in high definition

so the first week of the training is over and now we’re at our respective schools. The training itself was none too exciting, but the people we met and things we did in what little time we had outside of class was pretty awesome. not sure how prepared we are for the teaching though, since the training was a bit hack. my mandarin is terrible too, since i’ve been told that i have an extremely heavy accent and that they would prefer that i stay in english =/ so yeah. help.

some highlights in the past week would include the last night: sneaking down to the pool/hot springs and getting in after a lot of bargaining (not by me :P), going to the beach after lunch, learning and performing a dance with one of the groups, and just getting to know a bunch of awesome (well, for the most part) people. it’s been hella good. now we’re gonna actually start teaching. so wish us luck. cuz we’re gonna need it.

how’re things back in t-dot?

so i’m leaving today for my volunteer trip in taiwan, which should be interesting. i’m bringing my camera with about 10 gigs worth of memory card, since i won’t have any place to unload my pics, so with any luck, none of the cards will corrupt (especially the 8 gig one >.&lt and i’ll come back with some nice photos of taiwan!

everybody’s so busy this summer, and it gives us almost no time to do anything at all. early august will be a good time to do things. XD and speaking of being busy, I have to go now. so yes. short post. Have a nice summer everyone, and I’ll try to update in taiwan - give you all a heads up on how it is over there XP

so…exams are coming. tomorrow. who’s ready? haha

so when i’m bored of studying, i pick up my camera and i take pictures. and here’s one of them. click on the picture for the real deal XD

found out what school i’m going to in taiwan. Here’s their website…i think: http://www.cshs.tpc.edu.tw/cshs/en/index.html

anybody want to teach me some taiwanese? XP

So yes. Extra extra read all about it! Pi has written a WORDPRESS!! Once in a lifetime stuff folks, come and read! XDDD hahahaha enjoy.

Hm. Weird. A blog by me. I am definitely going to regret this… eh well. I needed to write a speech for class anyways, might as well share my thoughts.

Equivalent Trade

“People cannot gain anything without sacrificing something. You must present something of equal value in order to gain something.”

Having finished watching FMA in the past month, I began to wonder about the so-debated principle of equivalent trade. All throughout the series Ed believes in it, and gets angry when Dante tells him at the end that the principle is not true for the world, saying that some people start out doomed regardless of how much effort they put into living (not her exact words but whatever). Hohenheim of Light also says that the principle fails in reality because materials alone cannot be created into an object; for example the pieces of a broken radio alone are not enough to create a radio.

So, what about equivalent trade in real life (without alchemy)?

I guess that even though I can see where Dante and Hohenheim are coming from, I have to see some sense in the principle of equivalent trade. I believe that if you honestly put effort into something, that effort will be reciprocated. The keyword here of course is ‘honestly’. If you casually flip open your physics textbook for five minutes before the test and expect to do well, prepare to be disappointed. But if you honestly try your hardest to understand optics, or electricity, or whatever you’re learning; that is, you’re not trying to study while chatting on MSN or Gtalk, then you should definitely see results.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems that everything is going badly. You got a crappy test score, hell weeks with tons of assignments, someone is mad at you… etc. Whatever. The principle of equivalent trade states that to gain something, you must lose something. Similarly if you lose something, you gain something. But what do we gain from these hell weeks? These bad tests?

Some will claim that when you get a bad mark on a test you studied for, you sacrificed your time and effort and gained nothing. That is not true. Some idiot once said that you learn from your mistakes. That idiot undoubtedly went on to do great things. It’s because idiots make mistakes, and if an idiot can learn from his mistakes, then he’s well on his way to greatness. If you sacrificed time to study yet failed a test, but you learn from the mistakes from that test, then your net gain is probably worth the time and the fail. If you are even inspired to not fail again, then you just got an extra added bonus. If, however, you fail a test, go emo, cut yourself, refuse to learn, and hide in your room to cry all night, well, I can’t help you there.

So. Does equivalent trade hold? So far, yes. We can learn from our crappy blunders that screw us over and cost us, and in the bigger picture we gain. Who cares about this one 70% if you’re guaranteed never to do badly again?

Back to FMA, Hohenheim’s point makes sense. There are those of us who have to give it our all for that 85%, whereas there are others who can get their 95 eyes closed. I guess this could just be a product of their parents’ sacrifice of time, because their parents studied like good Asians (joke) when they were younger and thus became geniuses and then passed on their genius genes. So the principle still holds.

