Lyrics

Tomorrow will be my last day of lessons at NJC. Friday will be our farewell assembly so there won't be any lessons (though there will still be chemistry and GP consolidations...), and after that we'll be flying solo. Of course, there will still be messages from mission control from time to time, but by and large we're on our own for this final fight. Nostalgia is definitely starting to creep in, but I shall stave off those thoughts till the day itself; after all, that deserves a post on its own.

For now, the main thing on my mind is tomorrow's DSTA Scholarship interview :X Can't say that I'm 100% prepared, but at least I managed to do some reading up... That should be enough right? [No, not really]

It's still two days away but that graduation song from Vitamin C has started looping in my head already. I guess there's just something about that song, like so many diabetes-inducing love ballads and cringe-worthy National Day songs, which makes it sound unbearably corny at any other time of your life, but seem perfectly acceptable and even likable during those few moments in your life when you actually experience what the lyrics are telling.

In case you haven't noticed, I've decided to make a conscious effort to use proper spelling and grammar in my posts from now on :D Looking back through my archives, I realised that using IM-style contractions make me sound like a bimbo, and I've been cutting back on them for a while now, so I decided to go all the way and fix the lack of capital letters at the start of sentences too. Call me a straw-grabber, but I'll do anything right now to at least give me the feeling that I'm improving my GP in some way. I simply have no affinity with argumentative essay writing, be it GP or econs (<- this is more of a general shorthand rather than an Internet-spawned contraction, so yeah :D ); I remember that I used to actually like writing stories for English compositions, but I just can't find the same enthusiasm or flair in JC.

Wish me good luck for tomorrow. WISH ME NOW.

Sanitarium

Today was a really long day. i was already dead when it came to maths, but that was only halfway through the day. after school, the cohort had a mock GP paper 1 followed immediately by the checking of answers. we did the 2009 A level paper, and i was completely annihilated by it. i have no idea how i can even consider myself ready for the A levels given the kind of performance i put up for the test.

i feel much more irritable these few days. maybe it's due to the mounting pressure, i don't know, but i seem to have more pent-up rantings inside of me. oh well, as long as they don't start bubbling up and disturbing the smooth surface of the still lake, then i guess i'll just deal with it. i guess it's something we're all feeling nowadays, and the natural reaction is to strike out at the source of irritation; a rebellion of sorts. but then again, what is the point of rebellion if you have no cause to rebel for?

on a brighter note, i got into the final round of interviews for the DSTA scholarship! :D really excited, but at the same time really nervous. i have absolutely no idea what kind of research i should be doing to prepare for it: do i read up on singapore's defense strategy or learn about our latest defense technology? or do i just keep myself updated on weapons technology in general? the scary thing is that there are only 10 of us (at least for that day), so more than ever it feels like i'm alone on this path. am i the only NJCian applying for it at this point? i don't remember seeing any other NJCians at the assessment centre on friday, and the only two other people i know of who were invited to the assessment said that it wasn't their thing. well anyway, it's on thursday, so i'll be crossing my fingers till then. i really hope i can get this, because in all the uncertainty and turmoil of the A levels it would be really emotionally comforting for me to have some sort of a "safety net".

so anyway, on the topic of going crazy from stress, this is a song that's been stuck in my head the entire day. it's a song about a man locked up in an asylum who doesn't believe that he's insane. one of the best transitions from slow and peaceful to fast and heavy i've ever heard. so here's Welcome Home (Sanitarium):

I could use some guiding light, some place to go

I guess at some point in our lives, we will all have dreams. often they are lofty or far-fetched or simply plain ridiculous. precisely because they are so ridiculous, the circumstances you find yourself in will very often urge you to abandon such wild and unrealistic thoughts. it is very tempting to simply forget that wild dream you had when the sound of the world yelling "No" to your face drowns out that tiny voice in your heart that whispers "Yes".

i've always had something like that in my heart: a small flickering flame that never seemed to burn out. in the past, it was a flame that i could always see no matter how dark it became; a pinprick in the inkiness that i could count on to be there.

then i grew older and saw the chips and cracks in the idyllic world of myself and the flame, and it seemed that my small little light was no match for the sheer amount of darkness that poured into my world through the cracks. surely that tiny candlelight had long been washed out, i thought to myself. so i lost sight of it, and went on with my life content in wandering in the dark.

but now, after seeing nothing but the night sky for so long, i caught a glimpse of a light from long ago. it's the same tiny twinkling flame as before, but it gleams brighter than ever in a sky that has never been darker; it is a star, a guiding star with which i can find my way. i may not ever reach the star, but it will always be guiding me along this road. and if i'm lucky, i may just reach that star after all.

You may not reap what you sow, but you will never reap what you dare not sow.

Clock hands

Today's DSTA assessment was highly unconventional and unexpected. i was expecting an interview or maybe an IQ test, but what actually happened was far more interesting than that. i don't think i'm allowed to reveal much about it since there are candidates who still haven't been assessed, so all i'll say is "RPG" :D it may sound weird to you if you haven't experienced it first-hand, but even if the application doesn't go through, i still think it was the most unique (dare i say fun?) scholarship assessment i've ever been to. and DSTA's supposed to be the boring one?

After a week of wondering why everyone else is doing their testimonial while we haven't even caught wind of it, we suddenly have the weekend to write a testimonial. i thought that the SGC was already blowing your own trumpet, but the testimonial blows that clean out of the water. oh well, i just have thicken my skin over the weekend and get over it.

i feel lethargic, all the time. even today, when i woke up at 10.30am because i was going to the assessment instead of school, i still end up feeling like my body is made of lead by 10pm. maybe it's because the entire assessment lasted for 4 hours without any interval. maybe i should have drank more free coffee and tea from the refreshments area. maybe i need to have a regular caffeine intake. i guess independence from commercially available stimulants is just another thing i have to give up for the sake of the A levels.

