sunday, post-lunch

This is the time of the week when depression sets in and doesn't lift till at least Wednesday or Thursday. When I look at the clock (fuck it's nearly 2pm) and dread the inevitable packing up and getting ready for another tedious week. When I contemplate the emptiness of family and life and a wasted bookout that never lives up to the promising Friday-morning expectations of fun and friends. Bookouts always seem wasted, no matter how productive they are or how long they are or which of my best friends I spend them with, because they're always too short and I try and fail epically every time to condense my 7 days of life into 2.

I'm hard-pressed to explain why I'm feeling down and world-weary. Well I mean there are blessings; there are friends whose support has been fantastic, there is a future to look forward to... there is music. In fairness life's been pretty kind to me. NS is survivable. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family and an environment with lots of love, care and attention.

But maybe that's it too. Now that that my dad's love's been taken out of my life I've been aching for it to come back to me and my mum. I've tried to fill my life with some re-creation of the love that my dad gave me. It's a poor substitute. Because for love to be fulfilling there's got to be someone to love, and someone to love back. And nope, I've tried but to no end.

I'm wallowing in it, let me wallow. I'm empty, let me indulge in emptiness.

Don't mind me, let me Marvin (v.) for a while.

3 more weeks

3 more weeks or so till I pass out of this course (18th Aug!) and into full-fledged spec-hood. In the grand scheme of things this means only a $100 pay rise. No lifetime supply of chocolate, alcohol or passion, I'm afraid. Who cares about non-commissioned officers anyway?

Well this week wasn't too bad... Depression always strikes hardest on Sunday night and Monday morning, when I'm reminded of how sucky life is, and it usually clears up 'round Thursday night. Outfield every day again but Cat(egory) 1 weather (potential thunderstorms) killed off 2 out of 5 days and gave us a free tonner ride in place of a 5km route march during Ex. Musang II... which is pretty darn good. And we booked out 3pm on Friday. Hoping this luck persists.

As for life, well I'm getting over things and living life a little more lightly now. I just listened to Pet Sounds and some random Beach Boys tracks. It's fascinating how The Beach Boys and The Beatles fed off each other musically - the most obvious pair of songs I've found is The Beach Boys' California Girls and The Beatles' Back in the USSR. And well, I'm kinda sold on the languid musical vision of surfing, fast cars, and hot chicks. xD

contemporary classical music

I couldn't agree more with Joe Queenan: Admit it, you're as bored as I am. Thanks ZH for the link. He's found exactly the words I needed to express my utter disgust at anything "avant-garde" in classical music. If anything, classical music has been more harmed than advanced by attempts to move beyond the paradigm established by Bach and upheld for over 300 years. Yes there've been occasional bright sparks but no luminous visionaries to light the way ahead. Minimalism, serialism, the 12-tone row... unfortunately these are all historical curiosities that'll only endure as museum pieces.

composing

I have just written down 4 bars of a godawfully beautiful melody and harmony to go with it, and now that that's done I feel a magical inner peace.

Unfortunately that means I can't continue it, because anything that comes after will be pure crap.

discovering pop.

It's taken me a long time but I've grown a respect for pop that I never quite had before. I guess I never found satisfaction in the watered-down crud that the radio stations play, or the country music my parents love. Geez. Then I found Hey Jude, and Barcelona, and Mrs Robinson, and life wasn't quite the same. They spoke to me as clearly as Bach and Brahms and Sibelius and Elgar ever did.

So I'm still discovering the classic albums that define '60s rock... Revolver, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper's... I'm on Pet Sounds now, off the Beatles for a change (I only ever knew the Beach Boys from that saccharine-sweet song Kokomo, which is like knowing classical music from Pachelbel's Canon). And dang, God Only Knows is languidly, beautifully compelling. That's music as worthy as anything ever written and recorded. There's just something about the shape of that melody and the simplicity of the words that caught my mind like a mousetrap and isn't going to let go anytime soon. There's a je ne sais quoi about it. Like you, my friend...

For you out there: God Only Knows

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it
God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me
God only knows what I'd be without you

love, sex, and singapore babies.

