Upon reading the title of this post, the reader must be wondering what kind of dichotomous content am I about to delve in... What the heck do geography and music have in common? To answer in the simplest way possible, nothing. I wanted to talk about both but I did not have enough subject matter about either to dedicate an entire post to solely one of the two topics.
Geography: I don't know why, but for some reason Brandon, yes the same genius who earned the 2400 on the SAT, inspired me (yet again I guess) to improve my geography and knowledge of the globe. I think it's just his pure genius that makes me want to be like him. I mean it was like around 12 o'clock in the night when I asked him if he knew the capital of Brunei. He almost immediately replied "Bandar Seri Begawan." Most people don't even know where Brunei is, but not only does Brandon know where it's located, he knows its capital, its main exports, its demographics, and some of its history. Brunei is only one of the hundreds of countries for which he can enumerate these many factoids. He amazes me. He doesn't even know how much he amazes me haha. But yeah, over the summer I made an effort to memorize the world map, or in other words, the location of every single country in the planet with the exception of some of those very obscure Oceania islands. Sorry Oceania. Since then I've gotten rusty on my European geography, especially the post-Yugoslavian-split countries. It shouldn't take me that long to re-memorize all the locations. After that, I plan to learn each and every capital of the world. And after that, I wish to memorize the geography of the states of the countries that I find most important -- India, China, Spain, Canada, France, Niger, Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc.
Music: Recently, I've been going through a very strange transition in musical interests. My soul has always been attached to classical string (quartet) and piano music. Just listening to
J's quartet perform at my school inspired me to practice the viola even more. Sure my skills aren't as developed as I would like, but I'll get there sooner or later. And eventually I'll be playing a Mendelssohn masterpiece in an awe-inspiring quartet, too! Even more recently however, my musical interest has made a rather drastic transition to pop -- but not just any kind of pop: Korean pop. It all started one fateful day before period 4 APUSH. I was sitting next to
A while she was loading a YouTube video. She gave me a headphone and asked me to listen. The song playing was Haru Haru by Big Bang, a very young and famous K-pop band. At first I couldn't believe that I was actually listening to music in a different language. I felt silly. But after listening to the beautiful piano, absorbing the catchy beat, and watching the gripping music video, my perspective on Asian music took a turn for the better. I instantly downloaded the song. Much later, while sitting on the bus to Monterey Bay where part of our class was heading to kayak, one of my good friends,
A, was sitting next to me. We were listening to music on my iPhone when he chanced upon Haru Haru in my library. He was shocked to see an Indian person with Korean music on his phone. He asked me if this was already there before I purchased my phone, and I simply answered no, it's one of my favorites! We both listened to it. After we returned home from the field trip, he sent me some of Big Bang as well as Epik High's bests. It just goes to show that it really doesn't matter what ethnicity the music is from as long as the beat, the melody, and the rhythm are catchy. Big Bang is a little bit more than just catchy though; their songs are moving, regardless of whether you understand them or not.
