me and my cello~

I remember it as clear as day, the day I took my diploma exam. It was just three of us is in the exam hall – me, my teacher as the pianist and the examiner. Make it four, if you want to count in the recorder. A lot of preparation went into the exam. Preparation was as early as nine months before the exam. A lot of thought went into selecting the best repertoire of songs that could best suit my playing style and songs that I could interpret well.

I can say with absolutely certainty that it is nothing like what you see on American Idol. Playing the cello is more than just singing your heart out to a million fans watching national tv. Playing the cello or any other musical instrument is about reaching out to your listener through the sounds it produces. With the ever popular electric guitar, most of the sound it produces is manipulated by the amplifier and all the other gadgets thrown in but with the cello or violin, your very fingers that press the strings and the amount of pressure you apply with the bow become the core and source of the sound it makes. In a nutshell, you are the player, the amplifier and the synthesizer.

When I finally selected and finalized my repertoire of songs for the exam, I knew I had to sit myself down and really think about how I wanted to represent the song to the examiner. The examiner is human like me, which means he will also be driven by a set of emotions. I knew it was going to be up to me to bring out a flare of emotions from within him if I was going to even stand a chance to pass the exam.

I started reading up on the composers. I wanted to step into their shoes to understand why they wrote the songs I was going to perform because behind every song written, there must be a specific inspirational motto or theme to it. I haven’t heard of anyone composing a song for the sake of composing one. Even if there were such a person, I am certain as day that the song will be of no value.

After understanding the songs from a more historical perspective, or at least I think I understood them, it was getting down to practicing the songs. Trust me when I say performing the song is the easier part of the process actually. Practicing the song to the point where you are comfortable to perform it is the grueling, painful, nerve-wrecking, finger-breaking process.

If you think I am kidding, here’s an overview of my practice menu. It was either a 5 day week practice or full 7 days:-

1. It’s about 2 to 3 hours per practice session;

2. Break a particular song into smaller sections;

3. Practice one particular section per song until I am familiar with the notes only. This involves a juggernaut amount of repetition of the same section.

4. Once I am happy that particular section, I move on to the next.

5. When I am finally done with knowing all the notes, then I finally move on to so called “adding” the emotions to the song.

6. When I am finally done with all the above, I try playing through my entire repertoire without stopping and start troubleshooting areas of concern in any particular song.

As much as the practice session sounds extensive, the professionals go deeper into it like 6 to 7 hours of non-stop practice and really go into more than just understanding the composer. It’s almost as if they want to be the composer. It’s amazing when you think about it!

Which reminds me, my practice sessions included a lot CD listening. Picking up CDs of different performing artistes to listen to how they interpret the songs. I really was trying to come as close as figuratively asking, “How do you express this song emotionally?”

Looking back at what I have achieved so far with my cello, if someone asked me if I am happy with where I am, I’d say no. There’s so much more I can do with the cello and there’s definitely more to learn about the cello and my cello. What I have learned so far, is probably just the tip of the iceberg or maybe even just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

At the end of the day, be it learning a musical instrument or simply learning to do something. It’s more than just having the right set of tools but it’s more important to have the right mindset to approaching it. Above everything else, it’s about liking what you are doing. I doubt I would have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for the fact that I really do love the cello and the sound it makes.

mistakes do happen~

As much as I hate to admit it, there are times where I am guilty of making the silliest of mistakes whether it's at home, at work or in a relationship. It can be as simple as forgetting to turn of the fire at the stove before I leave the house, or a simple e-mail to the client that is drafted incorrectly, or a as simple as forgetting to drop a loved one a sms to let them know you have reached home.

As simple as all the above examples may seem, it is never too simple to make the simplest of mistakes. If you may have found yourself in such situations before, you will probably be quick to note that as simple as the mistake may seem, some people don't seem to take them likely and you may well find yourself paying a penalty tad too expensive for such a mistake.

The horrible part about committing a mistake is that a mistake will always be a mistake whether it turns out to be a major blunder or a small hiccup. You probably know what I mean. To make matters worse, sometimes the more you try to explain a mistake, error, miscue, miss, or whatever word you want to coin it with, the more you are accused of coming out with excuses to cover for your mistake. It hurts and sometimes it even puts you down, especially when you earnestly mean to explain yourself.