This blog is not usually a social commentary but I was appalled to read the article in ST's Saturday section about abortion in Singapore. According to it something like 25% of all pregnancies here are terminated through abortion. And that's down from a high of 35%. I remember roughly the same statistics came up while I was researching for population geog last year. And roughly the same thought came to my mind:

What the hell?

To put things in perspective, the Rwandan Genocide resulted in the death of about 10% of Rwanda's population. And assuming that biblical Egypt had the same TFR as Egypt in 1985 (that's 5 babies per woman), the deaths of the firstborn only amounted to one-fifth of the pharaoh's kids. I'm trivialising things a bit here but you get the picture...

Imagine these foetuses were all born before they were slaughtered. Now just for a slight semantic shift you could call it a death rate of 25%. To me it's not too much of a stretch to label our abortion rate as genocide, by negligence. And it's not like Singaporeans have that much sex in the first place.

Why on earth are we killing ourselves off? I don't think Singaporeans really hate themselves that much, do they? Is it just symptomatic of a general callousness about humanity that we have? Do these people realise they're killing babies?

Certainly I'm pro-choice; there're valid reasons to terminate a pregnancy... but let me put this to you: the probability that an act of coitus will end in conception is the same regardless of whether that conception culminates in abortion or not. That suggests that 25% of all vaginal intercourse in Singapore is regarded by the female partner as a mistake, at least when it ends in pregnancy.

I'm not a moraliser; I don't wish to speculate on the lax values these depraved specimens of humanity uphold in their lives. I merely wish to point out their colossal and systemic failure to undertake a simple cost-benefit analysis before they, quite literally, fuck around.

That's my thought for the day. Cost-benefit analysis.

life goes on

I know that's a line from (possibly) the most cringe-worthy Beatles song ever, but it's an apt phrase and I'm not going to let that connotation ruin a pretty apt phrase. (The song I'm referring to is Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, and I'd rather slit my wrists than listen to it.)

I've had a deleterious week. Outfield every single day from morning till night, and an SOC test just before Ex. Wolf (laying and breaching a minefield overnight). God that sucked bad. I'm kinda sleep-deprived and incoherent (by my standards). And nice words keep floating into my mind... inchoate thoughts. Music. Pictures. Ooh the music. Aah the pictures...

What else? Well there's 3 more exercises (that means overnight outfield missions) before I pass out on aug 18th or 19th. And 3 more extras to serve. -.-

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Life, life... I hang on to the hope of every bookout and the pretence of normalcy that I can feign, if only to myself. I'm beginning to know the feeling of living for weekends. I hope I don't end up in a job like that, that I hate... That must suck to the core.

But no, I'm better than that. I'll finish these sickening 22 months and I'll be off to places I never before dreamt of going. Life beckons! It's heartening to have that to live for. Don't get me wrong, I'm very embarrassed at this luck; it's richly undeserved. I know I'll have to work my ass off to prove I deserve it. But trust me, I will.

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And there's bittorrent; hell how could I have lived in the pre-torrent era for so long? I've discovered so much more beatles haha. I'm filling up my 320 GB hard drive already, since the previous drive's almost full. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is intriguing, simply mesmerising.

Now please recommend me movies that I can mindlessly LOL at, and music that'll blow my mind... peck I'm looking at you xP

bookout/newton dinner/A13A lunch

Ok I think this bookout was decent. My connection's working again thank goodness. I had a coolio dinner with you YO lot on sat (the Newton dinner), kinda fun. All violinists but me, but still great company. Stuffed my face with chicken wings, satay, hokkien mee, stingray... whatever. random crap. Lots of laughs & catching up.

Then class lunch today that was good stuff too. Again, stuffed myself. The Double Barrel sandwich at NY, NY is ok but not fantastic (actually I've a feeling that's true for most of their mains) but their mudpie is out-of-this-world. Screw the sinfulness shit. I'm out to get my life back during bookouts, even if it comes in condensed chocolate form. Was great catching up with all you dudes and gals all over again. Smoot you're hilarious. Pity the tables weren't conducive at all.