And yes, Dante’s point is equally as valid. Some people are just born unlucky/ screwed/doomed/whatever you want to call it. No matter how hard they try to live, they probably don’t gain anything and just die young, among other things. Possibly they also screw over those that gave them life… but that’s a depressing topic for someone else. I’m not going to look at those people. I’m going to look at us, the privileged, spoiled upper 1% of the world. For us, the principle can probably be applied. We have freedom, we have chances, we can afford to mess up and there will still be hope for us.

That said, there will always be those screwy privileged people among us who whine about the smallest things, complaining to the world about how whatever they invested didn’t come back, how the time and effort they put into something didn’t shoot something straight back out. Let’s be blunt. Yes, your life can suck at times. You can give someone your all and they don’t acknowledge you. You can try your hardest in a tournament and get completely destroyed. You can be betrayed by someone you put your trust in. What can you do? Live through it. In the end, if you live through a bad time, the sun will shine again [sounds really weird coming from me but whatever…].

We all screw up. We all go through times that we want to skip or avoid. We all have times when we feel like beating something up (sometimes ourselves… not a joke). But if we all ended our lives at this kind of time, then this would be a relatively unpopulated world. Live through the crap times. It’s equivalent trade, in exchange for living through crap you will gain fun experiences later. Just because in FMA they can instantly transmute stuff with alchemy doesn’t mean that equivalent trade is always instantaneous. We have time. If you make a sacrifice, you will definitely gain something for it, whether now or later.

all doors should have their “push” side facing the inside so you can push on the door to leave the washroom. XD this is because after you go to the washroom, you (usually) wash your hands, then go to leave, often without fully drying them, especially in those washrooms without paper towels. so then, you reach for the handle and you twist the knob and pull to open the door, leaving water on the knob. and then the next person comes along and touches it and goes “wtf is this piss?” and gets incredibly grossed out. It’s also better for the majority of the population, since the select individuals that don’t wash their hands will leave the contents of their piss (or crap) on the door handle for other people to pick up, which isn’t exactly desirable. It doesn’t take too much effort to do this, and it’s ergonomic. so yes. XD we should start a “all doors should push out of washrooms” movement. Then again, you could use paper towel to pull open the door. But that would be wasting paper. And there isn’t always paper.

The whole boys will be campaign is missing one key slogan: boys will be…good people. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then just follow the link here and just watch the site for a minute or so.

So the question is does UCC make us better people? Or does it just tell us how to succeed in the real world? It’s important to note that these two aren’t necessarily equivalent. A good person may not necessarily be a successful person, and a successful person may not necessarily be a good person. And an unsuccessful person may not necessarily be a good person either XD. A while ago, my violin teacher asked me: what does your school do to make you a better person? I found that I couldn’t give him an answer. Does UCC really do anything to make us better people? Or does it just teach us, as is one popular belief, how to beat the system and reach success? I think the lack of school spirit is a sign that UCC isn’t doing a good job. There are many people, myself included, who go to school just for the sake of going to school. They aren’t involved in any extracurricular, school-linked activities like sports teams and clubs. Another sign of this is the lack of commitment. People do things just to fulfill their CAS hours - they don’t actually have an interest in the thing that they’re doing, and that’s somewhat disturbing. Take the anime club for example. The people are all there just for hours. Same with the science club. Heck, pretty much every single member would have skipped the anime club meeting if Brawl had been open (half of them did anyways). The majority of people don’t do Horizons because they want to help less fortunate kids with their homework…it’s because they need their service hours. Although the fact that this is an incentive for people to go join Horizons, it is not the right incentive. People should be there because they want to, not because they need to fulfill some goal. It makes people very goal-oriented and detached from others - in a way it almost seems to set people up into a habit of using other people. Once something has fulfilled its purpose, it is cast away. This mindset may not be a healthy one. However, if it wasn’t for this need to attain a certain number of hours, the number of people doing Horizons would drastically drop. Attendance in clubs would probably also drop. Apathy and ennui is rampant in the school. The IB probably wanted good things to come from the CAS program, promoting commitment to certain hobbies and interests that could lead to something big in the future…but these good intentions may have gone astray, as people only see the CAS program as something that needs to be done to get the diploma, instead of something that helps you develop yourself as a human being (come on, we can all bullshit about how a certain experience has made us a better leader, communicator, person etc). Thus, because it is just another “task”, it can be forgotten about once finished. Is this really the kind of people we want in this world? Meanwhile, students are becoming adept at making excuses about why their homework is not done, or why their assignment was late, or why they aren’t going to class. They abuse and exploit the faults in the system, and not enough teachers enforce the rules for there to be any serious consequences, because that would earn the teacher the hatred of basically every student in the school (which, to us, isn’t a bad thing, because that means you have an awesome teacher and that the teacher is really “cool” because they don’t care for rules or deadlines). However, are we really supposed to like our teachers? Teachers are supposed to guide us, as students, to not only acquire the information required in their course, but to be a better person as well. However, many teachers are either unaware of these duties, or just shirk them. But yeah. Is it important to be a good person? And if you’re going to respond yes, are you just saying that because our principles and morals demand it, or do you really mean it? There’s also the possibility that you could be a good person, but still cheat the system…a robin hood situation comes to mind, but that’s only one of the branches of that thought.

