Viva Forever

My mother is a forum moderator. Lollerskates.

Two months ago my mother was completely computer illiterate. She didn’t even know how to turn the computer on and off. One day she received a phone call from a high school classmate of hers that she hadn’t heard from in well over 30 years. Apparently said classmate was trying to find people of their graduating year for some sort of reunion. A few phone calls later my mother was informed that there was an online guestbook set up where classmates of hers had been corresponding with each other.

My mother resolved to learn how to get on board the whole thing. I helped her create an email account, taught her the very basics of MS Word and she learnt by herself (quite quickly I might add) how to type pinyin. Before long, she typed up her first entry on the guestbook.

One day she came into my room excitedly, telling me that there’s been over 300 view counts on her entry and that many people told her that she should write more and they loved her writing. My mother had always secretly aspired to be a writer and so she was absolutely over the moon with the responses. I’m not actually sure what she wrote but it sure sounded like it was almost like group blogging. MY MOTHER WAS BLOGGING.

Class sizes back then involved upwards of 50 people per class and about 10+ classes per year so any reunion (online or otherwise) is pretty big. I guess the site coordinator saw how unwieldy the guestbook format was with so many people involved and s/he replaced it with a forum instead. And appointed my mother as a moderator of the “International” section of the board for classmates that now have left China and live aboard. It was so freaking adorable how bashfully exhilarated but happy my mum was to be given this e-responsibility.

It’s a pretty lively forum too. Peeking over her shoulder I see there’s always at least one or two people viewing the board at any one time. My mum excitedly shows me posts often, where she and other posters would post little messages to each other followed by what would be to us, rather tacky animated gifs (you know the ones of sparkly Korean cartoons or dancing babies) though my mum and her classmates think they are absolutely brilliant. Mum is also really proud of the fact that people tend to always reply to her messages more so than other people. xD It’s all so cute and endearing. One of the happiest times in my life is to see my mum happy. :3

Lack of posting due to it being exam season and like Chantelle, my last exam ends 21st November. One down, another three to go!

Anyway, my mum today was telling me about a family friend of ours, a chick about two or three years older than me, whose parents are close friends with my parents. I don’t remember her English name, let’s call her “C”. From the very beginning, when I first visited her house at the wee age of about six, I came to the lasting conclusion that C was a horrible bitch, mainly because she expressly refused to let me play with any of her toys. Anyway, being the older one, she started University about two years before I did, in some finance degree. Over the years, we’ve been hearing from her parents that she had academic trouble at Uni, but recently, we were told that she had finally graduated from her three-year degree in her fifth year.

Big twist time! Her mum told my dad a few days ago that C had been lying all along! She in fact stopped attending University after her third year (after what I guess were a series of very bad marks) and simply lied to her parents all this time about going to university, INCLUDING the bit about her graduating. I have no idea why one would make such a lie, I mean, sooner or later, you’re going to be quizzed about the existence of your degree. Her parents are absolutely devastated at the news and promptly have been going around telling everyone about how they are so ashamed and disappointed by the whole thing.

Now, as much as I dislike C, I really feel bad for her. I hate how some parents are so fucking sensitive about their children bring shame on them, and yet this “shame” they are so paranoid about simply wouldn’t exist if you didn’t go around complaining to people about it. C’s parents are quite traditionally Chinese in their absolute insistence on getting a University degree, and no doubt such pressure contributes to C’s decision to lie. C has had a continuous part-time job in the retail industry, can probably support herself financially (though still lives at home) and apparently she enjoys working and yet that’s probably not good enough for her parents.

Anyway, now that the cat’s out of the bag, C’s said she’ll be trying to get back into University to get some sort of tourism degree, though I don’t know how much THAT is influenced by her parents. It must suck so much balls to be in her position right now regarding her parents. :(

While Pocahontas is not on my favourites list, I still remember it to be vaguely entertaining. Also, its theme song, “Colors of the Wind” is a lovely song, melodically speaking. However, at times it makes little sense, both in terms of the lyrics and the part from the movie where it’s sung. Tim and I had a number of spirited discussions about it, and I thought I’d note down the main points we came up with. Below is the clip, and the lyrics can be found here.

Title
Firstly, what’s with the title? Wind doesn’t have colour (even though the wind in the clip IS coloured… doesn’t that make it smoke?). You can’t just slap on a description in front of a thing and have it make sense. It’ll kinda like having a title such as “scent of music” or “sourness of sand”. Does Pocahontas have synesthesia? I’d be happy if the title was just a a metaphor, but what’s it a metaphor of? Towards the end of the song, she talks about the “voices of the mountains” and that’s at least understandable as a metaphor for how wind around mountains may sound melodic to human ears or something. But colours of the wind? It’s incredibly odd that her song would be able the very thing that doesn’t have colour when she could’ve talked about any other physical object around them that do.

