Filed under: Brain Scrapings | Tags: canada, directional, election, politics, us
So Canada is officially having an election in October. I woke up this Sunday morning and listened to the first election speeches from all the federal party leaders. Jack Layton’s was by far the funniest. He kept on saying “We have to move forward, not backward!” It definitely reminds of another election line:
My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Watch the end of the video.
Filed under: Brain Scrapings | Tags: bilingualism, coffee, crowd, elitism, english, filipino, pretentiousness, shop
Originally uploaded by julymale
There’s just something about fast food chains that is not conducive to writing. A burger joint near my grandmother’s house has free unlimited Wi-Fi that I could use. Yet, I choose to go to a coffee shop that’s about an hour away and involving multiple transfers. Inspiration probably hits me when I can actually hear myself think. With my suspected ADHD, the cacophonous chatter and the crowds easily distract me. People watching entertains me. (Reality show junkie in hiding?)
Although I find coffee shops relaxing, they carry an air of pretentiousness that I find really annoying. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve observed the world over. Take the crowd in the place I am in now, part of what used to be one of the most posh malls in Manila. “English-speaking crowds” fill the tables. For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many Filipinos, especially those with money, abhor or refuse to speak in plain Tagalog (or whatever local language they know). They insist in talking in English when speaking in Filipino is completely fine and acceptable.
In front of me is a father, looks like a successful businessperson. Yes, I eavesdropped on his phone conversation (all about business) and looked over his laptop (spent a lot of time on the PSE website looking at his stocks I assume). He could talk in both Filipino and English yet when his sons came in, he would only talk to them in English. Question is why?
I asked a coworker before who had a similar upbringing about this phenomenon. His father, an executive at a very reputable international company, told him that it was useless to speak Filipino. English is the lingua franca. Okay, I don’t dispute the fact that you do need to learn English but if you are going to live in the Philippines please learn and use the language. Bilingualism is something to be proud of.
Is speaking English something that would separate you from the masses? Separation from the masses attracts attention and sometimes trouble. One of the things you avoid when traveling is to stand out from the masses. You don’t want to be the one person walking, looking lost, and nose inside a guidebook.
I am always amazed by people’s reaction that I could still fluently speak Tagalog. As I’ve told many people, my purpose for speaking English is very utilitarian. I speak English in Canada because most people I know outside the Filipino community can only speak English. When I go home or go out with my Filipino friends, I speak Tagalog.
Okay, rant over. I wasn’t even supposed to write this but quoting Peter Griffin, it just really grinds my gears. The coffee shop crowd sometimes isn’t the most accepting people in world. I do feel bad by being part of it on occasion. Good thing a cute set of ABBA songs are playing on the coffee shop radio. Oh how can you not feel cheered up by Waterloo.
I am officially an awful person! I was thinking of playing around with Photoshop CS3’s very powerful photo stitching feature and thought about all the photos I planned to make into panoramas. Oh my god, I dug through my folders and I have just been awful with organizing my photos. As of today, I have about 30 folders worth of photos that I haven’t even looked at or organized. It’s so overwhelming and I know that I’m overwhelmed because my head is starting to hurt.
I was so good about a year ago but school got in the way with my flickr posting. I just rediscovered my photos of my trip to Newport, Rhode Island and I still have two days worth of photos to go through for that. I also blame my short attention span, leading to me posting a picture a day before. I slowly moved up to 5 photos a day and then now I am up to 12 photos a day. Yikes! Help please!
Filed under: Brain Scrapings, Internet Scrapings | Tags: education, ipod, itunes u, learning, open, podcasts
I noticed a pattern with my 5 years of education at UBC. First year was characterized with perfect attendance, even with pending papers and exams on the horizon. Second year was not much different but I had my first experience with the phenomenon called truancy. Third year saw self-debates about going to class, which I went due to my sense of filial responsibility. Fourth and fifth years saw the inevitable decline of my class attendance. Although I did skip classes that I know I could download notes from or if I was severely disinterested in the lessons.
Recently I bought a new Macbook and it came with a free iPod Touch. It was my first iPod, so I was really free from this hoopla about the device. People would tell me about the podcasts they listened to or the new band they just discovered. I didn’t really understand any of these. At any rate, I decided to actually download some podcasts recently and listened to them while on the bus. It was interesting and then I decided to download some more.