Heck…don’t limit it to UCC alone. Does ANY school make us better people? Or does it just prepare us to become ruthless cutthroats in the adult world? Does the education system have a responsibility to make us better people? Or should that responsibility be left solely to the parents (which may or may not be the best idea, seeing as there are MANY different kinds of people out there)?

a single released by monkey majik on 23rd of april. i was looking around for new monkey majik music and just found it. i think there’s a sephiroth reference :P. other than that, i just think it’s nice music, touching story, interesting band. why interesting? because two members of the band are canadian. it’s sorta awkward to watch them sing japanese, cuz it doesn’t exactly feel natural, but w/e…their music’s nice. nuff said.

Halo: Combat Evolved, without question, revolutionized the video game industry, and was one of the most popular games out on the market. However, it also seems to be affecting the real world as well. A personal body armour is being developed by scientists, which give humans superhuman strength and unnatural abilities. This “armour”, as of the moment, is something of an exoskeleton, but add a shell around these bits and you have Master Chief, or any other SPARTAN, for that matter. Go here for more info on this. Here’s a nice picture. Add a bit of plating and presto, you have a character straight out of a video game.

To further mix things up, Boeing is testing an “Advanced Tactical Laser” or ATL for short that uses a laser to destroy enemy targets. Now the world is starting to look like Star Wars. With all of these new technologies being worked on, it’s no dream to think that super soldiers will be roaming the Earth by 2552 (the year Halo is set in)…it might even be a lot sooner than that.

Another interesting thing is the Yamaha Tesseract concept, which is basically a four-wheeled motorbike that, while it is safer, allows for the same kind of turns that a two-wheeled motorcycle can perform. Although there is no set release date, it looks pretty cool. I might get my M just to try this one out XD.

Here’s another brainwave: chat windows that look like word documents. This would make parents less suspicious if you were typing in a word document, rather than a small chat window. Somebody should definitely mod a chat window or create a skin that makes it look exactly like Microsoft Word or another similar program (Pages, Notepad, Wordpad). Keeping the font a neutral black colour would also help, as it words appearing on the screen are not abnormal in a Word Document, unless they were in funky colours…then the parents might start wondering what you’re up to. But yeah. That’s another idea to consider XD.

This movie started off slowly, but ended off brilliantly and beautifully. Centred around a delinquent son’s relationship with his mother, the movie revolves around the trials that they go through in life together. It is narrated from the present, and the son’s passage through life is shown in a series of flashbacks as he advances through the stages of life: childhood, middle school, high school, college, graduation, and life beyond that. At a point in the movie, the present is reached and the story continues forward. This is a tribute to the undying love of a mother for her child, the willingness to sacrifice everything for her son without asking for anything back: a truly rare bond. If you ever have some extra time on your hands, give it a try. Whatever you do, don’t stop watching.

Not really going to go into the plot and all. I’ll leave that for you to find out for yourself. I’ve been meaning to write something on the topic of parents for a while now, but never got around to it. This movie was a good segue, and so, here it is. Originally, the word file was called “unsung heroes”. I think you’ll get an idea of why it was labelled this.

Now this might not apply to everybody…in fact I’m sure it doesn’t….but for those people who have some that actually do their jobs, then you might understand what I’m saying. There are many difficult jobs in this world: as a president, you are in charge of running your country, as a surgeon in the ER, you are responsible for saving lives, as a hobo, you have to spend every living hour trying to stay alive, as a soldier, you have to kill other living things so you yourself aren’t killed. You hear about these people every day: how another soldier died in the war, how the president drew up a new legislation, how the surgeon managed to bring a car-crash victim out of her coma. Yet there is a job that is many times more difficult, that receives little, if any, “salary”, and that receives close to no recognition at all. This job, as many of you may have already guessed, is a parent. Of course, it will be as previously described if, and only if (iff lol sorry bad math joke) you do a good job at it.

