Wow, was everyone as amazed as I was by the opening ceremony in China last night? I thought it was incredible! My jaw kept dropping with display after display, especially all the tricks they were doing using that LED screen on the bottom of the stadium. And that thing is huge! It kept expanding for all the different acts, and I kept wondering just how large it was going to get!

I was especially blown away at the beginning when the Olympic rings suddenly looked like they were being lifted off the LED screen and rose to hang in the air. Same thing when the dancers were “painting” on the scroll and when they were finished, it began to unfold off the ground into the air. How did they do that?! Wires? Is it some kind of hologram or lasers? However they did it, it was unbelievably cool and I was just awestruck. Like the announcers kept saying, it was truly like watching a movie unfold in real life, complete with special effects and epic music. Zhang Yimou has style like no other; no wonder he’s such an acclaimed director.

I also loved the part when the Mahjong tiles (edit: oops, this was a printing press. Duh, I should know better) were moving up and down like waves and it was funny how everyone gasped when at the end, all these people suddenly popped out of the tiles and it was revealed that humans had been creating that effect the entire time, not machines or hydraulics or anything like that. I admit I gasped too, because they synchronized so precisely and in time with each other. It was flawless; I didn’t see any mistakes, but damn, how long did they have to rehearse and practice to get that right?!

It was totally amazing. I admit, the Chinese have issues they seriously need to work on (human rights violations, that nasty smog hanging over the major cities, etc) but I’ve got to give them props for their kickass technology and for putting on an opening ceremony like the world’s never seen before.

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…is clearly on display by the group of girls from Gloucester, Massachusetts who made a freaking PACT to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Note that the majority of these girls are under the age of 16, not to mention the fact that many of the baby fathers are in their mid-20s! Click here to read the article for yourself.

“They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life, and these girls are very, very young. And I think if you talk to any teenage mother who is caring for an infant, the road is not easy.”

I’ve seen and heard a lot of stupidity in my nineteen years but this just really tops them all. I just can’t believe the naivety of these girls. Sure, intentionally getting pregnant is going to get you lots of attention (whether it’s good or bad attention is another story) but a baby does not necessarily equate to unconditional love. You sure as hell aren’t going to think so when the baby wakes you up at 3am in the morning, crying to be fed or for their diapers to be changed. You’re not going to feel so loving if you have a colicky baby screaming all through the night. Having a baby is a minimum 18 year commitment, from the time you pop the thing through your vagina (an experience most women have told me is in itself enough to scare you from never again having sex, let alone another baby) to the moment you watch your kid walk across the stage at their high school graduation. Being a parent is a lifelong job, and you don’t get to say “I quit” or just walk away if you’re tired of it (that is called abandonment/shitty parenting).

Now that the story’s exploded onto national headlines, everyone’s pointing fingers everywhere, blaming bad/neglectful parents, media (“Juno”, “Knocked Up”, Jamie Lynn Spears) and even the controversy between abstinence-only/sex ed. Um, HELLO? Anyone who’s naive and idiotic enough to watch a movie and decide, “Hey, having a baby looks easy! And they’re so cute! I wanna have one! So I’m going to go find a random 20-year-old to knock me up and live happily ever!” is just PLAIN STUPID. So what if they’re emotionally messed up and looking for attention? I have issues too, I watched “Juno” and “Knocked Up” (and enjoyed every minute of those movies, by the way), but do you see me going and making the deliberate choice to get pregnant? Hell no!

To make matters worse, not only did these girls decide to get pregnant, it appears they chose guys in their twenties to be the fathers of their babies. Ever heard of a little thing called statutory rape? And one of them was a 24-year-old homeless man! Are you telling me these girls just chose some 20-year-old at random and said, “Hey, I want to get pregnant! Let’s have sex, stranger!” How do you know they don’t have AIDS or some kind of STD? They could have raped you and killed you and buried your body somewhere.

The surge in teenage pregnancy has brought a heated debate over contraception and education in Gloucester, which is heavily Roman Catholic. The school clinic’s medical director and its chief nurse practitioner both resigned in May after the hospital that administers grants for the clinic opposed making contraceptives available to students.

