Viva Forever

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. *__*

They kinda are. :P Here’s a bunch that have accumulated recently.

1. Question Time
I’m probably the 23,482nd person to be doing Amanda’s “ask me a question” meme, but I’m not one for being on time. So yeah, I’m just going to quote her directly, with my modifications:

So, in the interest of allowing my readers to learn more about me as a person, rather than me as a blogger, and because I fear nothing, and show everything…ask me a question. Any question you want, no matter how crude, rude, personal (to an extent), irrelevant. I’ll answer them all in tomorrow’s the next entry (and all people who ask a question get plugged).

2. Blog Day Plug Five Blogs You Read Day
As I said, I’m not one for being on time. :P Here’s five blogs that I admire a lot (and read a lot). In no particular order:

• Void Star - Dee likes Batman and comics (amongst other things) and many of her posts are amusing, educational or both. I’ve always found her blog to be awesome in how it’s coded and set out… it’s got all the necessary features of a blog while being kinda also like LJ. Oh and she draws awesome pictures.
• Jing Wen - Amanda’s articulate, funny and is brave enough to post about topics that some might classify as “too much information” (there’s no such thing!). She also almost posts every day. I think we have a winning formula?
• Oxalic - Sabrina uses lots of big words but I don’t think that detracts from her posts, rather it makes her posts more interesting to read. Many of the posts have a hint of dry amusement about them. And she likes Stephen Colbert too, so double yay.
• Infidel - Kudarania plays DDR too! Woot! I find from reading her blogs that we share a surprisingly large number of opinions, like for reviewing and parenting.
• WordFall - I discovered yesterday that Daimira and I have known each other through blogging from about 2002. In fact, she’s one of the people who I felt encouraged to keep blogging back in the days. Though she does most of her general blogging on her LJ (like EVERYBODY I USED TO KNOW -_-), she’s got a new blog that centres around literary stuff. It’s new and looks very promising. I need to read more books.

Honourable mentions: Everyone else on my dailies list… you guys are all on my feed because I like reading your blogs, even if I don’t comment each and every time.

Been manually converting all the archive pages of the really old entries into actual database entries. I long lost original greymatter exported logs, which means that all entries had to be manually re-entered and backdated, and because I’m pretty anal insistent about preserving the content of old entries as much as possible, I’m manually re-entering all the comments too (and backdating them). I’ve nearly finished 2002! Tedious work, but not without some fun in skimming all the entries I used to write when I was… what, 16? Ah nostalgia.

So, dear readers, got a question for you: what kind of blog entry do you want to see me write more of? Alternatively, what type of entries are more entertaining (coming from me) than others? Don’t pick more than two! :)

• More updates regarding how I’m doing in real life
• More philosophical opinions, musings and/or rants
• More trivial (but fascinating!) tidbits and knowledge about the world I’ve picked up
• More reviews about games, books, media, anime etc
• More opinions about online-related issues
• More craft posts (this really is limited to the time I have for crafts… hint: I don’t have any)
• Nothing. I should give up blogging and pursue another hobby. :P

Any input would be appreciated!

In other news, I watched Magicians today and I quite enjoyed it, then again, I do love Mitchell and Webb from Peep Show. LOVE THAT SERIES. SO MUCH.

I wish I can do magic tricks. =/

Primordial Dwarfism
I watched a documentary called The Smallest People in the World by the ABC about Primordial Dwarfism, initially focusing on a TINY baby girl called Kenadie who was born with the condition before progressing on to talk to other, older people who also have the condition. It was utterly FASCINATING. Most people would be used to the archetypal impression of what a person with dwarfism would look like, but I was utterly taken back by how regularly proportioned people with primordial dwarfism, but just that EVERYTHING is shrunken down! There’s a wonderful gallery of professionally taken photos of Kenadie and other people with such conditions here. There’s also a video available here with more information (if you’d excuse the obnoxious interviewer lady).
Because most of the documentary I saw focused on Kenadie, I was just constantly enchanted by how tiny she was. She… looked almost like some sort of fantastical, magical creature! Oddly enough, I felt she made the people around her look like giants rather than herself looking too small. Most of all, she really reminded me of the classical illustrations of Matilda by Roald Dahl. I loved that book, Matilda was one of my favourite childhood figures.

