alright, I’m working on a project right now, and I need to gauge what would be considered ‘common knowledge’ here.

I just got a hammered dulcimer! And I have some questions.

So, I’m mainly wondering about chords. The books that I read either say you have to strike the strings really fast, or that you can’t use chords at all. However, I’ve also seen people pressing on or plucking strings to create them. What’s up with that? Also, if the strings are positioned correctly, couldn’t you just hammer multiple at once?

I have experience with guitar, and I got the dulcimer because I kind of felt I was forcing the instrument into genres where it doesn’t belong. I like REALLY old classical music, European folk, (especially Celtic and Nordic which doesn’t often use guitars,) and the fact that the hammered dulcimer is used for Chinese folk and pop is a nice bonus, considering I do listen to that sometimes. If anyone knows of any songs that were written for the dulcimer, let me know. (I can read sheet music.) Also, I hate strumming and thought I would explode every time that was the only thing I was expected to do.

So, who was it who decided that Shakespeare’s writing is the pretty stuff and Dante’s writing is the gross stuff?

I mean, Dante was the one who wrote flowery, delicate passages about love and empathy, and Shakespeare was the one who wrote poop and fart jokes.

So, for a while I thought that Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, St. Nicholas, and several popes were buried in the same cemetery. (I screwed up during my research, that is not actually true.) Honestly though, that is a BBC Ghosts spin-off waiting to happen. I like to think the human who can see all the ghosts is a scruffy old groundskeeper who is also the world’s most Italian man.

I feel like a lot of people seem to undermine how much love must have been behind Leonardo Da Vinci. Yes, he was undoubtedly an intelligent man, but some of the people who romanticize him don’t seem to recognize that part of the reason he was able to do so much was because he LOVED everything. A ton of his diary entries are notes to himself to ask various people how they have the skills they do. He didn’t eat meat and literally refused to hurt a fly. He made doodles of random things and people, did practical jokes, played music, was an foodie, wore strange clothes, was unashamedly queer, and was described by many as the kindest person they ever met. That’s not intelligence to me, but it is something we should all see as a form of love.

I like to think that Da Vinci wasn’t so successful because he was smart. He was successful because he was loving.