Finding New Energy to Cover New Ground

OR HOW SPONTANEOUS DECISIONS CAN GIVE YOU LOADS -- LIKE INSIGHT, PERSPECTIVE, ADVENTURE

Today has been a long day. Today is the day my Canadian friends, these two lovely women who took me under their wings and became my make-shift family here at I-House (International House), left. Today is the start of a holiday weekend. This 4th of July will be the first holiday that won't be spent with any of my loved ones. Today is the last day in a long week, a week that contained 3 tests and some of the final, tired steps of my first semester of Chinese. The course I'm taking is 2 semesters' worth of material, meaning I'm grasping onto the threads of the dead middle. And I am so tired.

Yet on my walk home, I kept finding more and more energy. Maybe because I had just come out of The Last Airbender, a fantasy movie about war, peace, and finding one's purpose, all by age 11. Ang, the last airbender, learns how to master the water element by learning to accept his emotions whatever they are. Funny enough, but this really resonated with me. There is so much on my plate that I am finding hard to swallow. I don't want to accept that I've graduated, that I am far from the people I want to be around, that I am a fellow, that I'm stuck in this Chinese purgatory for another 6 weeks. The walk back I just let myself accept what came -- the frigid weather; the 30 minute, uphill walk; the bizarre people on the street (preppy, rich college kids and homeless people); the drums. The drums?!?!?! THE DRUMS!

On my way home, I followed the sounds of a drum circle. On the street, people were talking about how "primal" the sounds were. Rolling my eyes at them, I went to go check out the perfectly valid music coming from a hidden corner of campus. I came upon a janggu ensemble, a form of Korean drumming. The janggu is that hourglass drum you see in the picture. Three drummers sat in a semicircle, facing a gong player. The gong player was clearly setting the tempo (pace of the music), because he changed it quite a bit during the drumming. Much like the master drummer controls and manipulated the main tempo in gamelan music, if you are familiar with that.

Seeing these players, I was was just flabbergasted. I had never seen drums like this. My only clue was that the language the players spoke to each other sounded a lot like what many of my bilingual classmates speak, Korean (and English). So I googled and found the janggu. It's been too long since I've encountered an entirely new instrument. As I walked away from the players, I chose a path that led straight away from them, so I could hear them for much of the rest of the way home. The farther I got, the more intense and frenzied the playing sounded, until the distance snuffed the sound out.

PHOTO FROM http://www.flickr.com/photos/misterpetey/2588126606/