Terrorism, Or “Are You Afraid?”

Most of my relatives live in the United States. Most of them live in California, to be specific. In fact, most of them have lived nearly all their lives in California.

So when Michael Moore says that Americans know nothing about other countries, he could be right. . . . except that most of what comes out of Michael Moore’s mouth seems to be opinions of someone who really hasn’t lived outside of the United States. So he speaks for himself.

I am so glad that I live in the United States. I am even prouder that I was brought up in small towns with people who cared about me and taught me what has been done to help me survive in this world. It was their wonderful guidance that helped me become someone who helps others survive in this world.

My parents just came back from visiting relatives in Thailand, where bombings of restaurants and police stations are a regular occurrance thanks to local Islamic terrorists who threaten to remove all Buddhists from that region of the country (either by killing them or scaring them away — obviously they’re not trying to convert anyone).

It’s coming to the point that my aunts are thinking of leaving that part of the country.

I don’t hate Michael Moore. I do think that he’s a very intelligent capitalist who took advantage of over 50 million Americans (that’s a lot of royalties). And even though I think his choice in movie-material is repugnant, it never crossed my mind to shoot him to death. In the Netherlands, if you make a movie that Muslims disagree with, you just might be stabbed and shot to death (and in a country that strictly regulates personal handguns. . . imagine that).

And again, I have to say, that I am so happy to be living in the United States because, unlike my relatives in Thailand (and California), I refuse to be pushed around.

I am proud to be an infidel.

‘Don’t like it? So sue me! Because in America, we don’t bomb trains to get our way. . . . we litigate.

Lifelong Learning

No matter how old you are, there are always “tests.” I thought that after high school and the SAT and ACT, I’d be done with tests. But then there were college exams, and then the GRE, and the MCAT. And now I’m doing the USMLEs. And then there’s Board exams. And people warn me of Continuing Education exams.

One thing I’ve found, through all these exams, is that they may or may not have any relevance at all to what I’m taking the tests to achieve!

But they are hoops I jump through, nonetheless.

In addition to these bubble-tests, I generally like to teach myself other things which only require that I challenge myself.

One of our faculty recently gave a lecture about learning styles based on personality types. He is somewhat correct when he describes my learning style based on my personality type. So, I post the basic premise here, in case it may help someone else who may be struggling in the learning department.

His suggestions:

1. Find your personality type, based on the Myer-Briggs test. This is actually an exam that should be “administered by a professional,” but for my purposes, I used this free test here.

2. He had suggestions for how different personality types learn best. I agree with him in that, as you get older, you may have already trained yourself to learn using a method opposite to your natural type. For this reason, some learning may exhaust you, because it takes effort to use a style that is opposite to your own natural style of learning.

3. His biggest suggestion is to learn “concept mapping” because according to his personal experience counseling medical students, all personality types can benefit from learning in this way (although it may be very tiring to some personality types). I believe the theory behind concept mapping is that one is actively organizing information in a way very similar to how the brain stores it. In other words, you are creating a neural network, very similar to how you want to store it in your brain, such that it is easily retrievable.

To all who have upcoming midterms, break a leg!

Sailing Free

There are all these maps and tables about the 2004 election and conjectures about the type of person who voted for whom. There’s even some kind of email hoax going around about IQ compared to who voted for whom. I never pay any attention to those kinds of things. I know who I am, and I know my own history. I think my favorite Dolly Parton quote has to be this one: “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.” Matt met Dolly Parton in his former job in another life. He said she’s very nice in person, and very beautiful in person as well.

http://www.dolly.net/her_story.htm I used to watch her on Captain Kangaroo.

Corona del Mar

I may make fun of L.A., but I did have fun there. I love roaming around on my own, discovering places through chance. You can’t do that in Southern Thailand and parts of Malaysia (– too many Islamic terrorists kidnapping civilians, including Australians.) People in the United States may think Islamic terrorism is not real (an unreality trip courtesy of Michael Moore and Democratic propaganda), but well, I trust that my relatives know more about what goes on in Asia than Mr. Moore. After all, they do live there. And I am thankful that here in the States anyway, no one feels the need to warn me not to travel as a woman alone because I might get kidnapped by people trying to make a political statement.

The picture below is Inspiration Point on Corona del Mar.

You can barely see him, but there was a very sad-looking guy sitting on a bench at Inspiration Point. I think he was hoping to be inspired.