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Otherwise... Well I always have stuff to moan about. My life, generally. Yeah you might think it's going great (apart from NS). I mean, yeah ok. Uni is settled, the future looks bright. But my personal life... those of you out there whom I've really let into my life... you know I've screwed up, terribly.

I can never forget that there's a friendship out there, that I valued and treasured, and I kept cultivating carefully, that's now ruined. Inevitably. Because I had to be honest, and I had to do what was right by my (now) ex-friend. There was no choice. I had principles to live by, no matter how much it hurt me. You mightn't understand.

Oh! Darling, please believe me
I'll never let you down.
Believe me when I tell you
I'll never do you no harm...

goodness gracious me

bloody hilarious. thanks zh (but i discovered the radio version FIRST)

my life

As if my life wasn't screwed enough, in the last couple of weeks:

• My internet connection fucked up.
  
• My hard disk died and was resurrected after 1 day. (I believe the previous record was 3, but that was different)
• I signed 3 extras cos my rifle kena stun (i.e. was taken) during field camp

I'll be back to update this.

Computers and my bookout

My comp really screwed my life over this bookout. First on Friday night it came on with the words DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. So my hard disk was failing. Is failing. Some frantic minutes rebooting and digging out the Windows XP disk and the spare hard drive. Then after a couple of reboots and swapping the wires about it started working again. Geez.

Then on Saturday morning the internet died. No real panic, it's not quite as devastating compared with a hard drive failure. I composed and played Civ 4 for the morning then went out, thought it'd be fine when I got back from dinner with friends.

It wasn't. Neither was it on Sunday (today). Now can you imagine living a bookout without even checking your mail? I only managed to squeeze in a blog entry on Friday for crying out loud. And my connection was already cranky then; I couldn't even finish my email. I burnt my whole morning and half of the afternoon desperately changing the phone wires, checking the connections, trying to dig out the old modem (successfully) and the driver (unsuccessfully). All that for nothing.

I have no internet connection now. When this post goes online it'll probably be in a couple of weeks. I feel thoroughly emasculated.

And this really drove home how dependent I was on my dad to fix the comps. Papa, he'd know what to do. There was never a 70-year-old quite as comfortable with computers as he was, probably never will be (till Steve Jobs turns 70, possibly). I realised that when I was at Sim Lim Square with my brother Adrian shopping around for a new hard drive - I'd forgotten to check if my comp used IDE or SATA drives (they use different connectors; if you have a SATA drive and IDE cables or vice versa, you're fucked). Dumbass me. I got a 320 GB IDE drive in the end, thanks to Adrian's advice. (phew it works - yeah he's even more a comp geek than me).

Yup and on Sunday morning when I screwed up the formatting (installed Windows XP on the new drive by mistake, when all I wanted was an NTFS partition) I remembered Papa would've got it right first time (use FDISK from the Windows 98 startup disks - not the Windows 95 one 'cos it can't support FAT32 or partitions above 2GB - and I couldn't even find the stack of startup floppies).

Couldn't find the old modem either when I tried to get the internet connection to work. Screwed up the connections too when I disconnected the mess of phone wires. 3 desktops to one router stuffed chock-full of microfilters and 3-to-1 & 2-to-1 connectors is a recipe for trouble. He'd have remembered how to do it; only he knew precisely which wire was connected to the phone line, which one to the router, to the comps, to each other.

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Now I realise how much I miss him. I always depended on him to figure out what screwed up in all the computers I had. Only he'd have the patience to work out what was wrong. He knew everything about all the hardware, where all the papers and spare chips and drives and wires were kept, all that kind of stuff. All I know about computers I learnt from him.

Man... he kept my life running and I never knew it. Even last December he brought me down to the computer fair at Expo to get new RAM chips, just a couple of days before he got admitted to hospital, really, really sick. By then he was struggling against the cold and the crowds in the exhibition hall and trying his best to keep up with me as we waded through the whole mess of people. I only realise it now, and it hits real hard.

Damn I'm emo now. I miss him terribly.

