The End of "Adventures"

It's been a week since I've returned from my latest work experience. This time I traveled further north for about 6 hours to some remote location that's pretty much forgotten by the world. I was surprised to find that there were shops and stuff there- I guess it's just a self-contained town. The town was beautiful, but there wasn't much to see if you're not into natural scenery. Definitely not much to entertain either- but I guess it was nice to take a break in the country. I mean, it was always one of those places I'd wanted to be on a warm Autumn afternoon.

So I had a good time in the country, but I didn't have internet for two weeks and stress was starting to build. I had a lot of work being built up but I couldn't really do much without internet. I don't really know how people lived without it- then again I don't think people before me had to be thrust into such dire circumstances... who the hell expects papers to be written while you're out in the country on work experience?

Now it's catch up time, but exams are only about a month away. I have to finish two assignments and a shit-tonne of paperwork before exams come around, so I can actually study. I think this year is just totally unaccommodating- as if life wasn't hard enough on its own, stuff just get piled on and on and on and there are some days where I just don't want to get out of bed. For real though, my biological clock is set for 7am, but I lie in bed, refusing to face reality until about 11 or 12. I don't know why everything is so HARD but I'm sure other people out there have it harder. I'm just personally going through a bit of a rough time.

Mmm, I don't know if there's much to say about work experience. It was pretty much the same as last time except nobody schooled me in philosophy this round. It was kind of depressing actually, the people I spent time with seemed rather cynical and washed up, but I don't know if it's because I'm too young to understand the futility of my struggles. In my mind it's never over until it's actually over, or until you give up trying. My opinion will probably change given enough time, but I'd like to retain the privileges of my youth for as long as possible.

Anyway the only good thing that's come out of all this is that I no longer have any other episodes of work experience for the rest of the semester- I think I'd had quite enough of travel and all that. I like being home, where I have a nice warm bed, as much tea as I want to drink and internet.

Let's just keep struggling forwards, yeah?

Models regarding transsexualism

This is a really controversial topic, I want to talk about it on this blog because non of my friends have the time to listen to my rants or the ones that do invariably reply something sexist to piss me off, so I'm gonna leave the rant on my personal blog. See I've always found psychology fascinating, and I guess I became more interested in the sexual aspects of it ever since I hit puberty and my brain went into over-drive about sex sex sex oh sweet sex. Staying true to my boring academic self, instead of going out to obtain the sex sex sweet sex I decided to go on the internet and read articles about sex; from sex-tricks-in-the-bedroom to gender equality to the endocrinological consequences of being castrated.

Anyway, today, I'm going to write about the topic of transsexualism. To do that I'm going to need to throw out some definitions which you may or may not agree on, but it's for the sake of coherence in my post. Here goes:

• Sex = your physical, physiological and genetic definition. You'd think this would be the easiest one, your binary of being male or female. Wrong. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia, some people have dysfunctional Y chromosomes so their testes never descend and are in the position of ovaries, so your phenotype may be misleading. See I'm already going on a separate rant- given how you're supposed to be either male or female (barring medical defects), we'll label this one as binary.
• Gender: this one is heaps complicated, but it's what I define as your "identification" of being male, female, neither, somewhere in between etc. The word identification drives some people up the wall, because they're like "just because you think you're a cat doesn't mean you're a cat! Identification is bullshit!" and there is some validity to that argument, I'll go into it later. The most important thing to remember though, is not to judge whether identification is "correct" or "incorrect", but whether they identify yes/no. Okay? Gender is a spectrum, non-binary, non-discrete.
• Gender expression: how you dress, act, behave etc in accordance to "gender roles". Whether you ACT like a male/female/neither/somewhere in between. In essence gender is what you think, gender expression is what you do. Again, a spectrum. 
• Sexual orientation: whether you're attracted to male, female, neither, both, somewhere in between, w/e. It's what you want in a partner. Majority of people are heterosexual, meaning we're attracted to our direct opposites in terms of sex and gender- but of course that is not always the case.
• Transgender/transsexual: someone whose sex and gender don't match. Sometimes people use transsexual to imply that they want surgery or they have undergone surgery to correct the mismatch, but in my post I'm going to use the 2 interchangeably. Don't get your panties in a knot over it.

See there's so fucking much to talk about, and I think grouping LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) together is actually so hard because they're actually all talking about different things, and I guess their main similarity is that they're related to sex and that these people are minorities who are heavily stigmatized against. Anyway, I'm going to focus on the transsexual/ transgender part of it today. 