Down in the tidepools, there was a wedding party creating photo album memories as the waves foamed up around their feet.

I went there for one reason only though. To watch ships.

There was one particularly gorgeous ketch with parchment colored sails.

A shot from a railing
(next to where sad-looking guy was sitting)

It’s a lot easier to take pictures of the sailboats when you’re actually out on the jetty.

Taken from the jetty

The above picture was an attempt to capture the beauty of this really beautiful ketch. Unfortunately, you can’t really see it in this shot, but as it sailed by, the remarkably well-varnished teak trim shone a nice golden colour in the sunlight.

Gorgeous little boat! ‘Made me drool.

Thanksgiving

Before I left for a conference in Irvine, I was kind of stressed out about work. My job requires I see and witness things that most people go to movies to see. Needless to say, sometimes I can be pretty burned out. There are many things for which I’m thankful. And after returning home from California, I increased my things-to-be-thankful-for by at least 10.

10. Gas where I live is $1.79 a gallon. (In Los Angeles it was $2.49 per gallon. No wonder they’re all so angry.)

9. I only have 3 stoplights between my house and work. (I read a local paper while in Newport Beach that talked about how some guy got hit walking across Coast Hwy.)

8. I don’t have to pick up my dog’s poop, and he can pee whereever he pleases. (On Balboa Island, people have signs on their fenced-in yards warning pet-walkers to not let their dogs urinate on their bushes. So they pee on the fences or the sidewalk, since everything is paved.)

7. People here actually let me onto the highway. (Defensive driving is the rule in L.A.)

6. I don’t pay state income tax. (Heh!)

5. Vegetables cost the same here as they do in California. (Which is odd, because you’d think without state income tax, they’d make up for it in sales taxes. And they don’t.)

4. It doesn’t take me 45 minutes to get to a beach and find a parking spot.

3. I don’t have to pay thousands per year to dock my sailboat on the water.

2. I can actually afford to buy a house with my income. And unlike my colleagues in California, I can probably pay it off in three years. (I saw some houses in Newport Beach that were selling for $1,500,000, with no yard, no privacy, and about as much square-footage as my old apartment. What a ripoff!)

1. The majority of people in our state were apparently informed voters.

Sex and the Kiddies

It always amazes me how uninformed the media is. And that’s sad because it seems that the media is always the one that educates the other uninformed populace.

People are always debating whether or not we should allow public schools to pass out condoms. “It promotes safe sex,” they say. “It reduces unwanted teenage pregnancies,” they also say. Or this one, “It reduces the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.”

Does it really?

I mean, come on now. Have any of these condom promoters ever done an internship at the Illinois Public Health Department? Have they even ever had any sex? (Most of the people who promote condoms look like they really need some sex.)

How many teenage guys are actually going to put a condom on before sex? And an even bigger question, even after you have correctly demonstrated to a guy how to correctly put on a condom (pinching the head before rolling it down, so that the semen is caught in the reservoir), how many are actually going to put it on correctly? And the biggest question of all, after they actually put the condom on correctly, and at the appropriate time, are they going to pull out right after cumming (to prevent spillage and rupture of the condom)?

Uh huh. Yeah.

And how many people are actually being misled to think that condoms prevent all sexually transmitted diseases?

There’s actually been a rise in syphilis in spite of the promotion of condom use.

And oral sex. I laugh to think how many cases of herpes I’ve seen. And I’m not talking HSV1, but HSV2. Due to the increase in casual oral sex, HSV1 (which used to be predominantly oral herpes) is now seen “down there” and HSV2 (which used to be predominantly genital herpes) is seen as those wonderful things people call “fever blisters.”

It’s surprising how many teenage girls these days have HPV (the virus that causes cervical cancer), manifested in those fluffy cauliflower-looking lesions known as genital warts.

Gonorrhea and chlamydia (usually asymptomatic in the genital tract) used to be diseases of the urinary and genital tract, causing pelvic inflammatory disease in women. But we have plenty of people coming in now with gonorrhea of the mouth, and chlamydia tracheitis. And it’s obvious how they got it, even if it isn’t to them.

I guess I shouldn’t complain about all the misconceptions people have about condoms. People getting sick just increases my business. (I may purchase that 40-foot ketch sooner than I think!) But, I’d just like to warn all you lovely people out there in cyberspace to take a good look at your partner’s pieces, because in addition to the above-mentioned things, condoms don’t prevent crabs.