a little Xtra

Singing ACAPPELLA!!!!


Well, it's sunday morning and I've survived TWO acapella concerts and i'm trying to get back down to work now. Still on a high from last night tho'..


THURSDAY NIGHT.

my voice was TOTALLy gone. THe tenors were TOTALLY OFF.. so were the rest of us actually. It was so bad, i was getting real jittery. Even 5 minutes before the start of the jazz band, we were trying to squeeze in last minute pract in a corridor.. Andrew backed into a light switch and threw us into utter darkness and confusion as we hit the opening notes for Mo MO Ai Ni. " are we THAT bad?," Kat wondered .Then Ken discovered the offending lightswitch and cuffed Andrew...right into Wei. The 4 guys got into a scuffle while the gals stood utterly bemused out of harm's way. After a mintue of so, we finally got into the song. Everytime one of the tenors went off, the other would smack the guilty oneand it would end in a shoving match or a giggling match. One base kept singing soprano.

5 minutes before the performance. Wei was screaming at Andrew something about him being a fat ass coz the belt he borrowed wouldn't fit.. and something about someone telling him to wear cargo pants for a concert.. oh that was real funnie. everyone showed up in a suit and him in cargo pants. I decided to wear a hat in case we malued ourselves too badly, then at least i had an outlet to hide my face. And the tenors ... wait. a minute. Where were they? We craned our necks. Van and Jess were wringing their hands, I was worrying about our still less than perfect pitch, the bases and Kat were singing with the choir and we had to make a stage appearence in less than 5 minutes... And the tenors had gone whoop whoop.
FInally they made an appearance... their arms loaded with icecream and sandwiches???!!!!

I was totally tensed thru out mo mo ai ni. We hit the opening chords ok. And WE MADE it through the song without a hitch!!! OMG. we even pulled off the transition with aplomp. something we've never done b4!!! WOW. Coca cola was a hit too, the audience chuckled as we finished with a grand.. Pissssssssssss... I was jumping with joy, exchanging handslaps with the tenors and punches with the basses and hugs with the gals. We did it!!!! OMG. I just love the feeling when you pull off a concert !


The NOrth in Concert


HH and I went to watch the Idea of North at her church. We scooted in early to get front row seats. To me utmost delight, during the first song, the tenor Nic came to shake hands with us. I narrowly missed having my name used in a song. Thank god he didn't do it , coz he needed a name that ended with "een" and i was one of the 3 gals in the front who had a name that ended with that. So he ended up serenading a red race caucasian gal next to HH. The performance was pure magic. This group won teh harmony sweepstakes in US in 2003.. In league with rockapella and the likes. Their harmony was just sooo tight you couldn't rip it apart at all!!!! HH actually Won a Cd in a draw.. yez. the gal next to her drew HH's name. It was so funny. But hell, she got the NOrth's CD.. :) we were bouncing around in delight. Wow!!!! Wat a lucky night! The north ended with a song where they got the audience to harmonise with them. Yez, we were turned into a choir. and boy we sounded good!!! THe audience roared for more at the end of the performance and we gave them TWO encores!!!! . Oh what a night!!!!

UP and down we go.

After a pleasing singing session yesterday, we just plumented right into dismaying cacophony today. It was more due to the distractions during the practise sessions than to the skill level of the group itself. I've heard us improve and i don't believe it could just all have shot to hell in the small space of 24 hours. The tenors have improved by leaps and bounds but the rest of us just keep detoriating. It's disheartening and our moral is sure on an all time low. ( well.. could hear it by the way we kept going flat :P ) Hai

. i've my Xmas acapella cd blaring now. With the romantic strains of "have yourself a merry little xmas" my mind keeps drifting to a holiday i took a few years ago where we were the mountains of california, in a little lodge complete with a quaint, fireplace and typical rustic furniture complete with teddy bears and rocking chairs and lovely rugs with the snow falling softly outside and twinkling christmas lights. How I yearn to see the very weather phenomenen I was named after. Snow.

