Still Failing as a Human Being

It's roughly eleven on a Monday night and I legitimately can't recall anything that I wanted to write about tonight. The main problem stemming from today being the first day of college, and three classes has burdened my summer-weakened mind far beyond what it can take.

That being said, this post will be a simple update with a few short thoughts on my classes. Full posts should return Thursday, on "these are stories", with something I have promised will be "special." I honestly don't know what I'll be doing yet.

One Thought Per Class

- American Literature as a class has strengthened my desire to delve into the origins of Canadian Literature.

- Literary Nonfiction was all about writing in a nonfiction manner, but all I could think about was how some people pop the collars of suit jackets, and seem to be okay with it.

- French 101 has cracked down on my inability to roll my "r's." I have been practicing nonstop ever since the class let out.

I Don't Always Watch TV, But When I Do . . .

. . . it's typically cartoons, music videos, cooking shows, or Deadliest Warrior. For those if you who aren't super familiar with the latter, the show pits two of history's greatest fighters against one another to see "Who Is Deadliest?" This is done by testing various weapons from each fighter, and then inputting that data into a "battle simulator designed by Slitherine Studios," which then conducts one thousand battles.

The man who enters said data into the computer is Max Geiger, introduced at the offset of every episode as "computer whiz, Max Geiger." Recently the third season was revealed to be in production, alongside the shocking news that Max would not be returning.

As a loyal fan of the show, I am both saddened and dismayed. Computer whiz Max Geiger was, to me, the lifeblood of the show. His sideline comments were not often useful and were more for comic relief, but he held in his fingertips the ability to turn interval-scaled statistical information into living, breathing fighters. Gaze at the first two seconds of the clip below and behold as numbers metamorphose, matrix-style, into fierce combatants.



In my mind there is no one else who can replace Max Geiger. Apparently there's some ex-Navy Seal or something who's going to be the new expert on fighting techniques, but can he use the computer? Can he type the jumble of keys necessary to prepare the battle, before pressing the one essential to its beginning? There is no other man alive capable of taking over this job.

Here Max Geiger shows us what he thinks of a weapons test.

Max Geiger, computer whiz, genius, expert, you were with us for too short a time. I look forward to this next season not with anticipation, but with a deep sense of loss and disappointment. I can only hope that somewhere out there you are typing keys, and doing what you do best: bringing dreams to life.

Deadliest Warrior, etc. is the property of Spike TV. You should watch Spike TV if you are a man and like stuff that men like.

32 Emotional Signs That He's Cheating

I can actually give you just one (1) tangible, piece of evidence why I'm cheating, and it has to do with this blog post. Actually, the piece of evidence is also the blog post, and to find out why you will have to keep reading. If you think the title is nonsense it's because it is; it was the first entry I got when I typed in "he's cheating" on a popular search engine. Google, my hat's off to you.

To get down to brass tacks and start beating this bush, let me be the first to say that this post is really just a redirect towards a new blog I am starting as of today. If you want to find out more about it, I strongly recommend the link posted in the next sentence. To describe the new blog in twenty-five words, "these are stories" is a place on the internet I have made to put writing I would not normally place on this blog, i.e. fiction.

This decision was half-made by me quite a while ago, and if you can recall a post made on July Twelfth you will remember that I had asked you all to throw opinions in my general direction in terms of a blog specifically for stories. I read the two comments I had on there, asked others as the weeks went on, and came to the conclusion that this was the ideal route to take.

You will notice on the top of the site, beneath the title "these are words" it now says "updates every monday." This has been changed because, as I'm sure you've already figured out, this blog will now only update on Mondays. The other blog, "these are stories" will update every Thursday.

So go on over there and check it out. If you decide not to now, there will be a new link on a sidebar somewhere to it, and you can always click on it then. That's all I have for today (on this bog, anyway).

Oh, and I'm "cheating" with these posts because instead of being about something it's more just a redirect someplace else. Just wanted to make that super clear.

