Make Me A Melody

It's hard to write a meaningful, agenda-specified and publicly singable song.

So far, I've written four separate tunes for the upcoming Youth Camp. After I completed each one, I remember I felt quite content, confident that that was going to be it. But it was naively so. Each song was a song on one day and a mongrel of cheesy intervals and pretentious lyrics the following week.

I think I'm beginning to empathise with a fraction of how these guys felt. Not to make much of my plain efforts to create affecting music, but I think the tension between being simultaneously creative and logical can become really hard to resolve. It becomes even more difficult with the gravitas that accompanies the expression of spiritual truths. The good thing is that it certainly fuels more experimentation.

Maybe I should hang out with the Maestro more often and hope something rubs off somehow, linguistically and musically. But I'll be writing this one in English anyways. I must have been out of my mind to have tried and presented otherwise in previous years!

Come to think of it, perhaps the latest song just needs refining. The main problem with it is that it's particularly hard to sing, I think. Haha. Ah, but who knows what I'll have to say about again tomorrow. I've really been humbled by this task.

Lord, make me a melody for me to use. Make me a melody for You to use.

Plastered

Three Nights Ago

The moon was low. Cabbies scouted the main thoroughfare outside Central mall. We flailed for transport like moths to their cadmium headlights. Well, it'd been a fun night.

I got in alone, murmured my address and the engine started. The usual stench of midnight surcharge wasn't that eye-watering. Rather, I was more occupied with how I was going to make it to school at 9am, and have the energy not to break my limbs while carrying gear back to the room with the real stench - the price of being small-time 'rock-stars', as it were.

Still, falling asleep wasn't the easiest thing to do. The driver took to my observation quite quickly. He was hunched, slightly rotund and clearly working against his years. His seatbelt was unfastened and his wrinkled digits clasped themselves tightly over the steering wheel. I thought there was a slight, intermittent quivering of muscle in the grip. The passing streetlights cast a motion of lustre and shadows on the car like sprinting zebras. His age spots faded in and out eerily under the dominoes of silhouettes. I buckled my seatbelt quickly.

It was after a red light that we both realised he'd forgotten to start the meter for the fare. He clicked it on with a soft chortle, and I wondered if he knew that we were both in the dark on this. I hoped he did and decided not to comment.

We were soon passing by the place where I had to be in a few hours for menial labour. It was a relief that home wasn't too far away from Clarke Quay. Then he missed a turn.

And as soon as I informed him meekly, the car decelerated to a nervous halt right in the middle of the naked road. I caught my breath. Jolted, I instinctively turned behind for a glance, then back ahead - no cars. We were all alone in the dead of the night with blunder for awkward company.

Then I heard his hoarse voice again, apologising this time, not profusely but sincerely. I judged that it was really no cause for panic, and quickly reassured him of the situation. It felt embarrassing to do so, but I told him that he could still make a right and a left after taking the next turn and still get me back home. It was perfectly remediable, and he agreed quickly.

The warm sound of the engine echoed encouragingly. We were soon at my drop-off point under the shelter of my estate's roundabout. It totalled up to a decent $11.10. I handed him $12, and intended to tell him he could keep the change since he triggered the meter late. But something else caught my eye first.

As he rummaged through the coin compartment, his sleeve receded slightly in the movement, revealing a small cotton bandage plastered on his mottled skin across a visible, glaucous vein, which was embedded like a dying snake in the desert sand. The dressing on his arm was the the kind you could only get from the hospital. I recognised it from a previous experience. Now the implications were building up unrestrainedly - the time of day, the seatbelt, the wrinkles, the mannerisms. And as I contemplated, he gently handed me a single coin, the size from which I estimated it to be 20 cents. It wasn't exactly what I'd intended, but good enough for charity's sake not to be further pursued.

Then he said, politely and unassumingly, “谢谢你的支持。”

Later, it punctured my soul to discover that he actually gave me a dollar coin. I felt the weight of excess woven into the fabric of my velvet blazer. This man had a family to feed, and it seemed that he was the only person from the household capable of doing so, at whatever cost necessary.

Keeping Time

Moving 100++kg of equipment across half the country for a 10-15 minute gig is energy consuming, cash consuming and time consuming. Well, I guess all great bands start out like that. Got chance, got chance. Haha.

Time after time, we've led people to raise their hands and sing out their hearts on Monday mornings. Neither have we the voice of an angel, nor have we for virtuosity sold our souls to the devil. But we just hope that our music will duly electrify the ambience as our contemporaries are slow dancing in the Marriott chill.

