About the Japanese Quake

I won’t start by introducing my topic. I’m sure we all know about the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11 and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster. And I think we all know about all those fundraising efforts that are taking place right now.

But, but, BUT…

Are donations really reaching the people of Japan, or are we merely paying a government who doesn’t give a damn about their people or the environment? Reports say that when aid (in the form of food and clean drinking water) reaches Japan, the countries who donated the supplies also have to distribute the supplies themselves because the Japanese government doesn’t care enough to allocate human resources to the distribution of basic necessities amongst those affected by the disaster.

As for the nuclear crisis, they’re dumping the contaminated water that’s been leaking from the power plants into the ocean. I guess I won’t be eating seafood for the next sixty years until all the Caesium’s decayed.

Sure, I feel bad for the regular people of Japan, the ones who are truly suffering, but as for the Japanese government, I have no sympathy for them at all. Those politicians are sitting comfortable in their own homes whilst the survivors of the disaster are freezing and starving to death in a developed country.

Disasters often reveal the true nature of a nation. When the earthquake struck Christchurch on February 22, people from all over the nation rallied to help, driving their own cars down to deliver home baking and forming clean up armies to clear out liquefaction. The emergency services’ efforts must also be mentioned, because a lot of these people focused on saving the people trapped beneath collapsed buildings even though many of them were really worried about their loved ones in other parts of the city.

In Japan, people are left to their own devices. No help is given. Some went back to their homes within the area affected by radiation rather than stay in government operated shelters. Japan has often been touted as a very advanced and sophisticated country, and yet no help is reaching the people who need it.

I feel bad for all the people who are suffering. I want them to get the help they need. I will pray for them. However, I am not going to donate money as I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t want to feed an unworthy government.

 

I honestly can’t think of a title for this post–at the moment, at any rate. Anyway, I was reading a fashion magazine as I drank my first cup of tea of the day this…errr…afternoon, and it got me thinking about what it means to be a woman in the modern world. This is probably just going to a slightly random feminist rant, so if this is not your thing then…well, I’m not forcing you to read on.

I turned twenty one last year, and people have started telling me about what I should expect ‘when I get married’ and all that stuff. It’s like it’s expected that I will get married. Bear in mind that I’m a girl who hasn’t even dated yet, and the last time I was interested in dating was when I was sixteen and having a crush on one of my classmates. Ah, yes, I was so young back then.

I remember there was a time when I was terrified I wouldn’t find a guy (excuse my unenlightened fourteen year old self). That coincided with a time when I wasn’t very confident about my own abilities and under the belief that the ideal life for a woman was one in the home. Stereotypes really influenced me back then.

However, I’ve changed. As I grew older, I read about strong women –successful women– who were happier single than married. I’m not saying that raising kids who can contribute to society is not a success in itself, but I’ve been thinking that perhaps this is not the type of success I want to have.

Not every woman is well-suited to being a mother. Some probably shouldn’t have had children because they clearly don’t like what being a mother entails. I’m not naming anyone here, but I’m just saying I have met women like that, and their kids suffer for it. It’s not about bossing people around, being a mother. It’s about learning about this person you’ve created, who might be fundamentally different from you and might even have opposing viewpoints, and learning to compromise with and love this person unconditionally. It’s about learning that you’re wrong about some things and totally right about others. It’s about sacrifice and being content with the consequences of having children.

When I think about my own mother, I think about how she gave up a career she loved and flourished in to become a housewife after moving thousands of miles away from her entire family just so that her kids and her husband might have better opportunities. I think about a woman who made herself learn maths (even though she didn’t like it at all at school) so that she could tutor her children and make maths class easier for them. I think about a woman who cooks everyday even though she hates cooking, and picks up after three messy people without complaining–much, anyway. I just don’t think I can do that. I can’t see myself giving up everything and dedicating myself to a man. I can’t see myself sacrificing so much for my –thankfully non-existent– kids.

But does that mean I’m not a proper woman? No. I simply want different things, and the modern world and its infrastructure allows a woman to do what she wants. Sure, a woman can’t have everything. I read in a magazine that the most successful women, career wise, are mostly divorced or never been married. You gotta choose, but does choosing my career make me any less of a woman?