Kids These/(Those) Days

My grandmother's aggravating antics aside, I'm writing today's post about a topic that passed my mind a number of months ago. I'm . . . I'm going to try to wash this exasperation out of my system before I begin.

[Brief Pause]

Alright, let's do this.

First off, let me admit that writing this at an earlier date would have been ideal. Social trends change, popular tides ebb and flo, et cetera. This issue is dated, but I am going to write about it anyway.

Perhaps you can conjure up a time, long ago, when Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Twilight were at the forefront of every (pre)adolescent's mind. Yes, this is still somewhat the case, but just imagine the time when this was at its peak.

Of course, everyone everywhere (on the internet) was aghast at this cultural phenomenon. We (a collective we) were disgusted with this slurry that had become ever teenage girl's obsession, we took every chance we could to denounce and deride Meyer's books, the Jonas' music, and so on.

In the midst of this, however, it struck me one day what we were doing. A lot of the issues that people were nitpicking were tenets that I not only agreed with, but that I lived by as well.

In Twilight [SPOILERS, I guess] Edward refuses to have premarital sex with Bella, and is adamant that if they are to go any further they must get married first. The Jonas Brothers wear purity rings to symbolize their commitment to, well, being pure. Lo and behold, both of these things were brought under scrutiny and publicly mocked.

Why is it that the one time young people (okay, girls) have role models they should actually look up to, they're ridiculed? Miley Cyrus actually wasn't half bad as someone to imitate, before she decided to grow up. Of course, back before all of this she too was labelled as childish, annoying, et cetera.

Frankly, I'm disappointed with all of us. Yes, the Twilight books were less than stellar, and yes, I read them all. No, the Jonas Brothers are not fantastic at music, but they're not awful either. Here we are, sick of the way Disney gets into every single thing, but when was the last time any of us watched the Disney Channel and saw what was going on there?

Okay, so I watch it every now and then. I have issues with them portraying kids in shows dating, I can't be down with that. What I do notice, though, is how there's this refreshing absence of sexualization that runs rampant on MTV, and on most other channels after six. I honestly don't see almost anything wrong with it.

Maybe we (okay, mostly the internet) should sit back one day and watch some of the Disney Channel (Family Channel, here in Canada) and try to look past the lame jokes and the terrible acting and just admit that it's not terrible. This isn't corrupting kids, and I'd let my kids (I don't have any yet) watch it a billion times before I let them watch almost anything out there these days.

Counterpoints are more than welcome, and even encouraged (though not necessarily anticipated).

DIY Surgery

I decided to make yesterday a van Gogh day. To be more specific, I painted with watercolours which I had purchased the day before, and I cut off part of my ear.
For a very long time now there has been a slight growth on the back of my left ear. For the past couple of months I have had this desire to rid myself of it once and for all, but never quite got up the gumption to go through with it. Yesterday, as I was preparing to descend the stairs to my abode, I grabbed the sharpest knife I could from the kitchen, a little plastic cup full of cotton balls, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a glass of ice cubes, and a bunch of band-aids.

Sitting on my bed I rubbed an ice cube back and forth over the back of my ear. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was probably just hardened skin, and didn't have all that many nerves in it anyway. I grabbed knife, cotton, and alcohol, and walked to the basement bathroom.
Before I walked in I wisely stripped down to my skivvies. I remembered that a) head wounds bleed profusely, and b) I don't like blood on my clothes. Staring in the mirror I bent my ear and awkwardly positioned the knife. As you can see by the picture of the aftermath below, it was not a small one.

As you can see, I have the tiniest bathroom. Also: yes, that is a lot of blood.

I'd just like to make it clear that I sterilized the knife and the area I was about to cut. Just making that clear.

In spite of the fact that it was the sharpest knife I could find, it was surprisingly dull. I made an incision but only ended up making a slight cut in the skin. With the state of the blade as it was, I actually had to make a sort of sawing motion, moving both my ear and the knife back and forth against each other.

