How to not handle your gum like a douchebag

1. While chewing your gum, please do so discreetly.
   • This means not chewing with your mouth open. When one chews with his mouth open, others can clearly hear the chewing sounds being made, and clearly see the gum wad lolling around in the mouth, which is absolutely disgusting. Correct this habit.
   • Under no circumstances should you be popping, snapping, cracking or playing with your gum in the presence of others. It is extremely annoying. Anyone who cracks their gum repeatedly will be physically assaulted. That shit is LOUD and fucking disgusting.
   • A good rule of thumb is to imagine that your mean old teacher from elementary school who hated gum is present in the room and right next to you. Try to chew your gum in such a way that your teacher wouldn't notice.
2. After you have finished with your gum, please dispose of it in an environment-friendly manner.
   • Britain is forced to spend £150 million on removing gum from pavements, as chewing gum is non-biodegradable (it is rubber!) and will not be cleaned by normal means, and I'm sure the cost in the US is no different. You've seen the nasty little black and grey spots on the pavement--that is gum! That shit gets stuck to people's shoes, it soils the look of perfectly good pavement, and animals get hurt from trying to eat it (chewing gum is a human creation, it's only natural that animals don't understand it). Chewing gum is banned in Singapore for this very reason.
   • Underneath a counter top is also not an acceptable place to leave your gum. Don't think nobody notices.
   • In Six Flags New England, I once saw a little chicken wire-covered roof (also blocked off from the stairs I was on by fencing) that was completely covered in globs of ABC gum. I was almost about to be sick. Please don't throw gum somewhere just because you see other gum there! You only add to the problem!
   • Chewing gum does not decompose. If it gets stuck somewhere, it will be there forever until someone (hopefully the asshole who put it there) removes it.
   • Please dispose of your gum in an appropriate trash receptacle. If a trash receptacle is nowhere to be found, keep that shit in your mouth until you find one or swallow it. And no, it will NOT stay in your stomach for ten years or five years or even one, that is an old wives' tale. No, it will simply pass through your digestive system and out of your anus like anything else you swallow. The only difference is that it won't be broken down because it's not bio-degradable.

Easy process for formulating a thesis statement

While in the process of writing an essay for the summer reading assignment for high school (which starts on Monday), I decided to look up some useful articles on writing thesis statements, which is still something I struggle with.

My search landed me this excellent article by Dennis G. Jerz, who is an English professor at Seton Hill University, so this information is obviously intended for college students. This is all well and good for me, as despite being a high school student, I want to learn to write a college-level essay rather than a high school-level one.

According to the article, there are three parts to a thesis statement:

• The Topic: The main topic of your essay
• The Precise Opinion: The argument about the main topic of your essay that is presented throughout.
• The Reason Blueprint: The reasons supporting the argument about the main topic of your essay that is presented throughout, which are elaborated on in the body.

Now that I was aware of these three parts, I was now able to begin formulating my thesis statement. Here's where I decided to get a little creative and take my own approach.

~*~

This is the essay question for my summer reading assignment:

If you could be or if you admire any character in the book, whom would you choose? Explain. Support your answer with at least three specific examples from the story.

This question was not specifically chosen for the book, which I chose to be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but was a general question. As it was, it was a little vague and subjective to answer with a thesis statement, so I doctored it, as follows:

Out of all the characters in the book, which one is the most admirable? Explain and support the answer with at least three specific examples from the story.

Now, I was able to form a thesis statement. I decided to do it by tackling the three pieces in order. I thought of each part as adding on to the preceding step, as follows:

• Topic: R. Walton
• Opinion: R. Walton is the most admirable character
• Reasons: R. Walton is the most admirable character because he is willing to care for a dying man and record his story, he is not afraid to sacrifice his honor and his ambitions, and he puts other people before himself.

Initially, I tried to make Frankenstein my topic, but then I realized that my opinion was about R. Walton, the character, and not the novel itself. When I changed the topic to R. Walton, the process went much more smoothly. This is how I realize that each part merely adds on to the first.

