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.

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 graduate school, you don’t receive a salary for teaching classes and doing research, you receive a “stipend”.

This is amusing because the only other time I’ve heard the word being used in any context was in my senior Japanese history course, where the Samurai warriors, we were told, received annual “stipends” from their Daimyo overlords for services rendered on the battlefield and elsewhere.

To put things in perspective, the Samurai, who were respected for their chivalry and placed at the top of the feudal Japanese social hierarchy (with the peasants, artisans, and merchants below them in that order), nonetheless lived very spartan and impecunious lives.

Incidentally, this is rather reminecent of grad school as a whole, where masters and PhD students technically exist in a higher academic strata than the undergrad masses, but get worked several times harder and paid miserably for research work that arguably goes further in establishing their daimyo’s advisor’s career than their own.

And as I weigh the pros and cons of getting a PhD myself, I can’t help but feel that going to grad school again is going to put me on the short end of a very long stick. It’d be at least 4 years of my life committed to solving somebody else’s problem before I can ever begin to broach my own.

Unlike the Samurai of old, you can’t just wander off to become a ronin (a masterless warrior). For better or worse, no such thing exists in the academic world.

It is said that Buddha once delivered a silent sermon to his disciples where he simply stared at a flower and smiled. The gist if it was to get them to appreciate the “stillness” of the universe and the beauty inherent within all of nature. Something along those lines, anyway.

Yesterday as I was sitting in Carl’s Junior munching down a supersized onion ring I took a moment to admire its crummy asymmetry and cholesterol-laden goodness and wondered, “why couldn’t it have been an onion ring?” Surely Buddha would have been equally happy staring at a big onion ring. Who wouldn’t be? Everybody loves onion rings.

And I smiled like an idiot because, for a moment at least, I was dead certain I was the happiest person in the restaurant.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Vladimir Putin looks looks like a textbook James Bond villain. So happens I stumbled upon this picture of Putin err… thinking about something and I knew I had to blog it. Isn’t amazing this guy has exactly 1 expression he wears all the time? You couldn’t tell if he was plotting world domination or thinking about doing the laundry.

My friend sent me this rather amusing web comic the other day. “You’ll like it” he promised, and to his credit it did bring a smile to my face. But one thing that was immediately clear to me was that the whole evolution-creationism controversy no longer pumps me up like it did back during college. I just don’t care that much anymore.

A little background info: Kansas in 2005 was a hotbed for the Evolution-creationism debates. The state board of education was about to introduce creationism into the school curriculum and as the only columnist in the K-State collegian with any sort of science background, I felt like I had the burden to say something. Yes, college. Where everything you do happens with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. So I wrote a couple of columns in the school paper on the matter and promptly received a mountainload of hate mail (of varying degrees of coherence and profanity) from fervid believers as far away as Florida. Not that I was ever deterred by them; the articles did give me some serious street cred with professors.

But that was back then. These days I look at the whole issue with only detached interest. Part of the reason, I suspect, is because I’m no longer in Kansas. After all, Its a lot harder to get excited about an issue if you’re not physically there to see any tangible implications. But the other reason is that the unabashed idealism I once had in college has since worn off. Coming to think about it, there there aren’t that many issues that incite the same kind of fiery passion I had for almost everything from the Iraq war to how I wanted my steak done.

Its not that I’ve become jaded, just that I’ve discovered other things to focus my energies on. Perhaps its a natural progression in the evolutionary course of the psyche, so to speak.