Piano Accompaniment

Being a piano accompanist for my sister's Suzuki group class is hard.

I don't feel particularly nervous, partially because I'm only in a supporting role, partially because the audience is very small, but I'm screwing up a lot, despite that. Not screwing up in playing wrong notes so much as just dropping out. I don't feel nervous, but I do feel inhibited, like sometimes my fingers don't want to continue playing a certain phrase. I'm inhibited because I don't want to screw up, but also because a lot of times the piano plays a different part from the violins. While I'm used to harmonizing with a group as a clarinet, the vast majority of my experience on the piano is as the melody AND harmony at the same time, rather than alternating. So, that fraction of a second where I realize that I'm not playing with the violins anymore is enough to make me drop out for several measures-- sometimes.

What can I do to fix this? Memorize the pieces I'm playing(1) , so I can focus on just one part, (the violins) instead of three parts at once. Other than that, just keep playing in my sister's group class on Mondays until I'm used to harmonizing with three or eight or a dozen violins.

1: and it's not like they are hard to memorize, just that there are so many of them.

Future Post ideas: Websites I want to make (or see made).

All of these are going to materialize in the next week or two. I'll post links to them all at the end.

• My grandfather's paintings, a gallery website.
  
• Where to find petitions? Using MySQL and Google Maps to find petitions in Portland that you want to sign.
• Getting Things Done. My version of the system found in the book of the same name. Written in PHP with MySQL, to be GPLed so that anyone who wants to copy the code, can.
  
• Carpooling. A website which I hope will help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. More details later.

Basically, I'm using the gallery website as a project to learn MySQL and PHP on, both of which I'm going to need for every other project I listed.

New Blog

Welcome, everyone who read my livejournal, knew me in chat, or IRL and to the new people, welcome as well.

I haven't posted to my livejournal in a long time, even though I've wanted to, and there are a lot of things I've thought about that I've wanted to write about, but couldn't because I felt censored. I'll post more on why I felt that way later. Sufficed to say, if you're reading this, you might already know why I'm giving it up. If you don't, then you will know soon.

I'll continue to use my livejournal for reading and posting to my friends list, but not for anything else. It's not like I wrote in it for that much to begin with. I may get a new account on it sometime, for discussing more personal matters because I have a number of friends IRL who use it.

What I'd like to do with this blog is be able to post about the projects that I'm working on right now, essays on subjects I'm interested in, when I get the time, and ideas that I have. The last of those is what I'm most interested in, and, while it probably isn't what I'll be devoting the most space to on here, in my thoughts, it will be the biggest part.

Ideas? Well, ideas for websites I could see myself making, ideas for new products and companies, ideas for board, card and video games, and ideas for books and short stories. I'm still at a stage where I'm trying to hammer out what I want to do in my life. While I have a pretty good idea that I want to be a Neuroscience researcher, and I have a plan of what I need academically to get there, I have a lot of side projects I want to pursue which are completely unrelated to Chemistry, Psychology, or Neuroscience.