Thursday, April 12, 2007

filler


okays...i shouldnt be doing this right now. and i did say goodbye to this blog. but i was randomly trying the first two from my cousin's blog, and the answers are hilarious. cant.help.it. so here goes...
(one of those put your playlist on shuffle-waste time and do unproductive nonsense thing)

How are you feeling today? Tangled by Maroon 5
hahahahahs.. probably damn damn traumatised by the econs paper today.

Will you get far in life? Someday by Eternal
the art of answering the question by rephrasing the question :)

How do your friends see you? Teenage Wasteland by The Who
firstly, i am not a teenager. secondly, i didnt waste my time as a teenager. thirdly, i feel like i'm wasting time defending myself.

Will you get married? When the world ends by Dave Matthews
for the sake of the world, i wont!

What is your life's theme song? Stand By Me by Oasis
me being there for the people i love and people who love me!

What is the story of your life? Winter by Vanessa Carlton
cold, snowy, white?

What was high school like? Livin' La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin
it was, afterall, the best time of my life

How can you get ahead in life? We Are by Ana Johnsson
nice! means that i am ahead already. i hope.

What is tomorrow going to be like? Ever The Same by Rob Thomas
constancy is a not a bad thing.

What is the best thing about your friends? Breathe In by Lucie Silvas
"Life's too short to never know the truth | Maybe it's already here | We could throw ourselves into the fire | We could give up now and never even try" the good and the bad.

What song best describes you? Hollerback Girl by Gwen Stefani
not ever taking bullshit. frighteningly accurate

How is your life going? Can't Take My Eyes Off of You by Lauryn Hill
this is beyond my interpreting skills.

What song will play at your funeral? Lollipop by Mika
actually, the selfish bitch in me prefers people to cry during my funeral. and not sing a catchy song about "love gonna get you down"

How does the world see you? Scars by Papa Roach
i have my down days but am i that closed in and melancholic?

Will you have a happy life? Do You Only Wanna Dance by Mya
guess i will although there is always this nagging voice for me to do better.

What do your friends really think of you? I Want Your Sex by George Micheal
i am NOT going to go there.

What song describes the person you're attracted to? These Words by Natasha Bedingfield
individualistic but still capable of caring.

What message would you like to tell the next generation? The Way by Clay Aiken
that they should find someone they love and procreate so the human race survive. hahas.

Do you have a deep dark secret? Like I Love You by Justin Timberlake
all the narcissistic people out there can think about whether this applies to them!

What will I feel/think the moment I wake up tomorrow morning? Music To Watch The Girls Go By by Andy Williams
sobs! but i am not lesbian. yet.

What will be my recurrant thought/mood over the next weekend? Replacement Klllers by Chemical Brothers
feeling vengeful and destructive. hahas.. happens everyday.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

goodbye

no particular reason (although the track record of always doing this during the exam period would probably count as one).
after all, why must something happen before changes are made?

i will miss this place. and the questions on my sexual orientation the template generated :p
the mostly black and whiteness. the 434 posts.
recording the happy, sad, sane, crazy times.
at one point, i got pretty uncomfortable realising the number of random people who stumble across this.
but all that have been written here are highly censored. so there.

already found a new place.
but with new interface to play around with and more pressing issues like exams, i am keeping it to myself.
for now.

to those from within my inner circle, i may drop you all a mail with the new address notification when i feel like it.

to the misc strangers, i'm sure that within these two-or-so weeks of newblog construction, you'll figure out how to reach me. ask nicely and i will oblige you.

gender relations


a little of consumer behaviour, a little of language, a little of all the pyscho/philo/socio stuff. ripped off -

"There is an ad for Gap on television right now. It's pretty simple: the concept is of a musical and onstage is a couple. The woman sings, "Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you" and "Anything you can wear I can wear better" etc. The guy sings the refrain, "No, you can't" throughout and, at the end, the woman pulls the pants off the guy and puts them on.

The idea is pretty simple too. The entire ad is staged around the concept of someone "wearing the pants" in the relationship. The pants in question are called the "Boyfriend trouser" and, ostensibly, by taking his pants, the woman is taking control in the relationship. That is, she is now in a position of power. This is designed, obviously, to appeal to women by empowering them symbolically.

This ad made me think of women in power – the idea of a successful woman – and how they are portrayed in ads, on television, in the media, or anywhere, actually. What strikes me as interesting is that women in power always have their power defined as their overcoming of men. Even in something as innocuous as an Archie comic, whenever masculinity and femininity clash, Betty and Veronica are always the ones with the last laugh while Archie and Reggie are shown in some humiliating position.

As a male, I used to be mildly offended that any ad on television that pitted the wits of a man against a woman always had the woman win in the end, but I realised that that was a myopic view of the situation because there are ads that portray powerful and successful men as well, but the reason I did not think of them is because they do not parallel the ads of successful, powerful women; unlike those ads, powerful men in the media are never portrayed as having overcome women. A credit card ad will have a good-looking middle-aged man lean back contentedly in his leather chair as the camera pans out to an overview of his expansive office, symbolically signifying his success and power. There is not a woman in sight.

