Music in my ears.

NOTE: Although I will continually update this list, this post may get bumped down from various other works I may write, so you may want to keep this tabbed if you're into following this work-in-progress.

Now anyone who has even a slight grasp of who I am, knows that I like music, and my ears allow the transition between headphones or speakers to the keys of a piano. This is what people call "playing by ear."

This summer, a side-project of mine was to look into figuring out as much music as possible, as it is one of the few big chunks of time I have without having to worrying about biochem problem sets, board meetings, pick-up games, and rendezvouses with various people, be it in person, on skype, or on the phone.

Now, what kind of music is fair game? In all honesty, I enjoy the challenge for pieces that are unconventional on the piano, but let's be honest, it's hard to do a rap when you're relying solely on musical notes (granted, I've done rap choruses). Anything else, well, if it gets stuck in my head, it's fair game. As you'll soon see, genres are being broken down faster than the Berlin Wall.

Songs in the bag:

Love Story - Taylor Swift

I'm Yours - Jason Mraz

Not Afraid - Eminem

Love the Way You Lie - Eminem

She Will Be Loved - Maroon 5

Hey Soul Sister - Train

童话 - 光良

都是你 - 光良

Fireflies - Owl City

I Could Sing of Your Love Forever - Sonicflood

Unashamed - Starfield

You Are Holy - Michael Smith

Bulletproof - La Roux

Cooler Than Me - Mike Posner

Basket Case - Green Day

Beautiful Girls - Sean Kingston

God of this City - Chris Tomlin

Safe - Phil Wickham

Libertango - Astor Piazolla

Happy Birthday to Me - Bulldog Mansion

Apologize - Timbaland ft. One Republic

Victory - Bond

The Scientist - Coldplay

Alejandro - Lady GaGa (Prepped to Record)

Holiday - Green Day

My Girl - The Temptations

Baby - Justin Bieber

Yesterday - The Beatles

A silly little song.

You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift

Dynamite - Taio Cruz

Hey There Delilah - Plain White Ts

Viva La Vida - Coldplay

This Love - Maroon 5

Pokerface - Lady GaGa

Airplanes pt. 2 - B.O.B ft. Hayley Williams and Eminem

Where Is The Love - Black Eyed Peas

Bad Romance - Lady GaGa

Beautiful One - Tim Hughes

You've Got a Friend in Me - Randy Newman

Halo - Beyonce

Our God - Chris Tomlin

My Heart Will Go On- Celine Dion

新鸳鸯蝴蝶梦 - 黄安

Clocks - Coldplay

Merry Go Round of Life - Joe Hisaishi

Beethoven Virus - Banya

Georgia on My Mind - Ray Charles

Songs currently partially down or could use some polishing (some are getting dusty):

My Girl - The Temptations - 8/14/10

Where Is The Love - Black Eyed Peas - 8/16/10

Bad Romance - Lady GaGa - 8/16/10

Through the Kaleidoscope - Steven Cravis

Merry Go Round of Life - Joe Hisaishi - 8/21/10

Halo - Beyonce - 8/18/10

Baby - Justin Bieber - 8/14/10

Bleeding Love - Leona Lewis - 8/19/10

You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift - 8/15/10

新鸳鸯蝴蝶梦 - 黄安 - 8/20/10

Holiday - Green Day - 8/14/10

Love Game - Lady GaGa - 8/19/10

Airplanes pt. 2- B.O.B. ft. Hayley Williams and Eminem - 8/16/10

Viva La Vida - Coldplay - 8/15/10

Clocks - Coldplay - 8/20/10

Hosanna - Hillsong

My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion - 8/18/10

The Only Exception - Paramore - 8/15/10

Dynamite - Taio Cruz - 8/15/10

青花瓷 - Jay Chou

Georgia on My Mind - Ray Charles - 8/23/10

Our God - Chris Tomlin - 8/18/10

Beethoven Virus - Banya - 8/22/10

King of Anything - Sara Bareilles

Songs currently on the list to do:

Hey There Delilah - Plain White Ts - 8/15/10

Alejandro - Lady GaGa - 8/13/10

Beethoven Virus - Banya - 8/17/10

The Only Exception - Paramore - 8/13/10

Beautiful One - Tim Hughes - 8/16/10

King of Anything - Sara Bareilles - 8/24/10
Georgia on My Mind - Ray Charles - 8/16/10

Our God - Chris Tomlin - 8/16/10

Dynamite - Taio Cruz - 8/13/10

Avalanche - Marie Digby

Sky Sailing - Brielle

I'm Letting Go - Francesca Battistelli

Mine - Taylor Swift

青花瓷 - Jay Chou - 8/16/10

发如雪 - Jay Chou

菊花台 - Jay Chou

You've Got a Friend in Me - Randy Newman - 8/17/10 (Recorded)

Keep in mind, I may have forgotten a bunch of songs, so this list is definitely tentative. Any recommendations? Let me know. I'll add it to this list.