I’ve reached the age when people always ask me whether I have a boyfriend or not, and when my grandmother starts nagging me about finding a boyfriend or else I’ll end up old and single and lonely, because older women have more difficulties finding husband and bla bla bla. I’ve actually been tempted to tell her that I prefer girls just to get her to stop (there isn’t anything wrong with girls liking girls; I just don’t happen to be one of those girls).  

Even a friend of mine, who is younger than me, told me that I am emotionally immature for not wanting to settle down with a mate. I am not fundamentally opposed to the idea of marrying, as long as I’ve found the right guy who’s worthy of such devotion. However, marrying for the sake of marrying? No thanks. I don’t need a man to complete me, and I’d rather be single and devoted to my career than trapped by a lukewarm marriage. Luckily, my other grandmother is busy nagging my older cousins, so I’m way too far down the line in terms of age for her to get to me in the next five years.

When it comes down to it, being a woman doesn’t mean that you are destined to settle down with a guy, marry him whether you like him or not, pop out a couple of kids and raise them. There should not be a definition for what being a proper woman means these days, and as far as I am concerned, there isn’t. As a woman, I can have a high powered career that can rival any man’s. I can choose to stay single and not raise a family, just like any man. I can choose to have a kid without man. I can dress in whatever I like however I like –short of indecent exposure, that is– and I can think and act in ways that are not considered to be proper for a traditional woman. However, as long as I feel like a woman, I am a proper woman. Feminity is not a limitation. It is a something that I was born with, and that I’m going to relish.

 

Unravelling an emotional low

I have two weeks or so left of my trip in Hong Kong. I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t been doing much writing at all, come to think of it. It’s the middle of the night —early morning, really— and I’m feeling depressed as I think about the day I have to leave. I don’t really know why I’m feeling so down. Even chocolate didn’t help. It’s not as if I don’t miss home. I do. I miss my parents and my brother and my friends. I miss the air, the silence, the weather, my room, and my shoes. I miss my fabulous frocks that I haven’t yet had the chance to wear. I miss the fact that we recycle almost everything and have simplistic meals that come in just one pot. Technically, I have no reason to be depressed. I’ve gotten into journalism school, gotten an internship and a scholarship, and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, waiting for me to start living it. Sure, I’d been afraid of the Peeping Tom/ Crazy Stalker who’d once urinated outside my window, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t come around anymore, not after the police were informed and a fence was put up. I sure haven’t seen or heard any sign of him. The fact that I’m still worrying about him and the potential threat he poses is a sign that there is something else amiss with me.

As I analyze myself, I realize it’s not that I’m sad that my trip is coming to an end. Hong Kong is a great place, but it’s not one of my favourite places. The extreme capitalist-consumerist lifestyle sucks the spirit out of me, and the noisy assaults from every direction in busier parts of the city switch off my brain. It is, however, the place where most of my family reside. When I leave, I don’t know when I’ll see them again. And then there’s the fact that this trip marks the end of an era.

The last time I came here five years ago, I was a steady high school student expecting two more years of school and then three or four of university. Life was all about studying and academic achievement. It was composed of a rhythmic cycle of class, study, exams and holidays. But now, this holiday is like a goodbye to that life. I’m still a student, but I’m no longer that kind of student. In fact, I’ll be transitioning into a world of professional work. I won’t be a kid anymore. No one will see me as a kid. I kinda miss that, being young. Now that I know how it all plays out, I want to do it all over again. I want to relive my life as a child, a tween, a teen, with all the angst and drama, but also with the knowledge that I now hold. I had fun then. The world wasn’t such a cruel place, at least not in my mind. I could simply obsess about my favourite movie star and his films, and that would be the centre of my life. My biggest problem would be fighting with my parents about quitting maths and that zit on my nose. My biggest challenge was persuading my parents to get me contact lenses and a director’s cut version of a movie I already owned on DVD. The biggest problem in my life was whether the boy I had a crush on liked me back or not. It was so simple, so clean. Everything was routine, and I knew almost exactly what to expect. Although, looking back, I sure had some crazy daydreams about dramatic whirlwind romances and suddenly becoming gorgeous like in those clichéd teen movies.

