BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Malaysia begins migrant round-up BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Malaysia begins migrant round-up

scary tactics in a time of regional turmoil... obviously not likely to beget immediate retribution, but not likely to be forgotten any time soon, either.

and there is obviously an untenable (or at least irreplicable) aspect to this... if malaysia's round-up/expulsion techniques were enacted worldwide millions of people would be harmed.

i don't know, i mean i obviously see the reasoning behind such tactics, but they just seem rather heartless (and tenuously succeptible to violent clashes and opportunistic application)  ¶ 8:32 PM 0 comments

 
flew to san diego for an ultimate tournament this weekend, but it rained hard almost the entire time. this is how we spent a large portion of the trip.   ¶ 11:03 PM 0 comments

  ethnicity as a source of insecurity i think that one the things i'm most insecure about - and i've only recently become conscious of this insecurity - is the notion of cultural/ethnic loyalty and duty. it's something that seems very prevalent in society (not necessarily the particular portion of society with which i am best acquainted, but the abstract idea of society throughout the world). the obvious reason for the insecurity this fosters is my lack of cultural/ethnic classification. i worry that those who i need/want to accept me into their hearts will, in part, reject me because of the lack of shared heritage and social backgrounds.

that's a really difficult insecurity to avoid. once it gets into my head, i see possible situations for it everywhere. even tougher to take is the consequential realization that this insecurity has probably only developed during my time at harvard. while my first inclination is to blame the passively stubborn infrastructure of boston/cambridge/harvard society, i think the reasons also go deeper. they must include the fact that, at harvard, i am no longer at home where, although i don't share the same cultural heritage as either of my parents, collectively we do. they must also include the possibility that my expectations for acceptance were inflated by the melting-pot aspect to los angeles culture.

whatever combination of these and other reasons may be the true cause, the fact that these insecurities have developed in this specific location makes me glad to be leaving to explore other parts of the world. i don't really expect to 'solve' this by going some place else and gaining new perspective, but it really couldn't hurt.  ¶ 12:22 AM 4 comments

  the twilight samurai i've taken the first week and a half of school as an opportunity to extend my vacation. i haven't chosen a fourth class yet, haven't purchased books, haven't gone to class since tuesday. aside from sleeping too much and drinking too much, one thing i've been doing with all of this extra free time is watching movies. i activated a two-week free trial at blockbuster.com... and i chose movies in two ways: first, i chose the boring way, choosing movies i'd wanted to see but for one reason or another had missed in theaters. second, and much more interesting, i used rottentomatoes.com. rottentomatoes.com is a website that compiles critics' reviews of films and shows what percentage of them approved. so i looked up the most approved movies of 2004 and put a few of them that looked interesting to me in my queue. although i did not get to many of them, because the movies chosen through method one were already ordered, i did find one that i loved.

the twilight samurai is a movie about a single father samurai and his struggle to balance his job, his obligations, his family, and his desires. in the end it ends up being kind of sappy. but it was so resonant! i'm still trying to work through the reasons why. i think that, beyond me being a sap, a lot of it has to do with the process of translation. it's a japanese film, set in a context i have absolutely no familiarity with. so my process of understanding the film comes without many of the cultural signals that may exist with understanding of the japanese language or japanese culture. and i feel like there's a significant degree of personal interpretation that occurs in the process of grafting the words at the bottom of the screen to the actions which they describe. in a way i guess i'm saying that the combination of unfamiliarity with language/culture made the personalization process much more profound than i would have thought. the movie really grabbed hold of me and i think it's because in the translation/personalization many of the normal distractions were lost and i received the story in a more pure form. in that way it kind of reminded me of fairy tales i used to read when i was really young - how everything was so fantastical and so moving. i haven't been this wide-eyed in a while. (and i love it)  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 comments