Life begins with You.

This summer, I have found myself without a job, which is a bit different from the past few summers.  Not having a job means that I don’t have to leave the house, and I can bum out at home in clothes that are super comfortable.  Not that work clothes or casual clothes can’t be uncomfortable, but come on, what’s more comfortable than a loose t-shirt and basketball shorts?  Probably a onesie made from corgi butt fur, but I have yet to find one of those.

The other day, I was going out to hang with some homies, and because I was leaving the house, I had to put on some pants.  I don’t really like wearing my basketball shorts out in public, because they don’t have any pockets, and if you know me, I really don’t like carrying things when I’m out and about.  Like, I’d rather wear my jacket instead of carrying my jacket, even if it’s super hot outside.  So, I grabbed a pair of jeans that I’ve had for the past two years.  However, I noticed that they were a bit tight, probably tighter than Beyonce’s  Deréon jeans.  And as much as I’d like to deny it, I had to face the truth.  It’s as if my dear friend Freshman 15 watched from Lebron James win a ring in 2016 and declared “I’M COMING HOME.” Because my basketball shorts are super comfy and have a nice elastic band that stretches, I hadn’t noticed how much bigger I had gotten.  My normal pairs of pants don’t fit like they used to, and it’s even worse when I put on a suit for weddings and such.  I guess that’s what happens when you wear the same suit for the most physically fluctuating years of your life.

Now, according to the This-is-how-Matthew-writes-a-tumblr-post formula, this is the part of the post where I make a Biblical analogy as well as issue a challenge so you don’t end up like me.   I’m always told that as a Christian, I need to read the Bible, I need to pray, and I need to go to church.  Which is fine, I agree with all of these things.  But everyday, when I wake up, I need to remind myself of why these three things are important.

“Be alert and of sober mind.  Your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”

Satan doesn’t play any games.  I get the feeling that he knows that he can’t top God, and that he’s fully aware of his fate because of his decision to rebel way back.  So, he’s doing his best to take down as many of us with him, and he’s going to use every trick in the book.  However, in order to face this kind of enemy, we need to be just as vigilant, if not more.  God’s Word provides us with everything we need to fight against sin.  It reminds us of God’s promises to sustain us if we choose to follow Him, and it’s all rooted in His decision to love us.  Not because of anything we have done, but simply because He chose to.  Live with the assurance that God wants to sustain you and to protect you.

So don’t give up if Bible reading gets boring or if it gets too tiring to stand up for what is right.   It’ll be worth it in the end.

To continue the theme of releasing music every Thursday, I dropped another cover today.  And okay, I didn’t write the song, but I wish I did.  But I did want to share some thoughts about why we chose that song of all songs in the world to sing.  

Sooo, I think the song is about feminism or gender equality, which is fine.  But I decided to do a different take on it.  We were auditioning to perform for a showcase, the Taiwanese Student Association’s Culture Night that they have every year, and the theme this year was “Throwback”. Upon going to some meetings, I found out that they wanted the concert to be in honor of Asian parents who immigrated to the States in the sixties and seventies in order to create new lives for themselves.  When I thought about that and how it applied to my own life, I thought of my mom. No doubt, she gave up a lot to get to America, and on too of that, she gave up even more to raise me and my three brothers.  But now that the four of us are older and more self-sufficient, she doesn’t have to work so hard to make sure we have food in our stomachs or clothes on our back.  She doesn’t have to wake up early to drive us to school or spend hours cleaning up after us (but there are times when we’re forgetful and she does so anyway).  Maybe she does think that taking care of us is fun, but at the very least, she has time and energy to pursue the things she personally finds rest and comfort in.  Things like drawing or taking pictures of flowers or potentially opening up a coffee shop.

I realize that not everyone may have great parents in their lives.  But I think in one way or another, we are where we are today because someone gave up a lot to take care of us, to feed us, and to teach us.  Spend some today to thank them.