Now, I had a rough thesis statement, all I needed to do now was fix it up a little so that it would make a little more sense to a reader:

In the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, R. Walton is the most admirable character in the story because he is willing to direct the most of his attention to the emotional support and care of a dying man, he is not afraid to sacrifice his honor and his ambitions, and he puts the safety and desires of other people before his own.

Now I'm ready to use this thesis statement to write an essay!

A Word on Children's Fiction

(Note: At the time I wrote this blog article, I was sitting underneath a tarp in the middle of North Carolina wilderness. I have not made changes to the article since, aside from minor proofreading. A little shabby, but still not bad for being in the wilderness for six days at the time.)

~*~

What makes a good children's fiction? Is it the simplicity? The safety? The charm? What separates an adult's fiction from a children's fiction?

In my view, a good children's fiction must be enjoyed by an adult just as much as a child. There isn't much that separates children's fiction from adult's fiction other than the arbitrary decision that one is "for adults" and the other is "for children".

One may say that a children's fiction must be about a child in order to be enjoyed by a child. As can be determined from Disney movies over the ages, this is not true. The majority of disney's movies happen to be about teenage (Belle, adult Simba, Aladdin, Ariel) or adult protagonists (Finding Nemo's Marvin, Hercules, Tarzan, even UP is about an old man). A children's fiction can be just as easily about adults as an adults fiction can be about children. One may say that the Disney movies may be about adults because adults are role models to children, but I don't think that's the case. I think children relate to characters like Aladdin and Tarzan because they have a nature often found in children: youth and charm. Contrasted with the nature of their respective antagonists, this is even more obvious, as the antagonist of Tarzan is a cruel man with no appreciation for nature and other people, and Jafar is a man overrun with greed and selfishness. (Funnily enough, these qualities are both negative side effects of growing up and into the world.) Children like to see the adults who are still in touch with their inner children beat the ones that aren't. (Hades in Hercules might be a special case, however, as he's still quite a childish and fun-loving guy. Maybe that's why he's a popular Disney antagonist.) The reason why adults love the same fiction is because they themselves are still in touch with their inner children.

The idea that children's fiction must be simple, pleasurable and devoid of a mature theme is utter crap. Good characters don't have to avoid dying or suffering. Children are more capable of handling death than adults may think, and if they are experiencing death in their life, seeing it in fiction helps them deal with it. See Mufasa's death in The Lion King, which is a tear jerker for any viewer. Although Mufasa does "come back" in the form of a spirit, this does not minimize the emotional effect. If a major, lovable character like Mufasa can die, then potentially so can any protagonist.

Death isn't the only mature theme that can be explored in children's fiction, however. What about death en masse? Survival? Sacrifice? Fear? The light novel series Animorphs is about all of these. Animorphs may not be the best-written series in the world, but it has many good parts. It circles around a parasitic alien invasion, and, instead of scratching the surface of this idea, delves deep into it. The protagonists are forced to hurt and kill innocent people who are controlled by the parasites, and they know it all to well. This is a popular children's series that has spanned over 50 volumes and multiple companion novels.