I guess, the question that you and I will ask is really, "how to move on with a mistake done?".

Let's try to put it in a simple scenario - 5 year old kid, goes to the kitchen to try to get himself a glass of cold milk. Finds himself a little too short to reach for the packet of milk on the third rack in the fridge, tip toes almost reaches the packet, he slips, tips the packet and "smack" the packet of milk falls to the floor leaving a nice pool of milk on an expensive carpet.

Mom hears the ruckus, comes down and find kid with a sad face wondering how he got himself in the situation. Kid starts saying sorry to mom profusely in hope that he doesn't get apprehended too badly. In the end, Mom ends up doing clean up, Mom scolds the kid and probably gives one or two smacks on the bum and 5 year old cries himself to bed in regret.

It doesn't end there.

After all the clean up, scolding and smacks, Mom really isn't mad at the kid. Well, she was mad about the spilled milk but she's not going to be mad eternally at the kid. 15 minutes later, kid walks out of his room to see if Mom's fine, he find Mom's looking at him with soft eyes and says, "If something's too high for you to reach, grab the little stool there. If not, ask me next time.".

Little kid nods.........

Throughout the entire mess the kid made, Mom was probably upset with him for making the mess and not because little boy here wanted to get himself some milk. At the end of the day, when someone apprehends us for a mistake we have made, it is not without a reason. Would you scold someone for no reason? I am sure you won't. If you do, I think you might need some psychotherapy.

As much as getting apprehended for a wrongdoing leaves you feeling upset or angry about it, you've got to realise that there must be a reason someone is telling you you made a boo boo one way or the other.

That someone isn't mad at you personally, he's going to be mad because more often than not, when a mistake is committed, it is going to be tough to undo what's been done. Example above - spilled milk means no milk for the kid that day, not until and unless Mom buys a new packet plus the fact that mom has to do clean up.

We are not perfect and thus, we make mistakes. You and I have to understand one important thing in life - if it's anything, mistakes do happen. We just need to make sure we recognise the fact that we made a mistake, make up for it and then learn from it making sure at best, not to repeat it.

your cards

Have you ever played the card game, Black Jack? Where you try your luck with a deck of cards to get a combination totaling 21 or anything higher than the dealer of cards. I am sure you have since it is probably the most widely played card game in virtually any casino in the world.

In a nutshell, the dealer gives you two cards. What you do is to look at the total of those two cards and you are given the option to keep on taking cards to a maximum of five cards. Once you are done taking your cards, you'll the pitch your total against the dealer in hope to have a total more than him (assuming you don't blow your way past 21).

I never really liked this game since you place most of your winning chances on luck since you'll never really know what cards you get until you take which most of the time mean it is too late especially when your current total is 16 and you end up taking a 6! You'd be surprised how often this happens with gamblers, always attracting Murphy's Law.

So now, how does this relate to people like you and me who don't usually gamble or not gamble at all altogether?

Forget the money making or the money losing aspect of the game for now but let us really look at how a game called Black Jack can teach us a bit accepting our lives and circumstances around it.

We all go about our lives doing what we need to do, whether it's studying, working, buying groceries and so on and so forth but at the end of the day what and who we are today are sometimes the very result of the cards you and I were dealt with earlier in our lives. Of course I don't literally mean a deck of cards given to us but rather cards that metaphorically describe circumstances surrounding our lives.

I too have had to work with cards that I was dealt with. Many people have always ask me why is it that my older brother studied overseas while I studied locally. As much as three quarters of the population of this country think that studying overseas makes a hell of a difference, I tend to beg to differ. Any place you go to is only as good as the people you know in it, or at least that is my belief.

Anyway, back to my hand of cards I was dealt with. The answer to the question is simple - my parents couldn't afford sending me overseas to study. Not without having to take a study loan. So I decided to simply make the best of what I have, that is to study locally by way of looking for the best college I could find based on the limited budget I had to work with.

In hindsight, I think I turned out alright. I graduated successfully and I have a job (not the best job I can find but it'll help me survive and put food on the table).