To a parent, their child is their life. Their child’s dreams become the parent’s dreams. Their child’s successes become the parent’s successes. Every moment of their day revolves around catering for the desires, the faults, the emotions, the questions and everything else that their child might have, leaving little personal time for the parent to spend. In this way, they are bankrupt of any time for themselves, and yet the steadfast parent will keep at it. What drives this dedication? Is it some sort of invisible link between the child and the parent that fuels this desire to care for the child? Could it be the fact that a child is, fundamentally, you? A child has your blood coursing through its veins (well, if you’re a guy like me, then tough luck - your children might look like you if you’re lucky…or unlucky) and so, he or she is essentially an extension of your body. For women, this might also have something to do with the ten-month pregnancy in which the baby essentially is a part of the mother’s body, dependent on her to survive. There is much suffering associated with a pregnancy, the final frontier being the pain of birth. In fact, you’d think that people would not have children, if they have to undergo such extreme pain. And yet, it happens anyways. Somehow, we are able to overcome our fear of being hurt to have this child. But then what? Then comes late nights staying up, taking care of the baby, dirty diapers, loud crying. The process of raising a child is the most taxing of all. In order to guide them correctly, the parents have to be on constant watch, careful not to let their child “stray from the path”. The parents pay to send them to school. The parents spend their time arranging events for them. The parents stay up late with their child. The parents take them to places. The parents do their best to make sure their life is the best. They do what they think is the best for their child (regardless of whether it is or isn’t the best - and besides, there is no set ‘best way’ to raise a child anyways - we are all beginners in this field).

As children we often forget that our parents, no matter how harsh they are, are humans with feelings as well. This links back to one of my previous posts: your parents were children once too. They too had their own desires, their own dreams, their own goals, their own list of things that they wanted to do. And yet, they often sacrifice some, if not all, of this just so that you, the child, can realize your dreams. This selflessness is amazing, and sometimes, unimaginable. As a result, we often end up hurting our parents, either in the things that we do, or the things that we say. We don’t see the pain that they feel when we say “I hate you” - just imagine: something that you suffered to bring into this world, something that you raised with care, something that you sacrificed everything for, turning around and saying those three words: “I hate you”. That rejection is something difficult for even the coldest human to take. We expect them to love us. We think that it is their duty to protect us, to provide for us, to cherish us, and sometimes, we may take advantage of this fact, and say things that might hurt them. When you fail at something that you are really dedicated to, you feel terrible. However, the parent, upon seeing your sadness and disappointment, feels even worse that you could not succeed - they would probably start thinking about what they did wrong, what they could have done to help you gain success. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. If you had a child, and he or she said something like “i hate you” to you, how would you feel? But, being young and carefree, and, somewhat ignorant of other peoples’ feelings, it is ultimately something difficult for youth to realize and act upon. The parents, in the end, just have to grin and bear it.

So, the parents give, give and give. And what do they get back? An occasional smile? A hug every once in a while? An eternity full of dusty memories? As a child grows up, he or she begins to distance themselves from their parents. They find their own friends outside of the family, and begin to spend more and more time with them. After spending so much effort raising something, you’d think that they’d stay with you for a bit, at least. But as soon as that time comes, the first thing we, as children, seek is independence: we want to get as far away from them as possible. Do you ever feel guilty for not spending enough time with the people that spilled blood, sweat, toil and tears to bring you up? Are you ever torn between what the right decision is? Usually, people would not give a second thought to this. What kind of loser would rather spend time with their parents than with their friends? However, remember this. Given a normal lifespan, your parents will be gone long before any of your friends pass away. Your time with them is limited. There is only so much time and then…that’s it. They’re gone. It’s too late. Too late to say goodbye. Too late to spend just a bit more time with them. Too late to go walk about in the park with them. Too late to take them out to lunch with you. Too late to apologize for stealing the two dollars from the table that cold winter morning in grade 4.

From this, parents have come to be happy about the smallest things. An afternoon visit. A phone call home. They are not greedy. They just want to see you doing well. They want to be able to leave the world knowing that they have left a capable person behind, a person who can take care of him or herself - they are ultimately raising a person who can be independent of their parents. So why not indulge them while we can? They have feelings that are very real. They have things that they want, wishes that are very, very real and that can be granted by us, as children, easily. It only takes a bit of time, consideration and love. Is that really so much to ask from somebody that has given 110% for your sake? Surely not.

This is what I think. What do you think?