Yellow Dog

Grown ups have this way of projecting their own wishes onto children. They wish that their children would do better than they did when they were in school, they make their children learn the things that they always wanted to learn, but didn't have an opportunity to. In other words, they exploit children so as to gratuitously relive their own youth (or what they wished had been their own youth).

My father recently bought a ukulele, but not a real, nice brown wood looking kind, It is bright yellow, with the front and back view of Snoopy sitting on an island, on the front and back of the instrument respectively. Let's call it Yellow Dog. Cute it is, but playable it is not (strings too far away from the fingerboard - you need a whole lot of strength to bar chords). Today he asks,

"Eh go and see if you can find out how to tune the thing, search online or something."

"Why?! You can google it yourself right.."

"No la, no time."

And then he runs off to the library to borrow books.

So. He buys an instrument, he expresses an interest, but doesn't have the time to find out how to play it. But no worries, I went online, and found a fantastic site set up by a guy called "Pineapple Pete" (very Hawaiian feel indeed). Since I didn't feel like doing any more of my readings on anxiety disorders and Anna Freud's defense mechanisms theories I decided to attempt to learn how to play Yellow Dog.

It isn't that difficult really, very much like playing the guitar, only there's a whole new set of chords, the space between strings is a lot wider, and it's not tuned according to ascending or descending pitch. (The first (G) and fourth (A) string are one tone apart, the middle two strings (C and E) are pitched lower than the 1st and 4th. ) And in the 90 minutes my dad's away, I made an extra effort to learn the thing and play something impressive-sounding so that when he came back, he'd think that it's very easy to pick up and would be inspired for a while not to abandon Yellow Dog.

Predictably, that was what happened. (I suppose uncannily accurate predictions come with 20 years of interaction). When he came back I played some (self-proclaimed) funky tune, and he went,

"What's that?! How you do?!"

And was interested for a grand total of 5 minutes, in which I showed him the whole weird plucking method and basic chords, after which he laid Yellow Dog down to rest, presuming that I had already slavedrived the poor instrument when he was away. (Which isn't that far from the truth anyway.)

Well, I suppose parents projecting their desires/hopes on their children is not that bad - after all the child might actually learn a new skill which may be of (dubious) use in the future. But when they slavedrive their kids to get all 'A's when they got 'B's and 'D's and *gasp* 'F's as seen from a yellowed cert strategically hidden in an inconspicuous corner, that's not very good.

They should just leave their children to slavedrive themselves.