----------------------------------------------

Firstly, being transsexual in itself isn't technically a problem. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, because woah your gender and sex doesn't match aren't you just in constant misery because of how wrong everything seems? That may well be the case for some people, but in theory, if the individual is actually okay with their state of their mismatch, and there are no negative social consequences, then there is actually no problem. The main problem is, right, that there are almost ALWAYS negative social consequences. Just because the person is ok with themselves doesn't mean everybody else is ok with them, and I think that's totally fucked up but that's really the way the world is. Then here's the thing: is it the fault of the individual or is this something that we, as a society need to work on improving? Just because they're in the minority doesn't mean THEY are the ones that need to change.

So that was point one on "is transsexualism even a problem". Point two being "is transsexualism a medical problem". There are many treatments for it, right, from surgery to hormone replacement to counselling, and it is logical to question "what are we treating if it's not a medical problem". Well, being transsexual itself doesn't make you sick, but getting depression, anxiety etc as a result of this will make you sick. Thus we are targeting the root of these other problems and trying to work from that angle. There is a medical term for it- it's called "gender dysphoria", revised over and over because people find "transsexual, transgender, gender identity disorder" too offensive- I guess calling it disorder is offensive but I don't see how calling it dysphoria is much better. Political correctness in a nutshell. Look in my opinion, it's not a medical problem. We just have a diagnosis for it because it makes paperwork and legal stuff easier, but I don't think it means you're sick.

Point three: how do we treat gender dysphoria? I guess I've sort of explained why we treat it even though it's not an illness. This is usually the bit where people get heaps uncomfortable. The main legit argument I hear is "just because you think you're something doesn't mean you are something." And you know what, on a literal level, that is true. Yet that still doesn't mean someone is wrong and it still doesn't mean they're sick. If they want their body to match their brain, then we should respect their autonomy and they can go for it. I have the same reasoning for elective plastic surgery which I explained years ago- yeah yeah I know they're not the same thing because apparently improving yourself for the sake of vanity is looked down upon, but to me, you should just do what you want to be happy (without harming others yada yada). Problem with surgery is that it's expensive, it carries risks (infection + other complications), it's largely irreversible and people are really uncomfortable with "destroying perfectly functioning body parts". The first 2 sucks, the third is a matter of opinion. "Perfectly functioning body parts". So what? These people don't want to use their sexual organs for those functions. Things that shouldn't be there aren't useful to anyone anyway. It's like fertile women who don't want kids, tall people who didn't become basketball players--- because they have priorities in their lives and they wanted something else. 

Point 4: the mind vs the body. Naturally some people won't be convinced that being transsexual is not a disorder of the mind. People still believe that being homosexual is a disorder of the mind. "There is obviously something wrong with their brain, otherwise they would be like the rest of us". Though we often use majority to define normality, it doesn't mean the model fits with every example. "Why don't we treat their mind instead of treating their bodies?" Well that's hardly a novel way of looking at it, with the number of grotesque things people have done in history to make others conform. See I actually got caught up in this a while ago- I was trying to figure out why we didn't treat the mind, and why we allow this incongruity--- but if someone said they identified as a cat we'd say they were insane. 

The answer is simpler than I imagined. We don't turn people who think they're cats into cats, because no one is born thinking they're a cat, and cats don't function too well when you place human responsibilities and expectations on them. We don't turn them into cats because their quality of life doesn't improve and they're not very useful to society. We treat the body over the mind because it is our minds that make us who we are. If your significant other lost a limb you may very well stay with them, because they remain the person you know and love. If your significant other suffered a brain injury and had a massive personality change, you would feel as if you had lost the whole person though their body was still there. I'm not sure I understand the concept of a spirit or a soul, but by some chemical miracle our brains have formed in such a way that we have thoughts and feelings and it's really our brains that define who we are. Our brains change naturally as it is, and I don't know if enforcing uniformity in our brains is the way to go. Like, I just finished reading Brave New World (really great book, btw) recently and I'm really not that keen on that particular thought.

Then there's the issue of how we can't realistically alter someone's brain with such specificity right now- the technology isn't quite there yet (in terms of safety and cost, at least). So there really isn't much of an argument for altering someone's gender to match their sex, and I personally believe altering the body is way easier than altering the mind. 

Would someone choose to change their gender instead of their sex if given the choice though? Absolutely. If there was some magic pill that someone could take so they wouldn't be stigmatized, criticized, ostracized for being themselves, I'm sure the line would be huge. Oh wait, are we still on topic? So the thing about gender is- it doesn't actually change as you get older. People with gender dysphoria never "grow out of the phase". Asking someone to be a different gender is almost like asking "would you like to be someone else". And if you've ever learnt anything from children's TV shows it's that you never really want to be someone else, you'd really just want yourself to be better. I wish we could do some sort of social experiment, where people stopped being so obsessed and hateful about transsexualism, and then see if we still struggle with the idea of transsexuals being normal people.

