An interesting generalization…

…and we all know that generalizations are only broad comments and therefore does not apply to everyone.

Here is the original post.

Here is my modified and reversed version.

Have you ever noticed…

• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as heroic?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as tragic?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints his faith as a different faith from every other faithful follower who has ever followed and come to a bad end from it?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine insists that his path won’t end up where every other follower’s path ended? Which is to say…
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine hates it when the historical and logical progression of irrational belief is pointed out?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as smarter, deeper, less lazy, and more honest than people who don’t share his faith?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as humble, while those who point out the irrationality of the ‘Word’ are arrogant?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as nice, while those who point out the irrationality of said doctrine are mean?
• …everyone who tries to advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as courageous, while those who point out the irrationalities of the ‘Word’ are bullies and ruffians?
• …everyone who tries advocate an unpopular Biblical doctrine paints himself as academically sophisticated, carefully nuanced, and wonderfully insightful, while those who point out the irrationality of the ‘Word’ are unenlightened hacks and drooling doubting troglodytes?

A Different Type of Discrimination

Right now, I should be getting dressed and eating breakfast instead of being on the computer. However, I don’t want to go offline yet, as I’m in the middle of a role-playing game. It’s funny how addictive the internet is. Perhaps I crave the companionship of people like me. Creative people are a rare breed. You only find one or two amongst hundreds (might be a slgith exaggeration there) and even amongst creative people, there are those who don’t know what you’re on about. I had a friend who was a brilliant writer; she won a prestigious national literary award when she was fifteen. However, she and I could never agree about what constituted as good literature. What I enjoyed put her to sleep and vice versa. She was more like the mainstream literary people in my country who preferred literature which reflected aspects of society. I was more of a person who wanted to write stories reminiscent of Hollywood blockbusters.

In my country, discrimination is rampant. However, there is one sort of discrimination which no one has addressed yet; genrism. It’s not an official sort of discrimination, but it’s what I call the descrimination against certain genres of literature. People who write historical or fantasy epics are said to be wasting their talents. These stories simply are not welcome in our literary circle. Everyone who is a ‘proper writer’ should be writing about serious real life. It puts people like me at a disadvantage because I don’t want to write about serious real life. I see enough of that; when I write, I want to escape to a fun and exciting place with people who I want to meet, not people who I see everyday.

Children are discouraged from writing fantasy in school. When I was sixteen, I was forbidden by the teacher to write anything set in history. She said I had to bring myself back to the ‘real world’ and write about an ordinary setting. To prove my point, I wrote about guerilla warfare in the streets of Baghdad. It took a heck of a lot of research about rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns and tanks, but I finally got there and even got to describe gore, something which I’m good at and fond of doing. I guess I have to thank that teacher actually, because she made me strive to prove that epics are just as valid as literature as all the boring gritty real life stuff which I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. She made me really try to improve my writing, and to create good believable and likeable characters for my epics. Of course, I got into fanfiction and one can’t publish fanfiction, but I still managed to achieve something. Apart from the reviews, I got nominated for the MEFA awards, something which I am still surprised about.

In my opinion, far too many authors write for renown and not for fun. That is true of me to some extent, but what really brought this to my attention is my friend’s question. She said, “What’s the point of writing fanfiction? You don’t get any recognition for doing it.” I replied saying that I did it because I loved doing it, and it’s true. I also said that people get renown for writing good (or bad) fanfiction, just like in the world of printed literature. In the end, it isn’t recognition that I really want. I just want to prove to the world that writing epics is not a bad thing and end this discrimination against certain genres so that other really good works (such as the film Kingdom of Heaven) will be recognized for their brilliance. At the moment, some wonderful works of art are ignored just because they happen to be of the ‘wrong’ genre.

Christian Bale and World Events

Thursday 24 July 2008, The Press, CHCH.

No, I’m not going to blog about Christian Bale and his life; that’s his business. Truth be told, I’m more interested in the newspaper itself. It’s very interesting actually. Notice how the headline about Mr. Bale has a bigger font than the one about the man who did something nasty with a bulldozer? Moreover, the former is higher than the latter, and the fact that they’re on the same page in the world news section really does say a lot.

The newspaper tells us that as a society or a species, we are very nosy. We want to know other people’s deepest darkest secrets. That’s why the headline about Mr. Bale is very big. The editors of the newspaper probably want people to see it, get interested, and buy the paper. And if they didn’t know that we would be more interested in Christian Bale than, say, the plight of the Palestinian people, why would they give him a bigger headline?

It also shows us how trivial we have become. Since when did gossip about famous actors become worthy headlines in world news? Not that I don’t read gossip, but the world news section is presumably for news which has some sort of world impact. As good an actor as Christian Bale is, I highly doubt he has any effect on world events which can influence the fate of the human species. Lots of people assault others, and if every person who was accused of assaulting someone was mentioned in the news, we’d have newspapers as thick as the Oxford Dictionary. So really, world news should be saved for those really important things, such as the rebirth of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the state of affairs in Iraq, or Israel and Iran’s latest confrontation and another rise in oil prices…you get my idea.

It’s a sad world, isn’t it, when people are more interested in the private business of actors than things which could actually affect their lives. ‘How?’ you say. ‘Iran and Israel are really far away. I live all the way in Australia/Brazil/the United States/Japan/New Caledonia/England. It’s not going to affect me.’ The fact is, the world is like a row of dominoes. One domino toppling over will hit another domino, causing it to fall, and so on and so on…you know, the Domino Effect. Israel and Iran going to war would cause oil prices to soar, and since most things in this world need oil, your wallet is going to be a lot lighter. Now, perhaps obesity is a bad thing, but I’ve never heard of anyone complaining that their wallet is too heavy.