Finally I was able to remove most of said growth. I then set it aside and got to staunching the wound. It bled and it bled and it bled. I alternated between soaking up the blood with alcohol-dampened cotton balls and rubbing ice over it. And still it continued to bleed.

Eventually I got sick of my own blood getting everywhere and but a band-aid over it. The blood still leaked out, but eventually it managed to clot a little, so that was good.

I cleaned up the sink, put some clothes on, Skyped a friend. After a while I got to removing the bandage (and the scab that had grown) and it started bleeding again. So I grabbed more cotton and soaked up more blood and finally put on another band-aid.

This morning all is well. I actually don't think it's infected, and it doesn't really hurt at all. Life is good.

Troubled Standard

I'm writing this with the internet off, because I have somehow managed to contract a computer virus. To be more specific, and more truthful, it is actually malware, and has materialized in the form of a program called, ironically enough, Antimalware Doctor. This program enjoys informing me that I have problems with my computer, to which I mentally respond, Yes, thank you very much. I've found sarcasm to have little to no effect on this program.

Hopefully my Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware software and my AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition will be enough to scour this pestilent persistence from my hard drive. Only time will tell.

And now on to the Real Topic of Today's Post . . .

In spite of the melancholy mood brought about by finishing one of Canadian author Douglas Coupland's novels, I am going to press on and write about racism. The last time I wrote on this topic was in the hodgepodgish bric-a-brac of the post on The Last Airbender. In this case, however, I will take strides to make my thoughts much more cohesive and, hopefully, understandable.

The topic I would like to discuss this evening with you all is when (or more appropriately, why) race is made distinctly clear in conversation, or when an event is being recounted. An example of this would be stating that a guy I saw on the subway was black or Asian, and not elaborating at all if he was white.

Understandably there are quite a few factors to take into account. Where am I at the present (where am I writing this from)? Canada, the West. What is my ethnicity? Filipino-Chinese, Asian. What do I consider myself culturally? An equal mix of Eastern and Western. Who do I find myself interacting with most on a daily basis (ethnically)? Asians.

It's granted that I do live in Canada, where the majority of the populace is Caucasian, but what of it? While I live here I am almost always interacting with my relatives, who are Filipino, or my friend Terence, who is Chinese. Moreover, I live in an area right by Chinatown, where Caucasians are most definitely a minority. With these facts in mind, it would be a poor argument to state that in my current general existence white people are the standard.

Is it because I consider the majority of my audience to be Caucasian, most of the time? Sure, perhaps here on my blog that is the case. And it certainly wouldn't be untrue to consider most of the general populace at the college I attend to be white (as well as my friends at said college).

All factors aside, my issue here is not that other ethnicities are stated, but that Caucasian is the only one that is not. Why this should occur in my case, specifically, when I have lived half my life in Asia, is terribly vexing to me. When I spoke to my friends in Thailand about a scene I saw on the street, was it really necessary that I pointed out that this person was Thai? Shouldn't that have been the standard?

Perhaps this is more a personal issue than anything. If you're white and you interact almost solely with white people, then why shouldn't that be your standard, why shouldn't that just be a given? In my case, however, I find it somewhat troubling. I don’t' know that I'll start stating every single person's ethnicity when brought up in conversation from now on, but I'm going to do something, I just don't know what.

Trouble Eating

For those of you who have known me for a while, it's no big news that my grandmother has Alzheimer's. I realize that most of you probably know this, but just to be upfront and everything, Alzheimer's is a mentally degenerative disease that specifically affects memory, breaking it down over time.

My grandmother is in Stage Six of Alzheimer's, and well on her way into the seventh. No, she doesn't ever recognize me, though she's become familiar to my general presence around the house. She knows who my grandfather is for the most part, though when he is in another room she will look over at him and ask me who he is.

I guess the real reason I'm writing this is because very recently (as in the past three or four days) my grandmother has somehow forgotten how to eat.