Lo and behold, I stumbled into iTunes U. Think edutainment and lectures but podcast form. I discovered videos, speeches from famous people, topics on current events and issues, etc. I devoured them. I downloaded more of them. I searched for them. It’s really funny that now I am out of school and I am learning more than I should. This actually reminds me of the reason why I went to class. I went to class because I didn’t want to read my course books at home. I only read something while being on the bus. Once I get off I never opened a course book again. Some books are totally dry and a bore to read. I can’t think of a more positive way to describe a lot of academics’ teaching styles. If professors question why students abhor going to class, I going to say something right now. No matter how important your lessons are, if you are boring the hell out of everybody, all your students will question the proper use of their time by being in your class. If you were in our place, you would think of the same.
I am surprised why aren’t educational institutions taking advantage of this technology? It something new for students to try. The current student population is already carrying devices like iPods, why not try to reach them that way? Commuting takes a significant chunk of my time during the day that listening to something interesting as a discussion on the ethics of food. I just finished a downloading spree that included a speaker series of world leaders and a documentary on Sierra Leone. Why couldn’t my classes be these interesting?
Filed under: Brain Scrapings, World Scrapings | Tags: asean, cambodia, consolidation, democratization, papers, research, un
Inspired by Jon Beasley Murray’s work, I’ve decided to track my progress on my upcoming research papers by writing as much about it as I can on my blog. I cannot promise that I would write everything because I can barely scrape my time to write a post regularly.
I have two classes that requires a research paper, namely my Comparative Democratization and International Organizations classes. For convenience sake, I have decided to do both papers on the same country. I chose Cambodia for two reasons:
- I am very interested in Southeast Asian politics and most of my research papers have dealt with the region
- I have not written a paper about Cambodia (just to keep tabs, I have written on Thailand, East Timor, ASEAN, Philippines, and Singapore)
For my Comparative Democratization class, I am suppose to be looking into the CIDA projects in the country. How these projects are working. What is working and what is not. Recommend projects or different angles the same problem can be attacked from. In my IO class, I am looking at ASEAN’s reaction during Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.
Hopefully, I can properly do research for these papers. I haven’t done one of these in a while, so it should be interesting. If anybody has any resources they would like to share, please feel free to let me know.
“Me fail English? That’s unpossible”-Ralph Wiggum
There is just something unnatural about calling the plural of mouse (the thing that moves your cursor around on the computer) mice. I always use the word mice when I’m referring to actual mice, those real live things that some people experiment on or make them find cheese in a maze or what Pinky and the Brain are.
One of my colleagues wanted a mouse with a scroll button and I told her that there were tons of “mouses” inside the storeroom. Of course, I was corrected and I was wrong but it felt so unnatural to call them mice. I wish they were called something else like I don’t know..ummmmm….can’t think of anything right now but you know what I mean. OY! One of my other colleagues actually Googled the word mouses and nothing came up. With him claiming Google’s all-knowledgeable power, I retorted with “Check Wikipedia!” It was not a good day today. *insert sad face here*
And this Ralph Wiggum moment was brought to you by my decreasing brain cells.
Filed under: Brain Scrapings
Since school started, I have been caught in a dichotomous relationship with the blog. On one side, I have a lot more to write about. My readings and the eternal wisdom that professors impart into my impressional mind are springwells of topics that needs to be either praised, berated, or better clarified.
On the other hand, I promised myself that I’ll be ahead of the pack this year. I have to do it at least once and prove to myself that I am not the eternal slacker that I’ve to accept. Oy!
Decisions, decisions….but then again I’m still writing this..so Scraping the Fringe: 1, School: 0…..
I seriously considered buying my own domain name yesterday. I wanted to own the address “http://www.scrapingthefringe.com”. I came to this conclusion for two reasons:
- It’s just really cool to have your domain.
- I love the title Scraping the Fringe. It took me awhile to actually think of putting together those 3 words but hey it’s better than my other title for this blog “Rants, Ramblings, and Whatnots”. Sounds very generic doesn’t it?
My untechieness has caught up with me again when options about protections came or messages about getting more traffic by buying domain names that are similar to yours. Some of them I do understand, especially if you want to start your own business but others are completely unnecessary. I realized then that sometimes selling something is a product of fear. Fear of not getting the product, fear of not getting as much as you think you should, etc.