Music is my drug.

I have to admit it: I must be hopelessly addicted. Some people say I have a problem, but they just don’t see what good comes from it. It gets expensive, in its own way, me spending all this time and energy on varied musical nonsense almost seems…counter-productive. People want me to do something useful with my life. But don’t you see? This is my little wormhole out of reality; to a place where time falls into my control. If it so calls for allegro con brio, then let the clock ticks quicken with my heartbeat; but if we’re humming a nice dolce andante, time will bend and slow to my whims.

How does one stay sane? Let me ask you this then, why do we dream? Our minds working ever tirelessly when we’re supposedly at rest; it is our way of staying productive, staying active. Once we lose that, then and only then, is when insanity sets in. The same can be said about the connection between music and me. This is how I “stay productive,” how I refresh myself after a long, tiring day at work. This is how time flies by. Now this may seem contradictory to the old proverb, “slow down and smell the roses,” but just because our minds stay active doesn’t mean they’re sprinting; as runners may know, slowly jogging for an extended period of time is less tiring and taxing on the body than sprinting and stopping in short bursts.

It used to sound like a chore, when my dad told me to stop playing video games and practice piano; of course my then childish desires were to stay glued to the television screen, guiding an Italian plumber wearing a red cap I’ve never met before jump through obstacles of a dream world. Little did I know that my dad was, in reality, giving me the set of keys that allows me to traverse through a dream world of my own.

I can’t imagine a world without music, a world where everything is silent. It may help me concentrate or focus on something in the short run, but if I had to give up my hearing, life wouldn’t be peaceful; rather, it’d be quiet…too quiet…suffocating.

What’s your drug?

Another Notch...

...in the belt of life. Ever since starting this long, tedious, sometimes repetitive road, there have been many "moments." These include: moments of brain freeze and sighs of near-defeat during the essay writing, moments of depression and anxiety staring at my glaringly less than perfect GPA and "good-enough" MCAT score, moments of hesitation before clicking the submit button and paying each school's application fee, and moments of joy when truly finishing and checking off each school on the giant checklist that I have made on a sheet of notebook paper.

Now being officially done with said secondaries, I suppose I've moved on from the writing phase to the waiting phase. Although now it is now completely out of my hands, I know He'll guide me to where he wants me to be, and it'll all work out in the end.

All this work and belt tightening is making me skinnier, I think.

Perhaps

Perhaps this scene was used as a snapshot in a movie. The fan is whirring, humming a cool tune, letting its song fill the small, dark room. As per usual, a solitary light coming from the laptop prevents the blackness from swallowing the entire space. It is mysteriously hot, uncharacteristic for this time of day, for this part of the nation, given this section of the year.

Perhaps that's why the young man is still up so late; the inability to find a comfortable spot to fall asleep in without overheating from simply his own body heat. Instead, he finds himself tapping away at a keyboard, diligently working; it's surprising how much more work he gets done at this time when everyone else is sound asleep.

Perhaps he should realize this incredibly ironic situation. His mother complaining to him, asking why he never works, and that all she sees him do in the daytime is slack off, play games, exercise, and read. Maybe if she would look past all that and see the young man's work as an end result, she'd be satisfied; but alas, that would be asking too much open-mindedness for someone who has long solidified their perspective like a concrete tunnel.

Perhaps it is he who should adapt; it's not like the young man doesn't understand where the opposing arguments and points are coming from. As he continues typing, he pauses, and chuckles to himself on the silliness of it all. Soon he shall be done with whatever it is that he had to do, before whenever the deadline was, and sent it to wherever it needed to go. The details no longer matter; all that is important, is that it is done.

Perhaps he'll get a breather when all of this clears up. Although the young man has rested quite often over the course of this summer, he doesn't exactly feel...relaxed, calm, poised to take on the last year. The whole process of waiting doesn't sit well with him; he likes to be moving. He likes to be in control.

Perhaps it is painstakingly obvious that this "he" is me.

Perhaps it isn't only me.

Perhaps.

How do I stop...

…this wagon of worry, this pushcart of pride, this locomotive of little faith?

I feel more and more out of control and the result of a crash is never a happy ending.

I need to stop feeling like I need to be in control of everything I do; truth be told, I can control little of what’s to come. I know that these things are better left to hands much more capable than my own, His hands, and yet I am unwilling to let go of whatever “free choice” I have.

