20030405
I remember a time I used to paint my fingernails, oddly enough. It was ridiculous, but I think I know how that could have turned about.
I don't remember what age it was, but Elizabeth, a girl at my old preschool, had painted her fingernails and I got jealous. I wanted to copy her. Her mother babysat me.
When I got back home, I begged to have my fingernails painted. She said that I was not a girl, but after pressing her, she relented.
What happened? School happened. Although I was delighted to have my fingernails painted, I discovered to my shock, horror, and shame that boys don't paint their fingernails and I felt left out.
So by that night, I wanted to get rid of my fingernail paints as quickly as possible and sought to forget that moment of embarrassment as quickly as possible.
I didn't, obviously. And now I look at this as one of the many clues that pointed the way to who I am now.
I don't remember what age it was, but Elizabeth, a girl at my old preschool, had painted her fingernails and I got jealous. I wanted to copy her. Her mother babysat me.
When I got back home, I begged to have my fingernails painted. She said that I was not a girl, but after pressing her, she relented.
What happened? School happened. Although I was delighted to have my fingernails painted, I discovered to my shock, horror, and shame that boys don't paint their fingernails and I felt left out.
So by that night, I wanted to get rid of my fingernail paints as quickly as possible and sought to forget that moment of embarrassment as quickly as possible.
I didn't, obviously. And now I look at this as one of the many clues that pointed the way to who I am now.
20030404
A different topic altogether regarding the idea of abortion:
I am terrified that science will discover the means to remove homosexuality, to make sure the gay people are never born again. So what we will be facing is that the existing population will grow older and die out, trying mercilessly to clone themselves or to make gay babies in order to survive.
Abortion is a possible method, and I can only hope that women will by that time be enlightened enough to base their choices not on whether children are, to use an emotionally charged word, abnormal, but whether they feel the time and the circumstance are right to have a child.
If the permanent minorities had not reached the critical mass necessary to bring about changes in society before the means to remove them had come about, I fear that the world would have become like the world in The Giver, which describes a depressing utopian world. Jonas, the 12-year-old, was selected to be the Receiver-of-Memory, a position of high prestige and even higher burden. Jonas must remember everything, including the history that led to this state of existence where everyone is well-meaning, but unhuman.
I am terrified that science will discover the means to remove homosexuality, to make sure the gay people are never born again. So what we will be facing is that the existing population will grow older and die out, trying mercilessly to clone themselves or to make gay babies in order to survive.
Abortion is a possible method, and I can only hope that women will by that time be enlightened enough to base their choices not on whether children are, to use an emotionally charged word, abnormal, but whether they feel the time and the circumstance are right to have a child.
If the permanent minorities had not reached the critical mass necessary to bring about changes in society before the means to remove them had come about, I fear that the world would have become like the world in The Giver, which describes a depressing utopian world. Jonas, the 12-year-old, was selected to be the Receiver-of-Memory, a position of high prestige and even higher burden. Jonas must remember everything, including the history that led to this state of existence where everyone is well-meaning, but unhuman.
I support women's right to choose. Yes, I do, although I would actively try to encourage them not to abort. It's not about the fetus, killing the fetus. I don't care about the fetus. That may seem cruel to those heavily focused on the idea of the fetus as a human being. Yes, I do feel that killing the fetus is an inhumane method, but I do not feel that it should be completely abolished. To have abortion be abolished would mean endless lines of women crying in desperation to get rid of the babies they do not need or want.
I believe it is more cruel to have women be suicidal. I believe it is more cruel to have women be abandoned by men who only wanted one-night stand without responsibility. I believe it is more inhumane to have an entire family suffer because the father doesn't make enough money to support another child.
What I am concerned about is the welfare of the women. For those potential first-time mothers, the lost baby may be something to consider more thoroughly in favor of keeping it even if having the baby might delay a career. The reason is that if you choose to abort, and have children later, I cannot seriously consider those children to be your first . . . If mothers so choose to tell their children that they had abortions before they gave birth to the children, the idea would belie the children's assumption that they were the first ever to be made in the mothers' wombs, except that they were first-born.
