Ever since I learnt music Braille, I discovered a pattern in the literary Braille system as well. After I discovered this new analogy, I decided to have people perceive Braille as a table, not just as a shape felt underneath one finger or have them perceived as dots that many people assume the Latin alphabet can be written in twenty-six dots when you only need six dots total. I started to experiment on making simulated dots using Excell spreadsheets so I could better explain the concept of how Louis had it in his mind at the time. Since he was also a musician, I decided to learn the music Braille system. That itself took about two to four months to master, even though I never read it until 2011-2012 since it was Late into the year when I started, and early in the year when I began applying it to my band exercises.
The first thing I had to understand was the fact that everyone had me play music all by ear, and that I would simply never learn the notation of music. An example of that would be when the teacher asked me to copy the rhythm he clapped out to me, and I just clapped them back without knowing. That’s how it is for many people when they are learning something new. You imitate it before you get the meaning. However, like any other language, music is a language everyone can understand. I sometimes wondered to myself, though I rarely gave it a second thought, how did my fellow students know what to play when they saw it on the board? I would have needed to learn how music notation worked before I could begin to read Braille because then I would know how to associate the organisation of dots to a note value and pitch, and an added dot for the octave mark since it was not dependent on clef signs. For this reason, I thought music Braille was confusing because I didn’t know how to interpret it. Luckily, a teacher, who ironically didn’t know Braille, or at least the tactile version of it, was able to get me to read music Braille after being fascinated by the fact that music and math have a lot in common, especially with fractions. This was because they knew how to read print Braille and they were able to assist me in understanding the process in a kinaesthetic way. I was thinking, why can we not apply math concepts and use music as an analogy to veer a person’s motivation that is relevant so they can get a math concept? Same thing with Algebra and computer programming.
Here are the list of authors I have read and why I read them starting with Doctor Seus. He was the first author who I read and that I fully remembered because my mother would read Spanish books to me and I would remember those nights clearly. I had a cassette machine from the National Library Service, a branch of the Library of Congress signed by President Hoover in 1934. Then I began to read a few books here and there, starting in 2002. Usually I would read them and tell myself what I liked about that book, like this subject,such as in Gloria Rising, by Anne Cameron, I liked the idea of being an Astronaut, but I did not find a theme or a moral within those books because I haven’t learned to look out for those. Then I advanced to reading in Braille and I read Judy Blume’s book. At first I wasn’t really interested in the book in 2004 until I got the book on tape, and later, I would revisit her, including Beverly Cleary when I had access to accessible books on the internet to see if there were more books the authors wrote as opposed to what the schools had on their reading list. Sometimes I am fascinated by one subject that motivates me to look at series or something, maybe because they gave me a book in the middle of the series rather than the first book. If I am in the middle of a series I have to know what goes on next, like in the R. L. Stine Goosebumps series, I would wait for every book that came out just to finish that mystery. These are known as cliff hangers.
When I started receiving automatic-send from the library, I just decided whether or not to read the books depending on whether the title interested me, but as they say, never judge a book by its cover. I soon read Lynn Reid Banks, The Indian in the Cupboard, followed by the two books succeeding it, and the former was in our reading list. Then I read several short stories like the Ballad of Mulan from the Rewards textbook, and I enjoyed reading those a lot because it made me think. I should mentioned that in 2005, like in November, I read the Wizard of Oz, and all the books by the same author once I had access to the public domain. I read plenty of Tom Swift books. It was his wireless message to rescue the castaways of Earthquake Island, and another book I have read, that got me interested in ham radio. I didn’t really begin reading till later in 2008, but the first book I read was Tom Swift and His Sky Racer, Or, the Quickest Flight on Record. Then I read Jamie Gilson’s Hobey Hanson, You’re Weird book, but I didn’t realise I read the middle of the sequel until much later,so I read the rest when I had access to accessible books. I read E. B. White, Dan Gutman’s A BaseballCard Adventures, Andrew Clements and James Howe the Herold and Chester books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, which was a blast from the past. Then, In ninth grade, I started reading young-adult novels and revisited books that I read, which I do when I am bored. If you constantly read something, even if you already read it, you refresh your memory and you read something new that you haven’t discovered, or something that first didn’t make sense, which does now because of change in your schemas.
One reason I might have decided to move from generalised science to medical science was based on influences by Deborah Kent, a totally-blind author, and Lurlene McDaniel and other medical thrillers. One of the books I really enjoyed was One Last Wish. I was able to understand what she was trying to convey, and since then I realised that books were my friends, and I could stay up with popular culture to some extent and still enjoy listening to Western art music.
Gradually though, I expanded to reading other authors as I re-read the current books I had, and last year I managed to re-organise my books by author’s first name ascending alphabetically for easy searching, and my nonfiction library is separated by categories. This year I started learninghe the difference between young-adult and new-adult novels, and when I started learning about the principles of what it means to read something from a student’s, a teachers, a reader in general, and from an author’s perspective, all the kinds of literary devices that are out there. It was the reading that inspired me to do other things, and I would make any book recommendations to anyone who wishes to acquire the same kind of knowledge I got from reading. It is for these reasons people get close-minded sometimes, even though I observed drama in novels so bad I would be scared to read because I would not be able to keep myself from cringing, and the same applies to movies. Still, I learned that reading is a lot like having a conversation with the author or narrator. You engage in a monologue of asking questions and waiting to see if the narrator answers them. Since you and the narrator are the only two people interacting indirectly, perhaps it is not really a monologue.
I’m going to end this section with a revelation. I didn’t always listen to Western art music, though I have been exposed to it several a time. In seventh grade, when I was starting to conform to teenage life, I started to listen to the radio, and many of the songs I heard whilst in the gym I really liked because of its catchy rhythm, the lyrics, the ostinato, etc. In 2010 I was tested by a choir teacher, who diagnosed me with perfect pitch. In this context, diagnose shouldn’t be given negative connotations. After that I started to learn modern basic music theory, and I began to relearn how to play the piano. I started with oldies, but soon I found myself sliping back and back and back until I finally arrived at the olden times. So as you see, I used to be like everyone else in popular culture. My writing improved dramatically since then, and it might have to do with the Mozart effect. I soon discovered more reasons for liking Western art music than most people had as to why they primarily liked modern music. For this reason I cannot easily blend into the popular mainstream. It might be the fact that I am an old soul. Such people tend to become an empath.
So, that is all I have to say in this post, but like always, feel free to look up anything in here, and remember, everything I say can be contradicted, can have exceptions, information is based on best educated guess, and I may have forgotten to include something important long after I published this post. Merry Christmas to all of you!