Inquisited.com

Dear Yngwie

I just bought you latest album and have to say it totally blew me away. The new tracks are just pure badass awesomeness - I really digged “Caprici Di Diablo” and “Death Dealer” for all the incredible speed and signature classical overtones you’re famous for. “Eleventh Hour” with its exotic eastern vibes rocked, too. Once again, you’ve reminded us why you’re still the patron saint of neoclassical metal. As Borat would say, very naiiice.

Nevermind the fact that all your songs basically use the same chord progressions, same modulations, the same predictable arpeggio runs, harmonic minor sweeps, and horribly cheesy lyrics. But alright, I guess no one really listens to your songs for the lyrics anyway - that would be a lot like reading FHM for financial advice… or watching a porno for the plot. Whatever, you get the idea.

I do have one request, though: Change the damn album art already. Seriously dude, pulling a constipated look while posing with your guitar get a bit old after a while, don’t you think? I mean, look at some of your album covers over the years:

Rising Force - 1984

Marching Out - 1985

Trilogy - 1986 - Very Tenacious D-isque

Odyssey - 1988

Fire and Ice - 1992

Magnum Opus - 1995

Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E Flat Minor Op. 1 - 1998 - That’s one long-ass album title

Perpetual Flame - 2008 - Your most constipated look yet

See a pattern here? I don’t know about you, but I for one would like to see a wee bit more creativity. The cheese factor is through the roof. Not to mention that you’re like at least 15 years older than what you appear on the cover of “Perpetual Flame”. And what’s up with the headbanger hairstyle and leather outfit? That’s so 20 years ago man.

But whatever. Keep doing what you do, malm. Rock on, and I’ll see you in Singapore the next time you tour asia.

Your fan,
David

Normally, I pay a lot of attention to my dreams. I write them down first thing in the morning, draw similarities and patterns from previous nights, and reflect on them. I find it unfortunate that few other people do the same: after all, dreams are as much an integral part of our reality and existence as our waking life. Of course, some would dismiss this silly notion on the grounds that dreams aren’t “real”.

That would bring us to the deeply existential question of what we consider to be “real” in the first place. To me at least, living is about experiencing, and anything that brings about a new and unique experience is real enough.

Dreams speak to us, but only if we allow them to. Dreams or nightmares, they all have something to teach or show. But all that’s assuming that you remember your dreams at all, and I can’t if I’m too mentally fatigued which I have been for the past few months. Last night, the dreams returned. A weight has been lifted, and at long last we will dream again.

I’ve recently realized that my blogging patterns aren’t as erratic as I previously thought - my writing output seems directly correlated to bouts of melancholia and euphoria. When I’m pathologically happy (yes, it does happen), I tend to blog and emphatically argue my point on random social/scientific/political issues.When I’m melancholic, its much more introspective and personal. But its all the insipid emotion states in between that seem completely devoid of any creative potential. And unfortunately, much of my life exists precisely in that state which explains why this blog isn’t updated more frequently than it should.

But still, I’m glad to have discovered something about myself today, even if it was a “duh” moment that wasn’t particularly novel or exciting. Its good to know that even after 20-odd years you can still surprise yourself with the little things in life. Maybe the world isn’t so boring after all.

Been swamped with work again. The most prodigious consumer of my spare time lately has been graduate school applications. Its such a formidable logistical nightmare applying to 8 different schools it almost makes assembling the space shuttle look like a walk in the park.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that there is no centralized system to handle applications and each school acts as if the applicant is applying EXCLUSIVELY to their school, which needless to say is an awesomely stupid assumption. This means that since each school requires 3 letters of recommendations, I have 24 individual snail-mail letters to track and monitor.

And for heaven’s sake graduate schools should stop asking retarded questions like “Why choose Stanford?”. Now I have a problem with this kind of question on 2 levels: Firstly, it a huge time waster for the applicant. Obviously, if Stanford had nothing to offer me I wouldn’t be applying there in the first place.

Secondly, I’m convinced its meant as nothing more than an ego boost for the admission committee. i.e 90% of our applicants think that our university has a world-renowned faculty, state of the art research facilities, situated in the perfect junction between academia and industry blah blah. Therefore it must be true.

Because nobody ever bullshits on their applications. *cough*

Imagine if I had to write 8 different essays waxing lyrical about the putative attractiveness of each program. Its exhausting to keep coming up with ever-more grandiloquent fluff and gets a bit ridiculous when I start reaching my “safety schools”.

