First two weeks

First off, the title is a misnomer, since my confinement was actually 18 days, which according to hearsay with my friends in other platoons is one of the longest confinement periods. It definitely sucks to know that your book-out is later and shorter than everyone else's, and that you're having your field camp immediately after you book back, and that you're getting 'A' level results immediately after field camp, and that there's yet another field camp after getting 'A' level results. I can't talk about the details of all that because the army likes to be secretive and all (so much like DSO -.-), but basically life is going to get pretty rough for the next week or so. But as my friends have advised me, the important thing in NS is just to take things one day at a time, so for now I'm going to enjoy my long-awaited book-out day :D

In truth, my NS experience thus far hasn't been all that horrible. Yes there's the waking up extremely early every morning, and the physical training that we have to do every day, and the punishments we get for seemingly petty offences (which is still physical training anyway), and having to do ever-increasing work in an ever-decreasing timespan, but if you do manage to follow the commanders' instructions dutifully then you would have saved yourself a lot of push-ups and learned how to be a more efficient person at the same time. It's a bit like school, except that the teachers skip the basic chapters and go on to second-tier topics immediately, and punish you severely for not succeeding. All in all I'd say that it's a survivable experience definitely, but excelling in that kind of environment is another thing entirely. Being a so-called "leadership batch" which is being groomed for potential officer or specialist cadets, I find myself wondering very often whether I'm good enough to meet their expectations or not. Should I just drift my way through and remain under the radar contented with what I have, or should I keep pushing forward, potentially landing me in a situation where the training is 3 times worse than what I'm going through now? The big question now: OCS/SCS or not?

Drowned in all the army talk, squeezed silent by my helmet straps, somewhere at the back of my head, lies a greater ordeal. In a flash, 18 days went by just like that, and now there's only about 5 days left to the release of 'A' level results. The worse part of this particular problem is that even though it is so critically important to succeed, even though a misstep here could literally ruin my future, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except sit and wait. So I sit, and I wait.

Five days. All I have to do is take it one day at a time, five times.

Songs that happened while I was gone

So I came back from Tekong and was greeted by awesomeness.

Two from The Human Abstract:





And one from Last Chance To Reason:

Coded to Fail by prosthetic

Prog Metal March (and a bit of April too if you count LCTR's release) is going to be epic beyond words, so I won't even try to type out my feelings now.

School of hard knocks

Tomorrow's the day. That day. That one day that every Singaporean son would have heard so much about from fathers and uncles. That one day that they have buried in the back of their minds for so long, but have been secretly dreading their entire lives. Tomorrow's the day I check into Tekong. Physical and mental grinding like never before await, and there's not much I can do about it now. I'm just going to go in with the ragdoll mentality: go in, get whipped and come out the other end in whatever mangled form I become. In spite of all that, there's still a part of me that's excited for what's to come. After all, grinding is what sharpens mere pieces of metal into swords. I guess you could say that what I'm feeling right now is similar to the feeling of going into a new school, except that now it's a school of (really) hard knocks, maybe 30% dread, 5% excitement and 65% resignation (the math is correct right? I'm transitioning my brain from "thinking" mode to "complying with physically-demanding orders" mode).

For obvious reasons, I'm gonna have to abandon this blog for a while. See you guys again on February 26, if I don't slip into a fatigue-induced coma over the weekend (though seriously I don't know who I'm addressing here anyways, the few people who follow my posts are probably in Tekong now).

Bye :)

Final words

OK, finally an actual post with actual words after so long. I'll try to recall what I did as much as possible.

From the second day of CNY up till Sunday I was on a floating fish farm in the middle of the sea somewhere in Batam with aunts and uncles and cousins from my mother's side of the family whom I never knew existed O.O It sounds really awkward on paper, but actually it turned out pretty enjoyable. Sure, there were sunburns and splinters and cuts from barnacles and no electricity before 6pm, but the feeling of lying in a hammock at 4pm with the sun shining lazily on you and the wind blowing past you and the ground bobbing up and down with the waves more than makes up for all that (note to self: acquire hammock for personal use).

Yesterday there was an 09SH27 dinner, probably the last one for a long time since the February enlistees will all be going in one by one. It was the Dhoby Gaut Just Acia again, seems to have become our standard location for class gatherings when we're not going from school. As usual I ate way more ice-cream than I should :P (on a side note, they have slushies now which are actual really good, better than the 7-11 slurpees) Also, we passed around a birthday card for tzumi so that everyone could sign it, but jacob kept smudging it while trying to write in it -.- Oh well, in spite of, and because of, their epic retardedness, I'll definitely miss my friends. Hopefully I'll meet a few of them in Tekong (talking about the guys here obviously).

March is shaping out to be a life-changing month. It's not entirely because it's Prog Metal March though (but still, Prog Metal March plays a big role in its importance), but also because if the persistent rumours are to be believed, 'A' level results are coming out on 4th March. Quite without exaggeration, our entire future hangs in the balance of what is printed on our tiny little report slips on that day. It's crazy that so much can hinge on so little, but that's simply how it is in Singapore.

Another thing that is simply how it is in Singapore is of course NS. The first of the February enlistees already went in yesterday, and later today another group of them will check in, and after that is my batch on Wednesday. People keep asking me how I feel about it but honestly right now I don't have a good answer for them. I guess I've just been pushing it to the back of my head for so long that I haven't had the time to seriously think about it. I consider myself pretty talented at pushing undesirable thoughts to the back of my head; after all, that's how I could go on for weeks without doing homework and still not feel or anxious.

Speaking of not doing things, I still need to finish packing for NS. Also, I still haven't healed completely from this pretty big and pretty irritating ulcer I've been having for nearly about week now. Not that it's life-threatening or crippling or anything, but I just want to go in with as little to have to worry about as possible.

DO MATH; BECOME UNSTOPPABLE

The gold here is in the fine print, it may be TL;DR but it's totally worth it.

Truth in advertising

Rabbit

Boom. I just gave you a nightmare.

[spoilers]
But seriously, I find this animation short mesmerisingly good. The use of 1950s children's book stickers and illustration style to represent the corruption of innocence; the insatiable hunger of the idol to represent insatiable greed; selling away quill sets to represent rejecting intellectual pursuits for wealth. The twisted, corrupted beauty of this short really is in the details.
[\spoilers]

LOL-worthy pictures

C'est La Vie

Just when I was about to go off to sleep, fate gives me a reason to stay awake for another half an hour or so. And by fate, I meant Protest The Hero:

C'est La Vie (Pre-Order Scurrilous Now!) by VagrantRecords

I NEED THIS ALBUM NOW DO YOU HEAR ME

This is WHAT music?

It's part techno, part death metal, part dreampop, and all good.

I need to start listening to bands that people have actually heard of. Sinking in too deep into the hipster pool here :/

Japanese Girl Explains...

Literally LOLed XD

Demon

If there can be love at first sight, I am convinced that similarly there can be enmity at first sight. While I really honestly try not to be put off to much by a bad first impression, I'll really start to get pissed off if the virtually every subsequent impression is just as foul. Everyone has people whom they simply don't like and cannot bring themselves to like, but while others can ignore them or even lash back out at them, I'm stuck with someone whom I'm forced to see everyday and obligated to treat nicely. Maybe I'm just being evil here, but then again I never proclaimed to be a saint, and he's definitely no angel either.

I may have 101 reasons to dread going to NS, but here's one reason for me to look forward to it: at the very least there'll be less friction, which will be better for everyone.