I need to stop comparing myself to other people. Be it the result being feeling of inadequacy, or the unsubstantiated sense of pride for being better than someone at a certain aspect, it is never to the expense of anyone else. That may be the case now, but just having these types of feeling means that the mindset is still there, and only sooner and not later, will this spill out more catastrophically than the oil spill in the gulf. Why do I subject myself to meaningless comparison, when I know that everyone’s conditions and backgrounds are different, hence listing apples and oranges?

I need to stop actively looking for an answer, but rather, open my mind and my heart to what He has to respond. He’s been there, at times very clear to me, and other times, not so much. I need to stop thinking like a child, “If I can’t see it, then it’s not there.” This mentality just highlights the weakness of my faith and not completely trusting what the Lord has in store for me.

I need to find the brakes, and hopefully do not stomp on the gas while trying to do so.

The Writer

It’s silent…disturbingly silent. Even if it is 3 in the morning, you’d expect the crickets to be out serenading each other. In the middle of the darkness, a dim blue/off-white glow of a laptop computer monitor flickers. In front of it, the faint silhouette of a man, hands on his head, shaking with disapproval. The keyboard clicks a few times, and words disappear off the screen. The man has been at this since he ate Chinese take-out for dinner, and hasn’t left his chair since answering the door to tip the high school boy who drove him his food.

Writer’s Block? More like Writer’s Great Wall of China, the man thinks to himself. Frustrated, he throws a crumbled fortune cookie at his overflowing trashcan, bouncing out, showing an ironic fortune: Your ideas will inspire others. He looks at his watch—3:18am. With a sigh, the man looks at what he has accomplished thus far; 8 prompts, highlighted in bold, lines of personal notes italicized, and a variety of key points underlined. Unfortunately, none of that translates to the necessary yet elusive essay form that will satisfy the requirement.

Tap, tap, tap, tappity, tappity tap. The cursor dances across the screen, words left in its wake. It halts, seemingly realizing the sloppy trail it has been leaving behind, and quickly retreats to clean up its mess. The man is taking two steps forward, three steps back; this must be the hardest assignment he has had yet. The fact that there is a deadline does nothing but add stress to the entire already dicey situation.

He tries to reread the text that is already jotted down, but prevents himself from deleting it. He quickly hits Ctrl + S, and closes the lid of the laptop, letting the poor thing finally go to sleep. Now that the room returns to being pitch black, the man rolls onto his bed, and lies there thinking, patiently waiting for the darkness to lull him to sleep.

------

On a completely unrelated note: cheers to half a century of posts in 2010.

An Experiment

Now I'm not sure how many people I've told, or how many people have picked up on this, but my left is stubbornly refusing to admit it is the off-hand. From experiences and slowly noticing the habits that I have across various activities, a story that my mom told me of my childhood makes more and more sense.

My mother tells me of a time where when I was young, before I could speak. I would grab everything with my left hand, and swing it around, only using my right hand to perhaps hold onto something that did not quite capture my attention or that I wanted to "put away for later." Now growing up in the stereotypical Chinese family, where chopsticks are ALWAYS held (not so strict anymore, I guess) with the right hand, as I grew older, my mom said that I would slowly be "corrected" to prefer my right hand to my left.

To this end, I believe that I was truly ambidextrous at some point of my life. At some point, my right hand most have felt just as natural as my born-instinct to use my left hand. I think the tipping point of no return was when I entered pre-school, where we started to learn how to write the ABCs. I think that day I felt pretty good with my right hand, and thus the teachers taught me to write right-handed, and that was that.

Now there are certain aspects or habits that all point to why I am not naturally-right handed. The biggest indicator, is that I am completely left-foot dominant in soccer, where it is pretty hard to switch dominant feet. My penmanship with my left hand, is that of perhaps a 3rd grader, someone who just never really learned cursive (which leads to many additional questions). Whenever I'm drinking any beverage, I always reach out for it with my left hand, unless it's more convenient to take it from someone with my right. Finally, I may dribble with my right hand, but I am a left-handed shooter. At any rate, now as a 21-year old, I decided it was going to be fun to experience what it was like when I was little: to be left-handed.

I went to work today, and basically did everything that would normally be done with my right, with my left. To my pleasant surprise, most tasks, such as pipetting, sorting tubes, writing on plates, were just as easy, if not easier with my left-hand.

Coming home, I suppose the only task that was significantly challenging was pretty obvious: eating dinner with chopsticks. After getting my left hand locked into the chopstick hold, I felt like I was following the 1-2-3 step directions of how to use chopsticks seen on disposable chopstick sleeves. "Now you can pick up anything!" If only it were that easy, then I would have been tearing it up with my lefty chopsticks.

I found that today was a very enlightening experience, that within my day at the lab running experiments, I was running my own, personal experiment. Perhaps one day I can return to being truly ambidextrous, but that may have to wait until much later in the future.