I thought I may as well blog.

I'm just going to share a few of the things which I'm dreading over the next month or so.

1. Zone Cross Country. lasdfihidhf;hihaD what was I thinking?!?!?! I only ran in the stupid school cross country because I'm a house office bearer and I thought I may as well get fit while skipping two periods of school. Now I'm going to fucking Macquarie Uni to run like 5 kilometres for zone? What was I thinking? I could hardly deal with the 2 kilometres of St Leonards Park. Dear god no. My peer support girl Julia will beat me, seriously. IN THE UNDER-13s.

2. SMH Plain English Speaking. I suppose my debating coordinator felt it was good for me and Sabrina to enter as we, you know, didn't get into the debating team. Seriously! I'm breaking out into like a cold sweat each time I think about it. ARGH! I blame sabrina for this, seriously. Seriously. I CAN'T DO THIS FOR SHIT.

Actually, that's about it. Most other things are pretty breezy. Huh.

By the way

blog is now private, only 5.

It's pretty much dead so yeah

oh what fools these mortals be

After all the cyberbullying lectures we hear at school, we kind of scoff, thinking 'like you teachers know better than us who basically stalk the internet.' But with this whole Jaebum fiasco, it's just dawned on me how scary the internet really is. (Well, Kai would probably think it was the 'krazy koreans'.) If you don't know who Jaebum or 2PM is, I'm relatively surprised since I'm guessing you go to Baulko. But maybe you don't have korean girls in your grade who've been wailing about this for the last couple of days. (There's a couple at NSGHS, I'm sure).

Fast facts

Jaebum was the leader of 2PM, a korean group that debuted in 2008 and has been ridiculously popular ever since. He was born and raised in Seattle, and tried out for korean entertainment companies there. At the age of 18, he flew over to Korea; without knowing the language, culture, way of living and not able to eat the food, having been accepted into JYP (the company responsible for the Wonder Girls, who are currently very randomly touring with the Jonas Brothers). He missed his family and friends, and was just really another korean-american guy that tlked lyyk this yo.

Context

Korea's a really conservative society on the surface - for example, Joo Ji Hoon, a famous korean actor, was found to be using drugs earlier this year. That might not seem like a great deal to us, but he was sentenced to months in prison although he got let off that with 200 hours of community service or something. All his projects that he was signed up on were cancelled, and all the main channels dropped contracts saying that they didn't want a bad influence on their TV. Seems harsh to us, huh? Difference of culture right there.

However, Korea is also full of CRAZY teenagers who have a mob mentality and are really good for marketing because if they see a popular actor advertising a product on tv (every ad is done by a famous singer/actor/whatever), they go off to buy it straight away. 99% of them, if you ask them what they want to do with their life, respond 'get into Seoul University' which is the top ranked college in the country. If the 'jjang' of the school (the hottest, best at fighting, most popular etc) says something, you all have to listen if you don't want to get beaten into pulp. Er, remember I'm being biased here because I'm really disappointed with the country at the moment.

The entertainment industry in Korea is so cutthroat - even if you do get to the top, there's a high likelihood the fame will only last for a few weeks until you're forgotten again. You have your fans who would spend $10, 000 on your birthday present but you also have antifans who spam your homepage with things like 'go die, you're useless, pathetic.' The amount of celebrities who have been driven to suicide the last two years is absolutely ridiculous.

But yes, to put it to scale, Dong Bang Shin Ki (DBSK) according to the Gusiness Book of Records, is the group with the largest fan base in the world. The things the fans worldwide do for them are pretty freaking amazing. However, if something is that extreme, there's always a negative. So for every fan for a group there's an antifan. Think Robert Pattinson fan meetings with girls actually getting trampled, times the scale about a million, and that's basically the life of a popular celebrity in Korea. No joke. Popular dramas such as Boys over Flowers couldn't film because of all the raging fans in the background even when the setting was kept an absolute secret, and so they'd have to creep out at 3am when there were only a few hundred fans still waiting around.

It might not be understandable to you - Australia's not really like that, probably because the entertainment business really relies on America. I mean, our favourite tv shows, music, celebrities. Come on, how many can we actually say we own? On the other hand, Korea thrives on their own and for such a small bit of land, it's pretty amazing the things they come up with. Asia in general loves Korea, always buying rights for dramas and such. Ironically, Korean groups are always trying to break through the Japanese market (Big Bang etc. Although DBSK and BoA have always been very well received.)

