Reasons you should take up guitar (idea)

As a pianist/keyboardist, my ability to impress chicks with my ivory-tickling skills is seriously hampered by a number of contemporary realities:

• "Gather 'round the piano while I play something" usually sounds either presumptuous ("so I can impress you") or hokey ("for an old-fashioned sing-along"), and just sitting down and playing tends to have a pretty dramatic and immediate effect upon the "room", while noodling on a guitar is far less imposing and allows a crowd to form more naturally.
• Limited availability of ivories to tickle - pianos are hard to lug along on camping trips or midnight runs to the beach
• The piano-free inclination of most of today's Top 40 and pop music (this was less of a problem when Billy Joel was still cranking out great albums; e.g. Storm Front)
• Chicks prefer guitarists (see women who like jerk guys); I've been called a "piano hero" twice in my life, compared with my best friend Will who has been called a guitar hero more times than either of us can count. (Note that he is the exception to the insinuation earlier in this bullet item.)

As such, I have been forced to take up the guitar as a kind of gateway instrument (see gateway drug); it's a lot easier to lead a group to the piano in the other room to play "And So it Goes" (and maybe get the girls to sing a Sarah McLachlan song in chorus) after I butter them up with a rousing rendition of "I'll be", "Closing Time", "Crash into me" or some other easily guitarable song that might appear on the Dawson's Creek Soundtrack.

See also on the selection of musical instruments.

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Of course, all this presumes that I have time to go to parties where I can do any of this; my indentured servant duties tend to interfere.