#offline hobby

[lauraine90s]

A slow living-day

My whole day today consists of:

1) Taking care of my pony ( @faeriethepony )

2) Reading books in public

3) Ballet class ( @latetothepointe )

I always try to imagine what life would have been like had I not been born in the 90s, but properly grown up in it like an older millennial. I see movies like Clueless and spot a character (Christian) reading a book for leisure and pleasure while he sits in class like it's the most normal thing in the world. (He is in fact identified as gay by another character because he, among other things, reads Oscar Wilde, which only means something to people who have at least a passing knowledge of literature. All of these characters are still in high school.)

While I can do blogging on the go now, it's almost like a lost art form in a way. I think of the popularity of personal websites in the 90s, and of the LiveJournal fandom wars and forgotten gems like Pottersues during the early Y2K era, and realise how far removed we are from those days.

Tumblr picked up where the others left off in the 2010s, but with so many people huffing AI slop and thinking short form content amounts to actual reading these days, I sort of miss the days my uncle was a micro-celebrity in his specific blogging niche (it was ofc travel-related).

It made no money; that wasn't the point. Some people, like my uncle, got quite a lot of readers, but the dopamine hits weren't instantaneous and marketed to users with red notifications to draw their attention. It was sort of more personal and authentic that way, though I suppose the privacy issue was a thing back then too.

There's just a lot more nastiness on the internet now, which is why it's good to sit back and relax with some offline things every now and again. In fact, I've made a habit of doing this for the majority of the day (barring the fact that I listen to music through my phone).

Life is just a little more peaceful when you pretend your access to the internet is limited the way it was when I was a child, and not just because computers were too expensive to really have more than one, and you certainly wouldn't let your kids play with those all day when you could just send them outside to play with other kids in the neighbourhood.

[starrysostarry]

my offline hobby is recreating wallpaper I like with paint only. birds birds birds.

[lauraine90s]

🪉Harping again today~

I can't describe how funny I find that word. It's a thing harpists use because it just so happens to be a word, but it absolutely doesn't mean 'playing the harp'. I guess I can harp on about this for a little while, but realistically I'm just sad that I can't say I'm guitaring or balleting (would you or would you not pronounce that 't'?).

Btw, the heatwave DESTROYED one of my thicker strings. It's going to be FANTASTIC to have to purchase one of those and tie it to a stopper so I can attach it to the harp.

Slow hobbies engage the brain in the least expected ways. I suppose I should have guessed a harp is what we call a "living instrument", so it quite literally breathes because strings randomly snap (I'm currently missing three 🤕), but the fact that the first one snapped within 24 hrs of me bringing my rented harp home was chef's kiss-levels of appropriate.

I don't necessarily deal with frustration well. The internet has certainly further diminished my limited capacity to deal with frustration (though paradoxically I'm also really patient), so harping on about my harping actually helps me through.

I was also ready to flip proverbial tables in ballet class last Monday because I couldn't grasp new steps, but calculating how many classroom hours I've spent thus far with both of these hobbies really put things in perspective for me (it was under 20 hours, respectively).

Pick up a slow hobby and smell the flowers (i.e. the way the English language works in this case), everyone.

[lauraine90s]

I'm trying to be a harpist.

Here at my 90s blog, I'm all about offline hobbies. While the 90s did have the internet, it was just a lot of blogs back then, so I see this as my sign to pursue a purely offline hobby and justify posting about it in this format.

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(Nothing Else Matters gets bonus points for being from 1991~)

Harping is one of the most frustrating, rewarding experiences I've ever had. I've already had two strings snap while just trying to tune the thing, and now that I've had to order new ones, I doubled down and got a music book with 16th (and 17th but meh) century music in it.

🪉 Why a harp?

After a year of playing the guitar, I decided I could move on to bigger things, which in this case is an instrument made out of solid wood. Don't get me wrong, I've really enjoyed my time as a guitarist (and also didn't stop playing that), but the harp has always been my dream instrument, so I felt like I had to try it now while I still could, because uni starts back up in September, and who knows how much time I'll have then?

🎸 (this but acoustic) Goals?

I haven't really got any. I basically feel as though I'm terrible at it all the time, but I still notice improvements. While I have to work on my rhythm and all sort of little technical difficulties (like not getting so upset when I can't tune the C1 D1 E1 and possibly also F1 harp strings at all, as all of them show a different note now – long story, I guess, but whatever the issue is makes me glad that I have an instrument with only 6 strings too), I seem to have picked up an ability to actually play music somewhere down the line.

The main problem, apart from the broken strings, is that I need to get one of those backless chairs they use, as I currently don't have the means to lean my harp against me and play. I should probably also get a music stand while I'm at it. Funny how over a year of playing music never required any of this, but I guess that's why I picked a guitar. Ease of use.

Do we reckon that after a year of playing the harp, I might also be something of an intermediate harpist? Or at least one that can somewhat quickly tune and replace strings?

Maybe I'll just learn not to get so emotional anymore when things aren't going well. I'm quite acutely feeling the strain on my brain when I'm forcibly confronted with how much of a beginner I am, technically with both of these instruments, but the harp is described as a living, breathing instrument for a reason, so I'd imagine that one will keep feeling worse.

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One amusing aside is that my right arm is currently strained, so a lot of random things irritate it. My right arm already feels strained from regular guitar lessons, where I have to sit like a normal human on a normal music stool, but I usually play like a lazy person while sitting on my bed. I just put all my music on the bed in front of me and work my way from there.

🎼 Harp forced me to sit like a normal person.

So I just ordered a music chair, which the website said is usually used for keyboards. Now, I work as a cleaning lady in a care facility for people with disabilities, and a number of them also really love music, so I already knew this, and they're wonderful objects in every way.

I like the fact that my still relatively new interest in music makes it so that I want to take extra care of people's instruments, and some of them have such lovely setups that you know their instruments are well looked after even without my help.

I guess you could say that I've developed an alter ego. Much like what happened with ballet, which I was also ill-prepared for, I'm now an amateur musician of sorts. Had I done this years sooner... Oh well. No use in dwelling on the past.

Additional fun fact: The book my harp teacher uses has originally been used by someone in 1992. They were wise enough to jot the dates down on which they first did certain exercises, and I think I quite like this habit. I mean, suppose we have it a lot easier now, since we can just as easily document our progress through recordings, but still.