QOTD: Stop Posting Q’sOTD !

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Gwendolyne Krasnicki

Something as insignificant as people posting pictures of quotes everyday on their Facebook pages drives me nuts, which is thankfully making me lose interest in spending time logged into that social networking site. I do check my FB at least twice a day to see if anyone wrote to me, but even there that hardly happens. If I see myself scrolling down my news feed to see what’s up with everyone, I’ll usually stop myself before I get too far because I literally tell myself “This is pointless…” and I’ll proceed to log out.
But what really annoys me are people posting quotes and images which clearly shows that they don’t know how to think. That’s how I see it anyway. Sure, it’s good to follow some life philosophies if you happen to stumble upon them in the form of text written on a picture of a cat climbing up a tree with the sunset shining through the clouds and a tornado in the distance. Or is it a rainbow?… But most of the time, they seem pointless to me. And some of these texts don’t make any sense at all and make me question whether the person who posted them actually knows how to think for themselves or not.

I recently stumbled upon a few quotes and images that made me react. One that I remember off the top of my head was something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what anyone does as long as you love yourself”. Really? Let’s say someone close to you decides to murder your kids, dismembers them, dumps their parts in various dumpsters, sets your house on fire, murders your neighbours, tortures stray animals found in your alleyway, shoots a few officers who tries to stop them, poisons the water supply and then throws acid on a few people. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but I believe that it’s by exaggerating certain points that we get to put things in perspective. Of course, it doesn’t matter that that person did all those horrible things, you love yourself. ???
“You raped women and children and even murdered some of them? It’s okay, I love myself which means that I love you!”

I’ve learnt to love myself over time but I’m sorry, I still dislike a few people who did hurtful things to me and others and I probably won’t forgive some of them. That philosophy sounds like some kind of religious crap that involves forgiving your neighbour or something.

The only quotes I seem to remember are those that make me react like I just mentioned. Most of the time I skip over these images because I don’t understand what the point of posting quotes is. And if I do read some of them, I don’t remember them. Is the point in posting these to get people to react? To share your constant newly acquired philosophies? To show the picture that’s hidden behind the quote text? I don’t understand…And what’s this business with the new carpe diem, YOLO? You Only Live Once. Okay, so make sure you stay alive by not doing stupid things? Make sure you find peace and happiness with yourself in order to live a fulfilled life? I always found it pretty obivous that you only live once…

An image that got me reacting was one of a woman from I don’t know which part of the world who put herself in the position of letting the public do whatever they wanted to her. She had 72 objects at their disposal ranging from a feather boa to a knife and a loaded gun. After 6 hours she ended the whole thing but concluded that if you left decisions up to the public, the public would turn violent and want to kill. So humanity=evil.
I’m sorry?
For the majority of people on this planet I believe that we all want peace and happiness for ourselves as well as for everyone else. In the four paragraph description of the photo, it was only filled with negative conclusions from the “study”. There was never any mention of the people who did good to the woman, the people who walked along and didn’t care, the people who yelled for help or tried to stop the others. No mention of any of this “good stuff”. Only of the fact that people cut up her clothes, stuck thorns in her stomach and pointed the gun at her head. What about the others who we’re so mean? To conclude that humanity is evil based on this irrelevant “study” is…stupid. And misleading. I see other images with negative descriptions constantly floating around on FB and I wonder why people post them. One habit that I am acquiring is the one involving questioning. When I see something like this, my first reaction is “Wow…that’s terrible”. After reviewing it a second time, my brain seems to say “Wait a minute….there are some important facts missing that are very relevant to the situation. How can we conclude what is being said without those facts?” I believe this habit of questioning oneself and their environment (what they see/hear) is very important and seems to me that people forget to do this, or they just don’t know how to yet. They aren’t stupid in my eyes, they just seem unfortunate because they jump to conclusions so fast.

Same goes for Quotes of the Day: people read them and go “OMG! I have to post this! This is SO true!” without pausing to think about the other aspects. Perhaps I’m wayyy off the bat and I’m being too critical and harsh, but it seems that many of us are just getting sucked into our computers and a constant bombardment of information, a lot of the time negative, and it is causing us to lose our abilities to be rational and think.

Perfect Pitch

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Gwendolyne Krasnicki

I haven’t written a blog post in a while and on this lazy Easter day I figured I would write about an awesome gift that is part of me: having perfect pitch. Ever since I began playing piano by ear when I was 4-5 years old, my father would tell me what a good ear of music I had. He practiced piano often and I would try to replicate what I heard…obviously they were hard pieces, but one piece that I had figured out were the opening measures of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I was also always able to sing and my parents tell me that when I was almost a child, I was the only one who was able to hold a tune in my music/ballet class. My ability to sing also improved by going to church. I loved singing hymns and I remember being 9 years old and impressing people sitting in the pews in front of me with how well I sang.
I also remember how easy it was and still is to remember pieces, songs, riffs, whatever, in their original key and recording. This is how useful it is to have a strange musical gift. When I have a song in my head, it feels as though the actual recording is playing. I hear it going through my ears and into the front part of my brain. I don’t only hear the melody, I hear everything and I never hear it in the wrong key. For the longest time I thought everyone could hear music the way I did and they could repeat something back in the actual key. It was natural for me and I couldn’t understand why the majority of people sang whatever song in whatever key. It’s actually annoying because as they’re singing something, I’m hearing the actual song in my head in it’s original key. Having this ability to remember music like this is useful when writing my own songs because I hear the arrangements and harmonies and am successfully able to replicate them with the tools that I have. Transcribing what I hear being played in real life isn’t too challenging either because I hear the actual notes and chords. My marks in ear training were obviously very high.
It is also easy for me to remember choral music, and is also a reason why some choir rehearsals may be a bit boring and annoying for me; I learn everything after one rehearsal. For example: If, during our 2½ hour rehearsal, we go through two movements of whichever work we’re working on, by the end of it I’ll have remembered everything and won’t even have to review my music during the week, which is always the case. It is easier for me to remember music that requires me to sing compared to music for violin because I’m actually using my voice to replicate the notes written on the staff, and not a physical instrument or finger movement. So, I never look over my choir music at home and I’m always prepared for rehearsals as well as the concert. For my most recent concert with the OM Choir we sang Verdi’s Requiem and had only been rehearsing for 1 month, 1-2 times a week. I performed the majority of the concert looking at Maestro for the obvious reason that he’s the conductor and he’ll keep us all together, and also that my music had been memorized for a few weeks already and I almost didn’t need my music in front of me. Again I thought that most people could remember music this easily and be able to sing without looking at their books, but apparently not. It also explains why the conductor reminds us at least once to look up at him and not lose ourselves in our books.
Perfect pitch is also useful for my violin playing as well as annoying. When I play a note that is just slightly off (like, by 1mm) it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I try not to be so hard on myself for that because every violinist struggles with playing every note in tune, but man, we don’t even have frets and when we’re really into our piece and one note is just off, it almost ruins it the entire piece.

It disappoints me to know that I have this fabulous talent but that many other factors in my life caused me to not acknowledge it and feel terrible about myself. I feel like I should be farther along down the musical tunnel. But alas, all hope isn’t lost !