I am experiencing a severe lack of ideas of what to write about right now, so I thought to myself “What’s an extremely general topic that I could write a few paragraphs about?”. And this is what I thought up.
Music is a pretty significant part of my life. Not just playing an instrument (although I do love to play keyboard as often as I can), but listening to different songs, and each one of their different rhythms and sounds. On a typical day in the car, traveling around the country and driving for more than 4 hours, I can easily listen to music for most of the ride, which somehow helps pass the time, even though I’ve listened to those songs multiple hundreds of times.
Another reason I like music is because it can help me focus. When I’m gearing up for competitions, similar to probably most every other athlete on the planet, it helps me get in the zone. Whether it’s snowboarding or track (It doesn’t really help that much to gear up for tennis :P), music never fails to psych me up (Unless it’s something like Beethoven’s Symphony #9, which I actually listened to the first minute or so of before a competition just because I accidentally clicked on it. It didn’t help). I even was listening to music for a couple of my slopestyle runs last snowboarding season, which totally helped me focus on the tricks I was throwing (although it was a pain to setup right before I dropped).
I do love playing the keyboard, and I’m attempting to learn to play some of my favorite songs by ear. I’m close to being able to do it, and I can identify the key of each song if I try for a while, and can pick out the right hand melody if I practice for a few minutes, but still can’t instantly hear and play or even nail the individual left hand notes of the bass/background beat, resorting to mostly chords. But that’ll all come in time.
So that was my completely arbitrary entry on a random topic that I picked simply because I was listening to music at the time of writing. Hopefully you enjoyed those possibly parenthetical paragraphs, and I’ll be writing again shortly.