quitting | 3/7/25

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last week i mentioned that i dropped out of the piano class i'd started taking at glendale community college. i've been thinking about what it means to "quit" over and over in my head ever since, but lemme walk you through what happened.

i really just want to learn how to play the piano. i've gone through a handful of musical instrument phases. in 2019/2020 i owned a roli seaboard block (and a few other roli blocks products) and i loved them! i just didn't know how to use them. an ex of mine bought me a roli lumi as a gift during the pandemic, which is explicitly a tool to teach people how to play the piano. that didn't really stick, but i'd like to give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that that was because of the fucking pandemic and not a personal failing. in 2018 i picked up (and kinda learned!) the ukelele by watching youtube videos. when i was a kid, i used to be able to play the violin (with some proficiency) and the flute (an instrument i think is stupid) but in my mother's infinite wisdom i wasn't allowed to continue playing them after i started to pick them up.

all of this is to say that i like to think that i am a musically inclined person, i just don't have the fundamentals. and my feeling is that, through a combination of piano knowledge and (eventually) knowledge of digital audio workstations, i could play anything i'd wanted. long term, i don't really know if i necessarily want to make music, but i do like the idea of being a dj (catch friday night fuser live on twitch.tv/nikigrayson, returning next friday). mostly, though, i dream about sitting at a piano bench with my kid and sharing music with them.

so after bouncing off of numerous youtube courses and paying a silly amount of money for playground sessions (and then not really clicking with it), i decided to follow in the footsteps of someone close to me (they're actively taking ceramics) and registered for a class at gcc.

things started out pretty rough. i got the stink eye from the teacher for walking in two minutes late to class on the first day in a classroom that is really hard to find (there was no signage). 10 minutes later, a woman in her 60s walked in and the teacher – who had already started actively teaching the course, no real warm up or syllabus review – pulled the handbrake and told her that she should have arrived on time. (the teacher was then pretty cruel to this student for the next 4 classes i attended, frequently grinding the class to a halt to point out her mistakes.) the book we were using was written in the 70s which is fine but also i do think there are probably new and better ways to teach absolute beginners how to play the piano than moving from "here is what notes the keys play" to "ok now you should know how to read music on the staff" in the span of 4 pages. on the last day that i went to class, i got confused as to where my fingers were supposed to be (because the teacher was moving at a million miles an hour without checking to see if everyone was on track) and asked for help. instead of providing any real help, she mused out loud to the whole class on whether or not i was paying attention! as if there was anything else in the room full of people trying to learn how to play the piano for me to do.

fuck off.

after the first class i felt a pit in my stomach about going to the next one, which is the opposite of what i wanted. i made it two weeks before i officially withdrew. i quit.

it didn't even feel like a relief when i did it, it just felt like failure. i couldn't even complete a community college piano class. i somehow forgot how to learn. i couldn't dedicate myself to doing a thing that i wanted to do for two weeks before i said "eh, i'm good on this". quitting in this situation, at least initially, felt explicitly like an admission of defeat. i just wanted to learn the piano, not sit in a room two times a week with a woman who was teaching with the firmness of an instructor at julliard.

with the benefit of some breathing room though, i don't really feel that way anymore, but i'm still bummed out. is quitting if the thing that you stopped doing was making you sad? does quitting just have such a negative connotation that we are unable as a society to view it positively without some work? am i thinking too hard about this? is this just a thing that didn't work out? probably!

i'm going to give playground sessions another shot post-GDC, maybe it'll stick this time. if you have any piano tips, please slide into the comments and give me the lowdown.

i slept wrong on my neck two consecutive nights in a row this week and i have spent the last few days turning my head like michael keaton batman. it blows. i miss being able to rotate my neck and look over my shoulders. do you know how frequently you look over your shoulders when you drive? a lot.

i also went to the la zine fest last weekend, which was a two day affair hosted at the broad museum downtown. i bought sooo much stuff from a bunch of great artists and zine makers including christine lesantos, jenn duan, jennifer ma, and the papercuts library. it was great to be in another queer, creative space! lucky to live in this town.

also i wrote this during the lakers/knicks game and folks!

thanks for reading. hope you have a good weekend!

-

niki