Let's back this up a little and do a little explaining. First off, Filipino people (and many other Asians) eat with a fork and a spoon. The fork is held in the left hand and the spoon in the right; the fork is used to hold food down while the edge of the spoon is used to cut it. Typically the fork is used to push food onto the spoon. [Honestly, I don't understand how people here eat with a fork and a knife, it strikes me as one of the most illogical systems known to mankind.] Secondly, there is normally a bowl of what Filipinos would call sawsawan, which is a combination of soy sauce, fish sauce, lemon, or vinegar (usually not all four at the same time), which is either dabbed onto each bite or only on the ulam, or whatever is being eaten with the rice.

Nowadays my grandmother never picks up her fork. She'll use her spoon to awkwardly cut at whatever meat or fish is on her plate, and then try to get a spoonful of both meat and rice together. This process usually involves using her fingers. The fork just sits there on the side of her plate. The sawsawan also just sits there, almost embarrassingly useless, equidistant between her and my grandfather but only used by one of them.

It's fairly worrying stuff. This is the third summer I've lived in my grandparents' basement, and I have of course watched my grandmother's mental faculties slowly deteriorate overtime. I've been witness to many outbursts; just yesterday she slammed her glass of juice on the table because she didn't want to take her medicine. This however, stands out. Eating is one of the simplest, most standard of daily routines. Having difficulty eating is a sure sign that there's this transition to Stage Seven.

This is the first time I'm writing about my grandmother's condition, but it certainly won't be my last. To end this all off, I leave you with a short snippet I wrote on my old blog.

May Twenty-Ninth, Two-thousand Nine.

Ghosts.

I just realized that to my grandmother, this house is full of ghosts.

Not being able to remember anything, the sounds she hears from above, with Anh and her children on the upper floor, and the noises she hears from below, with me living in the basement with the radio going, are a quiet commotion that cannot be attributed to two octogenarians lying in their bed.

At times I am walking in and out of the living room, and perhaps she glimpses my comings and goings. She is surprised every time, and does not call out. Who does she think I am? Some phantom who stalks a path from basement to sofa then back?

The walls are covered in photos of past celebrations- birthday parties, anniversaries, and the like. There are grandchildren she cannot recognize, their pictures changing every so often as they age. All around the house there are families of strangers- happy, smiling people, all of them foreign and unknown.

Even as I sit here writing this, the door creaks open and eyes peer out of a darkened room. Before I can even raise a hand to wave the door is shut again. 

Perhaps, taking this into account, it is my grandmother who is the ghost- haunting a house that does not belong to her.

Thank You, AP English

When I was in my last year of high school I took an Advanced Placement class in English, to help myself out for what college academic life had planned for me. In this class we wrote a lot of essays, many of which involved comparing and contrasting two literary works of great merit.

Very recently I was able to thoroughly experience two largely varying narratives, both of which I enjoyed immensely. This post will discuss the connection between StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a real time strategy game, and The Poisonwood Bible, a novel published in the late nineties.

Wings of Liberty follows the path of ex-lawman James Raynor, and his mission to overthrow a corrupt government he helped put into place in the previous game. The game begins in a bar with Jim down on his luck, drinking in an empty bar on the same planet he began his career as marshal. Who should step through the door but Tychus Findlay, Jim's partner in crime from years ago, offering work that could get his rebel organization back on their feet. This renewing of their partnership kicks off a sector-wide epic which brings them face to face with the two other alien races of the game, and which culminates in a decision Raynor never thought he would have to face.

The Poisonwood Bible is the story of the Prices, a Baptist family who moves from Georgia to the unfamiliar wilds of the Congo. Narrated by the five women of the family, the tale is seen and told through the eyes of Orleanna, wife of preacher Nathan Price, and her daughters, Rachel, the eldest, Leah and Adah, the two very different twins, and Ruth May, the youngest. Originally planning on only staying for a year, their missionary tenure in the village of Kilanga is set awry by the political upsets, many of which are caused by their own government.