As for Christian Bale’s business? Well, it’s his business. Let’s leave it at that.

Idiots and…wise people?

The other day, I was making up a statement concerning freedom and wisdom and I needed a group noun for wise and smart people. Being the relatively studious sort of person, I went and got my Oxford Thesaurus off my bookshelf and tried to look for something which would suit. One of the few words I knew which meant someone smart was ‘genius’, but as there was such a fine and fuzzy line between genius and madness, I couldn’t use that for my saying. I looked up ‘genius’ in the Thesaurus. That didn’t yield any good results (‘Einstein’ wasn’t exactly what I was looking for) so I went and looked up ‘intellectual’ instead. There were very few synonyms, but after a while, I chose ’sage’. The word ‘intellectual’, while appropriate, didn’t have the right rhythm. The thing is, I didn’t find many nouns which meant ’smart people’.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the word ‘fool’. That was the other word I was using in my statement. There were so many synonyms listed there that it would take a while for me to type them all out. I found ‘idiot’, ‘ass’ (very insulting to donkeys, in my opinion), ‘halfwit’, ‘blockhead’, ‘dunce’, ‘dolt’, ‘dullard’, ’simpleton’, ‘clod’, ‘dope’ etc. just to name a few. The most important observation was that there were a lot more synonyms for ‘fool’ than there were for ‘intellectual’.

So what does that tell us about society? It was just a curious thought. Why are there so many words for a stupid person? Do we live in a society of idiots, or are we just a defamatory society which delights in putting people down? Either way, it doesn’t look great.

I’m feeling lazy. What’s new?

I should be typing up my latest fanfiction chapter at the moment. It’s supposed to be three to four thousand words long, and while I have it all written out by hand, getting it down in electronic form can be a bit of a bother because typing can be rather boring, especially if you are watching out for stupid mistakes. Creative writing is unlike simply blogging or journal writing. You actually have to think, and if your brain is like mine, it sometimes just can’t be bothered. One good thing is that I have the entire storyline figured out (even thought this is actually no big deal because there are only two chapters left to go, including this one). I think I have the situation under control. The same cannot be said of the sequel, but that’s part of the fun of creative writing, I guess. To quote Bilbo Baggins, ‘you step out onto the road, and if you don’t watch your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to’, or something along those lines anyway. Everything in writing is quite unexpected; it is for me at least. That’s why I don’t like planning anything beyond a very vague outline. Too much planning ruins the element of surprise which makes being a writer exciting.

 

Onto other things. My parents and I were discussing private schools this morning. I myself was educated in a state school, and from what I can see, there is no difference between a private school and a state school. The same curriculum is taught (the Ministry of Education sets that) and in fact, the only thing which makes a private school a private school is the ridiculous cost. Their uniforms are more complicated and more expensive, the fees are very high. I feel that sending kids to private school isn’t really a good thing for them; it does, however, boost the parents’ ego to see their children in a ‘posh upper class school’ or whatnot. I find that quite objectionable, especially since these people seem to think that people who attend private schools are somehow more cultured than those who go to state schools.

 

The most important thing about a school is actually the quality of teachers. I have to say I have not been too impressed by the quality of many teachers whom I have encountered. Some of them seem to think that their job is to intimidate students. Others just sit in the classroom and make sure that the students are not burning down school buildings. Hardly any of them teach, and of the small minority who do teach, not very many try to make the experience enjoyable for the students. I’m not quite sure what most of them are being paid for. I remember sitting in a math class, and not being able to keep my eyes open because a) the light was at optimum sleep level and b) we were only copying notes from overhead slides which were so old that the writing on them was blurry and the plastic was yellowish. The writing was also in cursive and illegible. The only thing I learnt in math was how to draw, because I had nothing else to do.

 

Elementary/primary school was even worse. Not only did I not learn anything, I lost self-esteem. (that was covered in the post ‘Rub it in their faces’). Those teachers were a waste of time, waste of money. They did do a lot of successful advertising because almost everyone felt they were working hard. I don’t see what’s so hard about photocopying numerous worksheets and then handing them out, or taking the students out for a run each day. The work wasn’t even marked, so naturally, I had no incentive to do it. Besides, it was completely boring, and there was no point in doing about a hundred sums per day when you did not even get to know whether you got them right or not.

Technology–the new conqueror

Yesterday morning, I discovered that my new mp3 player wasn’t working. It might not seem like a big deal, but to me, it was. See, I had been planning on taking it to university so I could work under the influence of music. The malfunctioning of that tiny machine stressed me out so much that instead of studying (which I should’ve done), I wrote a two thousand word chapter of fanfiction just to de-stress myself, and that only made me feel just a little better. All right, so I wasn’t thinking about the mp3 player while I was writing it, but I was so stressed out that it only took me an hour and a half to write it.

This little incident, even if it is in no way out of the ordinary, has made me reflect on our reliance on technology today. Without modern technology like computers and cellphones, many people, like myself, would not be able to communicate as well as we want. I’m quite reliant on the computer for many things, especially for socializing, since the real-life people I meet are hardly ever interested in the same things as I am. The internet is a lifeline for introverts like me because we can hide behind this artificial alter-ego. I love the internet, and when it stops working, my brain ceases to function properly until the problem is fixed. I wonder if I can even survive (sanely, that is) without the internet now. Three years ago, I would’ve said yes. Now, I am definitely going to say no.