Writing “Incomplete” was both easy and hard.  In terms of rhyme scheme and song structure, it was super simple.  Verse, verse, chorus, verse, verse, chorus, and tag.  The song really only has two or three rhyme schemes, and the melody is so simple that I’m pretty sure there’s another well-known song that sounds just like it.  Or it could sound a lot like a song I’ve already written.  Honestly, this is probably the fifty millionth time I’ve written and sung about brokenness and pain. But the hard part was trying to sing about pain without ending the song on a hopeful note.  I know that makes the song pretty dark and gloomy, but realistically, when the pain and confusion are fresh, I don’t feel very hopeful.  I don’t want to “move on” or “get over it”.  I don’t want to hear things like “This will make you stronger” or “every cloud has a silver lining”.  I get that people are trying to be encouraging and that they’re trying to help, but there are times when nothing people say will make me feel better.  I just want things to go back to the way they were before.  

Maybe you’ve felt this way, and if you have, it brings me encouragement.  Strength doesn’t necessarily come from finding a palpable solution with clear benchmarks for success; sometimes, we can get strength just from knowing that people care about us enough to let us heal at the proper pace.  

Ahhh I remember when I used to write these.  And it feels good to be doing it again. So, I haven’t really uploaded anything onto my Youtube channel lately.  Neither covers nor originals, and I shall tell you why.  First things first, I think we can mention the common problem of “busyness”.  Everyone deals with it, and this past year, it hit me hard, and I hardly found any time for me to do anything besides do homework, eat, and sleep.  But I finished the school year in early May, and I ended up academic career (for the time being) after receiving my diploma on May 14th.  So that means that I have had almost two whole months to put something out or anything out.  I had those #chLINstmas videos, but those don’t really count.  So what happened?

So, time for a little history.  At the start of the summer of 2016, I made the decision to release a seven track album by the end of the year, and to be fair, the time seemed right.  I was on track to have a super easy school year, I had recently bought a microphone, and I had a ton of material floating in my head.  I had an album title, potential album art, and I had mentioned the idea to a few friends and received a lot of support.  The idea was to release the whole thing in the same way that professional recording artists to do it.  Release a few singles.  Post a few blogposts about it.  Create a trending hashtag through instagram posts.  Figure out a deal through Bandcamp or Noisetrade.  And then...release the whole thing.  I didn’t really make plans to perform anywhere or to go on tour or anything.  I just wanted to release a body of work that could be some sort of documentation of my life up until that point, something that would represent my experiences and my perception of the world.   

 But in a way, that’s kind of trapping.  The song you just listened to (if you listened to it), the version you heard was finished back in September of 2016, but I never released it for the sake of preserving the release of the album.  I thought, “This song is meant to the album opener, but if I release it now, it’ll lessen the impact of the album itself.  I gotta finish In the Orange Light or Screwtape first.” And it just went downhill from there.  I should have kept at it, even if what I made wasn’t going to be anything.  Just the simple act of keeping the creative flame alive would have been better than not making anything at all.  The longer I kept myself from releasing anything, the more the conviction to hold true to my schedule dwindled.  The more my creativity suffered, the more my love for songwriting suffered.  And what followed was a year-long drought of musical creativity.  

Taylor Swift recently opened access to all her music on Spotify.  Whether it was because she suddenly felt super altruistic or it was crush Katy Perry’s career by doing this on the same day as the “Witness” release date, it doesn’t matter.  I’ve gone on this listening spree of her material since Speak Now back in 2010.  And yes, I realize that I’m three years behind on all of this.   There are some artists that I listen to more.  Or rather, I pay more attention to what’s going on in the music.  It’s known fact that Taylor writes most, if not all, of her music, and that gives her songs a more organic, honest vibe.  Yes, 90% of her music is about her ex-boyfriends, which can get repetitive, but there’s still something to learned in terms of how  she writes about them.  I’ve learned that emotions are multi-dimensional with so layers and levels, and as someone who enjoys music and songwriting, her albums are treasure troves that I can spend hours listening to and learning from.

I feel inspired :) hopefully, I can release some new stuff soon.

We’ve reached this point in the NBA Finals.  The Warriors are on the cusp of greatness, just one victory away from completing a perfect playoff run for the first time in NBA history.  It’s all very spectacular, and I’m so excited for Friday night.  One more victory, and it’ll be over.