My top 15 beatles songs

Wow ok this is interesting. At the urging of Zhaohan, I'm supposed to think up my top 15 Beatles songs. Just when I'm listening to Simon & Garfunkel -.- And this will sure prove embarrassing, I hardly know 15. Well fuck that, since I've nothing better to do, just off the top of my head, in no particular order, here goes:

1. Hey Jude. This was the song that kicked my head in and started my own Beatlemania. It made me go wow; still does. It reminds me in my darkest moments that there's still hope and love in the world. "For well you know that it's a fool/ Who plays it cool by making his world a little colder" is quite possibly my favourite line, ever. And I love the 4-minute refrain & fadeoff; it's mesmerizing. It's a great end to an anthem of life.

2. With A Little Help From My Friends. For the turn-on-the-warm-fuzzy-feeling win. For reminding me that there is hope in friendship. For inspiring in me the will to carry on. "Are you sad because you're on your own?/ No! I get by with a little help from my friends./ Mmm! Get high with a little help from my friends. Mmm! Gonna try with a little help from my friends." I love that bit.

3. Carry That Weight. Bloody ironic that I remembered the first couple of lines of this one in the middle of my SISPEC 28km route march. I guess I'd taken it and imbued it with my own personal meaning, when it's actually a wisp of a song. Well well it captured my imagination.

4. Eleanor Rigby. Ouch this really speaks to me. "Waits at the window/ Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/ Who is it for?" It feels to me like a chilling dissection of modernity.

5. I Am The Walrus. Haha this screws your mind to eternity and back. I just refuse to visualise any of the images, but the first verse still grips my brain and refuses to let go. "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together." Wooaaahhh...

6. Got To Get You Into My Life. The sheer sound of those rolling syllables just never quite left my head. So I was introduced to the cover by Earth Wind and Fire first, so what? Both are great. It's sheer bloody exhilaration. I don't care if it's love or crack; "Ooh! Did I tell you I need you/ Every single day of my life?" Oh and the bass is pretty cool.

7. Yesterday. This is hard to bear. Kinda pulls at the heart.

8. Here Comes The Sun. It's a kind of wistful, nostalgic, tempered but quietly blissful optimism. The guitar's magical. "It's alright" and I'm somehow back in my childhood when (I've said this before) everything that could be right was right and would always be that way for ever and ever Amen. Lovely lovely lovely.

9. Oh! Darling. These are words that could've come right from my own heart. "Oh! Darling,/ Please believe me/ I'll never do you no harm." Awww...

10. Getting Better. A bit like Here Comes The Sun and With A Little Help, this reminds me that there's hope in the world. I can almost believe "it's getting better all the time".

11. From Me To You. See comments to (9). And if I could've dreamt it out it must've hit home.

12. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (and reprise). I almost feel I belong there haha. It's a brilliant atmosphere. The chords are fresh out of the shining gates of chord heaven. And the guitar's a helldemon.

13. Maxwell's Silver Hammer. I just love that li'l piece of shit.

14. Let It Be. I detest myself when I get emo, and this makes me detest myself every time. But there's got to be a reason why I keep on going back to it. It's awfully reassuring to know that "there will be an answer: let it be." It kinda reminds me of my childhood, when I got nightmares and used to creep to my parents' bed, turn on the table lamp and wake them up cos I just dreamt of a monster or something. I'd be told to say the Hail Mary and everything would somehow be all right again.

15. All You Need Is Love. This keeps on running through my mind too. It's awfully empowering, just as the feeling of love is - you can do anything, be anything, if only you love. And I'm quietly reminded of all the people I hold dear.

Yup that's what the Beatles does for me. I'm sorry if they're mostly awfully obvious choices. There's lots of the Beatles I haven't heard, or heard enough of, and it hardly does them justice. Oh well if you've got a problem with it shucks to you then ;D

Edit: I should have listed You Never Give Me Your Money/Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End (from Abbey Road) all together, since they're clearly thematically linked. And it gives me 4 songs for the price of one slot heh. And I like them all, especially Golden Slumbers. Yup.