this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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In high school we did long ass career aptitude tests on scantron. Most people got fairly long lists. I got librarian and one other job that I don't recall. Librarian really stuck in my head as so wrong and absurd?
Anyways it's been 25 years and I think I should have been a librarian.
There's an old joke.
Man meets a piano teacher at a party. He asks how long it takes to become a good player. Teacher tells him about ten years. The man thinks for a moment and shakes his head. "Too long. If I started now I wouldn't be good until I was 60."
"How old will you be if you don't learn to play?"
As someone who suffered through music lessons through high school and college and only found a personal connection to music-making late in life, those people are so damn irritating.
I feel like what they're really saying is, "I wish someone had magically transplanted the skill to play an instrument into me like Neo learned Kung Fu." aka "I don't think I can learn it myself."
But I have a whole rant about music education--I think it actively drives people away from music, as easily demonstrated by the availability of abandoned band instruments on facebook marketplace. The ONLY metric that should matter to a music teacher is, "How many of my students are still playing 20 years later?" Unfortunately, not an accessible metric in real time.
Same. I did private violin and piano lessons as a kid and still play those instruments occasionally, but I mostly play the guitar I bought on a drunken impulse and taught myself to play. All the regimented practice and songs and mandatory recitals killed my love of those instruments. I had a chamber group and played in a community orchestra and hated every second of it.
On a happier note, my daughter has an awesome piano teacher. He plays a ton of instruments, has a book that the kids work through but lets them find songs they like outside of it and encourages kids to write their own music. At her first recital, he had people playing Chopin, Lady Gaga, Star Wars (on the ukulele), and original compositions. Best vibe I've ever seen at a recital.
Your piano teacher sounds great. I wonder who taught him to teach that way and if he had to survive a music education.
My breakthrough was teaching myself to play melodies by ear. It really frees you up on an instrument because you can play anything you can hear. I'm teaching myself to play the clarinet and having a blast, but I do a lot of singing and playing on guitar.
I'd be curious if you could love violin or piano again. They're wonderful instruments and you have all those skills, you just need to burn through your PTSD and make a personal connection.
Yeah. I do some piano because I bought a little Korg synthesizer to mess around with. Violin is rough. I got it out to play some bluegrass with the family a few years ago and had to put it back down because I was shaking. Honestly, I had a decent teacher but she was strict and setting up kids for a career in performance. I used to dread recitals. And my mom was worse. She'd critique everything I was doing, down to the faces I made during the song. I ended up playing for the aforementioned community orchestra in college and wasn't able to practice because of my courseload. Got called out by the conductor about it and just walked away.
Oh well, maybe some day I'll pick it back up. In the meantime, I can play stoner/doom metal or write chiptune music and enjoy myself.
Sounds horrible. I guess it's a blessing I dropped out of piano lessons when I did, though I´d always thought it a curse.
I have a theory that a lot of what we teach kids is just to get them to compete for entrance to college and scholarships. Once they've reached or failed to reach that goal, they completely abandon whatever it was they were doing. That's no way to raise children.
I took a few lessons with a clarinet teacher. His advertising talks a lot about how his students qualify and win competitions. I remember him talking to a little girl who wanted to learn a piece from How I Tamed My Dragon and he insisted she get the sheet music so he could teach it to her. That is, the only way he was willing to teach her to interact with the music was to read it. Disgusting and vile.
My projects on guitar are mostly adapting songs I like to some kind of fingerstyle arrangement. I actually don't play almost any song "like on the record". I think "Blackbird" by the Beatles is the only song I can play that way. I wonder what's wrong with me that I don´t want to imitate anyone directly--that seems to be the main motivation for most guitar players. And on clarinet, I find myself drawn more to imitating singers than other clarinet players. Something about music in the abstract, I guess, or maybe I just don´t have the patience or skill...
I'm kind of a librarian 😅 it was just a long and indirect path lol
I'm an amateur librarian.
I love telling people what to read next.
Like this gal.
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=tanith+lee&bkshp-astro=t
Not in America, you don’t. Librarians are getting doxxed, harassed, and getting death threats for protecting everyone’s right to read.
Some are even being arrested over the right to read.
It’s an ugly time to be a defender of truth and rights in today’s America.
That all sucks but there are many types of librarians and I would not have been a public facing one.