Now I get to be the annoying neighbor.

Last night, I tried to eek out some sound on my newly acquired violin. I was marginally successful because I didn’t know how much rosin to put on the bow.

I ran into my future violin teacher — she’s a coworker, and we start lessons in two weeks — and I told her I tried to play it. I asked her about the rosin. She told me the first time I play it, I’ll need to apply a lot of rosin on it, till the yellow hairs turn white. If the rosin is smooth, I would need to score it to get the powder to stick to the bow. My rosin cake was indeed smooth.

So I did what she advised, and tonight, I got some sound out of the violin. And man, is that thing loud! And since I don’t have any bowing technique, I wasn’t making the prettiest of sounds.

My next-door neighbors have loud conversations on the terrace, while my downstairs neighbor does obnoxious things in the early morning. Now I get to return the favor of their asshattery and play violin badly in the evenings. What comes around …