Erm, I've been rambling, but I hope you get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

The Situation

So Jaebum's thrust from America to Korea. He doesn't really get anything anybody's saying, he fights regularly with people in his broken korean and is blunt with people which is shocking - especially with JYP, the leader of his company, since respect and manners is #1 for the country. So on his myspace, after a couple of months, he says things like 'Korea's gay' and 'The people are wack' as well as comments saying he wants to go back home. Understandable, right? Being an overseas student is always hard, and on top of that, stress of working to become a singer can pull anyone into bouts of depression.

After a couple of months of intense training in his vocals, rapping, dancing as well as keeping up with schoolwork in a completely different language, he starts to get hang of things. He helps his classmates out, goes jogging with an overweight friend who said he was envious of his body, gives tips for basketball etc. He finds other guys in JYP who are from America too, who are to join the group called 2PM. He posts more things on his myspace saying that Korea's so fantastic for giving him a chance. The group debuts, and finds instant success. Great, right?

No. About what, six days ago, somebody finds the things he said four years ago to his friend on myspace. It's leaked onto the internet.

Explosion.

Thousands upon thousands of people call him an American who only looks like a Korean, came to the country to just earn some quick money and go home. In lots of crazy swearing, tells him he has no right to say these things, sucking their money while they'd supported him and his music. Over 3000 people sign a suicide petition for him to go kill himself. Under news articles, 90% comments are discriminatory saying that they shouldn't've expected more, he's a show off, a loser, taking advantage of Korea etcetc. This is all in the space of a few hours, mind you.

Jaebum just keeps repeating that he's sorry. Sorry to his group 2PM, sorry to JYP, sorry to Korea. The antifans intensify their complaints. Jaebum resigns, and announces on his cyworld he's going home before anything worse can happen because of him. A few hours later, he's at the airport, and over a thousand fans met him there. He had his head down the whole interview, just repeating he was so sorry for his mistake, and he left with letters written by his fans grasped in his hand.

He arrives in Seattle, meets his mum, and starts crying. They pray. And fans in America recording this and having put it up on youtube, say that he was still grasping his fan letters.

SO WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS?

In the last couple of days, some antifans and fans-turned-antis said they were shocked, didn't think it'd get to this point. The good things he had to say about Korea were then revealed, and some felt remorse. Others thought it was getting rid of something lesser than dirt. Don't get me wrong, a lot of fans were cheering for him, and all these post-it-notes were stuck on the JYP main office telling him good luck, that he has to come back, etc. (Same thing's happening in America's JYP office). A few celebrities have stood up to him, his classmates have given testimonials, JYP's released a statement. But the negativity's swallowed everything up. I was reading some articles released yesterday on it, and even there, I could only find one positive comment out of the fifteen I read.

So in the last three days, I've just been coming home, reading more news about all these happenings, crying, getting ridiculously pissed off, stalking youtube videos of Jaebum and 2PM, getting depressed, being embarrassed to be Korean and repeat emotions. Mind you - I didn't really know of 2PM just a week ago. I'd hear their music sometimes but that was about it. So it's not as if I'm a really huge fan of them that I'm being reduced to these primeval emotions, but the principle of the thing.

Jaebum did do something wrong. He did post up negative things up on the internet. But WHO DOESN'T? Netizens' responses:

#1. He's a celebrity, he should know better - well I'm sure you don't really know the life of a celebrity, but what you should know is that they go through a great deal of stress that comes with the job (ie DBSK's fiasco that's only quietening down now, where it was revealed some of them were forced to sign 13 year contracts with their company.) Also, he was just a trainee then, not in the limelight. Finally, he was saying it to a friend - I mean, yeah okay, you should be wary of the internet, but we all know that and yet we all still post stupid things up.

#2. (For the people who can at least admit people do stupid things). He's not Korean, he's American and thus cannot be so negative - Oh, he's not Korean is he? Just because he's lived overseas his whole life, you're going to ignore his background are you? And since when did all you hypocrites decide American things were bad? Just awhile ago you were so hyped up over Lady Gaga who came to do a few concerts, you're obsessed with anything that comes from the Western world - designer labels, singers, celebrities like Paris Hilton ...

#3. He only came to steal money off us and leave - Oh, come ON. He came, despite the difficulties facing him, to

achieve his ambitions, and he was definitely good enough. It was for YOU that he worked 24/7, always figuring out rap, beats for songs, melodies, dancing and singing. And you know the reason why he brought money up in interviews? Because his mother was sick, and he really needed to send money for her hospital fees. Yeeeeeah.