-------------------------------------------------------

Oh man my rant is so fucking long it's atrocious. I wish I had someone to talk to about these things these days. I feel like people are always too busy for me. I want to talk about this, about genetic research, about the existence of God and bunch of other things which seem kind of irrelevant to me on a personal level. I think what I'm trying to say is that I miss intellectually stimulating discussions, and I feel like all my degree wants out of me is a robot that can remember some textbook really well. 

Basically to sum up my opinions on the idea of transsexualism:

• It's not a mental illnesss
• We treat it because of illness associated with it, not because it's an illness in itself
• Perhaps societal change needed over individual change
• Alter the body not the mind otherwise we turn into a sci fi novel
• Aim to improve quality of life and stop being a little bitch if they are not harming anyone. Their bodies, their choice.

Death of magic

You know I think it all started with Frozen. That one Disney movie which not only created the "let it go" meme but also seemed to mark the beginning to a shift, where kids' movies started getting way too real. In case you haven't seen Frozen, spoiler, but the prince the girl meets at first is not her true love and betrays her. How terrible, right. See while I don't think children should remain sheltered and innocent for as long as possible, I do think that fiction should stay fiction. You might argue "but there was magic and snow monsters etc etc", but for me the "magic" in these stories was never turning pumpkins into carriages, it was the fact that love existed at first sight and happily ever after was a guarantee. We know all too well that's not how it actually works, but in a fictional universe where we dictate the parameters, why wouldn't it be that way?

So I took my sister to see the Cinderella live action movie yesterday- and I'm pretty sure she hated it. There was no singing and music and happiness, there was just a tragic sense of doom and oppression, and even when the magic happened it was only transient. I think if we had to drag Cinderella into the real world it'd be more like "she was so sad she couldn't attend the ball, she started hallucinating things but her psychotic state was over by midnight". Also what troubled me was how absolutely fucking depressing the whole movie was. Like sure I know Cinderella is actually such a short story and you need some filler to make it 100+ minutes, but goddamn why couldn't they write some songs or some shit... like all their other Disney movies. In this rendition of Cinderella, she has a pretty mother, who dies of some illness while she's really young, then her father actually loves her, but of course he dies too. Then even the prince Cinderella meets has a father WHO ENDS UP DYING. Like, why, why create these characters which were not a huge part of the essential story, just so they can die off and drag us closer to reality.

What was horrifying was how they even went into the politics of marriage and social class and gender oppression. Women HAD to marry or else they had no way of supporting themselves, and apparently her wicked stepmother was once just another bright eyed girl who married the love of her life, BUT THEN HE DIED. So to support her daughters she had to marry this merchant who happened to be Cinderella's father, and she's really stressed out because her daughters are stupid and Cinderella's father doesn't seem to truly love her, he still thinks of his dead wife and is really fond of her daughter--- it's all such justifiable, human, natural jealousy. I really wouldn't be surprised if anyone felt the way she did, given her circumstances. The only thing that was unreal was how overblown her actions were against Cinderella- fulfilling the whole "wicked stepmother" thing... But it's like, the wicked isn't just wicked, the wicked stepmother is just a fragile woman to be pitied because she's suffocating in the tempest brewed by a patriarchal society and there was nothing she could do. Also she probably really needs help since she obv. has anger management issues or a hint of sadism or something... but yeah bottom line is I feel bad for her.

Though I am the kind of person to feel bad for Joffrey and Cersei after watching season after season of Game of Thrones.

Anyway Cinderella was a depressing piece of shit- sure the cinematography was great and so was the costume design, but for a shitty kiddy movie I took my sister to watch that was wayyy too real. Oh yeah How to Train Your Dragon 2 was the same shit! His Dad died or something- and the kid was crippled and had 1 leg! Like wtf that's so miserable, especially when you're a viking that wants to fight all the time. Then tonight my sister watched Big Hero 6, and I was busy playing games or w/e, but I noticed how the protagonist was orphaned and only has his brother, then his brother died, then all he got left with was his brother's robot, and the robot died too in the end. Like, they tried to salvage it (I think the kid rebuilt his brother's robot" but yeah that shit was fucked.

In summary, I'm totally not a fan of this trend of kiddy animation turning grim and dark, I just want to watch something that's mindlessly happy, where nobody dies or loses a limb and tragedy doesn't befall on anyone- bad people are just bad not morally ambiguous and situationally bad, good people are good for ever an ever and don't turn out to be some evil mastermind with selfish intentions.

I'm so done with this fucking world. If I wanted to feel bad I'd go read my textbooks instead.

The Future is Now

I've figured it out- for reals this time. I spent so long being miserable, and I told myself it'd all end some day. I said- if I move out- if I get away, it would all work somehow. Then I hated school anyway and realized I'd actually sealed myself into studying for another 5 years- the only thing I was good at but something I was really sick of. "Once I graduate", I told myself, "once I graduate it'll be so good".