Strike today. Queer. the whole of melbourne is on holiday and life still goes on in med fac in melb uni. The only stark reminder was that the brownless med lib remained dark and quiet with a crowd of bemused med students loitering outside. Strugglin with my PBL now. 0___o . it's awful. terrible.. urgh. the kidneys are an utter nightmare. the liver seems almost angelic now.

There's a light coming from my window..

THose familiar strains from the song titled "acapella" . How i yearn to hear them being sung again.

There's a light coming from my window,
And it shines down on the street,
there's some guys standing in the corner,
singing that good old harmony.

The lite from my window
sets the stage for a street side symphony,
I hear them laugh
i hear them sing
singing that good ole' melody.

Despite, my initial misgivings, the acap group's momoaini is coming along. Well, at least it sounds like a song now, tho' i suspectg that jing2 , the arranger of the song, would have dearly loved to slaughter me for allowing it to be sung in such a manner. But hell, it sounds better. I 'm just praying one of us doesn't mess up the pitch on the actual day. We're lucky to get stable basses, but the tenors do give me a bit of a worry. :) But what they lack in pitch, they really make up in enthusiasm. Even as I bear down on them in exasperation during practices, they keep us in stitches . Tho' some of the singing stints did degenearate into a cacophony of hapless giggles when they eased the already wavering pitch into something ludicrous.

I've sung in 4 or more acapella groups, but most of the time, the singers I've worked with were experienced or had already had some choir background. This present group reminds me of Zing, the group my friends and I founded in JC. It was an all gal group, formed out of defience and to put it mildy, despair. It was formed when 4 dejected gals trotted out of the classroom after going for our JC's resident acap group's ( fringe) auditions. I remember screwing up my auditions totally. Goodness knows how, but I managed to clinch a place in Fringe . But i remained as a member of Zing even tho' practises with 2 acapella group and being on the committee of a very very active choir were enough to drive me insane. Singing just took control of my life. And to put it honestly, I found my sessions with Zing a lot more fun. WHy? Well, the Fringe ppl had all the musicality, since they all got in with auditions, but the bonding just wasn't there. We were just a bunch of ppl, who were handpicked and thrown together to sing. When we started Zing, we were a couple of gals, with hardly any singing experience, who went on stage, wholly unprepared ,singing 2 simple songs and totally mortifying oursevles and the audience. But as we gained experience and skill, our repetoire and quality of singing grew, and that's where all the problems began. THe quality of the singers was hauled up. SOme had to go. I vetoed the suggestion. THe group was formed for the love of music, why the streaming? A few more tiffs regarding a few members' ( including my) apparently non-existant commitment to the group further strained relationships and I stepped down as the leader. We did recouncile, but after a good 1/3 of the group left or were kicked out. I never quite regained my enthusiasm for Zing nor the friendships with some of the girls. What might seem to be a mundane and rather silly line of events actually wrecked my life in JC. I felt betrayed and wronged by some of the girls whom I had considered my closest friends in JC. Perhaps that's why I"m pretty cynical about friendships these days.

You're probably chuckling now as you read. All that emotions over a singing group? Well, it's more than that. It's a bond between a couple of pple who love to warble. AAnd you'll be surprise how much you treasure that bond. Acapella singing isn't easy, it's a skill and you need lotsa time and experience to master it. Somehow, being mortified at numerous concerts does bring you together. You get addicted to it. It's dope man, pure dope. But like the drug, it also tears you apart in spite of it's innocuous sounding nature. . It makes you forget your problems yet it loads you with more. In my 2nd year, I was the co-music coordinator for Zing but I left the group later on the pretense of not having enough time. I threw myself into Fringe. Yeah, we had more technically demanding repetoire, and i did enjoy my 2nd year more, but i missed zing and it's carefree moments. Fringe practises were all business. We were there only becoz the school wanted us to sing for the concert. End of story. We weren't even close friends. You need alot more then music to hold ppl togethere. I left the choir with a bitter sweet taste in my mouth. I put my scores aside and told myself to find another interest. Perhaps in dancing or smth.. but like they say, once you start singing, you'll never kick the habit .

