Feb 01 2010

Music As Listening

File under Easy Listening. Popularity: 2%

I have this common statement that I make that’s actually an inside joke that I think only I get. Whenever I’m ending something, I say “Well, you know what the music means.” I’ve been given cause recently to wonder that some people might not.

I had a wonderful dinner the other evening with a friend that Jessica and I’ve met through our local community theater. We’ve been wanting to get together to chat for a while, and finally had the chance to visit them for dinner. It was a really exciting night for me because her husband is a bagpiper, and I really, really love the bagpipes. Not the Great Highland Bagpipes (The “GHB,” as they say), I love small pipes.1 That small, very ancient instrument that you can safely listen to in the intimacy of a small room and which rarely fail to touch pluck my heartstrings.

This man was a small piper, and I was really excited to finally be in the same room with this great instrument. I was even honored by being allowed to play them! For the first time in my life, I held this wonderful instrument in my hand and managed to get out the few first bars of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” before collapsing into laughter.

What bliss! It was as night filled with music and conversation, but there was one interesting conversation that the night brought on which I thought about long after the night was over. In fact, I thought about it all that night, and all the next day.

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  1. And there are a lot of small pipes. In fact there’s a list of bagpipes that shows that they are ridiculously culturally ubiquitous in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. []

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John Metta

Greetings! I’m John Metta, writer, hydrologist, programmer, and a digger of all things tech nestled snugly in the Columbia River Gorge (i.e. Heaven). This blog started as a test bed for programming social media apps, but eventually became something that, for whatever reason, people actually read. In fact, people read it so much that I had to create a whole other blog called Mettaprogramming for the geeky stuff I write. Feel free to email me at or contact me on Twitter @mettadore.

A Glorious Day!

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