It’s quite tragic how people with Primordial Dwarfism have so many health problems though and statistically die quite young. I think it’s rather amazing that they survive that length of time at all, given how shrunken down in size every part is… when you come down to it, the shrinkage is not perfect (for one, you can’t get smaller atoms, and maybe even not be able to get functioning, smaller cells), Primordial Dwarfism means less than normal of all parts of the body. Still, utterly fascinating it all is.

Foetal Theft
On a more macabre note, I watched another documentary called Foetal Theft on the Crimes and Investigations Network. It’s exactly what it sounds like, people who go out, find pregnant women and forcibly remove the growing foetus from the mother, often leaving the pregnant woman to die. Such cases are incredibly rare (thankfully!) and a synopsis of the show can be found here.

While it wasn’t too surprising that the documented cases were of women, with probable mental disorders and unstable romantic relationships who might possibly be wanting to steal baby to stop their partner from leaving them. What WAS surprising though was how all the women documented already have children! Many children in fact! Some perpetrators were even pregnant at the time! So it’s not some deranged, lonely woman craving for a child of her own, but for some reason, women who want another child to add to the ones she already has. Perhaps these women have found previously that their relationships with their partners can be healed by birthing a child that is theirs and in a fit of panic, wanted a child immediately to fill some sort of relationship breakdown? The documentary suggested that the need for control could be another central element.

It was also startling to see these foetal thieves (or as apparently some in the US have called them, “womb raiders”, har har) all simply refusing to own up to having done anything wrong. For example, the last woman, Solangela Cartagena, concocted an elaborate lie about how the pregnant woman she found WANTED to have the foetus cut out of her and she was simply obliging. This cannot be the case because the pregnant lady was found alive and recalled she was drugged right before she was kidnapped by Cartagena. It’s really tragic for all those involved.

When I arrived in Australia at the ripe old age of five, my parent’s financial situation was far from super. I’m not sure what the criteria for poverty is, but we probably around that description. My parents struggled to make sure we had a roof over our heads and enough to eat, but other luxuries like toys were completely out of the question.

But that was alright. I loved reading, and my thirst for knowledge and literary entertainment were easily and freely satiated by libraries. Once in a blue moon, the primary school I was at would have a book fair where they’d clear out incredibly old and mangly books (e.g. books without covers, or missing a few pages) and they’d be on sale for something like 5 to 20 cent each. I’d splurge my tiny fortune saved from Chinese New Years and my birthdays on such events and happily drag home a literal sack of these unwanted tomes.

But as I said above, I never had any toys to play with but I came up with an elegant solution to the problem. Like most people, our household got their frequent share of junk mail in the mailbox. Many of these would be glossy-paged catalogues from various stores having some sort of sale. I’d meticulously flip through these catalogues and clandestinely sneak specific ones into my room. These ones are always those that have toys on sale. I’d first carefully read over the short descriptions of each toy in the catalogue and marvel at what they can do. Then I’d cut out my favourite ones and glue it in an exercise book. I literally had a scrapbook filled with pictures of toys. I also did the same thing for jewelery from jewelery catalogues (I’d keep the most prettily designed ring or earring, for example) though that practice didn’t last very long.

I can’t remember being bitter about the experience. I guess it’s similar to how people might watch travel shows because one day they might be able to view the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel with their own eyes. I guess it helped that I didn’t really have any other kid who had lots of toys to compare myself to. I could’ve been a lot more miserable than I was in that situation, but thankfully that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, I can’t find my scrapbook of toys any more, otherwise I could scan a few pages in to show you guys. :P