My point is that modern societies define women as having power if they can overcome men, thus inherently acknowledging the fact that their power comes to them with respect to men and, more importantly, with respect to overcoming what is perceived as the dominant, or superior, group – men – and, because overcoming an inferior group does not display any overtly special power, men do not have to be defined as having overcome women to be portrayed as successful. Thus, based on the perception of modern society – which includes women, as women themselves buy readily into the idea that they are empowered by overcoming male obstacles – men are superior to, or dominant over, women.

Let us look at some essays exploring the idea of male and female. Deborah Tannen's "Asymmetries: Men and Women talking at Cross-Purposes" poses what is commonly called the Difference model in the study of gender and sex in language. She advocates that females interact in "a world of connections" in which "intimacy is key" and where "individuals negotiate complex networks of friendship [trying to] minimise differences, to reach consensus, and to avoid the appearance of superiority" whereas males operate in "a world of status" where "independence is key because a primary means of establishing status is telling others what to do and taking orders is a marker of low status" (214). Therefore, any asymmetrical relationship between men and women is not the result of an asymmetry in dominance but is the result of an asymmetry in ways of thinking.

The allure of this model is twofold. First of all, it propagates the idea that men and women are equal, merely different. Second, it readily explains any miscommunication between the two sexes. Tannen gives multiple anecdotes about how seemingly confounding responses in mixed-sex interactions are reducible to the basic concepts of independence and intimacy. Thus by dissecting any mixed-sex interaction with those two concepts, we are able to understand what exactly provokes a response in each sex. But is such a model tenable?

Up until now, language has been created and maintained by men. Dictionaries, the final authority on the meaning of words themselves, are perhaps the strongest definers of language. In "From discourse to dictionary: how sexist meanings are authorised", Paula Treichler says, "Dictionaries have generally excluded any sense of women as speakers, as linguistics innovators, or as definers of words... they have perpetuated the stereotypes and prejudices of writers, editors and language commentators, who are almost exclusively male (60)." The evidence of this is undeniable. In Muriel R Schulz's "The Semantic Derogation of Woman", she identifies hundreds of words which refer to women that have undergone pejoration – the act of picking up negative connotations through time – some examples being words like "hussy" which used to mean the head of a house, and "harlot", which originally meant a fellow of either sex; both words have pejorated to mean a sexually loose woman. In contrast, she could find extremely few examples of terms in reference to males that have pejorated as much, thus giving a compelling example that men have power over the shape of language.

This approach to language with the understanding that men created and control it is called the Dominance model, in which the dominant form of language and speech – "male" language – is the centre of that language and that all other permutations of that particular language – called vernaculars, which include "female" language – are deviations from the "norm". "Male" language is the impersonal, scientific and factual language of scholarship whereas "female" language is the language one would use in familiar and intimate settings. This model is the traditional model with which linguists approach this area of study. This curiously reflects the point I made earlier on women having to define their power in relation to men because "female" language, in the Dominance model, is also defined in relation to "male" language.

Watching that Gap ad was revelatory because it made me realise that it could be so that the Dominance and Difference models, rather than opposing forces, could in fact inform each other very well. Women tend to define their status in the world and their power with regards to their relationships with men whereas men eschew comparisons with women to define themselves in any way. Utilising the Dominance model, it seems pretty obvious that this indicates the perceived superiority of men as the group able to autonomously choose precisely what it wants to be without an external force and women as the inferior group that is dependent on defining itself by comparing it to something it is not. However, the Difference model suggests that women's definitions of themselves in relations to men are actually by-products of their desire to engender intimacy – they actively wish to define themselves in a relationship with someone else – and it is not that men do not need women to define themselves, but that they wish to define themselves independently.

The study of gendered linguistics would have us believe that one has to choose between the Dominance and the Difference model. We have to decide if we wish to approach this area with the idea of a dominant language in mind, and treat the other as a by-product of the first, or with the idea that men and women are merely different and all breakdowns in communication can be attributed to what Tannen calls "cross-cultural miscommunication". But as I watched that ad, it made me think about how those models – and models in general – are merely frameworks through which to look at things. They are easily understandable concepts with which we can, with comfortable authority, poke and prod into any subject matter at all. But why do we construct models? Perhaps we fear the great complexity of an irreducible chaos. We build tributaries and mills to guide and harness the raging stream and point to the results of our borrowed power and say, "We understand it now." David Lehman's poem "When a Woman Loves a Man" ends with the lines:

When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.

When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved.

A woman wants to stay awake because, desiring intimacy, the waking hours are more time to be spent together with the man she loves; but a man, loving her back, wants her to sleep so he can watch her in her sleep. Lehman's usage of the simile "as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved" suggests that a man believes his beloved is most beautiful when she sleeps as the moon is most beautiful in the darkest of night, piercing the darkness with its lunar glow. But what is a glow? Especially the moon's glow? It is a reflective light. The moon draws its beauty from the light it reflects from the unseen sun, but is it lesser because of this reflection? The sun does not dominate the moon – they both have their own times to govern the earth, and yet without the sun, the moon cannot be beautiful; it cannot even be seen.