CUT HIM SOME SLACK.

For goodness' sake, it was FOUR YEARS AGO. I'm pretty sure everybody's done some stupid things at the age of 18 (except we haven't reached that age yet), and I'm more surprised there wasn't a large amount of swearing than anything else. He was lonely, depressed, sad and homesick okay? So he did something wrong - but do we really need suicide petitions? Spamming to tell him he's a failure, an embarrassment, for him to stop pretending he's Korean and go back home and throw all the money around that he'd stolen from the Korean public?

Um no I don't think so.

Give him some EMPATHY. Is it really that hard to come by? Or if that's too hard, can't you at least pause for a moment because you start posting up stupid lies on the net?

The reason the Koreans get so fired up about these things is because they're very proud and patriotic, due to the past with North Korea and Japan's invasion and occupation (let's stop before I start ranting about that), which is you know, understandable. They're going to be defensive and take things harsher than perhaps some other countries would, since Korea is so small and unknown in the world. (Some of my friends can't point to it on the map.) However, that is not a reason AT ALL to react so harshly to Jaebum's entries.

It's the mob mentality. People quickly jump in without thought of the consequences. You might ask why I'm writing SUCH a long blog post about this (especially after our blog's been dead for like half a year) but it's just proof that the world can be such a scary place. We've just finished studying Lord of the Flies in class, and this whole fiasco's just made me question what's different about Jack and what the antifans did. So what, the latter didn't actually kill him physically, but this is just as bad if not worse. Is our world really being led into a dark world of evil and no hope? I personally don't believe so, because there's always people like Simon who radiate hope, but it is definitely worrying.

I just wish people weren't ignorant, could add a touch of empathy to their personality and not have a need to know everything about everybody. Oh, and be moderate instead of all scary types of extreme - because now, the main fanbase of 2PM in Korea has decided to boycott all things done by JYP (because they don't think JYP should have just let him easily leave for America) and all activities of 2PM. That too, I think, is bordering on worrying behaviour - I mean, my heart is broken too with Jaebum leaving too but that isn't a reason to ignore all the hard work the six other members have been putting in. His groupmate Wooyoung fainted at the airport after his leader Jaebum left, actually. I'm pretty sure the members are hurting more than we are, and to ignore them in their time of need is just as bad, if not worse.

Speeeeeeed stacking

Probably old, but fuck man I want to learn how to speed stack
That looks pretty intense. It's like the bottle game but... better.

Cygnis insignis

Well it's 11:08 and I'm listening to gargantuan amounts of Regina Spektor. I have spent the last four hours on the baulko subject selections forum, board of studies, and wikipedia and it's been oh so productive.

I've been checking out the Cosmology past papers on board of studies, cause I find the whole subject incredibly interesting. I attempted the first page of the first test (the one concerning Modules 1 2 and 3), some questions like 'give a concise definition of: a. a light year; b. an astronomical unit', or 'state the FOUR fundamental forces in nature' were pretty easy, but then others are more obscure like 'Why is it beneficial to cool the radiation detectors used with modern telescopes?' and 'State and briefly explain the anthropic principle in cosmology' (which I was all wtf is this shitting at because what does anthropology have to do with cosmology). But I looked them all up on wiki to get an understanding.

From then on, there were all sorts of stuff to look at like: the anthropic princple, pulsars, quasars, AU, LY, parsec, parallax, redshift, particle horizon, event horizon, cosmic censorship hypothesis, cosmological constant, zero-point energy, Einstein's static universe, cosmic background radiation, big bang, metric expansion of space, isotropy, cosmological princple, copernicam principle, great wall (astronomy, not china), anisotropic, biisotropy, special relativity, speed of light, large scale structure of the cosmos, end of greatness, doomsday argument, earth's orbit, fermi paradox, friedmann equations, hawking radiation, hubble's law, binary function, black swan theory, chirality (particle chirality is pretty interesting), center of the universe,.

Of course I understood like 1% of these entire articles, but the parts that were comprehensible were pretty fascinating. Things like the possibility of two distant objects to be moving away from eachother at a speed > c - thus meaning that they cannot observe each other. That's fucked up man. Also the 'What is the universe expanding into?' section of metric expansion of space has a nice analogy of the expansion of the universe with a balloon.

