Walking into class this Monday my head was definitely not held as high, more of a gloomy eyed chin tuck to describe it in a nice way.  If you can't tell from the description, this was far from a flattering look for me.  Learning guitar is a task that requires far more time than my schedule was willing to allow last week.  I gathered up perhaps around 40 minutes of practice time.  Before I even entered the room of instruction I already knew that 40 minutes was not going to cut it.

This week upon entering the room, I gave the first row a glance but decided to slouch away in the back corner instead.  Looking around the room this time, I saw there was about half the class practicing their guitars with grins bigger than their faces.  I heard the girl next to me talking of how she spent the whole weekend playing with her friends, picking up tricks and gracefully jogging up the ladder to becoming a "guitar player".  One girl did catch my eye though, who was still sitting quietly in the middle of the room staring at her guitar with a perplexed look.  This gave me a little bit of hope that perhaps I was not the only individual struggling.

Once class officially went into action, I realized moping around over a past mistake would only get in the way of my learning.  I closed my eyes took a deep breath and released all my negative energy.  We began the class with a simple review of the chords, requested by an older women sitting in my previous spot in the front row.  This is when I realized not everyone in the class was on their way to being the next Buckethead, there was still a vast majority of the class without a clue of how on earth our fingers were ever going to move up and down the neck of a guitar with ease. 

From this review, we attempted to play the C and G chords together without a pause in between hitting the two one after the other.  Much to my surprise, under the pressure of being in a large crowd I performed this exercise with ease.  After this we were now ready to attempt some songs. 

Mary Had A Little Lamb.  Well in my case Mary did not have a little lamb because I sucked. 

London Bridge fell very gracefully though.

And Mama's little baby got her mocking bird in Hush Little Baby.

Since than I have practiced these songs and amazingly Mary's lamb has returned!  And all the country folk cheered and rewarded me with a trip to the music store to buy my kapoe. 

From here though the remainder of class was far from a nice walk in the park.  Guess why?  Two more chords were thrown into the mix, D and A.  Easy to do by themselves.  But I am far...far...far from being able to put these two chords together to sound even close to good.  Even attempting to put together G and D was a no go for me.  I'm not going to let it get to me though because everything takes practice and practice makes perfect and one of these days I'll have time to practice.  From this point in our song book we have the beginning of a few popular songs to rehearse and perfect before next lesson such as Amazing Grace and Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

With 17 credit hours, a pile of homework taller than me, and 33 hours at work this is going to be an interesting task.  But until next time, looks like I still have those darn Bluegrass Blues.