S
ometimes I wish I were better at music. That's not really anything special -- I wish I were better at just about everything at various times. But I have a piano sitting in my living room now, the instrument par excellence, just begging for me to noodle around on it. I have an extremely forgiving wife, so dissonant noodling doesn't go over as badly as it would in basically any other conceivable context, and that is a great blessing. So every so often I hop on and press keys for a while.
The hope against hope is that by just making sounds semi-mindlessly for a long time, I'll get better at finding the nice sounds, and have a sort-of-basic, but ideosyncratic style of playing that is tolerable for regular people to listen to and interesting for me to play, even if technically unimpressive. This, however, is probably a vain hope. More likely, I will progress so slowly as to be unnoticeable.
Because I'm a prideful lunatic, I'm self-taught at just about everything I do (with the exception of carpentry). I did manage to teach myself how to draw (even if it took twenty years). How do I teach myself to play piano? Honestly -- I bet 15 minutes of noodling every day for five years would bear some kind of fruit...