Tomorrows the end of the term eh? Sic transit gloria term 2. (Sorry, in a bit of a latin mood right now. Doing that poem by wilfred owen, I was like ehhhhhhh- there's a regina spektor song that also uses Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori)

van she

basically, that is what killed my entire saturday.

got into massive arguments with my mum about being able to go ... eventually just sneaked out to the city and 'compromised' with her, so that meant i was able to eat GORGEOUS TAPAS WITH AIOLI at casa asturianas, then basically bummed around waiting outside metro theatre until 8, and when we got in it was quite bad, the support acts were ... boring. or at least they were boring for me, not being able to hear the music and all.

so around 10 me and penny got separated from the others and then sophia found us and we escaped to starbucks (note to self: pay sophia back for mocha) and then we went back in for van she at 10:45 and the waiting for them to come out was agonising but it was gorgeous. they played kelly, strangers, cat & the eye, etc, i left halfway through though because my brother was constantly calling me. it was quite disconcerting (haha), what with storing my mobile inside my shirt.

also i think i saw people i know there, but haven't talked to in freaking forever. steph polivka or nat perez, i think you were there, but i'm not sure, here's a shoutout to you in any case

it was 12 o'clock and i was sitting on town hall steps, and this guy asked me for a light. do i look like i carry around lighters or what?!

and then i got home and had a shower to rid myself of the smell of teenage boy.



and now i've wasted my entire saturday and it's very early sunday morning and i'm trying to write a scene for page to stage tomorrow. utter fail, lindy.

"I'll Be Back" Terminator Monster Ballad

What the theme song for Terminator should've been.

Didn't find it, LUEser did. (overthinkingit.com)
I'll be back

Model UN!

So Sunday a couple of us from school dressed up all formal and went to the first round of the UNYA Perez de Cuellar model security council. It was quite fun, getting all dressed up and talking about the most inane things, socialising with - you guessed it - year 10 nsbs, and essentially having a pretty cool day out. This was only after my mum had forced me to take a million public transports, on a Sunday no less, from North Sydney where I had been collecting for the Red Shield Appeal ( we raised $165 between Logice and me!)

And on Friday, in a quite literal downpour, I got to the state theatre and got us 500 days tickets (!!) sounds excellent

hey guys, someone get jiye to post now

That's what I want

Thats what I want! I want to laugh, I want to scream, at the biggest stars on wall to wall screens, I want to escape to the movies...thats what I want!

I want stadium seating and digital sound, I want my movies in full surround, I want to escape to the movies, Greater Union...thats what I want!

Science Research Project

The amount of people's msn statuses that have "OMG SRP SUCKS" or "F*** YOU SCIENCE" is astounding. MAYBE IF YOU DID YOUR FUCKING WORK IN THE 8 OR SO WEEKS WE HAD BEFORE TODAY YOU WOULDN'T BE STRESSED FOR TIME YOU DUMBSHITS. ARGH!

Yeah i'm tired and in a mood to rant. I'll stop before I make some enemies

(YEAAAAAAH) DAYS OF SUMMER

It's been changed to M from 18+
http://www.sydneyfilmfestival.org/Festival/Films/FilmDetails.aspx?id=43

oh yeah.

(RAGE) DAYS OF SUMMER

Ok, so you know that movie 500 Days of Summer that I really want to watch (scroll down). A tentative release date is 1st October, which is a couple months after America's 17th July, so thats pretty annoying in the first place. But then 500 has a showing in the upcoming (June) Sydney Film Festival. The only trouble is that most of the festival is 18+ by default, excepting some movies mostly children. This is because lots of the movies there haven't been classified by the OFLC, so thus everythings assumed to be R18+. And then I checked the OFLC website, and they have rated 500 Days of Summer, giving it an M! RAGH RAGE. @ my youthfulness
http://www.sydneyfilmfestival.org/Festival/Films/FilmDetails.aspx?id=43
http://www.oflc.gov.au/www/cob/find.nsf/5c2433d416948a0bca25759f00820d25/cd8069ede4c9511eca2575a9002767bd!OpenDocument

counting calories

So the title makes me sound like an annorexic chick that continually obsesses over her weight and carries around a book everywhere she goes, recording exactly what she's eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and maybe half a mandarin for a snack) to calculate the amount of kilojules, sugar, fat, sodium etc she's been consuming.

