MASOCHISTS AHOY!

As an official masochist, yours truly has a tendency to jump off the cliff every once in a while. Not literally, unfortunately. My kind of jumping off the cliff includes taking formal piano lessons in a music school and thus juggling Spartan piano practices and dreadful piano exams and work; taking a part-time job when I am already buried from the neck down with the workload of my main job, for the sake of ‘doing something outside the routines’; or throwing sarcastic remarks to a senior colleague for everybody to hear, and sarcastic means as sarcastic as to make my other colleagues stop talking and immediately pretend contemplating their nails. Oh wait. That last one doesn’t have anything to do with my being a masochist. That’s just mean. That’s just me.

Anyway.

In one masochism bout, I decided that I wanted to go back to studying classical piano formally. The tuition fee isn’t cheap, and in one delirious moment, I had this precarious idea that I should earn extra money by giving private piano lessons. I toyed with this idea for months; and a few weeks ago, probably not quite recuperated from a brain damage due to the rubella, I put an ad in a monthly community magazine that I’d give private piano lessons for children and/or beginners. Thinking that the ad would be published in January, I quickly forgot about it. Well, not completely. In the back of my mind I still worry about my insufficient skill, and the fact that I haven’t been practising enough lately. Hell, how am I supposed to teach a person how to read musical notes? But still, January is a long way from here. I can still afford to procrastinate.

Last Monday, though, barely sober after a full day in front of the computer deciphering what seemed like ancient Greek, I got a phone call from a lady inquiring about the tuition fee.
Of the piano lessons.
That I would give.

THE PIANO LESSONS THAT I WOULD GIVE???

The bloody ad was apparently published last week, instead of in January. While talking with the lady about fees and the lesson’s duration and whether five is too young an age to start studying the piano, I looked down to my hands and saw ten horrid telltale signs that I hadn't been practising enough; that I was indeed getting my masochist self into trouble once again.

No piano players in their right minds ever, ever keep their fingernails long.