A few years ago, we bought a car. We’re not car people. We don’t really care all that much about doodads and amenities, and we prefer inexpensive things, so we got a pretty basic Prius. Its fanciest feature is probably power windows. The guy who sold it to us tried to sell us on an upgraded media package that would have included I believe Bluetooth for playing music from our phones, but we preferred not to finance $300 more for a feature that we figured we could emulate using the portable Bluetooth speaker we already owned.

Over time, the sound quality (or at least the volume) of our Jamboxes has decreased. You can hear music well enough (if not quite loud enough for my tastes) if you’re sitting in the front seat, but sometimes we like to load up an audio book or listen to some Radiolab on longer trips, and the Jambox doesn’t work well at all for this. The kids can’t hear it if we mount the speaker on the dashboard, and I can’t really hear it over road noise if we set it on the console between the front seats so that the kids can strain to hear it. So over time, I’ve begun almost to regret not getting the media package that would have let us stream from our phones to the car’s speakers.

We did briefly try out a device that lets you stream your phone via a radio station, but it didn’t work well at all. I recently found myself thinking that it’d be neat if somebody invented some kind of fancy device that would work somehow with the CD player in a way somewhat analagous to but technologically more advanced than those old cassette tape deck adapters we used back in the olden days. I imagined that it’d have some receiver in it that you could connect to via Bluetooth and that it’d do something like flipping bits on the media on the fly so that the CD player could read it and play whatever audio was being sent over. This no doubt ludicrous idea probably illustrates pretty well the depth of my ignorance about how audio technology works.

Last weekend, I was in my friend’s car, and for some reason I noticed that his radio was set to AUX mode. I asked what that was about, and he said that it was how he could play music and podcasts from his phone on his car speakers. Here let us imagine the sound of a needle being dragged across a record in that universal “stop and let’s consider what has just occurred” sound we’re all familiar with from the movies. I felt like a moron. All these years I had been complaining about crummy audio in my car and all I’ve had to do was find the auxiliary jack in my car and push a button to play music from my phone?

I came home that night and ordered a cable for the purpose, and I’m pleased to report that yes indeed I have been a moron, and now I can play whatever I like from my phone and figure that the whole family will actually hear it. This bodes well for belting out holiday tunes on the way to visit my dad for an early Christmas in a week or two.

Somewhere around a decade ago, I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar. In high school, I had been a low-to-moderately talented trombone player — good enough to hold first chair in my school and fifth chair in the all-district band but probably not good enough to qualify for all-state — but don’t consider myself to be especially musical in general. For example, I can’t hear a note or chord and name it. I also can’t just decide to belt out a given note in my own voice. I can pick out simple melodies on a piano with trial and error but can’t just sit down and play a thing by ear.

So, about a decade ago, I bought a cheap acoustic guitar off ebay and spent a week or two trying to make my pretty non-dexterous fingers bend to the shapes required to play some basic chords. It hurt my fingers and I felt like I wasn’t making much progress, and it didn’t take me too long to give up. It’s been years since I gave that guitar to a friend who had mentioned being interested in playing again but didn’t have an instrument.

Last month, my company held an all-hands meetup as we do every year, and one of the activities during the meetup (these things are a mix of work and play) was a set of jam sessions with rented instruments. People who were able to play the various instruments that were available met during the week to play together. A set list emerged, and on our closing night party, colleagues rotated in and out of the band as they played a 40-minute set that was extraordinarily well done and fun. It was a real rock concert put on by people I knew (who I hadn’t previously known were musicians), and it was energizing and inspiring and fantastic all around.

It made me want to think about trying the guitar again. My fingers are almost debilitatingly un-nimble. Sure, I can type 80 or 90 words per minute in bursts, but otherwise, it’s like I’m working with meat hooks. I’m unable with either hand to form the classic American sign for the number three, for example. My fingers just won’t do it. They all bend together as if connected by thread, and it’s sort of physically uncomfortable to try. I had read that an electric guitar had a skinnier neck and was easier to play in terms of fretting, so a couple of weeks ago, I bought a starter guitar. I’ve been practicing pretty diligently ever since, using an app called Yousician to guide me.

I like Yousician a lot. It offers brief video tutorials for various skills and a karaoke style experience that teaches you to play and grades your performance. As you acquire skills and pass tests, you unlock new skills. Rather than just blindly trying to play random chords without knowing whether you’re even doing it right, you get instant feedback and learn chords in an order that I presume is pretty intentionally planned out (E, Em, Am, C, G, E5, A5, and D5 so far). There are two tracks you can follow — lead and rhythm. I started with lead and within a day or two was reading tabulature (ish) and playing simple songs. I followed that track for a couple of weeks and then decided to back up and start at the beginning for the rhythm track. Now I can play and switch between a handful of chords and play a rhythm part for some simple songs.

I have a ridiculously long way to go before I’ll feel like anything but a buffoon with this guitar, but I’m really pleased with the progress I’ve made so far, and even though I wouldn’t yet call what I’m doing making music, it’s neat to feel like I’m heading in the general direction of being able to make music.