Yet, I still have my fears.  No team has ever come back from being down 3-0 in a playoff run, and to think that it could happen against the Warriors in the NBA finals would be devastating.  They’re facing Lebron James, and you can never count out the man who has made it to the NBA finals seven times in a row, who passed Michael Jordan for the most points in the NBA playoffs, who has tied the record for the most triple doubles in the NBA finals.  He’s too great of an opponent for anyone to count him and his team out.  What if the Warriors make history, but for the wrong reasons?  What if the Warriors do even worse than last year and this time, blow a 3-0 lead? 

The Warriors are in a strange position, where things can go very right or very wrong.  Yet, this is what has to happen.  This kind of victory always comes with the possibility of failure, but that doesn’t mean that we run away from it.  We can’t shy away from the decisive moments, even if there is a the risk of messing up.  

Don’t close your eyes when the lights get too bright.

Since graduating from college (oh yeah, I graduated.  Now we’re all caught up), people ask me one of two things: 1) What did you learn from your time in college? 2) Where are you going to work after college?

I don’t have an answer for the second question, so I’m just going to proceed with talking only about the first question.

I’ve been in Pittsburgh for five years now, and there’s just a lot to talk about.  As I’ve talked to my friends from high school about their college experiences, I’ve realized that CMU is a rather unique school.  Most people talk about the workload and the busyness that comes with being a student at this university.  People talk about all-nighters, impossible problem sets, and various three-number combinations.  I hear negative conversations about how CMU is an “uncool” and “nerdy” school, and overall, people just don’t really like being here.  When discussing plans after college, it’s almost always the case that people want to leave and to never come back.  

And I get it.  From the student perspective, Pittsburgh just seems like a rainy city full of old buildings.  The closest major city at least three or four hours away, and there aren’t really any national spectacles except for the sports teams that reside here.  But I think the trick to enjoying your college experience in a major city is to separate the school from the city.  How can we possibly judge the merit and value of a city’s experiences if we limit what the city has to offer to a tiny college campus?  How can I possibly say “Oh, Pittsburgh doesn’t have any good food?” if the furthest extent I travel is under twenty minutes?  Pittsburgh is an old city, existing long before I even was born.  Five years is a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of things that I would never have experienced if I went to another university.  If you’re still a student in Pittsburgh, or if you’re working there, go out! Do your best to see everything that the city has to offer.  Most of the time, that involves putting down the travel guide and moving off the well-traveled path. Every city has its problems, but every city has its highlights.  If I could generalize for a bit, I have found that the highlights have more to do with the people who live in the city, rather than the physical, tangible tourist attractions.  The most valuable experiences often have to do with relationships and interactions.

I recently watched Logan, which serves as the Hugh Jackman’s final time playing the Wolverine on the big screen.  I’m not sure if Hollywood plans on making more Wolverine movies, but based on what I’ve seen in interviews, this will be the last time Jackman will be cast as the character.  But this post isn’t about the move itself or anything.  It’s more about my growing understanding of the character.

I originally thought that Logan’s main powers were the adamantium claws.  After all, that’s the highlight of all his fight scenes in the X-Men movies.  But later, I realized that his main ability was his ability to heal physically at a rapid pace.  The claws, though originally made of bone, were encased in adamantium later on in his life.  His ability to heal from physical damage is so strong that it actually prolong his body’s natural aging process, and he’s able to live much longer than the normal human being.  However, the theme of long life or eternal life, an ability that everyone seems to want, comes at a terrible cost.  Unable to reverse this ability, Logan retains his strength while everyone around him dies and fades away.  As much as he tries, everyone he cares about dies, and he eventually accepts his mutation not as a blessing but as a curse.

At the start of Logan (this isn’t a spoiler because this has already been revealed through interviews movie trailers), Logan is left with Charles Xavier.  Two characters, despite experiencing the same pains and the same losses, hold two very different views of the world.  Logan survives day to day, trying to get by on food and alcohol.  However, Charles continues to firmly express that mutants are still alive, despite no new mutants having been born for twenty years.  Yet, he continues to hope, to believe that things don’t have to remain the way they currently are.   When put face to face with death and disease, with so much loss and heartache, how do we respond?  Do we give up and sink into cynicism?  Or do we hold onto hope, and chase after brighter days?