So here i am, in Melbourne uni, once again swept up in a group. And I'm shamed to admit that i've let my yearning for the quality of the music override the enjoyment of just making it. I've metamorphosised into the very ppl whoes views I once spurned. K's right. We should go for the concert, if not for the experience, then for the enjoyment. Making music isn't just about how well you do it, it's about how much you enjoy it. I'ts about making that magic work together and above it all, enjoying yourself.

And watching this new, motley group struggle to get thru one of Zing's more technically demanding pieces, I 've gotta admit, we're doing pretty well already. Who knows, given some time and a little training, we';ll mature into a better group than Zing or Fringe? :P perhaps i'm getting my hopes too high.. but hey. we've to start somewhere~! And i'm grateful for the chance to even find a bunch of ppl with the same interest! I'll keep my mouth shut then :P


they're singing soul to soul
brother to brother
Acap pella!
And it sounds good to me.

Rocking around the dead and feeding the living

Well, school has started, but i realised i forgot to blog about last friday, one rather busy, yet most poignant day of my holidays. It started the week before, when HH dropped into the library chair across me, and wondered out loud," I wonder what I have gotten myself into..." Logic told me to just give a weak grin and continue to nose around my pathology book, but curiosity got the better of me. Well, like they say, curiosity kills the cat. I had gotten myself a booking on Friday to go to HH's church to cook for 20 odd refugees.

So there I was, on a lovely, hot friday morning, sitting on a bench outside victoria market and feeling my black boots melt in the sun, which contemptously played peek a boo with me. After removing my jacket and putting it back on for the umpteenth time, I spotted HH popping out of Mac's. We waited for the rest of her Overseas Christian Fellowship ( OCF) group. HH had to drag me away from a busker who was putting on a magical performance with his old guitar. SHe managed to get me to the veggie shed as I strained to hear him launching into a spirited rendition of " something stupid." We wondered around the market buying veggie and then meat. HAlal meat. Wait, there wasn't any here. We approached a middle eastern lady for help and i nearly collapsed into to giggles when I realised we had asked a catholic nun where to get halal meat.

After exhausting 3 chicken stalls, HH and I went up to brunswick for the meat while the rest started cooking. We met up in church to storm the kitchen. After running around for 1 hour plus and sweating it out over 3.5 kg of chicken ( eeks) we were ready to go. I had to go off to school early for my practs in the anatomy room so I left. Perhaps I never got to meet the refugees, and never got to see the fruits of my labour that morning, but a weird sense of euphoria took wind in my heart, knowing that I helped to do something meaningful. Faith had nothing to do with it. I was a lone buddhist admist devout christians in a church, but it didn't matter. My HH told me later that the lunch was fascinating. She was trying to hold a conversation with a family from brazil which mostly consisted of wild gesticulations and doodling. And a russian scientist gave her a blow by blow comparision of nuclear missles in the US and russia. I wished I could have been there. I definitely will make another lunch. :P I think it'll be an unforgettable experience.

I bought myself a chicken burger and tried to scuff it down. THe wind was blowing the lettuce into my face. After that I rushed to the anatomy lab. Most ppl have a morbid fascination with cadavars. When I get questioned about the course, lot's of the conversation is centered on the cadavars. Guess pple have a morbid fascination with death. Personally, i think the living scares me a lot more. I rather stare at the cadavar than look at a operation. Contrary to belief, the anatomy room looks nothing like the freaky morgues in the b grade horror shows. Ok, yez, the white walls, clinical looking atmosphere are standard. So are the few hundred bodies lying on tables, covered in white sheets, the blunt, stained surgical equipment, the brains floating in the tub with bits of disintigrated liver and the metal tanks full of torsos and preservatives. But the bleak picture ends there. As few ppl as there were today, there was never an eerie feel about the room. A radio blared J lo's Let's get loud in the corner, ppl chatted and joked over the cadavars. Perhaps the worst thing about the cadavars was the awful smell. It wafted into the room beyond, a mixture of lap chiong and char siew. it took me ages to be able to cook and consume lap chiong again after my first pract. Yes, it smells like food. A sickly sweet odour. Not very good considering i just had my lunch. . Think rotting smell mixed with sweet .. not really eu Du cadavars. My tutor arrived with me and Va, his hair dyed a brilliant red. Red? " I had black hair, " he lamented, patting his hair. " I change the colour everyweek. Do you like it? "