The truth is that models are merely constructed perspectives which we may utilise to view phenomena. They may be elaborate and complex, but they are still just points of view and one point of view necessarily limits you to seeing only one side of something – you can never see the entirety of a sphere without changing your view by walking around it; there will always be half a sphere hidden from your eyes. But a qualitative analysis of these perspectives is needed, too. A fork can be seen as an implement with which to eat, or it could be seen as an instrument for poking out eyeballs. Regardless of what view one takes of a fork, all these perspectives share an overarching trait: that a fork is to be used to spear things. We understand that a fork is a relatively simple concept when we see that all potential views of it share very similar characteristics. However, the perspectives on men and women are complicated, the Dominance and Difference models seem to oppose each other and yet both have widespread arguments for and against them. That there can exist valid and yet contradictory perspectives on the same concept suggests to us that the concept in question is multi-faceted enough to encompass many perspectives. So we may never understand the other sex, and we may read gender and linguistics essays till we're blue in the face, but men will probably continue to misunderstand women, and women will probably continue to misunderstand men too because, beyond the crutches of models and perspectives, gender relations might just be complex enough to eternally confound."

p.s. the full poem by david lehman.
p.p.s. i need to read beyond notes, textbooks and blogs. sure, they do offer information and provide insights. but the scope is too damn bloody narrow.

think different


"Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, quote them, disagree with them
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing that you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can
change the world, are the ones who do."


well... i have no great plans to change the world. yet there is always this possibility of changing things without intending to. so as i struggle with inner turmoils about stuff that hasnt been planned for (which drives me nuts ever so often), i'll take comfort in the fact that it's okay to be different.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

evaluation


if i dont get acknowledgement, i am going to charge bizcom for my efforts.
effort per se is not the problem. but i dont need to do someone else's job.

parents do have high hopes.
to be suitably comfortable, i need to makem say, 3.5k within 5 years upon graduation.
if i want to provide them with what they requested for.
seriously.not.funny. especially with my mediocre and worse grades.
why am i not born with a silver spoon? hmph!

discovering that i already possess the deposition to thrive in the field(s) of choice.
losing that bit of integrity and gaining that bit of ability to manipulate.
essentially i dont see the need to burn bridges (social circles in this country are too small anws).
plus juggling expectations and managing opinions can exercise my degenerating brain. ha.



funny, quirky, touching, real.
always managing to make me cry and laugh at the same time.
gah. i can be so crazy emotional!!

avenue q


everyone's a little bit racist -
"Everyone's a little bit racist. It's true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being so PC
Maybe we could live in - Harmony!"

schadenfreude -
"The world needs people like you and me who've been knocked around by fate.
'Cause when people see us, they don't want to be us, and that makes them feel great.
Sure! We provide a vital service to society!"

plus the internet is for porn which only makes sense hearing the whole thing.
aveunue q is inyourface but endearing. and funny.
i wonder if they would actually have a performance here.

Friday, April 06, 2007

too many memories
too many firsts
too much heart

what counts


at the end of the day, no matter how we drive each other nuts, we still find something in us to like each other for who we really are. i guess that is what counts.

there are moments in life, fleeting at best, that impact on the rest of our living years. yet they arrive so quietly and move away so silently. do we ponder upon them as they stop for blink-and-you'll-miss instances? or are we left forever in their wakes?

i can be such a whack job. bless the rock who keeps me grounded and functioning semi-normally so i dont freak out most of humanity.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

self indulgent


emJay is right. i should slowly let the party die down. been.playing.too.much.

but really, how can i help it when i have the funTies (the almost reunion!), friends who decide to not study and take forever to eat lunch/dinner/whatever with and friends who make arrangements to meet before being physically in singapore so that hanging out takes place almost immediately after touch down?

okay.. i know i am so not going to be happylala when i see my results.

so back to the books and pray that i get distracted minimally. for two weeks. -fingers crossed-

Monday, April 02, 2007

chope first


this goes out to a particular ex-prince-now-presumed-gay-due-to-interesting-wardrobe-choices mr loo:

you are to IMMEDIATELY destroy the yet unseen but (i'm sure of it) definitely unflattering photo of me. it MUST NEVER surface anywhere, especially cyberspace.

i chope here first. and remember that i'm your cutie's lover!

"But the ending always comes at last,
Endings always come too fast,
They come too fast but they past too slow"

oh wells.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

happy faces


a tribute to all the people who made the past week an incredible one. i am pretty sure i am not violating any copyrights -fingers crossed- by posting your mugs on the www. thank you for the time, love and making me the luckiest girl around to have you!


for those who still owe me, you will be part of "happy faces" when we actually meet :p

sixth


guys, you all are forgiven for paying more attention to the liverpool VS arsenal match. thanks for planning everything. thanks for getting the next best thing to giving me time. thanks for being the same ol' crappy selves despite heat exhaustion. sisters (and bong), thanks for being around despite being killed by the respective varsities.


funTies, thanks for showing me that things that matter never change. and making me feel damn blessed to still have you all in my life.