The trickiest perception of children's fiction to tackle is the sterilization of the world to make it suitable to portray to children. What do we do with things like sex? Swearing? Nudity? All of these are good and well in adult's fiction, but obviously avoided like the plague in children's fiction. Now due t the very nature of the stories told, most of it isn't even necessary. After all, why have a protagonist swear when it isn't even in his nature to swear? On the other hand, you have stories like Harry Potter (although the latter novels are very much written for teens) where there are characters who can and will swear but end up being censored anyway. (Until the latter novels, when Ron's mom, of all people, openly swears) One example is Ronald Weasely calling Professor Snape something foul enough for Hermione to scold him, but it isn't actually said what he called him. (Most likely 'wanker' or 'arsehole') It's possible this was done for humorous effect, but it wasn't quite played that way. Animorphs runs into this same issue with gore and violence. The prose will graze its edge and imply that someone's had was sliced off, but won't say it outright. This is where I personally run into an issue. If a child can already easily understand the implication that someone swore or lost his hand and perhaps may even be able to guess what swear it was, I don't see what harm there is in acknowledging the fact that the child already understands these things and allowing him to see what he already knows is there. (Unless it's deliberately done to tease or be funny, then it's acceptable.) Personally I think all the censorship issues is a result of culture more than anything else. The US (and most likely the UK too) has a very high culture of stamping "taboo" on the controversial, while many countries in Europe (namely Denmark) have a much lower culture of such. In Japan there is no such thing as censoring profanity at all. (Though there's no true profanity in Japanese just very rude words. This may be why children's shirts saying "Fuck off" exist in Japan, as the world doesn't have the same effect in Japanese as it does in English.) I think this taboo is a very self-feeding problem that can only be solved by learning to break the cycle. Does this mean that we SHOULD include taboo in kid's fiction? Not necessarily. I just think writers shouldn't be afraid to include taboo should the story ever call for it.

In the end, what really separates adult's fiction from children's fiction? Not a whole lot. One may be aimed towards adult and the other towards children, but there's nothing stopping an adult from enjoying children's fiction and very little (besides laws and policies based on ratings; I believe such laws shouldn't exist) stopping a child from enjoying adult's fiction. Who are we to decide who should read what and what should be read by who?

Bullet list

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Shyamalan's Last Airbender: The good, the bad, and the ugly

So I went to see Shyamalan's Last Airbender in the theatres, and this was my reaction:

Now, for starters, because I heard that the movie was going to be directed by Shyamalan, I didn't have high expectations in the first place.

So I decided to go in and just try to enjoy the movie without trying to compare it to the show and lamenting about the exclusion of this and that, but it was so bad that I couldn't just get into enjoying it.

The Good:

- They did a good job animating Appa and Momo. They looked pretty much how I expected the animals to look in live action.

- They did a fairly good job with the costumes. Of course, Katara and "Soh"-ka were technically dead since their robes were wrapped the wrong way (anyone who's familiar with Japanese kimono should be able to get the joke.), but I spent much of the movie enjoying the costumes.

- They also did a good job with the sets. The Fire Nation ships looked great and the city of the North Water tribe was amazing. The inner sacred pool in the same city was also beautiful.

- The bending special effects were amazing. I loved the water effects, and I have to admit, the fire burning off of General Zhao's hand looked pretty cool.

- I also enjoyed the live action interpretation of the opening bending sequence.

- The best acting was done by "Ee"-roh, even though "Ee"-roh had a completely different personality from the actual Uncle Iroh, besides the five-second clip of him drinking tea. I'll not blame the change in personality on the actor, but on the director and the writer. It's obvious that Shawn Toub did the best he could with the resources he was given.

The Bad:

- Most of the camera work in this movie was unimaginative, especially in the Earth Nation village where all the camera did was stand back and swivel back and forth. The pan down the bridge in the North Water city was acceptable, though.

- Occasionally, the bending motions came across as kind of cheesy and poorly done. This could be the fault of multiple causes, such as poor acting on the actor's part, Shyamalan trying too hard to impress (when it comes to the motions for bending, I believe less is more and Shyamalan tried to do too much in places), or the unexpressive camera work. (While watching the fire benders do synchronized bending in an episode of Book 1 I watched later the same day, I noticed how uncheesy it looked because the camera did interesting things like switch to the benders' feet.) However, the synchronized bending done by "Oong" and Movie!Katara was acceptable, even if it was poorly synchronized and the motions between the two benders differed too greatly.

- As I've been poking fun at throughout this entire review, many of the names were pronounced wrong. I can't figure out how that could happen since Avatar is an American cartoon so the team did not have an excuse to pronounce the names wrong.

