On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of
the United States. Along with a Republican House and Senate majority, to
boot.
The world around me is still hurting and reeling from the shock.
Make no mistake, I am scared. I am scared of the policies and
executive orders and legal decisions to come that may strip away many
civil rights and send the environment down a worse track faster than
anyone expected, and I’m barely in any of the groups that have the most
to lose. I have no idea what it’s like to go through this as any of you.
I am sorry.
But I am also scared that this fear is driving my friends and my
community away from talking to the people we need to talk to if we want
to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I’ve heard a lot of people vilify Trump and Trump supporters.
Anecdotally,
so have others. It’s an understandable reaction, but a fragile one.
60 million people voted for Trump.
Quoting
Wait But Why, “[P]eople with kids and parents and jobs and
dogs and calendars on their wall with piano lessons and doctors
appointments and birthday parties written in the squares. Full,
three-dimensional people who voted for what they hope will be a better
future for themselves and their family.”
This post’s topic might be the most controversial thing I’ve posted
here ever. I hope the points I want to make aren’t.
One of the excuses for not blogging I came up with and then deleted
while rambling about not
blogging was that I’m getting more feelings about real-world
real-person issues, things that people take heated positions on — it’s
not topics like what food I ate or what games I’m playing in fourth
grade any more — and my identity is pretty public here, so who knows
what’ll happen. Oh well. I’m probably just paranoid.
It’s also delayed, as the articles I’m talking about are old; the
latest two news items are the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando
Castile and then the police shooting at the Dallas rally. That was also
really sad, but I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about
it. Let me point you to the
MIT
Admissions post, “Black Lives Matter”, and then for something a bit
more optimistic out of a huge range of possible choices,
this
Medium article.
Although after I started writing this post, the story about
a
Muslim man preventing an ISIS suicide bomber came out, so now this
is mildly relevant again. Anyway, I guess the delay is no different from
how I put up life posts weeks after the life event happens. So today, I
bring you two old news articles about Islam that my friends shared and
discussed:
The second one first, whose argument is, to be frank, weak. I think
this piece from The Atlantic by Wood,
“What
ISIS Really Wants”, is a better-researched overview of ISIS while
still being pretty readable. One caveat is that it’s somewhat old. But
its central claim is quite the opposite:
No, I didn’t forget. Not for one minute. I was doing homework. I am
very happy because that means I was actually carrying out my priorities
as I envisioned them. I’ve probably edited this post too many times,
though. Meh. But it’s the first weekend after finishing summer homework,
so here we go again!
Fun fact: This is by far my favorite post title in the entire series.
Possibly in the entire history of this blog.
In the morning of the last day of official IOI activities, there were
a bunch of cultural activities, e.g. writing Chinese characters
calligraphically, doing tricks with the diabolo, or picking up beans
with chopsticks, and noncultural activities, e.g. getting somebody to
pour water into a cup on your head while he or she was blindfolded. Due
to the last activity I got wet, but my shirt dried really quickly. And
alas, even though I had taken calligraphy summer classes a long time
ago, my calligraphy was awful — robotic, lifeless strokes without the
right aesthetic proportions to make up for it. Blargh.
Anyway, lunch followed, and then it was time for the closing
ceremony, in the same building as the other ceremonies and contests. Our
team caught the ending song of in a Chinese musical being rehearsed as
we walked into the auditorium. While we waited for everybody, we milled
about waving flags that our various teachers had brought, including not
only Taiwan’s flag but also flags of my school, thoughtfully brought by
teachers who had volunteered. A little later our leader told us that all
the leaders had discussed the matter during a meeting and decided that
we shouldn’t bring any flags to the stage while receiving our medals, so
we were going to have to make do with being patriotic and
school-respecting off stage.
