History is our Future!

So as some of you know, I am working on a new Steampunk comic book. This right here is my first attempt at some of the concept art for the book! I already have what I am going to consider the first chapter of the work and I am pretty excited to nail out some more of the concept art in order to be able to start making a draft of the book! I would like someone who could illustrate it faster than I can! At this rate, I will probably have a draft done by late October but hopefully sooner! Check out my Twitter for more details and I will keep everyone updated on there! @johneg12 

Sorry its been a while people but I had some time on my hands so I wanted to write you this blog. Tonight’s post is about music. 

I absolutely love music! I think that it is the most beautiful and amazing thing in the world. Wikipedia defines music as “an art form whose medium is sound and silence.” It surrounds us completely wherever we go and we can hear it in our everyday lives, even if there is no actual “music” playing around us. What we perceive as music can be totally blown out of the water in one statement: all sounds that we hear around us are music, no matter how obscure they may be. Throughout this blog, I will write about how I see music and how it makes me feel, as well as give my thoughts about finding music in all aspects of life, no matter how hard it may seem. I will start off talking about music in its traditional sense, what we listen to on our iPods, and then move on to the more obscure aspects of it! Here we go!

Music, to me, is not just a nice thing to listen to, it is a drug! I literally cannot live a day without at least listening to one song on my iPod, I probably would go through a withdrawal, it may not be pretty. I diverge. Music in a scientific sense comes from the playing of an instrument, be it a violin or our voices, and the frequencies released from said instrument being combined into a wonderful chorus of waves and hertz that hit our eardrums and is transmitted into a beautiful song in our brains due to neurons. It is also scientifically proven to be therapeutic. It can be used as device to help with interpersonal problems, aging, and communication disorders. It has even been shown to help schizophrenia patients! That is the amazing thing about music, what we take as a nice commodity can literally save somebody’s life or make it so that they can function normally. Music is definitely therapeutic to me! I will admit, I have moments where I get in a terrible mood and I want the world to just go away and avoid me entirely. Then I turn on my iPod. Somehow, God, along with Steve Jobs in angel form, know immediately what song to play and put me in a better mood. Occasionally, it will be a song that I typically skip right over and that day it just is  the exact thing I need to hear!

Music is my escape. Whether I have been having a crappy day entirely, or am in the best mood ever, music is there to help me express my feelings. Thats why I spend about 80% of my day humming, tapping away on my desk, or shoving earbuds into my ears. Music is amazing. My playlist on my iPod contains all types of music, from classic rock to country, Eminem to Bach. It has every type of music for every mood. I do this because I appreciate all types of music, not just one type. Part of me breaks every time that I will listen to the Bach Cello Suites and have someone tease me because I love classical music. I ask them what music they like. Most of the time it is only rap or metal. I just wish that they could open their eyes to the entire broad spectrum of music out there! It is amazing what we as humans have created and I feel like it is my duty as a human to hold an appreciation for all of these types. All music has its own rhythms, feelings, tones, moods, tempos, etc. They all have their unique styles and the diversity of music seems to be as great as the diversity of our own society. Every region, village, conglomeration of peoples, has its own unique styles of music and they are all so beautiful if not purely divine in their own sense. I have to give props to my old choir teacher Mr. Grant. He would give us music from everywhere around the world and no matter how much we would bitch about how difficult or how weird it sounded, it was all unique and beautiful and I feel like it definitely raised our awareness of world music and different cultures through music!

Now we hear music wherever we go, even if it isn’t in the traditional perceived sense of notes on a page transmitted through an instrument of some sort. Music surrounds us on our walks through the park, sunbathing on the beach, driving on the highway! The chirps of the birds, crash of the waves, or honking of the horns all have their own unique tones and combinations which just make a pure symphony of wonder in the air! I am taken back to the scene in August Rush when the kid Evan is composing his symphony at Julliard and he hears the subtle sounds in the busy New York City streets and the music just flows from him as he listens to these sounds. Yes, all sounds that we hear are music, we just need to take the time to appreciate them! I know that it may be hard to find the music in some things, a teacher droning on about statistics, or a car as it comes screeching to a halt at a red light, but its there! So that is my challenge for all of you this week, try to find where you hear music surrounding you in your life without your iPod or your radio. Turn off the radio while you go to work or drive home, take out the earphones when you walk to class, or close your iTunes while you read your book and just listen to the sounds around you and you will be surprised as to what you hear!