“Why choose Pineappletart State University?”, you say? Because I’m out of options, dammit.

Yesterday night, I took a long bus ride home from other side of the island. I could have taken a cab and cut down my travel time by a few orders of magnitude. Ordinarily, that’s what I would have done because I’m a sucker for efficiency. But for some reason I didn’t. Last night was different.

The bus was one of the older ones, meaning it had no air conditioning and the rumbling and rattlings of its antiquated engine could heard as distinctly as it could be felt. It was also slow, but I didn’t care. The bus was vacant, so I had a large space to myself. The view outside was scenic, at least by Singaporean standards. With the windows down, I felt the gentle breeze of the night and the world in its natural state of being. It felt right. Just me and the world under a starry moonlit sky. For the better part of an hour, nothing else mattered.

So a lot has happened over the course of the past few months. Events that transpired included (but were by no means limited to): insomnia, heartbreak, insomnia, taking the GRE immediately after insomnia, getting drunk, and writing a song. Yes, in that order. Believe it or not, there actually is a name for the malady that I was afflicted with: oneitis.

Oneitis is something that happens when you meet someone you’re hopelessly attracted to. Somehow, you are certain that said person is “the one” (hence the origin of the term) and would do virtually anything to win him or her over. The subject of your affections becomes the focal point of your life: you lose your wit in front of her, you get jittery when she doesn’t reply to your messages, you feel compelled to check her facebook profile several times a day, ambiguous statements are taken as massive hints of her desire to be with you and so on. Because this is a one-way energy transfer, oneitis is both emotionally and mentally draining. Needless to say, it sucks.

In my case, I couldn’t let her (lets just call her Layla) go for the longest time in spite of some rather glaring personality flaws. It didn’t matter, so long as she liked me I was willing to adapt and compromise. Some might call it unrequited love. Others, stupidity. There’s a thin line always. I can’t say exactly what it was that ultimately cured me of oneitis. There isn’t a definitive incident where I can point to with certainty and say “that’s what made me stop liking her”, but there were a series of events - inconsiderate decisions (understatement) on her part - that made me feel like shit. That was the dealbreaker.

Oneitis isn’t something that can be rationalized. You can have 5 buddies patting you on the shoulder over a jug of beer telling you how she isn’t worth it but it won’t do any good. You have to feel it.

And that’s the best advice I can give to people suffering from oneitis. You have to convince yourself emotionally that you’re better off without that person. Get out of the house and meet other human beings. Specifically, members of the opposite sex. Because after you met enough wonderful people you start wondering what was so special about that one unrequited love in the first place. A serious conversation with your oneitis goes a long way, too. Sometimes, “lets just be friends” won’t cut it. Because as long as there’s still a glimmer of hope there’s always the chance that your festering chronic oneitis will become a full-blown infection again. People generally don’t want to feel that they are “bad” because they rejected you, so you’ll just have to do the dirty work yourself. Let it go because its not going to happen.

Be a man. Do the right thing.

As for me, I’ve suffered from months of oneitis with nothing to show for it. Well, actually that isn’t true. I do have my cheesy oneitis/Layla-inspired love song. At least that’s one in the bank for the band to perform.

P.S. Now that I think about it, “So long, Layla” doesn’t sound like a bad title for a new song. Make that 2 originals.

I was listening to music with my playlist on random the other day and an old song I haven’t heard in a while came up. “I’ve never been to me” by Charlene (its a good one, go get it). Its about life, regrets, mistakes, wisdom gained and the singer/narrator beseeching the listener to avoid the degenerate path she’s taken.

But that got me thinking: to what extent can we control the decisions we make in our lives anyway? It sounds like an awfully stupid question but the older I get the more I feel that our lives and actions are much more deterministic than we’re willing to give credit for. We humans beings are more emotional than we are rational. We’re creatures of hierarchy and social law rather than creatures of independence.

Picture the scenario of a girl who, against all reason, refuses to leave her cheating boyfriend. Or a disgraced samurai who needs to commit seppuku. Or an eager teenager surrounded by friends at a club imploring him to take his first hit of cocaine. In each of these cases, there’s the “right” thing to do, and then there’s the actual thing they somehow or another have to do, given the circumstances.

A rare few choose the “right” thing (sometimes, I wonder if we applaud those who do because it reinforces our illusion of free will) - But that belies the fact that most don’t. The hapless girlfriend goes back to her douche boyfriend, the samurai cuts into his intestines with his katana, and the teenager becomes high on crack for the first time. How much of a choice do they have, really? Its not just about being smart, being wise, or being brave. Sometimes, its more complicated than that.

