![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Seven-Eighths Club
Mar. 16th, 2018 01:11 pmThis morning I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 AM, was feeling some excitement about the projects I'd planned for the day, and decided to stay up. Then, predictably, a little before noon, I decided that I REALLY needed to take a nap. Which I did.
When I awoke, an hour or so later, it was from this really weird dream in which a little girl, with whom I'd been talking about music, told me that she was now a member of the Seven-Eighths Club.
Apparently, she had been learning to read music--much like my granddaughter Sophia has been--and had been having a terrible time reading and performing music that was written in 7/8 time.
So I immediately launched into one of those professorial explanations of mine as to what 7/8 time is, saying that this time signature simply means that there are seven beats to a measure with an eighth note getting one beat.
Of course, this sort of explanation--especially to a kid who has probably heard it at least 7 or 8 million times but is dealing with some manner of emotional, not intellectual, block--is totally useless.
But not to worry. The child then proceeds to explain that she has a teacher, fortunately more in tune (see what I did there?) with her students than I would've been, who enrolled her in something called The Seven-Eighths Club.
And while she didn't go into much detail about it, I assumed that this club was made up of students who had the same phobia as this little girl did with respect to music written in the 7/8 time signature. And apparently, by commiserating with her fellow sufferers, she had found friendship, consolation, and relief from this most debilitating of musical melodies. Er, maladies.
It was at that point that I woke up and the first thing I thought of, in trying to understand the odd connection which I sensed between this dream and my waking life, was where in the world would this poor child have encountered a 7/8 time signature?
Surely, at 10 or 11 years of age, she wasn't being asked to perform the music of, say, Harry Partch whose protégé Danlee Mitchell had been my music theory teacher in college. Because 6/8 is a common time signature for, say, a waltz while 7/8 exists only in those remote reaches of the musical cosmos inhabited by driven (or deranged) geniuses like, well, the aforementioned Harry freakin' Partch.
Then, as I was sitting on the side of the bed, debating between two equally-persuasive modes of re-entering my day-- either struggling to my feet and successfully walking a few steps across the room to my chest of drawers or struggling to my feet and immediately falling on my face--it came to me.
I would simply give in to the conspiring and persuasive forces of vertigo and gravity and fall on my face. No, no, wait, that wasn't it.
Just before I had decided to surrender my consciousness to what I assumed would be this restful interlude, I had been working on my current project in the basement. Specifically, I was installing a piece of hardware called a gate handle or storage bin handle, depending on where you look it up. (Lowe's calls it one, Home Depot calls it the other.)
Anyway, I was installing one on either side of my refurbished target box on a line 24" off the floor so that the screws, when they fully penetrated the side of the box, would embed in the end of the shelf mounted inside of it.
So I drilled the necessary holes and mounted the one on the left side without a problem. But when I looked at the right side, it appeared that my line at 24" was slightly off the centerline of the shelf edge. So I got out my tape and quickly determined that my line needed to be at 23-3/8" inches from the bottom edge of the unit.
Then, milliseconds before I made the fatally-flawed pencil line and drilled the horrifically-disfiguring holes, in the side of my newly-painted masterpiece, I thought, wait, that's not right, it's twenty-three and SEVEN-EIGHTHS.
See where I'm going with this? And aren't you now wishing you could somehow recover that time, those precious moments of your life, that you've wasted reading this?
Well, YOU CAN'T! As Hillary once famously proclaimed, "There are no 'do-overs!'" I don't remember what the context was, when she said it, but I do believe that THERE'S a woman who would know.
In any case, I'm quite certain that this is the first time, in my nearly 74 years, that I've ever made sense of a dream. And I have to admit that, at first, I was kind of excited about it. You know, this sort of personal landmark, reached at long last.
Then, as the lunch that I'd been eating as I typed this began to settle and other similarly-compelling realities of life began to intrude on this exploration of that mysterious boundary between the conscious and subconscious mind, I began to feel like everyone else who's been reading this.