I believe it is more cruel to have women be suicidal. I believe it is more cruel to have women be abandoned by men who only wanted one-night stand without responsibility. I believe it is more inhumane to have an entire family suffer because the father doesn't make enough money to support another child.
What I am concerned about is the welfare of the women. For those potential first-time mothers, the lost baby may be something to consider more thoroughly in favor of keeping it even if having the baby might delay a career. The reason is that if you choose to abort, and have children later, I cannot seriously consider those children to be your first . . . If mothers so choose to tell their children that they had abortions before they gave birth to the children, the idea would belie the children's assumption that they were the first ever to be made in the mothers' wombs, except that they were first-born.
The abject potential feeling of disclosure creates a certain sense of helplessness, of lying in between two versions of truth and untruth.
20030331
So interesting that though I profane and profuse actions and words so full of sounds and fury of the non-existence of God that I still discuss the "End Time." Although I am still ambivalent to whether the Almighty Being exists and for what beliefs, creeds, modes of living life He supposedly stands, I cannot help but to feel a sense of hopelessness if we fragile human beings have no souls and are but a sum of all the beeping electronic impulses of our brains. We are chaotic only because chaos is within our function to be so. How else can we adapt to a changing world, while the computer cannot handle a simple request for which it is not designed. Because we are continuously growing, a collection of protein-making cells, tissues, and organs, we are capable of seeming consciousness.
Why is there no souls? Because there is explicit evidence that once you die, your heart stops, and your brain is deprived of oxygen. What happens then at that moment that your brain cannot function? I suppose some people imagine that a soul is leaving the body. What if that was not, could not be the case? The brain . . . just dies. It ceases its actions, stopping chemical reactions that require oxygen, and stopping electrical impulses that enables responses. I understand that many people simply refuse to believe that a brain without a soul could be capable of comprehending the concept of "I." Though my brain dies, it is but a brain, "I" still live on, unbounded by my mortal coils.
Clearly no one can resolve this issue. It is something we shall never know, but still I feel that the truth is self-evident and we are all just not comfortable with it. The truth is that we have no soul. Our brain is just complex enough to evolve an understanding of abstract concepts and ideas. We also find ourselves unable to come up with new ideas because of the limitation of our brain. This either means that we are biologically incapable of thinking more unless people like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison come about to revamp our thoughts and we have no souls OR that our souls do not consider such intellectual pursuits to be important. Inventions and ideas are simply the biological basis of our brain. Our souls are considered to be something else.
Without our biological impulses, what are souls? It cannot be that there are dead sexual predators swirling among us on earth, in heaven or rather as Christians and other moralists believe, in hell. It cannot be because sexual predators exist based on the biological functions of their bodies. For some reasons, which are becoming clear in the years ahead, some brains are "turned on" by certain stimuli. Why? Are the reasons truly that souls are themselves perverted? Or can they be found within the complex ladders of the DNA? If the answers are in the double helix, they will deal a double blow to both the idea of souls and the ethics of modifying a person's DNA to make him less perverted.
Another answer may be discovered in how the environment affects a person's perception. If the DNA does not truly makes someone perverted, but simply more predisposed to have such thoughts and actions, then what can be done in the environment to remove or minimize such a dangerous predisposition from arising?
Why is there no souls? Because there is explicit evidence that once you die, your heart stops, and your brain is deprived of oxygen. What happens then at that moment that your brain cannot function? I suppose some people imagine that a soul is leaving the body. What if that was not, could not be the case? The brain . . . just dies. It ceases its actions, stopping chemical reactions that require oxygen, and stopping electrical impulses that enables responses. I understand that many people simply refuse to believe that a brain without a soul could be capable of comprehending the concept of "I." Though my brain dies, it is but a brain, "I" still live on, unbounded by my mortal coils.
Clearly no one can resolve this issue. It is something we shall never know, but still I feel that the truth is self-evident and we are all just not comfortable with it. The truth is that we have no soul. Our brain is just complex enough to evolve an understanding of abstract concepts and ideas. We also find ourselves unable to come up with new ideas because of the limitation of our brain. This either means that we are biologically incapable of thinking more unless people like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison come about to revamp our thoughts and we have no souls OR that our souls do not consider such intellectual pursuits to be important. Inventions and ideas are simply the biological basis of our brain. Our souls are considered to be something else.
