My Blogs Are Alive With the Sound of Music

Coming up with a good idea is easily the hardest part of writing (or doing anything, for that matter). I spend at least an hour lying in bed every night, trying to fall asleep, but inevitably being accosted by thoughts that branch off in every direction without resolution. Yet, when I sit down and devote ten minutes to thinking about what I want to write about for this course, my mind is a blank piece of paper and inspiration is essentially nonexistent. 

That might be somewhat dramatized, but it certainly proves my point. I do have ideas for both blogs and "This I Believe", however, after too much thinking. All of my ideas revolve around music.

My passion blog was probably the easiest to think about. Last semester I talked about the significance of the music from Freaks and Geeks in context with each episode and the lessons that a coming-of-age narrative inevitably conveys. Unfortunately, that ended up being stifling. My goal for this semester's passion blog is to give myself more room to be creative. My first idea involves writing about soundtracks. This would be close to what I was doing already, but would give me more of a chance to diversify my topics. I recently saw La La Land and my enthusiasm for soundtracks was reignited; the music from the film incredible in and of itself, but within the context of the plot, it becomes even more poignant. My other idea for the passion blog is an interview-based blog, where I would ask people what music means to them and how it has shaped their life. This is more of a gamble, but I think it's doable. I would interview a variety of people, from music majors to directors to performers to enthusiasts.

For my "This I Believe" essay, I want to talk about why I think music is so profound. I won't get into it too much here because I would like to save it for the essay, but I truly believe that all music is transcendental. My other idea for this essay is to talk about my belief that being good to strangers is incredibly important for being happy and fulfilled. 

As far as the civic issues blog, I'm not so sure about what I want to talk about. I definitely want to stay within the realm of education. I believe it would be interesting to delve into comparing America's educational system with that of other countries, and I think it would also be interesting to discuss standardized testing and testing in general in terms of its effectiveness in proliferating learning. I hope that I can just use education as a springboard and talk about various subjects within that topic. 

Overall, I am very enthusiastic about this semester in RCLII. If the title we chose for the class is any indication of how the semester is going to progress, I think we are all in for an interesting few months.