And speaking of, all the idiots who are trying to pin this on sex-ed, Glouchester is a conservative Catholic town. I see trouble already. I’ve said it over and over and I’ll say it again: abstinence-only education DOES NOT work and will NEVER work. It’s naive and shortsighted of the “adults” to think teens will not have sex if you don’t tell them about it, or worse, tell them not to do it. Let me define the word reactance for you:

“An emotional reaction in direct contradiction to rules or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. It can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude.” {Wikipedia}

In layman’s terms, rebelling against what our parents or whoever tells us to do, and in fact, going out of your way to do the exact opposite. Hmm, now who does that sound like? Oh, yeah, TEENAGERS. Sex is a natural thing and a human way of life and of course teens are going to want to experiment with their sexuality. People – teens – are going to have sex whether you like it or not, and isn’t it better to educate them and equip them with every single fact about sex (trust me, information is about the best deterrent you have; just learning about the nastiness of STDs in my health clinical class was enough to horrify me) instead of saying, oh, just don’t have sex and being all awkward and taboo about the subject so that their only knowledge about sex comes from their friends (who tend to be woefully inaccurate). Obviously the system horribly failed these girls somewhere along the way, and who’s going to be the ultimate victims in all of this? The poor innocent babies who will be born to teenage mothers who are apparently immature, childish, and incapable of making rational and appropriate choices for themselves, let alone another human being.

Reality check: life is not a Disney movie or Gilmore Girls or Juno. There is no guarantee your baby is going to grow up and share a witty-banter-sister bond with you like Rory and Lorelai and I’m guessing you’re nowhere near as sarcastic-but-oh-so-funny or even levelheaded like Juno. This is not some stupid fairytale; you are not Cinderella and that 24-year-old homeless man sure as hell isn’t Prince Charming come to take you away. It’s sad and horrific and it makes me wonder what America is coming to when teen girls make the conscious (albeit very stupid and uninformed) and intentional choice to have a baby because they think it will somehow make them a better person and solve all of their pathetic, emo/low-self-esteem problems. Sigh.

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You know, I just realized something when I was lying in bed and thinking of random things the other night. All of the funny, cheeky, snarkily hilarious writers and bloggers that I love so much always turn out to be British. Now why exactly is that? People always talk about Brits having the most dry, god-awful sense of humor, but I absolutely adore their deadpan style and their sarcastic wittiness. I find British television extremely weird and boring, but their writing is another thing altogether.

Take Douglas Adams for example. The man was a brilliant writer, in all his sarcastic glory and apocalyptic visions of doom (I LOVE the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Mind you, he had rather odd ideas in his stories – like the Earth actually being part of a millennia-old experiment run by the mice, who are actually 10th-dimension beings who manipulate us humans instead of the other way around – but the scary part is that it could all actually turn out to be true (in a freaky conspiracy kind of way)! And the way he writes it, putting us in the shoes of poor bumbling Arthur Dent, makes it seem so normal when you know it’s really not. And one of my favorite scenes of all time has to be the Restaurant at the End of the Universe part. Who else but Adams could come up with the idea of a restaurant that sits enclosed in a time bubble and visits the exact moment of the end of the universe, while managing to turn it into a comical satire that pokes fun at all those religions and cults who revere that moment as something holy and sacred? Genius, I tell you.

But it’s totally weird when even my mental voice starts to adopt a British accent as I’m narrating in my head, or sometimes I’ll find myself sliding into the same sarcastic and edgy tone when I’m writing or blogging. But I can’t really complain when I’ve got Alan Rickman’s silky voice whispering in my mind I can’t ever decide if he’s just really snarky and sarcastic or a totally vicious bastard when I read fanfiction involving our favorite Severus Snape. Or maybe it’s a combination of both. I have to say, it’s a pretty hot mixture. Tall, dark, sharp mind, sexy voice, what’s not to like? But only in dreams and fanfiction, sadly. J.K. Rowling ended any canon hopes for that character in Deathly Hallows when she killed him without ever giving him a real chance at redemption. Such an anti-climatic and predictable end for a character with so much more depth and a far more interesting backstory than the Golden Trio. Psh. But that’s another story and another rant.

