Long time no post. Sorry! I've been busy, I'm a college student, sue me!
I've been a little uninspired lately but behold, today an interesting thought hit me. Wanna hear about? You do? Great!
When was the last time you heard a college student (or any student for that matter) complain about how stressed, tired, and busy they are? No I mean before you started reading this post. Not long right? Well I can attest that it is in fact a ridiculously stressful and exhausting experience. There are indeed days when I would rather attempt to earn my living singing on a street corner than study for my next test or finish the homework which seems to rain down upon me like I hear luck does on Irish people. But here's a better question: when was the last time you heard a college student (or any student) tell you how thankful they are for their overflowing course load and copious amounts of homework?
Alright you can stop scouring your memories. Just read on.
I am so very glad that I am in college buried under what often feels like a mountain of things to do! Let me tell you about my day. I started off in French class. I kind of hate that class because I do not posses what you would call a knack for languages. But, I learned how to say fork so I guess it wasn't a total loss (fourchette- if you're wondering). Then I went to my 20th Century Musicology class. Today was one of those rare days where a simple lecture turns out to be riveting. You find yourself hanging on every word while your mind pieces things together quietly and you marvel at the connections you see. I then continued on to my biology class whose scientific nature I've been relishing these last few days.
I had just been learning about how music, one of human kinds most expressive and abstract arts, had responded to the changing times of the early 20th century. The world was changing all around them and some people had the presence of mind and musical abilities to put a nation's worth of people's feelings of fear of change mixed with their hopes for the future into music. A lot of troubling things were happening at the time. Einstein's theory of relativity showed people that time was not in fact a constant, unchanging entity free of all outside influence. And then Darwin went and told them that we all grew out of a single cell in the primordial slime. That seemed to mean that we weren't all descendants of Adam and Eve and if that wasn't true could anything else the bible told them be true? How could the things they had accepted fact and lived their lives by suddenly change? It must have been a pretty scary time for these people. And then you get people like Copland and Stravinsky who used their amazing human gift of capacity for thought and were able to put these new ideas into such an abstract art form as music. They and their 20th century composer comrades rejected the old "facts of music" like 7 tone scales and major/minor modes and forged ahead into the new and unknown. Just when the world was beginning to feel like it had all been done before and there was no where to go but down lo and behold, here come great thinkers and musicians and scientists to put what we already knew up on a shelf and charge ahead into the unknown. There was hope for the future yet!
Now rewind 2.1 billion years. That's what I did when I went into my biology lecture. The only thing living on our planet was pre-cambrian microfossils, that is to say slimy cells covered in mud. And that was it for the next several hundred million years. That's it, just prokaryote filled mush, not even mitochondria for Zark's sake! Then, slowly but surely, things started to change and evolve. Before you knew it trilobytes were swimming around and evolving into amphibians with legs and crawling out of the sea! Then there were terrestrial reptiles which turned into birds so very slowly that it is hard to say where the shift really is. Is that fossil a dinosaur with bird features or a bird with dinosaur features? Then, even more slowly there were mammals and eventually people! I mean it didn't go exactly like that but still... the wonder of it all! That bio class turned out to be another one of those truly engaging lectures, two in one day! To think that this dusty old planet stared as nothing but minerals and atmosphere and then some spark of life that grew from one slimy cell photosynthesizing in the ocean to a vast society of human beings who work and play and think and create!
And what's more is that I get to learn all of this. This rich history of music, of humans, of life itself becomes part of me when I learn it and store it in my memories and expand upon it with my own ideas and perspectives. And then, as the cycle goes on, I can share it with others (with you!) and thus exponentially it all grows. I never cease to be amazed at the interconnectedness of everything and it is days like these when it comes to the forefront of my mind and preoccupies my thoughts for a while in rapt astonishment.
That is just one of the many reasons that I know that I am so very lucky to be one of the depressingly few people in the world who get the chance to go to college and have days like these. So for all the whining I do about the homework and exams deep down I do know why I do it.
Now if you'll excuse me I have a test in an hour that I need to memorize facts for.