“You don’t know”

But still I cannot see
If the savage one is me
Now can there be so much that you don’t know?
You don’t know …

How patronising and INCREDIBLY offensive would it be if it was John Smith saying that to her instead? Imagine if, rather than being set in a lush forest landscape, they were in the middle of a British town and he was showing her stuff around the place while saying lines like that? Maybe replace the words “savage one” with, I dunno, “dumb white man”. I don’t think many people would be happy about that, even though in this context, having Pocahontas saying that to him is seen as being okay. Interesting double standard.

However, I can’t remember what happens before this song, so maybe Smith had previous alluded to being way smarter than Pocahontas or something, and now she’s laying the smack down on him.

Rocks Don’t Have Life

You think you own whatever land you land on
The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name

I’m not much into the whole property ownership thing myself. Especially with intellectual property, monopolising information is just WTF to me. I would agree to some extent that owning living things is problematic (especially sentient things); the fact that people are allowed to patent (and hence monopolise the use of) genetic material and microbiological process is just such bad idea for society as a whole. :(

However, while trees and creatures have life, rocks don’t. I don’t know what’s the point of saying that rocks have a life and spirit. And yes, they all have names, but I’m pretty sure the names were given by human beings to these things, regardless of what race of humans we’re talking about. It’s not like the nasty Brits went around pillaging this and that by purposefully not giving those things a name.

Watch Out For Bears!
Around the 0:58 mark on the video, Pocahontas and Smith sees a female bear and follows her to her den full of bear cubs. There, Pocahontas picks up a cuddly lil’ bear and hands it to Smith while the female bear shyly looks on.

In real life, probably even before Pocahontas and Smith reached the mouth of the cave, the mother bear would’ve FUCKING KILLED THEM for trying to go near her cubs. For someone who seems so familiar with nature, you’d think Pocahontas would know how protective mother bears get of her babies. Or maybe the bears in Disney-verse are just so used to human contact that people can just pick up their cubs. Because THAT’S NATURAL. Thanks, Disney. At least you made bears a little bit more realistic in Brother Bear.

Why Did the Grinning Bobcat Cross the Road Grin?

Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?

Pocahontas is implying that possibly the answer is that the bobcat are just happy fellas or something and that the narrow-minded Brits never got it into their arrogant heads to query bobcats of the reasons behind their continuous joy. Even just ignoring the fact that bobcats obviously can’t answer, the more sobering question is, why does she imply that the bobcat WANTS to be grinning? It’s kinda like asking why the Joker is always smiling. Maybe bobcats are actually miserable animals who suffer the additional insult to injury by looking like they’re happy all the time. Or maybe the insult is assuming there’s a point in anthropomorphising them, rather than treating them as animals in their own right without needing to twisted them to fit a list of human traits. Did you ever think of that, Pocahontas?

Eh the rest of the song doesn’t warrant much more critique. It’s a nice point she makes that creatures such as herons and otters are valuable, though I don’t need to call them my friends and family to know they’re worth protecting. I think she might be exaggerating Smith’s narrow-mindedness (I certainly don’t remember him being the racist that she paints him to be in the song), but still, yay for advocating diversity. :) As I said, I like the song, it’s nice to listen to. Still, kinda silly in some parts. :P

Life
Not much has been going on, gave in my huge assignments. My Intellectual Property assignment was left to the last minute AGAIN, and even staying up all night, it turned out all shitty anyway. Tim said it’s not bad when he helped proof read it for me, but we all know he’s just trying to make me feel better. :3 I need to get my Gardasil booster and maybe a blood test too, the perpetual tiredness is still bugging me.

Watched
On the night before my Corporate Law assignment was due, rather than working on it, I instead watched the documentary The Dying Room that’s basically an undercover report on orphanages in China. It’s well worth watching, though incredibly depressing. All the children in the orphanages were girls (except for a small number of handicapped boys). The living conditions in the state orphanages were absolutely appalling, with toddlers being literally tied to chairs to keep them from moving around. The looks of lifeless boredom in many of their eyes as they rock back and forth was absolutely horrible.

One of the commentators interviewed blamed the One Child policy for the huge numbers of baby girls being left in the streets because their families don’t want them. While the policy no doubt exacerbated the problem, the real problem is 1) the cultural disregard for the sacredness of human life and 2) the treatment of women as second class citizens. My mother once said that the more people there are, the more expendable they are. When we’re dealing with more than a billion of people, I guess it is easier and easier to think of people as just a number.