So what is it that gives those Brits that ability to wow and wound with their words? Innate talent? A product of that gloomy and perpetually rainy atmosphere in England? Or I am just rambling on about something that no one else sees? I love my British writers anyways =)

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Finals are over! Well, for me, anyways. I had my chemistry final yesterday (ugh), Abnormal Psychology today (very easy) and I finished revising my critical analysis for my honors English seminar! I’m sad that my freshman year is over; it’s been a long and strange year at times but I love college and now I don’t want to go home (oww)

I spent most of yesterday watching a J-drama, 1 Litre of Tears, and I absolutely loved it. I could not stop watching, and I saw all 11 episodes in a 48-hour span. It was so incredibly sad at times, and I found myself crying during several scenes, but it’s such a beautiful drama that’s all the more poignant because it really happened. It’s a true story based on the life of a girl named Kito Aya, who suffered from a disease called spinocerebellar degeneration, where your neurons decay and die and you slowly lose all motor function. Eventually, you won’t be able to walk, talk, or write, and there is currently no cure for the disease. It’s a rare disease but such a cruel one: even though your body is physically failing, your brain remains intellectually intact. Imagine having a perfectly capable mind, full of thoughts and all the things you want to say, and unable to express any of them because you can no longer move your lips correctly or even hold a pen in your hand.

1 Litre of Tears (1 Rittoru no Namida) is based on a book of the same name, which is basically a compilation of all the diaries that Aya wrote, from the time of her diagnosis at age 15 to her death when she was 25 years old. She wrote everyday, without fail, until she could no longer hold a pen. It’s both very touching and very sad to read some of the entries, and realize how entirely normal she was before the disease struck her, and to realize what a courageous spirit she had while she fought to live. Time is a very precious thing to patients with spinocerebellar degenerative disease: you go to sleep every night, wondering if when you wake up in the morning, you’ll still be able to walk or even swallow your food without choking, and Aya talks about all the dreams and hopes that were shattered by her illness. The book was published in Japanese, but I found an English translation online, which you can read @ http://www.xanga.com/onelitre.

But I definitely urge you guys to watch this drama, and don’t worry, even though it’s in Japanese, it has subtitles (cause I sure don’t speak Japanese). I promise you’ll cry, unless you have a heart of stone, and you’ll realize from watching Aya’s struggles that even the worst day you might have is nothing compared to what she went through. It was a reminder to me that to waste time might just be the worst sin of all, because all of us only have so much time to make our mark on the world, to experience hope and fear and joy, to love and be loved.

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I recently became a fan of Stephenie Meyer’s book Twilight. It’s a pretty recent book, written in 2005, and it’s been popular for awhile now but I never got around to reading it until just a few weeks ago. It’s really sad, I used to be one of the first to read the newest and most popular young adult fiction among my friends. I just don’t have the time for it anymore =( And I think I lost part of my enthusiasm for series after reading the final two books in the Harry Potter series. I’m a die-hard HP fan but I absolutely hated those last two books. Thank god for Fanfiction.net and the other fans out there just like me who hated the way the series ended and wrote their own personal interpretations in some of the best writing I’ve ever read.

But I fell in love with the Bella/Edward love story after reading Twilight. I drool just imagining what Edward Cullen would look like in real life. Talk about eye-candy And that sensous, velvet voice…oh Bella Swan, you are the luckiest girl in fiction ever. And then Stephenie Meyers had to ruin my fantasies with her sequels, Eclipse and New Moon. WTF?!! Why must you introduce a love triangle? And turn what was a perfectly lovely novel about love and immortality and free will and gorgeous vampires into a freaking soap opera that involves a deadly feud between werewolves and vampires?

And don’t even get me started on the whole Bella-Edward-Jacob thing. Jacob was totally cool in Twilight but he turned into a stupid cocky jackass in the last two books that makes me want to punch him in the face. And Bella is so stupid: why would you even bother with a smartass, immature idiot who thinks of the whole thing as a game when you have this perfect, angsty, greek god look-alike practically wrapped around your finger. Gaaahh. It makes me angry. I’ll probably read Breaking Dawn, the last book in the series, just so I can get some closure and see if Ms. Meyers actually writes the ending that should happen (if Bella gives up Edward for Jacob, I will burn that book!)

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