My last week’s worth of shifts at work have been rather crummy for things constantly going wrong, and it all caught up with me today, leaving me feeling rather mellow. The effort it’s taken for me to cope with my personal life in the past three weeks has left me ill-prepared to handle any problems at work.

I stayed fairly busy today, but when I got home and sat down for a moment, the mellow mood washed over me. I looked up from my perch on the couch to see my guitar hanging on the wall.

The backstory on my guitar is that I bought it the summer of 2002, the summer after my sophomore year and my first experience with living on my own and not in a dorm room. I bought it for less than $100 in the aftermath of my last really, really bad breakup. I was dirt poor at the time, and most of my friends had gone elsewhere for the summer. So, during the times that I wasn’t working as a server or partying I was trying to teach myself how to play. I picked up the basics — enough to strum out a few chords to put together a song — and found comfort that summer in the notes I plucked from the guitar.

I kept playing for about a year, but by the time senior year rolled around, I just didn’t have time to play. And though I’ve toted it through five different moves since the end of school, I’ve hardly taken the time to play it since.

I picked it up tonight, scrounged up a pick and plucked a few of its strings — very dusty strings. It was horribly out of tune, and somewhere in the last five years my tuner has disappeared. With the help of an online tuner and my rusty ear, I got it somewhat tuned. I strummed out a G chord and a D chord before realizing I couldn’t remember a single other chord.

I googled some guitar tabs and realized that aside from the simple tabs that just tell you “G” or “F” or whatever chord, I couldn’t remember how to read them. I looked at some online how-to guides, but got quickly frustrated and put the guitar aside.

And so now I’m blogging. 

I guess stick with what you know?