# 45

I re-learned to play a song on my guitar. I use the term "play" very loosely. I've never been very good at guitar. By the time I decided girls who play guitar ROCK, I was an older teen. Not that that is too old to pick up a new instrument, but I just didn't have the knack for it that some people do. If I had wanted to be really good, I would have had to start much, much earlier in life. Besides that, I have unusually long nail beds. Even when my fingernails are clipped to the very shortest length possible, they still get in the way of my playing. I suppose, even still, if I had devoted hours a day to practicing I may have learned to easily contort my fingers into the most unnatural positions in a way that made beautiful music. Not the case. I'm always just a bit sad about that. I really do wish I was a natural guitar player.

But I can still sort of contort my fingers into three slightly ill-sounding chords. And luckily, I have three songs in my repertoire that include nothing but those three chords. So I picked up my guitar yesterday for the first time in nearly two years and plucked out a little something. I can at least take comfort in the fact that I was better at one point in my life than I am now.

I wrote this song in college (when I was taking guitar lessons and at the top of my game). I was taking an astronomy class during summer semester. Though it was not my favorite subject, I don't think I ever took a class more fun than this. For our final project, we had to do any kind of project on anything related to what we learned that semester. The professor told us to be creative. Incorporate something we enjoyed. So I wrote a song about astronomy. He said in all the years he'd been teaching, that was the first time someone wrote a song. He flickered the lights for me and made a big announcement as though I was performing in a big venue. Needless to say, I got %100 on that project.

It's all about the forefathers of astronomy. I had to get pretty creative with some of my rhyming words, but the facts all came straight from my text. It's a little cheesy and embarrassing and poorly executed, yet somehow I'm really proud of my little song.