I'm Back!!

After being on hiatus for about 4 months due to school, exams, and piano lessons, I finally found some free time to write today’s blog post. I’m glad most of the midterms are over for my accounting and business classes which leaves only the final exams to be the last stressful thing on my mind. There’s a month of school left until winter break. Following winter break will be the spring semester and then after that, it will be the biggest accomplishment of my life because I will be officially graduating from San Jose State University with a bachelor’s degree in Accounting. Time sure flies. 4 years ago, I was entering college fresh out of high school but now in a blink of an eye, I am all grown up and about to graduate from college, take the CPA exam, and then enter the real world of accounting. In the real world, I can imagine life becoming more busier and complicated compared to being in school. Well, it’s hard to say what the future will hold for me so I will just have to wait and see what happens…

As for piano lessons, I have learned quite a lot after taking it for 6 months. I’m currently on Lesson 2 and enjoying it even more than Lesson 1. The things I have learned and enjoyed the most is being able to change to different hand positions, moving the fingers up and down the keyboard, and using the pedal to preserve the sounds. Since I wasn’t born a pianist, it’s difficult to play as smoothly as a professional. However, I believe that I can be able to play more smoothly probably in the future when I have master the skills. I noticed that the more time I spent practicing on the piano, the more drawn to it I become. Now I find myself playing the piano more than when I first started.

I just like the feeling of playing a song over and over again until I know how to play the entire song because this makes me feel like I have accomplished something big. This motivates me to practice even harder to try to master another song which I want to play and show off to my family and friends whom I can imagine being amazed by my piano skills. A month ago, I have purchased an electric piano at Costco for a very affordable price which includes a pedal as well as chair. What’s unique about this piano is that the keys are heavy-weight which feels like the ones on a grand piano. As for my old electric piano and dad’s old brown piano, they have been put aside for future use. The brown piano needs to be tuned up but piano tuning is a bit costly, so buying another electric piano is more worth it. Here is the electric piano I have recently purchased. You can see the heavy weight keys and the pedal on the bottom right of the picture:

Also, my interest in reading have grown in the past few months because I found myself purchasing books even when I haven’t even started reading the ones I already have. Maybe I should put a halt to my excessive spending until I have finished the ones I haven’t even started. A book I have recently finished reading is “Total Recall”, a biography on Arnold Schwarzenegger. Overall, the book is pretty interesting and very motivating. He pretty much talks about his life growing up in Austria while carrying the dream of going to America. He accomplished this dream through bodybuilding. After arriving in America, he worked as a trainer in a gym and later on, film companies hired him as an actor which then brought him to fame in Hollywood. You might’ve first saw him in “The Terminator”. He also talks about his experiences succeeding Grey Davis to become California’s governor and how that has changed his life.

I admire the fact that he had put a lot of time and effort to have succeeded in the position he is in today. There are many people who says that something can’t be done but Arnold is able to prove them wrong. For instance, in the book, he mentioned how his father didn’t believe that he will succeed in bodybuilding but Arnold was able to prove that his father was wrong by becoming a championship in bodybuilding. Also, when some people did not believe he will become a politician, he proved them wrong with his victorious winning in becoming a governor. I learned from Arnold that everything is possible if you just try.

Now, to end the day, here is a line from the book I find to be very motivating:

“The only way to make the possible possible is to try the impossible. If you fail, so what? That is what everybody expects. But if you succeed, you make the world a much better place”.

 -Arnold Schwarzenegger from Total Recall