I would love to hear what you guys feel, hear, think when you take these five minutes without any music and listen to the sounds around you. I want to know what you hear, what you feel, what emotions run through your mind when you do this! My email is historyisourfuture@gmail.com! Feel free to email me with these and let me know what you think. Also, if you have critiques or anything of that nature I would love to hear them!

Thanks guys for bearing with me through this!

John

Hey! So this begins the first of 366 blogs I intend on writing during 2012. Here it is!

Todays topic will be…. Reading!

Reading, whether it be for pleasure or profit, knowledge or tomfoolery, is perhaps one of the most wonderful inventions on the Earth. Whenever we read, our imaginations are able to soar and take us to wonderful worlds far beyond the world we know at the present. We are taken from castles and wizards to musketeers and revolution. We are able to learn and grow in our understanding of the world around us as well as to escape whatever we may be struggling with and go on an adventure down the Mississippi River with Huck or fight for survival and freedom with Katniss. In tonights writing, I will look at what makes reading so intriguing to me at least, as well as why reading for class and knowledge is just as important as reading for pleasure. 

My favorite author JK Rowling once said “It’s important to remember that there is magic inside all of us”. It is my own personal belief that one of the best ways to unleash the magic within is through literature. A good book allows for our imaginations to take flight and take us to new worlds. For me, this is the fine line that separates my love for film with my love for reading.  In film, we have images projected before us, showing us what the directors and scenic designers want us to see, not what our imagination projects for us. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love movies. I must say that I enjoy books more though. In books, an author can give me some details about a place, character, or situation which are crucial to the story, but 98% of the time, I am able to create the rest of the world and people within it using my imagination. This lets me personalize a story to me and what makes me reading a story and my perspective on a novel different from someone else’s. JK Rowling also said “Theres always room for a story that can transport people to another place”. I love this quote because it basically sums up why I read and why I find that I am able to take a refuge in reading where I couldn’t in other forms of media.

Being a college student, I read a ton for class! My current book load is a combination of 11 novels, folk tales, historical references, biology resources, and political theory. Although daunting, part of me loves this. Another of my loves is learning and gaining knowledge. 98% of the time i am conscious I am game to learn a new task or to hear about why the Chinese sent princesses to the Mongols. The reading to learn all of this interesting knowledge though, can be quite dull. There are times in which I just finish reading a chapter of Niccolo Macchiavelli’s The Prince and I just want to gore my eyes out with a hot crayon. The trick to this dull reading is trying to make a game out of it. Try picturing whats going on in that cell that you’re learning about or the King of England coming to the Pope as a penitent asking to be redeemed and reconciled back into the Church. This is where the imagination and wonder of reading comes in. It personally helps me learn by visualizing whats going on in a situation and making short films in my head in order to remember it better. This reading for knowledge is just as important as reading for fun. It lets you gain information that you might otherwise not have and it gives you another perspective to things that you might not necessarily have thought differently about. 

This is just a short writing about my thoughts on reading. As always if you have questions, concerns, feedback, etc. feel free to email me at jegland3@gmail.com or to leave me whatever comment stuff you can on here! I am also always looking for more topics to discuss and to answer whatever questions you have! Have a great 2012!

John

Hey Guys!

So this is my first blog on here and I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself! I am a current college student studying history and political science! I feel like history is perhaps one of the most important subjects in school. It teaches us about what has happened in the past and how that has led us to where we are now in the present. Additionally, we are able to predict future events and outcomes of our actions based on what has happened in the past!

Anyways, I will probably be posting my random thoughts and experiences from college on this blog! Also, any adventures that I go on will be blogged about on here! So any who…. I hope that everyone reading this enjoys hearing my random thoughts throughout the span of this blog!

Enjoy!

John