Howdy!
As promised in my post of Alison Wonderland’s album review, I’m talking about my happy place.
I actually had some issues when it came to putting a title together, I kept second guessing myself with saying either “what” or “where” is my happy place, because for many people out there, that exact place may not even exist. Maybe at one point of time, but it’s not there anymore.
So what is mine? It’s kind of like asking what my ideal day would be, it’s a hard question to answer. For most people, they’d probably say it would either be outside with the cats or sitting in front of my laptop, blogging, tweeting on end and I can’t blame them for automatically assuming those statuses, but it’s far from the truth.
As you may know, I love both history and music a lot. I do a massive amount of research for both topics on a weekly basis, because I am so interested in them, but not a lot of people know the back stories of them though and why I won’t exactly go to school for either subject, and that’s what I’m going to be discussing in today’s post.
First off, history. I’ve always been into various areas of history since elementary school. I remember learning about Pompeii while I was in third grade, we were given these little magazines and our teacher allowed us to look through and it had dinosaurs in it – this was before scientists were brave enough to tell us kids that they are more related to birds, and so had feathers! Anywho, it also had a section about the burnt bodies of both Pompeii and Herculean. I wasn’t allowed to watch too much gore-y stuff on TV at this time, but something about this was fascinating to me! I cannot tell you how many documentaries I’ve watched over the years about this one event.
I’ve never really been interested in learning American history. In my defense, having to take history classes every year was a little annoying! It was forced down your throat and it never became fun until I hit both of my sophomore and junior years of high school. I had World History and U.S. History, and even though we only had two weeks to learn one section at a time, I actually had pretty good grades in both of those classes!
Now you’re probably wondering how did my obsession for the British royals come about? Well, I like to throw the blame at my mom because she loved Lady Diana Spencer and still hates Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall! Honestly though, I wasn’t really interested in the royals as a kid. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I watched The Other Boleyn Girl and I was really curious about these early royals. At the end of the film, it gives you little pieces of information of what happened next and discusses Queen Elizabeth and it placed an “I” after her name and I did not what that meant and I kind of got curious about who was the second Queen Elizabeth and that’s how it happened!
Now let’s talk about the music part.
I had different family members trying to influence me in some way, but I don’t think anybody wiggled their way through the maze better than my mother! Since she was a teenager in the 1980’s, she was into the early days of hip hop and so I was given N.W.A., The Notorious B.I.G., and Salt n Pepa at a very young age. I was very much into West Coast rap music because of her. She also got me into Mariah Carey and Prince too. So it was a whole array of different music coming and going whenever I was around her.
The runner up of the pack would have been my papaw. I have a lot memories of him listening to his fairly large stereo system in the living room. My nana hated it because he would have the volume up pretty loud, Christmas at my grandparent’s was interesting from time to time because it was sort of a tradition to have a Stan Kenton holiday album playing as everybody was unwrapping their gifts, but towards the early 00’s, his stereo suddenly stopped working altogether. He always said something was broken. He used to have a LOT of records, mostly of Stan Kenton, but he also had some Nat King Cole in there too, which I’ve always found interesting but in his defense, my papaw liked playing the piano so he generally wanted to learn to anybody who was good at that specific instrument.
Once I was in school, I was always influenced by what my friends were listening to, which is probably how I got into the boy bands. I actually don’t remember how I came about the Backstreet Boys. And I usually remember everybody’s origin story if you will, so the fact that I cannot figure it out is weird to me. Anyways, once I hit the end of high school and discovered the joy of rock music, I really dived into the genre as a whole and since I had nobody else, that was really telling me to check these bands out, I really got to do the learning all by myself and in those five years, I can safely say that I respect the pioneers but enjoy the modern rockers and different subgenres.
So these are my happy places, discovering new music for not only myself but for other people, which is one of the reasons why I was so into the idea of adding “music” to my normal routine on here! As for learning and speaking about different parts of history, especially the royal department, I am getting more comfortable about discussing it online but not exactly on here yet. That’s why I enjoy creating different themes with History Of Royal Women, because it’s a place where I can truly be out in the open with myself. They both have ways to keep me happy and distracted at times too!
What is your happy place?
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