I realized though- that's not even going to work. Once I graduate I have to find a job, and I have to pass a million qualifying exams and I have to work 8am to 8pm for God knows how long until I make it out- but then surely I'll have it easy, right? But who knows maybe then I'll be so old I'd be depressed about my kids wanting to become coke dealers or something. Then you add up the cumulative years I've suffered, HOPING that it gets better and all of a sudden you realize it's not even worth it- because the years I have to live would be shorter than that.

Then there's that other thing- I don't even get a guarantee of this "years to go" thing. NO ONE has a guarantee for tomorrow. I actually never thought about it that way before- because I'm so young and generally healthy so it seems worth it to "invest" my time. Then I thought, if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, I would've lived my most recent memories in complete misery, I would regret all the things I didn't do and didn't have and it would just be totally shit.

That's when I figured- there is no promised happiness, nothing to look forward to. The future is NOW. If I want to be happy, I have to be happy NOW, because I could literally just die any time from whatever. Just because I stay sad for ages doesn't mean I can convert all my sad times into good times later on- it just means I need more time to make happier memories. I can't change the past, but every second of the present becomes the past, so that just adds to my theory that if I don't stay happy it's just going to be too late.

The moral of the story from my latest epiphany is: don't wait for the struggle to end, balance your tragic shitty life with bursts of joy here and there, and that can be your personal insurance against randomly dying.

Social Life on the Uprise

I feel like I've been really active lately. In terms of social life, that is. I got pho again with a friend I haven't been able to catch up with for a while- it was one of those not-a-date nights that I quite enjoyed. We talked about stuff and I watched him struggle with his food- apparently he'd never had pho before and had no idea what it was. He wasn't too keen on the tripe in the pho, and I secretly found it hilarious he was trying to hide his discomfort so that I wouldn't feel bad.

Then I went to a Japanese restaurant for the first time ever and tried a teishouku with karaage chicken- it's basically like this set meal thing with fried chicken. I have to say it was kind of disappointing- the karaage tasted like chicken schnitzel, the soy and sesame sauce tasted like Chinese medicine with salt and I'm 90% sure the miso soup WAS just salt and MSG- which I usually enjoy but only in moderation. I don't think I have a problem with Japanese food in general- I mean, I enjoy Asian food overall, I think it was just that restaurant which I found terribly disappointing. Then again my friends ordered different things and they seemed very satisfied, so I wonder if I'd be a lot happier if I ordered the udon noodle soup I was tempted by.

Today I went back to good ol' yum cha food- and that's when I realized it tasted "good" to me. I think my taste buds have been spoiled so badly everything that used to taste like heaven just register as "pretty good". The phrase I often use is "it's good but it's not the best thing ever" and right now I'm not sure what my standard of "the best thing ever" is. Anyway food was good- I ate egg tarts and wanted to eat more egg tarts, then felt guilty because I know egg tarts are practically just yolk and butter. It tasted so delicious though I felt like I could've eaten at least 10 without feeling sick.

Anyway I'm now blogging because on my other tab is my recently acquired 1400 page textbook which I'm supposed to read. A friendly older-student informed me that if I wanted to pass next year I need to know this book back to front- and since it's so long I've decided to start early because I'm slow and I heavily anticipating being bored to death by this oh-so-prestigious textbook. It's beautiful in its latest edition, for sure, but I just sort of see it and lose all motivation immediately. I still have a lot of work to sort out and that's all on track but stressful.

Oh speaking of that- I handed in another assignment thing early! Holy shit I'm on a roll- I swear I haven't had this kind of motivation since I did electronics back in high school. It was like- the day after the task was assigned, I finished the project. Did the editing the same night, handed it in the next day. It's actually so incredible it still feels a bit unreal. What if I just hallucinated doing work but in fact handed in blank papers... man that'd be really awkward. Though it's a new level of sadness reached if my hallucinations are about handing in work before the due date.

Then again I have woken up in tears from dreams about myself failing exams and such. I'm still working out my priorities in life- I'd like to say that I value love and friendship and that kind of thing, but truth is I have no one to love and my friends are really far away. The thing I feel like I have the most control over in my life is in fact my academic performance, which is why I feel I invest into that emotionally because then it's like a guaranteed return... sorta like, if you do the work then you can't fail so you can't be betrayed. Though even that isn't true because I've known people who failed the course who work harder than me and are definitely smarter than I am- and I'm 90% sure they just had a shitty day- coinciding with the exams.

See now the course of this conversation is just getting really depressing because it shows to you how little control I have over every aspect of my life and it's sorta like I'm treading on thin ice 24/7 and if I slip and break the ice I will freeze and drown despite wearing a life jacket.

Maybe the answer to life is to become a penguin. They survive pretty well, yeah? Or become a sea leopard because those fuckers eat penguins for breakfast.