UPDATE: I just heard that the reason why Shyamalan used these pronunciations was because he wanted to use the actual pronunciations of the names as they would be in the regions that the nations of Avatar are based on. I still hold on the use of the original pronunciations used in the show, which I believe can be justified by the Avatar world having a dialect that is different from our own.

- I didn't quite like the change in Zuko's hairstyle or in the design of the airbender tattoos, but they didn't bother me particularly.

- While it didn't bother me all that much either, "Oong"'s Avatar state was kind of creepy and made me think of blind possessed choir boys.

- I noticed that the entire part of the plot where Aang hears about the comet has gone missing, which takes away his main motivation to get to the North Pole as quickly as he can. Are they saving this for later movies?

The Ugly:

- Oh, god, the total LACK in character development and characterization. Where is Aang's playful and childish nature? Where is Katara's idealism and passion? Where is Sokka's sarcasm and closed-mindedness? Where is Zuko's pride and sustained fury? GONE. All of it gone. Even the subplots that could have given the cast a little personality were gone. I mean, even the first ten minutes of the film, in contrast to the first five minutes of the first episode, put no effort into expressing Katara's and Sokka's personalities, or the relationship the two share. I mean, I even would have been happy to see Sokka being sexist, but even that was gone. I mean, even the Lady in the Water cast had more personality than this.

- When I came in to see the movie, I was looking forward most to see how well Dev Patel could pull off Zuko. See, since I was impressed with his acting in Slum Dog Millionaire, and I had started to get past the Aang Ain't White thing, I believed Dev could do it. Unfortunately, Shyamalan, like other bad directors have a nasty habit of doing, had crushed the good acting out of Dev and and his portrayal of Zuko turned out almost as bland as anyone else in the cast. There was a glory moment where Dev truly played Zuko properly (in the company of the Fire Nation, to what I think was Zhao's ear), but it did not reappear.

- The acting of Movie!Katara, "Soh"-ka and "Oong" was very bland and did very little to bring out what personality the characters had left.

- The story presentation was flat and very lacking in pacing and suspense. If I had not watched Avatar, I would not have been able to understand the plot as it was presented, or the story concepts since they were very rushed in their explanation. The characters seemed to rush into moving the plot with no explanation or motivation, like they were controlled by some outer authorial force. It was this, the bad acting, and the total lack of characterization that prevented me from being able to enjoy the movie.

~*~

So it was a horrible movie, and I have the feeling that Shyamalan and the writers did not actually watch the show but skimmed over a few scripts, but to quote Sokka: "But the effects were decent."

Not that I think that translating Avatar into a live action film series is impossible. I think it could be done, it's just that Shyamalan did it totally wrong. Next time, Shyamalan, let me handle things like this.

We have lost cabin pressure.

IN LOVING MEMORY
1999-2010

Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking to the internet about this, but my cat died yesterday. I'm staying home today to find a way to cope with it.

Kitty was behaving fine the day before, and this morning, excited for his daily morning meal of canned food. It was only when I came home when I noticed something was wrong. My cat was sitting on the floor in the upstairs bathroom, and didn't seem to want to move around much. He meowed in unusual ways (either a call for my attention or a reaction to pain), did not respond to our typical communication cues, and his tail did not move (did not curl and uncurl the way it usually does). There was still some food on his nose from this morning. I had a gut feeling that something was very wrong, and checked the entire house for signs of something he may have eaten. (Nothing. He doesn't eat plants, and we didn't leave out any human food.) I had a gut feeling then that he wasn't going to be okay. I wondered if I should have called my mom.

The cat then moved on his own out of the bathroom and into my mom's bedroom. He walked very slowly, with his head and tail down, crouched, in a somewhat disoriented walk. He jumped onto the bed, and because he seemed to be breathing heavily, I called my mother. He jumped off the bed again and rested on the floor, his tail curled around itself in a way he usually doesn't. Because of the way he was moving I checked all of his limbs to see that they were okay. He put his head down on his arms (something he doesn't usually do) and seemed very exhausted.