Next week will be the last week of school.
A month and a day later will be the A levels.

The hands reach out to claim me
Those wretched hands of the clock

Assessment

Post-prelim, pre-A levels revision has begun, but i still feel that i haven't gotten myself running at that level of performance from before the prelims. maybe that short break i took wasn't short enough :/

anyway, tomorrow's the DSTA assessment/interview, and i have absolutely no idea what to expect. i honestly hope i can make it through, but this is my first interview and is therefore the most prone to screw-ups. i know that you're supposed to prepare beforehand and think about possible questions and other things like that, but in all realism there's no way my schedule these days could have allowed for that. of course, there's also the "assessment" that comes together with the "interview", and i don't know what to expect there either. will it be an overall IQ test? or a general knowledge quiz? perhaps even a combined science/maths test? WILL I HAVE TO DO BIOLOGY? D: like i what i said to the ignis IP kids: at my level of biology, a cell only has 3 components. in any case, i'll be skipping school for the interview, so i really hope it will be worth the lessons i'm going to miss. especially for econs, the one i desperately need help in. OHSHIT WHAT IF IT'S AN ECONS TEST.

on a music-related note, Abandon All Ships released their new album Geeving and it's awesome! :D and i don't care if technocore draw criticism both from the metal-hating danceclub music scene as well as the techno-loathing metalheads; the fact of the matter is that i think they're great, and that's all i care about when it comes to music. here's one of my favourites from the album, called Guardian Angel:



as bryan reminded me, after this week we'll only have about a month until the A levels.

Fish eye

I've been meaning to update, but somehow i never found the time to. quite indicative of what the immediate future will be like, sadly.

i don't know what i should be doing now. of course the easy thing to say is "prepare for A levels lah", but what exactly does that entail? i don't know how i should pace myself, whether or not i'm burning out too quickly or not quickly enough, and all those other minute details that we never expect to be troubled by when we were examining the scene from afar last year. nobody seems to know exactly what to do; some say take things slowly and pace yourself, some say go all out in the coming weeks, and many others have advice that lies somewhere between the two. tons of people have survived the A levels, but nobody can agree on any one optimal path we should take. i guess it really depends on the individual, and finding that path for yourself is just as important as actual academic ability.

"So Wei Shian, how are your grades? Do you have a full house?"
"Actually, it's four of a kind."
"Woah, so four As?"
"No."
as if i needed yet another reminder that i'm performing way below expectations.
at the end of last year, i was identified together with a a group of other people by the school to be one of those who have the potential to blaze through the A levels. now, all the high flyers are flying high; they're getting all the As and distinctions that the school believed they could get; they're living up to the expectations that everyone had of them. all except one.

ok, i just discovered this band called Last Chance To Reason. if i tried my best to describe their genre, i guess it would be something like progressive nintendocore. yes it sounds stupid, but they're really very unique. just have a listen:

Find more artists like Last Chance To Reason at MySpace Music

and also, i've decided to become more open-minded about Slipknot. i was initially put off by the fact that they have freakin' nine members in their band, which seemed like the same kind of overkill so commonly seen in k-pop groups. also, the whole image with the masks and the nine-point star kind of portrays a satanic metal vibe which doesn't outright put me off, but makes me hesitate before accepting them. still, i decided to re-listen to a few of their songs. i still came to the conclusion that most of their songs are not my type (i wouldn't say bad, just... not my type), but at least i found a good song that isn't Psychosocial. this one's called Before I Forget, and i really like that fast-paced guitar riff during the verses. it kind of mellows down to a more melodic chorus which was mildly disappointing for me, because i feel that a fast aggressive verse like that should end in a heavy chorus (except for Waking The Demon; somehow, Bullet For My Valentine managed to pull that off quite nicely). but anyway, here it is:



a literal translation of a chinese proverb: a fish eye disguised among pearls.

Signal flares

Got back econs today, and it was quite bad. well, there were some pinpricks of light, but on the whole i was losing large chunks of marks here and there for reasons i have not yet figured out, getting like 12 and 13 out of 25 for my essays... my original grade was  D, but by some miraculous moderation i shot up two grades to a B. still, it's sitting in the back of my mind that in actual fact i'm only a D-grade student. what went wrong? i think i know what was going on, so did the breakdown occur between the mind and the pen?

i'm very afraid for econs and GP, the two subjects that require essay writing. for some reason i can never ensure that i convey my meaning into words. i'm really starting to see the appeal that mathematicians saw when they decided to create their own language using intuitive symbols, stripped down of the ambiguity that we find in other languages. of course this considerably undermines the literary depth of any written material (imagine a poem written entirely in mathematical symbols?), but really, sometimes the depth and ambiguity only lends itself to misunderstanding. when nearly every word and combination of words has multiple meanings, it can get hard to convey messages and ideas.

ok, i have digressed. the fact of the matter is that maths will never become the language of choice for essay-writing, so i gotta quit whining and start practicing. it's probably time to spam full essays for both GP and econs, which sounds incredibly exhausting but is unfortunately the only solution i can think of, short of putting essays under my pillow and hoping for diffusion. but it's just frustrating to have to put in so much effort, knowing full well that it's likely not going to pay off in a very visible way. it's like firing signal flares into the night sky and hoping that someone in the inky blackness saw your plea for help.