Without our biological impulses, what are souls? It cannot be that there are dead sexual predators swirling among us on earth, in heaven or rather as Christians and other moralists believe, in hell. It cannot be because sexual predators exist based on the biological functions of their bodies. For some reasons, which are becoming clear in the years ahead, some brains are "turned on" by certain stimuli. Why? Are the reasons truly that souls are themselves perverted? Or can they be found within the complex ladders of the DNA? If the answers are in the double helix, they will deal a double blow to both the idea of souls and the ethics of modifying a person's DNA to make him less perverted.
Another answer may be discovered in how the environment affects a person's perception. If the DNA does not truly makes someone perverted, but simply more predisposed to have such thoughts and actions, then what can be done in the environment to remove or minimize such a dangerous predisposition from arising?
Perfect, we now are demonstrated by the incompetence of the President of the United States of the fact that many U.S. troops will die before the end of the war. One life is enough. To have so many lives lost on both sides of the war is making me feel pretty darn hopeless.
Well, I give my wholehearted support to the U.S. troops who are simply following the order of an aberrant president. I'm afraid I'm one of those swing voters. Sometimes, I feel that President Bush is a good man who wants to protect us by engaging in pre-emptive attack on a backwater nation. Other times, I feel that President Bush, and the people he hired to "advise" him, are morons for completely upsetting a carefully placed equilibrium that all the government officials of the world have been working so hard to preserve after WWII. Sure, technologies change, but it just feels so lonely to have the entire world seething venoms at the dangerous United States, which is supported by only few nations.
I understand that if it wasn't for the U.S. troops defending the foundations of the United States, we would not be so free to criticize the President and his actions. That is why it is so hard for me to write this blog. Maybe I represent the silent majority that understands the needs to do righteous things. After all, America is still so innocent that the nation cannot believe a person would be so cruel as Saddam Hussein to butcher so many people for expressing a human need to vent anger for respite.
But still, must we be so alone? Must we truly try to usher in a Pax Americana? A peace of a thousand years before the End in Coming? Wouldn't we rather have Pax Mundus? A World Peace, not an American one.
What I fear is that after this war, America will find itself in a state of decline. All resources will be depleted, and the cycle grows again with China taking over the world as the newest in superpower. We must be prudent, calm, quick to respond, but in affection, focus on wealth and philanthropies.
It is depressing that four soldiers could be so trusting as to come toward an Iraqi man in the car, only to find themselves killed by a suicide bomber. Clearly, America is still innocent if it does not truly understand the cruel rage that all the Arab nations and their Muslim fundamentalists are directing at us.
Well, I give my wholehearted support to the U.S. troops who are simply following the order of an aberrant president. I'm afraid I'm one of those swing voters. Sometimes, I feel that President Bush is a good man who wants to protect us by engaging in pre-emptive attack on a backwater nation. Other times, I feel that President Bush, and the people he hired to "advise" him, are morons for completely upsetting a carefully placed equilibrium that all the government officials of the world have been working so hard to preserve after WWII. Sure, technologies change, but it just feels so lonely to have the entire world seething venoms at the dangerous United States, which is supported by only few nations.
I understand that if it wasn't for the U.S. troops defending the foundations of the United States, we would not be so free to criticize the President and his actions. That is why it is so hard for me to write this blog. Maybe I represent the silent majority that understands the needs to do righteous things. After all, America is still so innocent that the nation cannot believe a person would be so cruel as Saddam Hussein to butcher so many people for expressing a human need to vent anger for respite.
But still, must we be so alone? Must we truly try to usher in a Pax Americana? A peace of a thousand years before the End in Coming? Wouldn't we rather have Pax Mundus? A World Peace, not an American one.
What I fear is that after this war, America will find itself in a state of decline. All resources will be depleted, and the cycle grows again with China taking over the world as the newest in superpower. We must be prudent, calm, quick to respond, but in affection, focus on wealth and philanthropies.
It is depressing that four soldiers could be so trusting as to come toward an Iraqi man in the car, only to find themselves killed by a suicide bomber. Clearly, America is still innocent if it does not truly understand the cruel rage that all the Arab nations and their Muslim fundamentalists are directing at us.
