The Path of Time

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 ...

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 yo...

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. ...

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...

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 lea...

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 inte...

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 you...