what are you making per shift on average? If it's under $250, work somewhere else that pays more if you're willing to be talked to like that.

you're not wrong, but look at it another way: I have a friend whose guiding light and burning desire when it comes to guitar is the complete works of Pantera. He learns all the guitar parts from tablature, and plays them along with the recordings note for note. As far as I know he plays no other music, original or covers. He practices no scales, no sweeps and no runs other than those recorded by Dimebag. He literally has NO interest in producing any musical sound that has not appeared on a Pantera record.

In my book, this person plays guitar, making him a guitarist. He is not a musician. Is it my sacred duty to point this out to him?? No. Wouldn't dream of it. Does this make me better than him? No. Not at all. He's doing it for the love, and so am I. Musicians understand things about music. My buddy understands (as far as I am aware) only Pantera.

my god.... how I wish that were true.

you look like you think "work" is killing zombies with your buddy, Rick Grimes.

Many, many things. Most of them are things that just universally suck about being alive.

"fuck you, pay me"

no, what you are is called "stoned". One of the things that makes "stoned" different from "ugly" is that dental floss will not work as a blindfold on most ugly people. Also, (mercifully) "stoned" wears off, where as "ugly" people are often afflicted for a lifetime.

without getting specific: No, I do not agree with any of those ratings. I would not have rated any of those women that highly the day I got out of prison.

well, I was about 12 years old- and I had been playing violin from the age of 4. Violinists didn't have the "cool" factor happening for them, and neither did I, for a host of reasons ( homeschooled, next to no social skills, mouthbreather, adhd, etc ). Anyway my mom had forced me into a gymnastics class which I loathed, mostly because I was/am a phenotype/build whose natural talent and general aptitude for gymnastics-or any activity requiring physical grace, spatial awareness or finesse- is best expressed as a negative number. The only good thing about that class for me was watching the 3 or 4 girls that actually had some gymnastic ability, and daydreaming confused semi-sexual fantasies in which they featured prominently. One day, one of these girls was heard to say how cool she thought guitar and guitar players were, and how much she liked Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here", and how impressed she would be if anyone were to learn the title track and play it for her. With my usual lack of foresight, I opened my yap, which emitted several lies: first, that I was a guitarist, second, that I was quite a good guitarist, and finally, that I was familiar with the song she favored, and would be happy to perform it for her whenever she liked. "Oh, really?" she said, with a reappraising look at me. "I'll have to take you up on that one of these days." I had never even heard a single Floyd song in my life. In those days, I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Bach.... but knew literally nothing whatsoever about any of the music of the 20th century. How hard could it be? I wondered to myself. Surely not harder than even the easiest of the Brandenburg Concertos.... right? So, I borrowed the tape from the kid up the street, dubbed it onto a blank Maxell 90min, dug a Mexican nylon-stringed guitar that my mom had bought for $5 in Ensenada a couple of years earlier, and learned an almost totally wrong heavily classically influenced version of Wish You Were Here. By "wrong" I mean that all the chords were technically correct...but all of their voicings were objectively wrong. The worst part, as it happened wasn't even the playing of the guitar itself. It was the fact that it hadn't even occurred to me how hard it might be to sing and play the song at the same time. As it turned out, it didn't matter- I never did end up playing my impressionistic version of Wish You Were Here for the tween gymnastics impresario. But that is how and why I started playing guitar.

that is the most hilarious tattoo in the history of tattoos

I am old AF- been smoking since I was around 12 years old, and I'm a couple of months away from 50 now. When I was a kid, smoking was all about putting off some kind of rebel vibe. Hella dumb. All my gfs (mostly) have been age appropriate and (mostly) smoked also. No biggie.

I was 17 years old playing in what amounted to a Zeppelin and Metallica cover band- this is back in the winter of 1992, in the Twin Cities, in MN. First gig EVER- but they didn't want to let us play because we were all 16 and 17 and this place was a ghetto biker bar in Inver Grove Heights or something like that- and you had to be 21 to get in. Finally got them to agree to let us play our set for free, first, and tear down and leave immediately thereafter. Oh, and my parents showed up- neither of them were ever motorcycle afficionados, or drank more than a glass of wine with dinner- basically, I just got tired of being alternately yelled and laughed at.

assuming the someone making the offer was referring to alcohol only, I would immediately make the deal and keep my end of the bargain till the day I die.

yeah, I'm gen X also- born in '74. My dad brought home our first computer in '80 or '81 also. I get it- pretending to be an underage girl in order to swindle/extort men who are really pedophiles but lack the courage of their convictions is not exactly my preferred get ~down either. Full disclosure: when I said above that it would be easy for anyone to run this scam, I didn't necessarily mean easy for me specifically.

There was a time that I'm old enough to remember where if you spent a lot of time online, it was a pretty safe bet that you had next to no IRL sex/social life. Send one of those dudes a picture of some random titties I bet you coulda had just about anything you wanted from 'em.

why the hell couldn't you? Just pretend to be an underage girl, grab some barely legal photos off of any porn site at all, alter them enough in photoshop so they'll not set off google image search, and away you go

Thank you so much for taking the time to reach out to me. I very much appreciate the good advice and encouragement. <3

TONS.

no, dermatologists jerk off ON his face

lower end Roland kits are about $1200-$1500, and totally worth it

I scrimped together money till I had enough for a lower-end set of Roland V-Drums, and started practicing. I still suck, and the only songs I can play are the ones I wrote- but it was worth it.

Wyeth's "Helga" as a child, pretty much. All the good and all the bad that go with that.

https://www.incollect.com/sites/uploads/Quillman080906sED_04.jpg 

I recommend a free program called TestDisk, by Cristophe Grenier. A google search should lead to his site, only download from there. If you don't know what you're doing, there's plenty of documentation available. Good luck.

THANK YOU ALL SO, SO MUCH! I deeply appreciate each of you taking your time and using it to try to help me. I put in as much effort as I could and it's about 25% better. I'll do it again today. Thanks again for being there for a stranger.

I don't get it- you must have a time machine or something, because you hadn't even begun swimming around in your father's balls in 1991. Yet I would swear on a stack of Bibles that I accidentally stepped on you in the Jane's Addiction pit at the first Lollapalooza.