There were a few performances, including two aboriginal music
performances and the musical we had seen rehearsed ealier, which was a
fun rock musical rendition of some Chinese tale that seemed to have been
sharply abridged, giving it the plot depth of a Wikipedia stub-article
synopsis — a conflict, boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love, and a lamenting
Aesop song conclusion with thrillingly vague general applicability. But
the singing and counterpointing and atmosphere were good. I guess it was
proportional to the relative importance of the performance to the
closing ceremony. The program interleaved them with the long-awaited
medal presentations: one round of bronze medalists, one round of silver,
one round of gold.
Dum-dum-dum-dum, medals! The home team advantage was really obvious
here; the cheering and the medal-presenter handshakes were both
significantly more forceful for Taiwan’s medalists.
I think our leader made this. Thanks.
Naturally, after the normal medals had been exhausted, the three full
scorers received bags with prizes that may forever remain unknown to my
sorry self, as well as a standing ovation from everybody in the
auditorium. The orchestra had been going through ABBA songs during the
ceremony, and very considerately played “The Winner Takes It All” for
this part. It was impossible not to mentally fill in the lyrics.
The winner takes it all The loser has to fall It’s simple and
it’s plain Why should I complaiiiiiiiin?
Speeches followed. Most were just average forgettable speeches, but
Forster gave another speech that was somehow even better than the one he
gave at the opening ceremony, with nonstop golden quotables such as:
Okay, I guess it was really naïve of me to suppose that I could get
any considerable amount of blogging done before the IOI ended.
Onward…
We left off at the end of the practice session. As if somebody were
taking revenge against us for not having to suffer through any airplane
trips, we were served a cold airplane meal for lunch.
Seriously, the box had a sticker that noted its manufacturer as
something something Air Kitchen and another translucent sticker that
badly covered an inscription saying the same thing in much bigger
letters. It contained a cold apple salad, a cold chicken bun, a cold
flat plastic cylinder of orange juice, and a package of plastic utensils
that was exactly like the utensils that came with every airplane meal
ever. I was disappointed, but at least the salad tasted okay, and I ate
an extra one because two of my teammates volunteered theirs.
To pass the time, we played an extra-evil
ninety-nine
variant. Apparently this is a very Taiwanese game because lots of
student guides were teaching their teams the game, although our special
cards differ from the ones Wikipedia lists in a lot of ways and our evil
variant created more opportunity for sabotage and counter-sabotage and
bluffing. 7s are used to draw your replacement card from somebody else’s
hand, and that person cannot draw again and will have one less card;
aces are used to swap your entire hand with somebody else, who also
cannot draw a card; small-value cards can be combined to form special
values (e.g. play a 2 and 5 for the effect of a 7) but after playing a
combination you can only draw one replacement card; and later, to speed
up the game, we added a rule where all 9s had to be unconditionally
discarded without replacement but would still get shuffled back into the
draw pile. Players lose if it’s their turn and they have no playable
cards, including no cards at all.
While we were playing and repeatedly reveling in everybody ganging up
to beat the winner from the last round, an instrumental version of “You
Are My Sunshine” played on repeat in the background for literally the
entire time. It wasn’t a very good version either. If you didn’t listen
carefully for the fade-out and few seconds of silence at the end of each
loop, you’d think that the loop was only one verse long.
Note: I wrote this in 2012. Maybe it’s kind of
amusing?
For some reason, everybody around here seems to think that adding
English characters, no matter how broken or meaningless, confers an
added sense of quality or superiority. I don’t really understand the
mindset here but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. It’s
certainly not to make the lives of our English-speaking population any
easier.
We were sharing songs in Chinese class with literary techniques, and
there were a bunch of songs, including mine, by this pretty famous
singer with the stage name
Fish Leong. Okay,
it’s kind of cute and it’s a translated homophonic Cantonese pun, so it
makes some sense, although I wonder what people would think the name
meant if mentioned without any context. There was this more obscure guy
a couple seasons back in the reality TV singing competition (see, no
original shows around here) whose name was Quack. smacks head
It’s also kind of cute if you only know that the word is the sound a
duck makes, which probably holds for most of the audience. But still, it
takes just five seconds to
put it into Wikipedia.
Oops?