I carried him in my arms very carefully downstairs so that he could be closer to food and water if he needed them. For the next few hours or so he sat either on the couch or in front of it, looking very ill. He responded slightly to only one communication cue, which was when I made to pet the side of his cheek (he usually lifts his head or leans into my hand because he understands my petting routine so well). I think his pupils were also unusually dilated for the light. (My other cat Charlie was in the living room, where there's a lot of light. Her pupils were a little smaller.) He also made very little effort to look at me.

Yeah, Charlie seemed to understand what was going on, probably better than I did at the time. A few times she came up to Kitty and would lick him on the head. (Licking is a way cats relieve stress and calm themselves. Cats will lick when they're stressed, and to comfort another cat. Kitty did not lick himself at all for the entire time he looked sick.)

He sat there on the couch for the next few hours, until my mom came home. We discussed the state of the cat a little, figured he had a stomachache from something he probably ate (my mom assured me that Charlie once behaved like this before and turned out fine) and that he'll feel better by tommorrow.

We went to the gym for at least an hour, and when he came back, he was still on the couch. He seemed to look a little better, because he lifted his tail closer to as he usually did, and then had to vomit. (Not like the usual furball. He coughed up a thin, reddish liquid which my mom thought looked like carrots. We checked around for signs of anything he could have eaten. Still, nothing.

My cat then moved into the kitchen (probably to get away from human contact), in a very slow, exhausted, disoriented walk in which he slipped on his feet, and slumped on the floor, looking very sick again. I decided it would be better that he laid on something soft, so I tried to carry him back to the couch.

My cat got out of my arms and went down the hall before I could get there, so I picked him up, and the same happened. He was breathing very healthy (I think he was panting, or gasping!), and then vomited. He fell on his side and gasped heavily, crying, and then he was moving very slowly, and then not at all. I was lying with the side of my head on the floor, looking him directly in the face, at that last moment.

About fifty percent of cats are born with a defect in the heart that causes an unexpected heart failure after at least five years of life. It's really difficult to diagnose because cats usually don't show symptoms until at least 3 months before death, and usually, once the cat starts showing symptoms, it's too late to do anything. It can't be prevented, or helped. Cats are also really good at hiding the symptoms from their humans (being intelligent creatures without the same dependency on others that dogs have), until they're too sick to be able to do so.

~*~

I don't know if you have ever watched a dying mammal up close before (including humans), but when you see them, you just know that they're dying. You just know that they won't make it out alive. It's like instinct. I was crying before he died.

So my mom and I probably sat in the hall next to his body for at least an hour. We put his body in a box, and decided we would call a pet funeral service the day after. Then we sat next to the box for at least another hour, talking a little, crying on and off. Charlie came around once or twice, rubbing her cheeks on the box (Cats mark territory by rubbing their cheeks on them, and Charlie does this with every single box she comes across), and looking very confused. I don't think the impact hit her until this morning, when she was meowing.

Now, all I can think about is poor Kitty. I was probably the human he was most close to. He sat on my bed the most, he would always sit in my lap when I was at the computer, and he would sit next to me when I played the piano. I would pick up his paws and pretend to make him play it. Whenever we watched a movie, he would sit in one of our laps or on the couch above our heads.

Oh yeah, he also used to have a hair fixation. Like, he would stand on the couch above you and lick your hair. He was really a sweet cat, with simple pleasures in life. He was really attached to us, and was scared of thunderstorms. He'd play with random scraps of plastic and paper that were lying on the floor. He was really timid, so the first time he sat in people's laps was always a big deal, because it was an expression of trust. When I came home, he would be lying on the couch, on someone's bed, and always seemed happy to see me. When he slept, he would curl up in a perfect little circle.

It's the first time I have ever lost anyone that was close to me.

You're the only conscious human in a world of sheep.

Self explanatory.

I think the root to this phenomenon is that there are not as many people who express their thoughts as there are people who think.

The solution? Express your thoughts. We humans are graced with the ability to express our intricate thoughts. We should put it to good use.