Aspiring to Competence (Adventures in Learning Guitar): Part One

It's been a little more than a week since I told myself it was time to fire myself up and learn how to handle the big acoustic guitar that's been in the living room for a while. I didn't really intend to become the next Hendrix, I just sort of wanted to be halfway competent. You know, in the middle-of-the-party "anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" manner.

Here are my updates and impressions so far:

• My fingers hurt really bad the first couple of days, but I've gotten so used to it that it doesn't really hurt anymore! Heck yeah!
• Human fingers are not meant to bend the way that some chords require.
• The two chords I can play, D and A, sound really cool when you just keep practicing them over and over again.
• Wow, these things are big. I'm no expert, but I think it's a lot bigger than a ukulele.
• We don't deserve people like Justin Guitar who put hundreds of hours of fantastic lessons and tutorials on the Internet for free.
• I'm working on chord changes using Justin's method, where you need to be able to make 30 half-decent chord changes a minute before you can move to the next lesson. I'm currently sitting around 21, so making progress!
• When do I get to learn "Seven Nation Army" again?
• Steel strings sound cool when you run your hands over them.
• Just holding a guitar makes you look a hundred times more awesome.

How fun. We'll see how that goes in the future.