In the 1970s, my grandfather was tortured by the Chinese communists for being a “Capitalist swine”. Not that they needed any hard proof to arrest anyone at the time, but the incriminating evidence was a picture of him at the age of 4 sweated on wooden toy horse wearing clothes that were evidently too western and too colorful for the tastes of the CCCP.

As I trodded down the crowded isle the central Wuhan train station yesterday, I couldn’t help but feel extremely… bourgeois, for the lack of a better word. The stark difference in dress attire certainly contributed to that effect. As did travelling to one of my dad’s clients factories in a rather large Audi. It certainly gives off evil-capitalist-oppressing-the-lowly-proletariat vibes. For those of you not in the know, I’m currently travelling in China with my family visiting relatives, friends, ancestral graves and all that good stuff. Its been about 5 years since I last visited China but I’m amazed at how much the country has changed - The Chinese can literally rebuild an entire city faster than it takes Singapore to build a basketball court.

People who haven’t visited China in recent years would find it hard to picture the scale and scope of the transformation that is taking place - Massive highways spanning the lengths of an entire continent (or lets just say hundreds of Singapores in length), state-of-the-art airports, hospitals, skyscrapers, and shopping malls so massive you’d consider them engineering marvels by their own right have all popped up like mushrooms after a bout of rain.

Its messy at times, and the dichotomy between the have and have-nots is mind-boggling to say the least. At Wuhan train station, for instance, you see migrant workers from the poorest provinces of China, beggars, charlatans peddling snake oil, vagrants all crammed together in destitute conditions. Just a gated doorway a few meters away lies another world, the first class lounge where students from previleged families play with their unlocked iPhones, businessmen in snazzy suits and their IBMs, chic chicks with all the latest fashion apparel who wouldn’t at all be out of place in Tokyo or Paris.

In spite of these problems, you get the unmistakable impression that progress is both real and unstoppable. The number of cars on the streets are increasing exponentially, not just the cheapo plebian-mobiles, we’re talking about BMWs, Audis, Jaguars, and even Cadillacs. The Chinese have just discovered their purchasing power. Business is booming, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. And it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the world’s grandest display of a market economy in action is, ironically, taking place in what is technically still a communist country.

P.S. The good news is that China has free internet (Yes, for everyone). The bad news is that its dial-up. And the worse news is that Blogspot is on its banned list, which means I can’t access most of my friends’ blogs. Good thing I have my own domain, else I wouldn’t be able to blog on the fly either.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. What little time I spend in front of mine is usually divided evenly between National Geographic and the History Channel. Exciting, I know. In this day and age where shows like CSI, Lost, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives rule the airwaves people find it incredible that I don’t have the faintest clue what Carrie Bradshaw does for a living.

Its not that I don’t enjoy a bit of drama every now and then; I just can’t justify spending hundreds of cumulative hours sitting in front a box and accomplishing nothing productive. But there are a few rare exceptions. A few years ago, one of the shows that I did invest a lot of time in was a sci-fi series called Andromeda. The funny thing is Andromeda was hardly the creme de la creme of TV productions: the theme music was cheesy, the special effects (or rather lack thereof) was dire and the script was laughable. The only reason why I followed it for as long as I did was because it was easy for me to draw some parallels between the script and my somewhat tumultuous life at the time, having just been transplanted from Singapore to Kansas.

The story itself is set thousands of years in the future in an alternate universe, where a prosperous democratic alliance of planets known as the “systems commonwealth” rules the known universe. En route to a battle engagement, the Andromeda, a starship captained by the protagonist of the series, Dylan Hunt, is ambushed gets caught in the event horizon of a black hole and frozen in time. Dylan and the Andromeda emerge 300 years later, only to discover that the commonwealth has collapsed and a universe in chaos.

With the only world that he’s ever known gone and displaced in time and space, Dylan Hunt sets about the impossible task of rebuilding his beloved commonwealth single-handedly. Its tough. After all, he’s an living anachronism longing to recreate dead ideals and dreams that few people understand and even fewer care about. He clearly knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell but he forges on anyway. The rag-tag crew of the Andromeda are wonderful companions, but they’ll never see things his way. In his heart of hearts Dylan knows he’s isn’t - and won’t ever be - where he belongs.

Somehow, I could relate to all of that.