Swooned...for 5 mins

A guy is most attractive when he is playing a musical instrument, don't you think? I attended a lunchtime concert put up by the Sing*pore Chinese Orchestra at the university campus last week, and there was this piece that featured 2 soloists, 1 male and 1 female. The female soloist was playing the pipa while the guy was playing what seemed like a smaller, more stout version of it.

He doesn't seem like a local Chinese, more like from one of those native tribes who live in some far-flung region in China. He was totally relaxed--occasionally he would break out in a grin while listening to the 50-odd-member orchestra playing behind him, or smile at the female soloist (so cute! I thought to myself.)--and yet his playing was so intense. His fingers were shaking and moving so fast over the strings they were a blur and he looked like a case of advanced Parkinson's disease. Very, very cool.

I wanted to see on the giant screen whether he has dimples when he smiles, but the inept camera people seemed fixated with this burly, mafia-look-alike drummer who looks like he earns extra cash by playing for a lion dance troupe or has a side job as the head cook of a zhi cha stall. Dang it.

But when the piece ended, so did his aura of attractiveness. He got up to take a bow and shake the hand of the conducter etc etc, and seemed just a bit erm, too sissy for my liking? Drats. :P

Much afraid

"That's what I'm afraid of

I don't have the will to change

Not when it's so easy, to be easy"

-- Easy, Folk Implosion

That's probably the thing I'm scared of the most now. How easy it is to be lured into wrapping myself in a kind of cocooning inertia, and how hard it is to fight my own innate instinct for the comfort of sameness.

Eh, where did my weekend go?

This is going to be a terribly self-indulgent post as I'm going to whine about weekends, or rather, how I squander away the precious weekends.

I just find myself caught in this loop of wasted weekends--every week, the same thing happens: Friday morning comes around, and I heave a little sigh of relief and say a bit of thanks. By afternoon, I've already lost the will to even pretend to work, and can be found surfing the web listlessly for amusement or having empty, emoticon-filled conversations that only the idle can muster with pals via MSN.

Friday evenings are not a good time to go out as I'm pretty much exhausted by then, so I usually go straight home, intending to watch all-night TV with some potato chips or cookies. Then, I concede defeat by 9.30pm and quit for the night to catch up on sleep since I've become a weekday insomniac these days.

Saturdays and Sundays would be a mindless blur. Lots of sleeping, channel-surfing, with a dash of reading and blogging and ironing and snacking, or movies and friends and coffee sometimes. That's it. I've slept my weekends away again! On Sunday night I would suffer last-minute, where-did-my-weekend-go panic and try to repent by staying awake as late as possible to cram in some leisure reading or whatever. So when Monday morning comes, I would, bleary-eyed, heave a sigh of resignation and resolve to make the next weekend different.

How nice it would be if I could do a different thing every weekend. Organise a family picnic, attend a concert, go roller-blading. See, the pangs of guilt are starting already.

Try and try again

The grade 2 violin exam which I took yesterday, my first music exam, was something that I've been dreading for 2 months.

I was very reluctant to sign up for the exam initially, because learning the violin for recreational purposes was stressing me up enough as it was, and also because taking the exam, which I wasn't even sure of passing, require hundreds of dollars. I grumbled that I must pass it or quit learning it.

The violin is something that I wrestle with. I stumbled upon music late in life. My fingers are stiff, and my hands, too small for my full-sized violin. I don't have a good sense of rhythm and my sight-reading ability is questionable at best. I'm a nervous wreck when playing the violin and always fumble over notes. I just wasn't making any improvement, and my enthusiasm was waning dangerously.

I still wrestle with it, but after 2 months of more intensive practising, sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I get it, like I'm really playing music. My fingers know where to go, the bowing feels smooth and loses its usual jarring quality, and I feel like I'm actually getting into the groove of it.

Anyway, the exam was a disaster. I was so nervous my mind drew a blank when I was asked to play the F major appregio. So silly of me to practise it over and over again and only to panic and forget it when it matters the most. The rest of the exam was a blur. I came out in a shocked daze, and proceeded to binge on a subway sandwich and pepperidge farm chocolate cookies.

Anyway, yah, 2 months of numbing practising have actually made me realise how much I wish to really play the violin, and not wrestle or fumble with it and make all those terrible screeching noises with it again. So even if I flunk this time, I've decided to continue learning it. Try and try again.

Places I want to go (II)

After more than a month of discussion, my friend H and I have booked that holiday thing. Perth, here we come! People have been saying that Perth is a boring place for retirees and old people but I think that's what we want: to let loose in a nice, quiet, little city (we are both, after all, spoilt, bratty city gals) with little shops, cafes, marketplaces, a nice park and surrounded by picturesque natural wonders, like what picture is showing above. Look at the sky! The water! I was telling H that I want to walk along the jetty that extends into nothingness and just jump straight into the blue water. Woo hoo! This is going to be one cool, crazy trip.