Guess what I found OUT out OUt ouT today?

I’ve got a blister… in my callous on my left hand’s index finger. Cool right? my hands are full of callous.. I guess my “interaction” with the double bass yesterday blister my my index finger (again)… this time, it happened in the callous (NEW!)… so it doesn’t hurt.. haha.. so cool… a blister in a callous…

Since this post carries an enSOUNDenment tag, I’ll have to give some useful insights into the music world… so… today I will give an advice on maintaining finger strength when you have no time to practice. The tip: fiddle with your pen… applicable during really boring classes…

I’ve got a technical exam tomorrow, and the past few days have been packed with rehearsals and tests.. so as I was in a certain class… (I found out yesterday that my coursemates read my blog… so cannot be too specific)… I was thinking: “How do I maintain the finger strength and dexterity that I worked so hard at developing the past few days?” You can lose a lot in just three days of no practice… then I remembered the days in Form 5 when I was really into playing with pens and just moving it up and down between my fingers.. what I remembered most is the roughness and tiredness of my fingers after those “play” times during supremely boring classes…

So tips to everyone wanting to develop or maintain finger strength and dexterity when not having your instrument with you… fiddle with your pen…

you can go bonkus at this pen tricks website: http://www.pentrix.com/

the basic exercise that I recommend is this: http://www.pentrix.com/tricks/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=23

but try between all fingers except between index and thumb…

I hope I’m getting paid for this…

“I’ll be going back next on April 27th…”

“Wow… so late? I don’t know how you can stand it…”

Honestly, I can’t. But here’s how I seemingly am able to.

Cheng Yee is blur. I bet a lot of you will agree and to a greater extent even say that it’s an understatement. It is true. In fact I’m hopeless in gauging state of emotions and finding out their causes. I’ve been feeling down. I’ll blame insufficient exercise, I’ll blame bad sleeping habits and I’ll blame the stress. It isn’t until my parents give me a call, and half way through the conversation that I realise that I’m tearing up, that I start think of other reasons. I’d think, is it because I’m alone most of the time, or is it because I don’t get to talk as much or as personally as I could when I had my close friends with me. 

I’ll remain clueless, continually praying for forgiveness for being such a joyless Christian. Probably blame tiredness and busy-ness. It won’t be until a few days after someone mentions the word HOMESICK, that I begin to suspect that I’m homesick.

By the time I’ve figured it out, it’s almost time to go home. So there you go. Guess what, taking the lesson from semester one, I’ve managed to figure out I’m homesick this semester in ONLY A MONTH after the depression started. Haha, vast improvement indeed.

And I’ve figured out alot of things. I’m not only homesick, I’m in doubt, I’m fatigued, lonely and broken all at the same time. Plus, I’m now very emotional and am very easily moved by music and literature. Score! haha…

The only reason I’m surviving, is that God’s been faithful. Even when I’ve not been faithful. So credits to The Big Guy Upstairs.

To the guy who asked me this,

“Then when is the time for building up and restoring?”

I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t want to be restored for the fear of being broken. This is my human answer.

This post is completely human. It does not try to rationalise the issues but rather just to present the natural response of Cheng Yee in a straight-forward manner. Cheers!

After finishing a tutorial at the language faculty, I was going home… guess what I saw…

This is the best bike modification I’ve seen… the guy added concrete seats for two more passengers… fantastic.. now it’s a three seater… my goodness… I wish I could have thought of this.. I could have ferried my little sister and little brother to school all in one trip!! Oh.. wait.. I don’t have a little sister.. nor a little brother.. oh well.. but it’s still a ingenious!!

I remember one of Pas. Keneth Chin’s sermon in PPBC last year, in which he explained the reason God created areas of needs in an individual’s life. One example given is,

“When you’re finally comfortable being a single, that’s the best time to go into a relationship…”

That really struck me. The example that he mentioned was something I already knew and agreed very much with. You can’t be a good couple until you know how to be single. But what really threw me off was the application of the concept of need on all other areas of my life.

Which brings me to this: I’m getting very comfortable pursueing musical skills and developing them. Too comfortable I might add. It’s no longer a drag to sit down and do scales, major, minor and chromatic according to metronome for two to three hours straight (I don’t do it that often, but I’d like to!). I thank God that I’m enjoying my course. But, the risk of me forgetting to keep on track in God’s plan is higher.

I must confess I am now much more confused about the developments and unclear of what God intends to do. Doesn’t help that I’m in my comfort zone again. In just over  a months time, I’ll be in another battle zone. It’s tiring to always be fighting in different battles across the year. But when I’m in the heat of battle, that’s when I realised that everything in me is screaming:

“I know this place. It’s like dejavu. This is the battle I was meant to, no, born to fight. This is the battle that God will give me and I will glory in the Lord. So hostile and so familiar is this place. I feel alive!”

I find my peace not in knowing that I am needed (I am dispensable), but that I am exactly where God wants me to be.

p.s. Cheers to the STPM and SPM’ers! The next step is a big one, go where God wants you to be. That’s what’s most important.

I’m on top of a very large ball that is pinning. Some people have named it Earth. Why I don’t know. Of all the things to name a ball. I’d call it Jeff. As in Jumbo Extension For Ferrets. Because I believe that there are quite a few ferrets in this world.

There are probably seventy six thousand crazed lollipops waiting to take over the world right now. Yes this news is hard to digest. But if you eat one, and tell another five people to do the same, we can evade this invasion, feed the hungry and create the first ever chain eating email. Or food chain email.

Some of you may notice that in recent weeks, you have yet to forget even once, that you have to breath. That’s amazing. I applaud you for your various methods and efforts to remind yourself to breath. One of my friends kept turing blue to remind himself to breath. Fantastic. I wonder how many LED’s it takes to light him up like that. Squirrels have relatively life span. That’s why they don’t play the games. That’s why they eat nuts. That’s why they are called squirrels. Actually, this was written by a squirrel that only knows how to give fragmented information.

*shove*

I apologize for that, I just went for a cuppa of coffee and some squirrel came and low-jacked my lappy. I should start a coffee shop callded cuppa.

Cuppa – That’s what we serve it in!

I’ve had to do an assignment on Brahms Symphony. So I did my research and found out that Brahms developed a rather interesting technique of composition. He would call the melody to play in triple meter while the harmony will play in duple. That’s like your left hand playing triplets and your right hand playing crochets.

The moment I read that, I remembered a few days ago when I spotted a book in the resource room: 1001 Blues Licks. I noticed that quite a number of the licks were in 4/4 meter but had mostly triplets for the licks.

This bewildered me. As an electric guitarist, I would think that the more notes per beat the cooler the sound. So I’d think a improvisation using semiquavers is really cool. So I decided to give it a try. Last week in church, when we reached the instrumental part, I tried playing triplets instead of quavers. The result was amazing. My improvisation sounded more melodious and legato because there were less notes and each note could be played out. Also, because there is less notes to be played per beat, there’s more time for me to think what to play next. That’s not all, the nature of triplets is such that it has a delay feel to it and that gave so much depth to the melody I was trying to express.

So, never underesitmate the brilliance of triplets in duple time. Do give it a try!