Time is Running Out

I'm leaving for Australia in 3 days (for Wallaby, not leisure, so you can stop being jealous now) there's so much to be done in Singapore.

The past few days have been hectic, to say the least. Ever-changing schedules have somehow caused me to lose nearly all my embarkation leave, and until now I'm still not done packing.

Sometimes I feel that I'm in the passenger seat of my own life, only watching but not controlling what happens to me.

If you don't like it, please don't put a ring on it

"Till Death do us part" seems like such an empty promise these days.

You can capture a body, but you cannot capture a heart. And perhaps, having an empty shell of a person is worse than not having someone at all.

And I discovered that my castles stand / Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

Commitment

A calm, serene lake, but all was not as it seemed. Turmoil lurked under the surface, violent undercurrents which rose from the bottom towards the top, ripping everything asunder as they rose. Finally, a leviathan broke through to the surface, shattering the mirror-smooth face of the lake I once mistook for true peace. It was poised, ready to devour the lake and all life within it. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. A tenuous silence was restored, but it was not the peace I once knew. The surface of the lake rippled constantly, seemingly quivering with fear, wary of the next time the leviathan would strike again.

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got till it's gone.

Love is not an emotion; love is a commitment.

Transition

It really only just occurred to me that I'm getting pretty close to my ORD. In about four and a half months, I'll be out of the army and thrown into the cold winds of reality, and the ironic thing is that in spite of all the whining and the complaining and the wishing for NS to end, I honestly think that at this point I'm still not ready for what lies beyond. Preparations need to be done, tests need to be taken, universities have to be applied to.

I guess that just leaves four and a half months for all that. Let the transition begin.

Method acting

I like to think that nobody is truly evil or malevolent; some people might place less emphasis on morality in their decision-making processes than others, but I believe that it is always a factor that is duly considered and only acted against in light of the most prudent of their judgement. Rather, it is the circumstances in which people find themselves that compel them to make choices that seem justified to them, but perhaps not others. What outsiders might perceive as errors of judgement or even direct antagonisation might just be the best or only viable course of action for someone, all things considered.

The problem is that other people might not think the same way I do, and in the end people get despised not for who they are, but for the characters they have to play as; blamed for the decisions that are hard to follow through with but have to be made in the face of the situation.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

Monster

My anger is something that I try to mitigate, because I have seen in my youth that I'm not very good at controlling it once it breaks loose. I thought I've been doing a pretty good job at it, and I honestly thought that I wouldn't again succumb to the mindless lashing out that accompanies a pure, blind rage. Two weeks ago, it nearly happened. I was trying to maintain my composure, but I could feel myself losing grip on the monster within. It felt like my skin was a porcelain shell cracking, and pure molten rage was spewing out from the fissures. I managed to keep my anger from reaching explosive levels, but the damage has already been done.

The weird and the wonderful

For those of you who have forgotten (and if so, shame on you), Art By Numbers released their debut album, Reticence: The Musical, on 29th May. It's a really catchy album which would be a great gateway for people trying to get into prog metal and even metal in general, but still manages to stand tall in terms of technical skills and writing. They decided to mostly drop the screamo from their Reyes and Minotaur days (those songs make a comeback in non-screamo versions, by the way), which is not necessarily bad, but just different. I've listened through the album about 4 times already and I'm still trying to decide on my favourite song of the album, so instead of giving any recommendations I'll just link directly to their full album stream and you can decide on your own.

Now that we're done with the wonderful, it's time to talk about that other thing. And if you think that I'm being judgmental by calling out a whole other genre of music as "weird", then I assure that what you're about to see and hear is objectionably weird. Say hello to BabyMetal:





It's kawaii-style J-pop... With death metal... I'm not sure if I need to say anything else. But all things said and done, "weird" does not necessarily exclude "good", and I can't say that I outright don't like this music; the metal parts are decent enough, and the J-pop parts are bearable. But then you get to actually watching the music videos, with the 3 girls acting sickeningly cute enough to give anyone diabetes against a backdrop of blast beats and guitar riffs, and I find myself getting goosebumps every time I force myself to sit through them. I'd hate to jump on the "WTF Japan" bandwagon, but seriously can you blame me in this case?