We'll be doing without proper percussion this time, that is, by performing a four-man acoustic set. So keeping tempo is really the crux in creating impression that we really know what we're doing, and that we're doing it well. We have suggested accentuating the bass slap, listening for the delay effects, which should be constant by virtue of its preset tap tempo, and even sleeping with the metronome. Clearly, all these tactics are pretty viable except for the last one. I'm just afraid of waking up to a day wherein my eyes are blinking uncontrollably at 70bpm.

On a (not so) separate note, the literal idea of keeping time has resurfaced in my mind recently. It is an otherworldly idea, but imagine if you could cache your free time in a bottle, then invoke its passage whenever you just needed a little more sleep.

Perhaps it's due to the sheer number of tasks that I currently have at hand. In contrast, after the third week of November, the idea of 'work' has lost all definition for most friends and slaves of the college. I'm not complaining though, just amused at the kind of expressions I get when they hear me say that I have to leave to finish some work. These expressions range from blank faces resulting from a complete breakdown of understanding, to scary and violent methods.

For me, I'm just thankful that I'm being played regularly as an instrument for a score that's been sovereignly orchestrated, much like how I will be fingering and fingerpicking the Red One tomorrow night.

Room Restoration Day

Just spent the last couple of hours packing my room. It was a feat. It was a record. I really deserve a prize.

You see, for the past couple of weeks my room has been as unsightly as a horse's shiny chocolate behind sticking out of a lorry transporting a herd of them to the racetrack. Not a common sight in Singapore, but you might catch a glimpse of one of these if you've been on the highway long enough. {Not that I have. [I don't even drive. So I guess I got (un)lucky.]}

Anyways, it's interesting how one thing leads to another. At first I was only looking for my USB wireless-mouse-detector-thing to begin re-exploring photoshop. I found it quite quickly actually. But in the search I'd created a couple new stacks of dusty papyrus and blurred out even more right angles. So now it looked like two shiny chocolate behinds instead of one shiny chocolate behind. Well, enough was enough.

So I started with the table first. Because everything was on the table, pretty much like this old meme, if you can remember it. I found a couple of things I thought I'd lost for good - a trusty plectrum, and the Hendon camp letter that actually makes people feel thankful, happy and all those other positive emotions for regular BMT. They really know how to play with your mind. I still think a red beret looks cool. See?

Then I sifted through two stacks of files and papers towering like the Petronases right below my window. This was a memorable excursion, whence I re-promised myself to buy three huge ring folders to get them all organised for a less frustrating life. That's because most of them were either Dom7th's anthem scores from the past couple of years, or that of our worship band rehearsals. I suspect there are a lot more in my guitar bag, that music shell-scrape. But with the dust in the wind, the find that really put a smile to my sneezes were the 领唱 scores. Many of them were filled with scribbles, mostly in Shorts' handwriting, occasionally in Muscle Girl's, who didn't like to bother, and my own. Haha, those were the torturer's torturous days. Definitely worth keeping.

Finally I tore down the sheets of white paper that were white-tack-ed to the back of my glass cupboard to reveal my vibrant encyclopaedia plus action figurine collection. You see, I'd converted the cupboard into a makeshift whiteboard for the exam period; one of my newer studying methods. I guess I'll find out in January if it really works.

Of course, all of this was done with both ears pointing toward my speakers, which were playing Hello Hurricane. Goodness that album is so brilliant it deserves another post all by itself. Go get it even if you're broke. Besides, at least you get free food in jail.

Well, we're spick and span now. Two full dustbins of two years in black, white and assorted colours.

Now if only the other things in life were that easy to throw away.

Today is the day...

...that the Roman Emperor Vespasian was born, in 9 AD that is. According to a few scholarly sources, the claim that he converted to Christianity during his reign is becoming increasingly credible. Interestingly, he afforded the Apostles and Jews relatively more peace in comparison to his predecessor Nero, who accused the Christians of the Great Fire of Rome, or his successor Titus, who besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. Hmm...at 9 AD, Jesus was probably around 12 years old, and so should have just visited the Temple Himself. A snowball of revolutionary phenomena crescendoing slowly in His little adolescent mind.

...that Mary I of England died, in 1558. She was also known as "Bloody Mary", an underestimated misnomer for the patron apparition of frequent forward-this-message-to-72384-people-or-die-at-12-midnight chain emails. She earned the name for orchestrating the Marian persecutions, in which about 300 protestants were burned at the stake and hundreds more were exiled.

...that the Suez Canal was opened, in 1869. The waterway of today is not to be taken lightly. It has survived as the landscape and the reason for two bloody conflicts of the 20th century - the Suez Crisis and the Arab-Israeli wars. Inextricable from the friction and from the Suez would be the country of Egypt, the other amazing land of biblical wonder. Accordingly, it is said to have seen three major religions, but I would argue five. First, Egyptian paganism (excluding Ham, son of Noah); second, Judaism from the Mosaic era; third, Roman paganism from Roman conquest; fourth, Christianity under Roman shelter; and fifth, Islam from the Ottomans.

