The Born This Way Ball

Off the top of my head, 10 things I loved about last night's The Born This Way Ball.

1. Singing Born This Way while playing with a little Lady Gaga doll that was thrown up on stage

2. Edge of Glory reminded me of the amazing performance on Idol where she fell off the "cliff". Here, she climbs all the way to the top of the castle.

3. Squeezing the biggest hits at the front, the ones that she's best known for... quickly escalated the atmosphere into a feverish pitch. Just Dance - Love Game - Telephone in Act II was amazing.

4. The moving banter during Hair. Always proves that she's got a story to tell while singing songs that mean something to her. I was surprised that she didn't do more slow ones with the piano choosing instead to go with production and choreography for most of it! But it made Hair all the more special.

5. Everyone, the dancers, to us, were hot. The nice, sweaty, warm, dance-like-mad kinda of hot.

6. The costumes were... I think it's a given that her costumes were memorable and top-notch. Especially loved the white "vacuum-cleaner" outfit where she glided across the stage.

7. Again, the dancers. There was one in particular, I really liked. Especially... well, I shan't name names!

8. The fact that she looked like she wanted to be on stage. That she was going to die on that stage even if it killed her, she'd want to perform. As she said, even if the money, the costumes... if everything were gone, she'd cherish the connection that she had with all of us. In any true musical experience like this, it's really what you take away from the concert. Not the material stuff but the atmosphere and that connection.

9. The audience was crazy. She attracted a different kind of music-lover. She induces a different kind of fever. She was outrageous and the audience followed suit. Everyone dressed for adventure, one notch higher. She even highlighted a queen in the crowd, standing right up there at the front. She must have queued for a real long time to get that position in the monster pit!

10. It was so brilliant to see her grow as artiste, since I last saw her in Singapore in 2009. She promised to be back and she really brought a show to remember. A set that put her relatively unplanned for Fort Canning gig to shame. A presence that evolved and commanded grandiose yet aware that any one of the hundred over shows that she planned for this tour, she must be intimate and find the connection and make every session different.

Truly, the best concert I've ever been to.

Looking Forward

We're all driven by instant gratification, the satisfaction in the now. It's getting harder to look forward, to see further, to take the bitter medicine and hope for the brighter outcome. It's a social thing, as things become more instant. There's magic lost as we lose patience. We lose the ability to appreciate things that come with consistent hard work and more often than not we start feeling like lost causes. We're only engaged when at that very instant, we're speaking to more than one person at once, logged on to more than one social media platform at once, handling more than one device at once.

There's so much to learn from that old-school work ethic of thinking ahead, working hard and pushing through problems - while living in the moment yet not being consumed by it. It's the reason why love was more romantic and epic. It used to last longer too. 

Sometimes being happy in the now feels like it's worth everything, now. But it's up to you to weigh the value of the "more" that the future can bring. Do everything with the purpose that it should also pay off later. Things that you grow, nurture, invest in, tend to be more meaningful in the long run so give up on distractions, on things that can only give you the "now" and look forward.