I know for a fact that if back then I insisted on studying overseas, my parents would have taken the loan for me and sent me overseas but in my mind it was a really a question of whether it was completely necessary? I studied accounting, which means I didn't have any use for high tech labs or high tech science facilities. All I needed was good books and a library filled with those good books. The rest of it was up to me.

I speak to a lot of my friends who studied overseas and I take a glance and ask myself some of these questions:

1. Does he have a degree any better than mine? Not really.

2. Does he have a job that pays better? Not really.

3. Is his progression faster than mine? Not really.

4. Is he any better at handling stress? Not really.

5. Is he markedly different in work quality? Not really.

6. So then, did I make the right choice in not studying overseas? I would say, yes considering there isn't much difference between me and those who went overseas.

Hence, you can't get everything you want in this short life span of our's but you can get try to make the best of everything you have in this short life span. Bad situation or good situation, that's up to you to decide. If you are going to sit down thinking of your circumstances as bad, that's exactly how it is going to be until and unless you tell yourself otherwise.

You have your own cards, what cards you get is the will of God (if you do believe in one). Work with what you have and God might just decide do deal you one real good card in the near future.

So what are your cards?

sounds simple yet difficult

After three years of pondering and saving up cash bit by bit, I finally made the plunge to get myself a DSLR camera. Braving the attempt to go into photography after having been captivated by the beautiful photos I see monthly in my National Geographic subscriptions. I always ask myself, "How do these people capture such photos?". Some of them being the simplest of a person's smile, or a simple landscape, yet it leaves you staring at the picture for a long time as if the picture reaches out and captures your heart and attention.

So after three years of saving and pondering, I decided I could spare a little over two and a half grand on a DSLR to start off before I venture into getting different lenses and the works.

Starting off isn't difficult once you have read about the camera functions and how you can tweak the settings to get the desired photography effect. The difficult part of snapping a captivating shot is more about knowing when to find that moment - right now, I am still not really getting it yet.

I thought maybe I can start off with the simple pictures - abstract of pictures of objects and then move on to portraits. Abstract and objects are not too difficult as the arrangements and the framing of the shots are all up to me. But portraits are quite different.

Here are some samples of abstract/objects shots that I found quite satisfying.

I wouldn't go as far as to say my shots are award winning but I can at least look at them and tell myself that it looks soothing and it almost tells a story to the viewer.

But when I tried to get my hands started on portrait photos, I just seem to miss the mark and fail to capture the moments. Even if I do, it one way or the other misses out on the X-factor. What frustrates me most is the fact that simplest of things become the most difficult part of photography.

You are probably thinking if I am trying to confuse you but I am not trying to kid you. A simplest of shot like a smiling face can become one of the most of the challenging shots you can attempt to take. I used to think it was all about, "Say CHEESE!!" when in fact it is more than that. Trying to capture one's face is all about the emotions written in the person's face and the image the object wants to project. Most importantly, it's the natural feel I want to capture in the persons' face, yet I keep failing.

Maybe, maybe, it's really the simplest things in life that become difficult. After all, we are so caught up in the fast paced motion in our lives that it gives us the notion that everything else doesn't matter. And we finally get to seat ourselves down and do the simple things in life,something like eating breakfast on a Saturday morning can end up being difficult. I don't mean eating becomes literally difficult but you find yourself so used the fast paced routine that you gorge your breakfast so quickly that within a time frame of 15 minutes, you find yourself staring at an empty plate and realise that you had plenty of time of time to enjoy your breakfast yet you got into the routine of chucking it down your throat.

From the camera experience to the life's experience, I came to a conclusion that as much as something can sound simple, most of the time it is the things that sound simple that end being difficult..............

small people in a wealth of knowledge....

See the little guy in the picture? Don't you think we are like him?

We are small people living in this big world filled with infinite knowledge and experiences! Every day we live in this world is like opening the pages to the infinite series of Encyclopedia. We feel new things, we taste new things, we hear new things and it's like blowing our mind away with a whole lot of knowledge.

Of course, if you look at it from the little guy in the picture, it's like swimming in a wealth of knowledge.