What a freakin' waste of time, lol...
LPK
Dreamwidth
3.16.2018
When I awoke, an hour or so later, it was from this really weird dream in which a little girl, with whom I'd been talking about music, told me that she was now a member of the Seven-Eighths Club.
Apparently, she had been learning to read music--much like my granddaughter Sophia has been--and had been having a terrible time reading and performing music that was written in 7/8 time.
So I immediately launched into one of those professorial explanations of mine as to what 7/8 time is, saying that this time signature simply means that there are seven beats to a measure with an eighth note getting one beat.
Of course, this sort of explanation--especially to a kid who has probably heard it at least 7 or 8 million times but is dealing with some manner of emotional, not intellectual, block--is totally useless.
But not to worry. The child then proceeds to explain that she has a teacher, fortunately more in tune (see what I did there?) with her students than I would've been, who enrolled her in something called The Seven-Eighths Club.
And while she didn't go into much detail about it, I assumed that this club was made up of students who had the same phobia as this little girl did with respect to music written in the 7/8 time signature. And apparently, by commiserating with her fellow sufferers, she had found friendship, consolation, and relief from this most debilitating of musical melodies. Er, maladies.
It was at that point that I woke up and the first thing I thought of, in trying to understand the odd connection which I sensed between this dream and my waking life, was where in the world would this poor child have encountered a 7/8 time signature?
Surely, at 10 or 11 years of age, she wasn't being asked to perform the music of, say, Harry Partch whose protégé Danlee Mitchell had been my music theory teacher in college. Because 6/8 is a common time signature for, say, a waltz while 7/8 exists only in those remote reaches of the musical cosmos inhabited by driven (or deranged) geniuses like, well, the aforementioned Harry freakin' Partch.
Then, as I was sitting on the side of the bed, debating between two equally-persuasive modes of re-entering my day-- either struggling to my feet and successfully walking a few steps across the room to my chest of drawers or struggling to my feet and immediately falling on my face--it came to me.
I would simply give in to the conspiring and persuasive forces of vertigo and gravity and fall on my face. No, no, wait, that wasn't it.
Just before I had decided to surrender my consciousness to what I assumed would be this restful interlude, I had been working on my current project in the basement. Specifically, I was installing a piece of hardware called a gate handle or storage bin handle, depending on where you look it up. (Lowe's calls it one, Home Depot calls it the other.)
Anyway, I was installing one on either side of my refurbished target box on a line 24" off the floor so that the screws, when they fully penetrated the side of the box, would embed in the end of the shelf mounted inside of it.
So I drilled the necessary holes and mounted the one on the left side without a problem. But when I looked at the right side, it appeared that my line at 24" was slightly off the centerline of the shelf edge. So I got out my tape and quickly determined that my line needed to be at 23-3/8" inches from the bottom edge of the unit.
Then, milliseconds before I made the fatally-flawed pencil line and drilled the horrifically-disfiguring holes, in the side of my newly-painted masterpiece, I thought, wait, that's not right, it's twenty-three and SEVEN-EIGHTHS.
See where I'm going with this? And aren't you now wishing you could somehow recover that time, those precious moments of your life, that you've wasted reading this?
Well, YOU CAN'T! As Hillary once famously proclaimed, "There are no 'do-overs!'" I don't remember what the context was, when she said it, but I do believe that THERE'S a woman who would know.
In any case, I'm quite certain that this is the first time, in my nearly 74 years, that I've ever made sense of a dream. And I have to admit that, at first, I was kind of excited about it. You know, this sort of personal landmark, reached at long last.
Then, as the lunch that I'd been eating as I typed this began to settle and other similarly-compelling realities of life began to intrude on this exploration of that mysterious boundary between the conscious and subconscious mind, I began to feel like everyone else who's been reading this.
What a freakin' waste of time, lol...
LPK
Dreamwidth
3.16.2018