...that the world continues to be a crucible of faiths. One religion can be voraciously eager, while another can deny that it is in fact a religion. Some people can believe in one and tune out the rest, while others can tune in to everything and start writing books about why what they're tuning in to are really hallucinations. There are yet others who believe in the absolute golden rule that you shouldn't stop someone from believing what he believes, unless he believes in stopping someone from believing what he doesn't believe. Now that's a pretty shaky belief.

The generic, man-centred purpose of any religion is to answer two questions: 'How did we begin?' and 'How will we end?' In simple words: What happened first and what's going to happen eventually?

So the real question is this: What's going to happen when we breathe our last and fall over the precipice of eternity?

Well, in the end, all of us will find out in at least one of two ways. If the scholars are right, some of us will be asking Vespasian, and some of us will be asking Bloody Mary.

...that we should all start thinking about these things, while we've still got the time.

Goodbye IB, Hello Hurricane.

There can be manacles

when you believe.

03/11/09 - 1pm: Chemistry HL P1; 3pm: Chemistry HL P2

04/11/09 - 8am: Chemistry HL P3

05/11/09 - 1pm: Mathematics SL P1

06/11/09 - 8am: Mathematics SL P2; 7:30pm: Choir Practice

07/11/09 - 9am: Discipleship Class; 4:00pm: Choir Practice; 7:00pm: SAT

08/11/09 - 10am: Cell Leading; 11:30am: November Anthem

09/11/09 - 1pm: History SL P1; 3pm: History SL P2

10/11/09 - 1pm: Biology HL P1; 3pm: Biology HL P2

11/11/09 - 8am: Biology HL P3; 1pm: English HL P1

12/11/09 - 8am: English HL P2; 8pm: Youth Worship Committee Meeting

But there can be miracles

when you have faith

(which is already one in and of itself).

Chemical Neussense

I'm currently hours away from my first IB paper (second, actually; CLB last year) but I'm already getting bored, somehow. It's an ambiguous sign, but it explains why I'm here.

Anyways, two days of hardcore chemistry revision has helped me to realise something quite irrelevant to my syllabus. Ironically, this was done through reading Geoffrey Neuss' Chemistry Course Companion, which was specifically written for the IBDP. Apart from Iron Man's notes, Neuss' book is one of the most comprehensive texts that I've ever read in my life. But that's not all.

It is an understatement to say that the way in which the book has written epitomises the inter-disciplinary nature of the IBDP. No, it is the very embodiment of the IB ideology. And yes, that I noticed with a great sense of comedy, but not without appreciation. So how is this the case? Well, let's just say that the book is littered with...riveting anecdotes that I'm sure would placate any IB student who is on the brink of getting 3 points for HL Chemistry. Here are three examples.

First, on page 87, Neuss discusses the molecular orbital theory of hybridisation from a 'biological perspective'. Have you ever heard of what a dzo is? Well, what better place to find out than in an IB chemistry textbook! Neuss writes "By crossing a yak with a cow a new hybrid animal called a dzo is produced, which combines the docility of a cow with the load-carrying capacity of a yak." And then he goes on to make the link, "this concept of hybridisation has been extended to atomic orbitals..." Oh, but male dzos, unfortunately, can't mate. They're sterile. It's a result of heterosis. Poor animals. Now I wonder how that might extended into orbital theory.

Second, on page 223, Neuss talks about condensation polymerisation with the example of nylon, whose repeating unit is formed by alternating diamine and dioyl dichloride monomers. He then discusses the economic importance of condensation reactions. And as if to add the final touch, he includes an epic black and white picture of two mountain climbers against a snowy backdrop, one of whom is holding on to a dark, thin and taut rope, both of whom are smiling blissfully at the camera. The caption says "Two IB teachers roped together with nylon climbing rope on the summit of the Wilde Spritze in the Austrian Alps (photo by Geoff Neuss)." I nod my head in agreement.

The third one is actually pretty cool. On page 27, Neuss talks about C-14 dating. He raises a historical example, namely, the "Shroud of Turin". He wrote "People have claimed that this shroud, kept in Turin cathedral in Italy, was used to wrap the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion in the first century CE, and shows an imprint of his face. Carbon dating has dated the shroud as no earlier than 1260 CE." The picture is quite compelling, actually. And Neuss was clearly trying to maintain a neutral stand.

Well, I can conclude at least one thing from this. If the IB system does in fact manage to inculcate all of its values into an arbitrary student, that student should grow up and write textbooks to proliferate the influence. *grin*