Which ... i'm really not. Probably the furthest you can get from it really - except for maybe my friend Jocelyn who thinks a diet is eating as many bananas as possible, alongside all the chocolate and doughnuts and tim tams and pocky and goodness knows what else.

Alas, when i exclaim over the amount of carbs in a product at lunch, laughing over it with my friends, girls who don't know me very well stare at me in disgust. You can hear them whispering, complaining about girls with image problems and how anorexia and bullimia is a fad and how if she wants to lose weight (which she really should) she should do it properly.

Pfft, like i'm going to change my eating habits any time soon. But seriously, counting calories and all of that stuff is so much fun! No, really!

It's like FUN maths (although i know you're sitting there going 'no dude that's an oxymoron.') You find the serving size listed on the packet, and estimate how much of each ingredient is in it, and see if you're right by checking the 'per 100g' column and converting it into a percentage! And at the same time, you're like whoa there's this many kilojules in uncle toby's yoghurt topped bars? that's the same as two apples or a big banana! or something along those lines.

You can blame this obsession on an exercise last year for biology where we kept a record of the percentages of fat and calories to see if we were over or undereating. It really is addictive, you know - because before you know it, you'll be comparing different brands of food to see which has more of what, and realise that sugar really does make a difference on the deliciousness scale. My most recent bout of calorie counting started off with the lindt box I received from a friend - 48% of those tiny balls that melt in your mouth is fat. Having read that, i got a bit of a shock because i happily ignore these depressing figures most of the time, figuring that not knowing is better for all aspects of my health - mental and ... um ... okay, maybe not physical. >_>

Of course, that didn't stop me from eating three (the different flavours! hazelnut, white and milk! okay, there was dark too, but i could refrain myself from eating that quite easily) lindt balls of course ... or eating home made cheesecake after seeing with my very eyes the copious amounts of sugar and butter thrown in the mix ... yeah, i can't ever resist temptation.

Come on, after seeing the cows being herded off to get killed in Armidale at school camp, I still enjoyed my hamburgers that night ... and the four or five slices of dominos pizza while watching reruns of 'friends' courtesy of my friend's birthday ... and the ramen and the chips and the natural confectionary and the buckets of KFC chicken delivered much later that night (also courtesy of my friend's birthday) ...

Needless to say I count calories for fun. But some of my friends NEED to know exactly what they're eating - take Amanda for example. As a hardcore hockey player and rower, she can only eat specific amounts of anything and everything. For recess, she'll eat this huge tub of yoghurt and nothing else, and then (very) low GI honey coated wheat. A few of us were all O_O 'dude just eat like normal, this is pain watching you eat like that' but it's a strict diet, and she has enough control to keep to it - (unlike someone I know).

So next time you see a teenage girl carefully studying the ingredients list or table on the back of boxes, don't roll your eyes. Go join her and explore some really interesting territory!

Well, unless her hair's falling out, and her skin looks really bad and dry, and her fingernails are all weird.

(On a completely unrelated note - isn't Benjamin Disraeli such a Lockhart?)

Definition

What defines who we are? This is something i thought of while playing guitar hero, don't ask me why, but I was just curious and I couldn't come up with an answer. Is it our actions, what we do? Is it our personality, who we are on the inside? I just couldn't decide. Anyway that's some food for thought for you guys.

In other news, exams are half done at the moment. That should make me feel better, yet I can't help but feel a strange sense of impending doom at the prospect of our 3 PERIOD!!!!! science exam tomorrow. But oh well, hopefully the hours of study I did today will help me do alright. I think I've actually studied harder for these half-yearlies than last year's yearlies, which I guess makes sense when you think about it since year 10 is a pretty important year. This next couple of weeks will be hectic with engineering things due in all over the place and a few more tests. Plus SRP. But after that should be able to rest up for a bit.

Anyway, this is my first post since the blog went back up. Feel free to comment in the cbox, and despite many accusations last time that the colour of the cbox was crap, I still think it fits in well with our website's colour scheme. Props to kai for expanding the banner at the top, I actually remembered something about history during the test cause of that.

Laters

Gravitating

I was bored, so I made some pick up lines.

• Are you undergoing stellar nucleosynthesis? Cause you're like gold to me.
• Are you a quasar? Because today you look especially radiant.
• Are you related to the photosphere? Because you're makin' me hot.
• Do you think I'm at my apoapsis? Because I think I'm falling for you.
• Are you Sirius? Because you're the brightest star in my night sky.
• You're the active galactic nucleus of my heart.

Yeah, I went there.