Not every plan fails.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
― Probably overused proverb

I have a music stand. It’s not very large, impressive, or good looking. It’s broken in some rather important places, surprisingly sturdy in some not-as-important places, and it has a very, very amusing tendency to fall over in the worst possible situations—a fact made even more apparent because I play the cello (picking things up is surprisingly difficult). Quite honestly, it’s kind of bad. I mean, I can’t really complain too much because it is a somewhat “portable” wire stand (as opposed to a fixed(?) stand, which is designed with sturdiness and reliability in mind), and the reputation of wire stands is... questionable, at best.

Considering the fact that it was given to me for free, from an even more questionable musical instrument “shop,” I should probably be happy that it even works at all (random side tangent because I need words: Always check, and properly test your instruments before you buy them. And check them thoroughly. Very thoroughly. Even better, if you ever plan to get an instrument, don’t buy stuff from Leonard’s Music in the first place, because they’re s*. At least with strings, they’ve tried to sell me broken (broken to the point where it wouldn’t be possible to fix at home) instruments on two separate occasions, before I finally gave up and went to a different place. Even if you manage to get a instrument that’s working, the quality’s still really bad).

So anyway, about a week ago (it’s probably not a week, but I’m too lazy to check. I do know that it was during the quarantine, though),  I had to record something for one of my classes. Well, no probl—of course there’s a problem. Why wouldn’t there be a problem. I kind of needed two hands for the thing I was doing, and a third to hold the camera up in place while I did it. Since I didn’t have a tripod, and I couldn’t quite find a very good way for me to get a third hand before the assignment was due, I consulted my imaginary friend, also known as the “third” state of inner depression (there’s presumably fourteen total):

“Hey, I need help.”

“Well I can help, but I don’t want to help you.”

“Please.”

“No.”

Well, a bit disappointing, but I could work with that. After that extremely enlightening and helpful conversation, I decided to take a look around my room, in order to see if I could find or design something. That’s when I stumbled upon the idea of using the music stand as a makeshift iPad holder. 

Surprisingly enough, unlike almost every idea that I’ve had in the past, it actually worked. It wasn’t really bad, either. As they say, “Good things often come when you least expect it.” The music stand, who’s only purpose before this was to allow me to wake up the neighbors easier at 11:00 during the night with my out of tune cello playing, now actually had some purpose, some legitimately good reason for me to use it. A zombie, raised from the dead—yet this time, the zombie actually helped me.

Never underestimate music stands.