I completed the single-player campaign of Wings of Liberty on July Thirty-First, and finally finished The Poisonwood Bibleon August First. Having experienced both in such close proximity, I thought about the two a great deal and was able to tie them firmly together in my mind using a single thread.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and The Poisonwood Bible, despite being worlds apart in both media and subject matter, are both bound together underneath the overarching theme of guilt.

Jim Raynor is a man haunted by the ghosts of his past. The sector's current tyrant, Emperor Mengsk, rules with an iron fist, and sits proudly upon his throne due to the former-marshal's aid in the first war. This despot betrayed Raynor's love, Sarah Kerrigan, by ordering her to place a device on the old government's capital planet which would lure in the voracious Zerg like moths to a flame, and then abandoning her to them. The Zerg would later turn Kerrigan into a creature known far and wide as the Queen of Blades, a malicious killing machine who would terrorize the sector and kill one of Raynor's closest Protoss allies.

Raynor's guilt at Kerrigan's death consumes him, and this is compounded when his old friend Tychus walks back into his life. Years earlier Tychus took the blame for both of them and was incarcerated for nine years. His reappearance in Raynor's life brings back countless memories of the good ol' days, and Raynor is forced to constantly defend his friend against the suspicions and accusations of his crew. The gripping conclusion of the first chapter of the StarCraft II trilogy involves Raynor having to choose between two regrets, two immense sources of guilt, and his decision holds the fate of their world in its hands.

The Prices do not adjust well to life in Africa, and the strain of life in an unfamiliar land is evident in their interactions with one another. While guilt is not present in their lives from the get-go, things take a sharp downhill turn once Nathan Price begins to force Christianity upon the villagers in a manner which borders on antagonistic. Their lives are placed in danger when political unrest begins to encroach on the borders of their existence in Kilanga and natural disasters such as a drought and the resulting famine cause many of them to deeply regret travelling to Africa in the first place. Guilt's immense weight finally falls, however, at the death of one of the Price daughters. None of the narrators are exempt from this event, and all are bowed beneath its burden as they move on with their lives, never quite leaving the past behind them.

The second guilt is felt only by some, and it directly involves the once-hopeful nation of the Congo. America's desire for cheap diamonds and cobalt leads to a scheme that will put the leader they want in charge of the country, a plan which will overthrow the newly-elected Patrice Lumumba, voice of the Congolese. Western guilt lies leaden on the shoulders of most (but not all) of the Price women, the actions of the Belgians in the colonial era and the actions of their own American countrymen in the post-colonial. Lives and hopes lost at the hands of their Western brethren force them to reconsider who they are as people, and to try to come to some sort of reconciliation.

Jim Raynor and Orleanna Price both have lines which, while appearing simple on the surface, speak volumes about who they are and what they've done with their lives. Facing his final decision Raynor says, "We are who we choose to be," a line almost stupidly simple at first glance. In it, however, these seven words manage to encompass his decision to become a marshal, and then a rebel freedom fighter, a path Tychus looks upon scornfully. These words contain within them his choice to set aside revenge for closure, to save lives instead of sit back, and, finally, his decision to choose between what seems right and what could be redemption.

Orleanna, in the first few pages of the book, tells the reader, "One has only a life of one's own." This simple message means more and more as the narrative progresses, yet from the beginning it reveals that she does not really feel needed or loved, and thus has only herself as company. As the novel goes on Orleanna makes a decision for the entire family, opting to set aside her weak-willed self and to put on strength and intensity, a woman motivated by the eventual safety of what family she has left.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and The Poisonwood Bible both feature characters who are riddled with guilt and yet seek freedom from it, who are forced to face it and move on, and who make their largest decisions in the midst of disaster, panic, and betrayal. Both have lived lives full of regrets, yet firmly choose to make one less mistake, for others and not for themselves.

Works Cited

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998. Print.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. V 1.0.1.16195. 31 July 2010. Blizzard Entertainment. 31 July 2010.