Although we are surrounded by all the knowledge around us like all the encyclopedias surrounding the little guy in the picture, but the little guy won't obtain any knowledge. Not until he pulls out one of the books and starts flipping the pages. Like us, we can either be happy sitting down pretty enjoying the status quo in our lives or lift our hands, and start doing something to experience something new.

Sometimes by watching National Geographic channel during my free time, I learn a wealth of general knowledge which can really open my mind to what's out there in the big world of our's. At the end of the day, how much we know is really dependent on how much we see, feel and hear.

So don't sit down tight in your comfort chair and be a couch potato but go on out there and try doing something different!

When you least expect it~

Not everything can go to plan because plans can sometimes fail and more often than not plans to fail. It may not necessarily be plans but sometimes you may set out do something only to find yourself doing something completely different and achieving an entirely different result altogether.

Friday night I saw a beautiful crescent moon in the clear night sky and I quickly grabbed my camera to capture the beauty of the moon. All in all I spent a good 30 minutes out in the compound of my home trying to get a good camera shot of the moon. So there I was shooting away and at the mercy of the mosquitoes to have a night meal at my expense.

I tried moving around, playing with different angles, camera settings in trying to get a successful shot of the moon. I just kept snapping and snapping away in hope to get a good moon shot. Then as I was happily snapping photos of the moon I turned to my right to look at a nice frame of a flower pot and the night lamp shining down on it, creating a very interesting frame and so I snapped a shot of it.

After all that, I uploaded all the photos into my pc to start the filtering process. To my surprise, after all the effort trying to capture the moment of the beautiful moon, the best photo happens to be the picture of the flower pot! Take a look!

I know if you look at it, it's just going to be a flower pot and a shadow but when I look at it, I simply get a very soothing feeling when I look at it. Maybe it is the soft lighting and the shadow cast by it.

And if I try to go through the moon photos, I think the best photo I can choose is probably this one here.

Personally, I think the flower pot photo seems more captivating.

But my point throughout all this is that I set out first all gung-ho to capture photos of the moon but I ended up with a more satisfying picture of a flower pot and its shadow. If I look at it from other aspects of our lives, there are and there will be times when we set out do something - home decor, car modification, fitness goal, etc. only to find that we end up with completely different results and sometimes the results can be far better than expected.

Sometimes, we can't grip too tightly on trying to "stick" to the plan but we can sometimes take it a gear down and look at things objectively and tell ourselves, "if I can't walk on the line I set, I can at least walk parallel to it".

When you least expect it, good things can come to you rather you having to reach out for it! ;0)

the bitter taste

I wonder how many of us out there still remember the anatomy of our tongue? Remember where the bitter taste receptors are located on our tongue? It's at the back of your tongue just before our throats. When I was a kid I used to wonder why we have the bitter receptors at the back of our tongues. I mean it always made swallowing medicines or herbal soup difficult because no matter how hard I tried, there was simply no way to make the bitter stuff go around the bitter receptor area. You just have to taste whatever bitter stuff that you put in your mouth.

I asked my mom once about it and I guess she didn't really know how to answer such a question, especially when the one asking is only 5 years of age. What she told me was really interesting.

"I know how you dislike eating bitter stuff and drinking the bitter ginseng soup I always make for you. Remembered the last time I caught you trying to pour away the soup I boiled? I remembered no matter how hard you tried to squeeze your nose, you'd still taste the bitterness and start going, 'YUCK!' right after drinking my soup.

But there is a reason why all of us taste bitterness on theback of our tongues."

"Why's that?"

"It's God's way of telling us that everyone of us cannot escape from bitterness. As you grow up into a big boy, you will always face difficulties. You can't escape from life's challenges just like you cannot feel happy everyday. Sometimes you feel sad, sometimes you are happy. When you are happy is like when you eat a candy that puts a smile on your faces. And when you are sad is like when you pout every time I make you drink the bitter soup.

No matter how hard you try, there will be days when you are sad and down. That's the bitter part of life and there will be times when you have sweet happy times.

And that's why you have the bitter taste at the end of your tongue just before your throat!"