Right now, I’m at a place where I’m totally unclear as to what is about to happen to me. Once I enter this world of adults and work and grown-up relationships, I’m afraid of losing the kid I once was. I don’t want to think about the world changing because I don’t know what it will become. I don’t want to change me. At least, not the essential core of me.  

It might have been better if the rest of my family weren’t so far away all the time. Family members outside of the nuclear family can act as great anchors, and I’ve got some really great people in my family. I’m separated by thirteen hours, two oceans and one continent, plus two thousand dollars. I don’t have a lot of friends, being the quiet and shy sort who is wary of opening up to people I don’t know well. I’m afraid of being totally alone and isolated. Sure, I like some ‘me time’. All right, a lot of me-time, but I also like human contact. I like being able to have in-depth conversations with someone. I like not being judged by the person I’m having an intense conversation with.

To put it all very simply, I’m depressed because I’m afraid, and I’m afraid because there are unknown factors in my life and a change in direction. I don’t know whether I’ll succeed. Even worse, I don’t know if I can overcome my fears. I keep saying I can, and hoping that one day I’ll believe it, but really, to tell you the truth. I have no idea, and I fear having no idea.

Then again, no one ever gets to foresee the future. Not even the greatest people knew that they were going to be great, unless they were real megalomaniacs who always thought that they were gods in a mortal realm or something. However, those people hardly ever end up being actually great. The greatest people, like Gandhi, the Prophet Mohammed, Einstein and so on and so forth, never knew about the impact they were going to have on the world. I think Jesus knew, but that’s because I believe He is an incarnation of God.

I keep on writing characters who don’t know whether they’re going to succeed or simply fail miserably, but they plough on despite their fears and give it their best shot anyway. Now that I think about it, it’s probably my subconscious or a divine being trying to tell me something.

I can’t get rid of my fears. We are programmed to fear what we don’t know, and the future is very much unknown. However, I can learn to live with them.

 

The Narrow Path

I have been pondering about the narrow path. In the New Testament, Jesus says that the path to Heaven is narrow. Traditionally, people have most interpreted that is following one set of extremely strict rules, and that all deviants would go to Hell (or at least not reach Heaven and get eternal life). However, it seems awfully cruel to me. Why would God exclude so many people from His presence? Is he not supposed to be a God of Love, and not the God of Discrimination?

I’ve pondered this for a while, and at one time, came to believe that there were many many narrow winding paths which led to the same destination in the end. That didn’t seem quite right either, so at last, I have come to a conclusion. Acceptance and love for others, no matter how much they deviate from your set of beliefs, is the only way to Heaven. We find it hard to love and accept those who are different from us. In fact, many of us (including myself) do not quite manage it. Since it is so difficult, then is it not the narrow path? If we can all practise acceptance and love, then we won’t have to wait until we are dead to get to Heaven. If you truly love someone, you try your utmost not to hurt them. If we all care about one another to that level, then we will have created Heaven on earth. And that, my friends, is a wonderful thought.

 

Where have all the good books gone?

Seriously, I have not read a good fantasy book in a very long time. All right, I have not had much time to read fantasy books, but I have picked up a few recently, and I am appalled at the quality. Have my expectations gone up, or have the standards gone down? I was reading a book about a battle between the Greek and Atlantean gods, and the main character, who is an Atlantean god bound in human  form, is basically the author’s wet dream. In his human state, he is helpless and is a prostitute. She has him whipped, castrated and basically puts him through more hell than I put my characters through, but here’s the twist–he’s not horribly scarred. No, he’s Artemis’ toyboy, and she simply just heals him after everything.

 That’s not even the worst of it; the Atlantean and Greek gods say ‘okay’. That really puts me off the story. ‘Okay’ is American slang. It doesn’t belong in anything set before 1900, much less a time before Troy was destroyed. Honestly, is it just me who’s feeling that fantasy novels aren’t what they were?

 

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.