In regard to sexism, it’s kinda weird. In modern times, every since the Cultural Revolution, it at least seems that there is more of an equality between genders. I’ve seen a number of women in parliament in China, and women are encouraged to work as much as men. But watching that documentary, female children are despised whereas male children are infinitely more desirable. This can’t be just an anomalous finding as generally speaking, there’s already way too many men in China because of people’s persistent desire to have male children over female. It frustrates me beyond words that there’s no movement in China to counter the mind-numbingly stupid cultural traditions of how women ought to be viewed and treated. It’s probably better now in the city areas of China at least but it is problematic that the idea that women are not as good as men are allowed to be trickle through.

Oh and yesterday I watched Moulin Rouge. I’ve never seen it before, and wow, talk about disappointing! :P I first heard the soundtrack from a friend when it was released and I quite like the songs on it. But watching it was excruciating at parts, the acting was bad and the choice of song was at times just bizarre (”Smells Like Teen Spirit”? Really, Baz Luhrmann, was that necessary?). And this is coming from someone who generally like musicals.

I finished watching xxxHOLiC, I have a review of it up. I watched the beginning of the first episode of Code Geass, but so far, the story hasn’t really sucked me in. I’m really not very into political conflict type anime. But yay, CLAMP artwork.

Games
I watched Tim play Portal (well the beginning and end, I fell asleep halfway through). It’s an awesome game to even watch. The finale was one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen, just in how funny GLaDOS is. I love the taunts she’d throw at you, oh and her ending song is just fabulous. More games should put emphasis on their scripts! The game itself looked fun to play, but given how un-coordinated and crappy at spatial tasks I am, I think I’m a little too intimidated to play it.

Site stuff

I finished this a little while ago. Mwaha, yay the Pucca fanlisting is finally mine! :D Heh, I love that little broad. Yeah, the layout isn’t very good, but I was in a hurry and I had a huge brain freeze. Why is it that I use image rollovers whenever I make bad layouts? Spin has also finally gotten an update after 11 months of no activity. I’ve got a bunch of other site updates that I need to make as well.

Right now, what I should be doing are my Uni readings though. Bah.

In response to the last entry, here are the answers:

Kaylee asked:
If you were given a million dollars, what would you do with it?
Donate a good chunk of it to research, give a good amount to my parents to live off, give another good chunk to them to invest for me.

How did you envision your future as a child?
I can’t remember! I think I may have wanted to become a high court judge at some point… not any more, too much work. I’m not THAT dedicated to law. :P

Amanda asked:
You and Tim seem to have a really close relationship - have you ever talked about making it permanent (e.g. marriage), or even moving in together?
Moving out is likely though I need to finish my degree first (another year to go!) and get a job first. But it would be nice to be more independent. I don’t think either of us hold ideas of marriage being this sacred union of two people… it’s basically just the law recognising your relationship, and financial consequences that stem off that. We would like to get a civil union instead (cos that just sounds way cooler) but I think only New Zealand allow civil unions between heterosexual couples. =/

Chantelle asked:
If you could have your picture taken with any living person, with whom would you choose to be photographed?
Stephen Colbert. :3 If not him, then my grandma from my dad’s side. I haven’t seen her in so long (she still lives in China) and she’s quite old now… it’ll be nice to see her before she dies.

What kind of law (if any) do you want to practice?
Intellectual property or cyber law. I haven’t done the latter yet but I’m so interested in how the internet interacts with our legal system I would love to have my career based around it.

Rilla asked:
If you weren’t doing law what do you think you would do?
I would say psychology because I have a strong interest in it, but I don’t think I’d be a very good therapist; I don’t think I deal with other people’s problems very well. Otherwise, I actually wouldn’t mind a common office job (with friendly work colleagues) that pay okay. I don’t think I ever had a strong interest in massively developing a career, I basically just want enough money to live comfortably so I can pursue my hobbies.

What do you think is the purpose of your life?
To be happy!

Sarai asked:
What was your inspiration for this layout?
I… didn’t make this layout. ^^; Credits in the footer! But I liked it for its simplicity, however, I recently found I don’t like light coloured text on very dark backgrounds at all. I hope to change it soon.

So there you have it. Also I finally installed the threaded comments plugin, so now people can reply to each other! Oh and one last thing, this is the most awesome thing I saw yesterday [source]. It’s in no way practical I know, but… it looks awesome. *__*