One great example is my friend who bought this $150.00 jacket from this store called Aritzia. The sales girl talked her into it by saying that they were not sure if other branches had the same item and it was already on sale (by the way, I would never ever buy a $150 jacket). They gave her a sense of urgency to buy it and successfully they did. Given though that my friend loves the store and will buy anything from there.
Another is when my friend and I got a free 1 week gym passes. We knew that they were going to sell us memberships and we have agreed beforehand that NOBODY will sign anything. We went in thinking that we would completely safe from any sales pitch. The “fitness consultant” then tried to talk us into signing a contract by giving us discounts and all that other crap. We didn’t budge so she resorted to the “fear tactic” by telling us that the discount was only applicable on that day. She also told us that we won’t really feel the goodness of the gym if we only tried it for a week. The worst was she actually told us that trying it out for a week is nothing and we will ultimately fail to tone up (my goal) and lose weight (my friend’s goal). After being called fat and useless, we decided to not do anything instead.
This psychology of fear is extremely powerful. It preys upon our wants even if we can live without them. Our wants turn into needs and then it turns you into this buying demon that won’t be able to stop. Realizing doesn’t really help either. That’s why I decide to avoid eBay as much as I can. This is coming from a person who just lost 2 winning bids at the last minute. OH SO FRUSTRATING!
Filed under: Brain Scrapings
I am an Arts student. Writing comes naturally to me. Creating a new blog post is quite easy and I can just go on for hours. However, writing for university is a completely different beast. I have not written anything seriously academic since I left for Singapore last year. My work is primarily focused on event planning, designing, and networking.
By not writing for those 8 months that I was away, my brain has turned into mush. Last semester was an abysmal one writing-wise. I could not start my papers or even start an introduction to one. Right now for work I am suppose to be writing articles and for the whole day I’ve only finished two paragraphs, which in my opinion are of inferior quality.
I can churn designs out as quick as a bunny produces his progeny. Writing has become a pain. I know the solution to this is to start writing again. I just don’t have a topic that interests me. I want to write about Southeast Asia again. That is my area of interest. I learn so much from the research alone that it inspires me to do more. It’s not that I am not interested in learning technologies. I just feel that I’m shooting blind, trying to feel my way through the whole where I should know by now.
I think it’s also the delay on working on the website. So many other things have come and gone and Spotlight has been pushed back. Now that I’m working on it, it has been quite difficult to get back into the groove of things. Oy!
Filed under: Brain Scrapings
For the next couple of entries, I will be doing something experimental. I’ve always wanted to try this out and I will do it right now. I will try to write a story, something emotional, something engrossing, something that will make you read through it again. Some of it maybe based on personal experiences, some of it maybe completely fiction. I will not attempt to create anything cohesive in any sense of the word. It will just be a creative outlet for anything that I can think of during the lull moments of my day. And so it begins…
“Stop talking! Stop screaming!” It was all I can think of. A flood of memories suddenly surged into my mind. I can see myself getting my feet stuck on the door. I called my mother for help but I knew nobody would come. She was at work as was the routine at the time. I tried to pull myself out from the crushing bind of the floor and the door. Splinters were piercing my brown skin.
I stopped, wondering how did I ever get myself into this. I never heard of the phrase, “curiosity killed the cat”. My lexicon at the time could not understand the concept of curiosity. Yet, she always haunted my developing mind, pushing the boundaries wherever I can and reeling back when consequences were dire. She was a friend when she wanted to be. Ultimately, abandonment was what she was most good at.
Wriggling was the next attempt. Turning and twisting from one angle to another. I wanted to see if my appendage would contort its way out of this mess. Moisture. It was a sudden onset of shock, fear, and disappointment when small driplets of blood covered my ankle. Friction broke down the barrier that protected me. It drove in the splinters like staking a vampire through its heart. I stopped. Pain was already present and he brought friends along for some company.
I looked again. Unbeknown to me, a force was pushing this slab of wood down to the floor. Attempts to push it up did not enter my thoughts. My arms did not know anything besides carrying a warm milk bottle or plastic guns made by a man I would never know. This force pulled me down the way it pulls everything down. It was something beyond my own powers.
Time seemed infinite. As I saw a finger moving around, I knew time was passing by. These strange symbols, however, were unintelligible to me. Memories of others looking at it and then hurrying were imprinted on me. The colours around me began to grow darker. The vividness of day gave way to the mystery of the night. Darkness enveloped me and I plunged into despair…..