We spent a good 3 hours with the body parts, which he hauled up from the tank. After the session, he insisted on giving us a treat at the cafe at the union house. So there we were, a motley little group who came reluctantly back to school during the hols, with our tutor, sipping hot coffee and stoning at our anatomy books. The tutor lamented how his circle of frens had diminished ever since he started working. It was the awful truth, medicine would invade our life and that's the way things went. We shook our heads, the prospect of working seemed light years away. But looking at things now, i realised that time had flown by real fast. I was nearly a year 2 med knob. A tad closer to entering the world of doctors. FREAKY.

Well.. there goes my beautiful blog skin. have to settle for this plain one. BUt oh hell.. the words matter more than the image don't they? and ah. my tag board is gone with the wind. SOrry ppl, but you've have to save your words for yourself. Jo ah.. just reply me on your tag board ok?

well, neway, the hols are fast drawing to a close. Just caught on with a dreadful cold so i spent the whole of yesterday in lala land. Yez, i'm adopting a new persona as an absolute PIG. Check it out, sleeping till 9am, waking up at 9.30am, pulling out notes of liver, falling asleep on top of them. Draggin myself to school, met steve for driving.. stalled the car 3 times in a row, much to his exasperation. Went to the lib, pulled out the notes on the dreaded liver.. and TADA> fell asleep again. Do i detect a relation between the liver and my sleep patterns?

THe lowdown?? I'm totallly behind my revision and still sleeping. oh yez.

Just finished a beautiful book written by Torey L Hayden called Somebody Else's kid. She was a teacher for for the intellectually disabled or troubled kids. Her job was to salvage kids written off by the mainstream school system as hopeless. Her writing style is ordinary, but the innate rawness and reality of the stories manages to move even the most frosty of hearts. One sentence in the story left me musing for a long time. One of her kids was shattered when he had to move away from the town, the school and his beloved teacher. He asked her.. was it fair for her to come into their lives and let them taste the sweetness of happiness, well knowing that the happiness would never last. Is it better to have love and lost, then never to have loved at all? Does it hurt more to be blind from birth, or is it more heart wrenching to have seen the vivid colours the world can offer and then lose that gift of sight? HH and I often discuss the issue. I feel that it is better to have tasted happiness than never have any contact with it at all. Not being able to enjoy the caress of this mysterious, yet lifegiving emotion would itself be a tragedy. Maybe I'm a romantic, but heartbreaking as it is to have that happiness taken away, I know that given the chance , I would make the same choice all over again.

Another part of the book that touched a raw nerve was when one of her kids had a fall and split his tongue, the doctor attending to him refused to give him any anaesthetic, claiming that the retarded kid probably didn't have any feelings.. I wished fervently i could have done a good surture on the guy's lip's minus the anaesthetic. MY GOODNESS. I would expect that a person of that calibre would have more humanity and maturity than that. He was inhuman. THere was no doubt about it. We see these ppl everyday in life. They're impaired in some ways, but talented in others. Like Boo, who was an enigma despite his severe autism; Like Lori who was so pure , so innocent, who could love anyone but could not learn to read. It's hard to see past the exterior, and we , the "normal " ones have the tendancy to shy away, ignore or look down on those whom we deem as abnormal. It's ppl like Torey who bring out the best in these special souls no matter how mammoth and utterly impossible the task may seem. Today at the lib, there was a student who seemed to be slightly mentally impaired. He would gurgle to himself at intervalsk, burst out into a senseless monolouge, and approach a soul at random and keep repeating some question about the weather. To my surprsie, the lady he approached was quite accomodating to his senseless, persistent questions. If it happened to me, i would most probably be heading for the exit in a flash, frightened by him, his differences, his innocence and egocentricity. Terrified by his eccentricity.
He was a rare gem. Despite his obvious mental impairment, he had made it to the university. And yez, like the punky dude whom i see so often, he could study. Amid his senseless gurgles and mutters about terrorist and hijackers, this guy had made it this far.

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