You know how you sometimes listen to an audio recording or video of yourself and the sound of your own voice just makes you cringe as if someone is stabbing a ripe banana into one of your ears and holding a jar full of baby spiders to the other? Yeah, I'm far too familiar with the feeling. Fortunately, I've grown accustomed to it over the years, as I've gotten used to being filmed and hearing myself during playbacks of videos. Now, while I've accepted the fact that I sound like a beefy Himalayan milkmaid with a tinge of wannabe-thug at the edges, most people still have a difficult time coming to terms with the sound of their own voice.
Today, my great friend Emma yelled something funny and sneezed shortly thereafter. I don't know why, but the way she did these two verbal things reminded me of the Lost Boys from the 2003 live-action version of Peter Pan. I know that's the weirdest connection ever, but I couldn't help but tell her: "Emma, if you were to do a voice over for an animated movie, you'd play a 10 year old boy." I guess she didn't know whether to feel offended or not, but she laughed her butt off for a good 3 and a half minutes. It just made me think about how people sound compared to the way people look. If someone were to ask me to describe Emma's voice, I'd likely respond with "feminine," "smiley" and "small-ish," but then I realize that I probably took those adjectives from what I know about her from LOOKING at her so often. Then I reversed the process of sight-to-sound and thought about people whose voices I've only heard. Like, who does the voice of Swiper the fox on Dora? Or Chihiro on the English version of Spirited Away? I like to look people up when their voices are particularly interesting. Like, I always thought Finn from Adventure Time seemed like he'd be a cute guy (turns out he's not too harsh on the eyes); also the guy who played the voice of Nemo in Finding Nemo turned out pretty cute, God bless him and his post-pubescent days. (see below)
Now I can't help but wonder what people would think I look like if they only listened to my voice for a while. On the flipside, I wonder what people would imagine my voice to sound like if they only saw pictures of me. Hopefully not like a beefy Himalayan milkmaid. Food for thought.
Today Miss Pyle asked us two questions in class. One of them was: "How many of you think you could have an intelligent, thorough conversation about the situation in Sudan right now?" My hand flopped around at my shoulder, indicating that I want to look like I have a somewhat decent understanding of Sudanese politics while in all honesty I'm really am rather clueless at this point. The second question she asked was: "How many of you think you could have an intelligent, thorough conversation about at least three African countries?" In response to this question, a million facts and memories whizzed through my mind as I suddenly recalled all of the research I've done on Africa, which is truly a quite fascinating continent. Let me tell you a little bit about my past with Africa.
My first in-depth exposure to Africa was when we were doing the Human Rights paper in 9th grade. You're probably assuming that I did some report on refugees or starvation or child armies, aren't you. I actually wanted to do something related to language and the barriers that languages can create, as this was around the era in which I was first discovering my love for Korean culture. Luckily, I found that South Africa is a hot bed of conflict due to language barriers. South Africa is a country comprised of many people of various ethnic, geographic and cultural backgrounds, including Dutch and English settlers as well as MANY tribes of Southern Africa. As a result of this smorgasbord of people, South Africa has 11 official languages. ELEVEN. Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, Tswana, Tsonga, Sotho, Venda, Northern Sotho and Southern Ndebele. Yeah. As you can imagine, this creates quite a bit of conflict within the country. Government documents have to be translated into almost a dozen languages (at a great expense), mass amounts of prejudice arise among neighbors and coworkers, and children are punished at school for speaking certain languages (even if that is their native tongue). Not good at all. So yeah, that's something important and hardly recognized by the rest of the world.
My biggest experience with Africa was last year when I was on the African Union for Model UN. I was representing the country of Gabon and man was I reppin' it good. I even had the Gabonese national anthem memorized, yo. Unfortunately, Gabon doesn't have a lot to do with the three prompts we were discussing (and I was a quivering scaredy cat when it came to speaking in front of the whole African Union), but I learned so much about Africa. We came together to settle a dispute on the eradication of malaria and discussed the use of DDT, an extremely effective pesticide that both exterminates mosquito populations and causes birth defects in humans. I had a great point about using DDT only in mosquito breeding grounds that were a safe distance away from crops and drinking water used by the local Africans, but no one listened to me. I'm still a little bitter about that. The best part of the conference was when we were discussing how to handle the M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose views and actions resemble those of the SPLA in South Sudan. On the last day, we decided to release a press statement about moving in on the rebel troops. To our surprise, the leader of the M23 rebel group, Sultani Makenga, paid a visit to our conference room. He came in clad in camouflage cargo pants, threatened to kill us all in an improved Congolese accent, and proceeded to murder our security guard with a shot from his Nerf gun. What a day. If that doesn't make you want to join Model UN, I don't know what will.
Between Gabon, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I think I could have a fairly lengthy and intelligent conversation about how intriguing of a place Africa is. Now go listen to Gabon's national anthem.
