, play whatever you feel like.
I just stared at him.
My mother wanted to play the piano when she was younger, which her parents forbade her from doing. She got her revenge by making sure that I went to music lessons every Thursday for well over a decade.
Every Thursday I trudged to these lessons, dragging my feet because I didn't want to arrive, where I would endure the weekly ritual humiliation of utterly failing at something I was expected to do and had no interest in, i.e. playing classical music from sheet music.
"Is there anything you could possibly have done to satisfy her?", my therapist once asked, mostly rhetorically.
"I suppose Nobel prizes in chemistry and literature might be acceptable", I replied, "provided I won it for a novel that was entirely about her."
It's been thirty years, but Thursdays still have a little bit of a synesthetic frisson about them... something at the back of my mind that tells me something is a little bit off about today.
I'm lucky that I have a career.
I wonder if I could have had two, or at least a hobby.