Today was my exam, and... it went surprisingly good. You know. For someone who was... not distracted at all during study-time.

But this wasn't a final-final because, simplifying, when you don't take one of the partial exams, you have to recover it as a final at the end of the semester. That's what I did. The "final for real" comes in two weeks.

I love you all, I will be... hiatusing. But you know how that goes.

(I swear I will answer comments later when I have more energy.)

FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS FU!!!

Dios, que mal ando, y LJ no es capaz de avisarme. orz

Te deseo lo mejor, corazón, sos una grandiosa persona que se merece grandes cosas!

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I just want to say I was raised by the best person in the world, and that's my mother. God, with so much shit going around, she just left me speechless by being an incredible person. That's all.

Via jhameia:

End Discrimination Against Transgender Women – The Marla Bendini Incident.

Marla Bendini, a transgender woman and an established artist and pole dancer was thrown out of a popular nightspot on Clarke Quay, Singapore, even though she was part of a group engaged to perform at the club. To add insult to injury, she was insulted by the club’s management. Her distress was visible and it was also witnessed by her fellow pole dancers.

[...] As Founding Working Group member of the Asia-Pacific Transgender Network, I will investigate incidents of abuse against transgender women in Singapore and the region. If the incidents are proven to be true, we will pursue further action against the organisation involved.

If you support the right of transgender women to be treated with respect and dignity, be a fan of our facegroup page here.

And Monica Roberts at Transgriot has received an email press release from Leona Lo:

A group of transgender women in Singapore have rallied to issue a joint call to Clarke Quay night spot operators to stop discriminating against transgender women. The latest incident involving a transgender patron has sparked outrage among the long-suffering community, drawn close to 500 supporters on Facebook, and sparked the launch of a first-ever anti-discrimination campaign entitled "Sisters in Solidarity" (SIS).

The SIS campaign will be launched on Wednesday, 5 May 10, at 2 pm at Post Museum on Rowell Road. Ms Marla Bendini Junior Ong, a Singapore transgender woman will be present to share her experiences at Clarke Quay witnessed by her dance instructor who will also be present. Trish, a transgender pioneer, will speak up for the first time about her personal experience with workplace discrimination. The campaign will include a series of education activities throughout the year.

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I don't think I will be around much this week, I got two exams next week, Monday and Tuesday, one of them is Biochemistry and I have to take the two no matter what. Just letting know the people I mod stuff with. (Sorry, the_future_modernes, I don't think you will have a lot of problems for just a weekend at politics, right? Just to be safe.)

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My two months LJ paid-account expired today, and I'm really grateful to the anonymous who gave it to me, I really enjoyed it. I also think the only thing I will really miss is the option of editing comments. I'm not such a sucker for icons, personalizations and stuff. I think I got to 25 icons, and not even used much of the other options. Yeah, I'm a free-account person.

Ni siquiera me agrada el tipo, pero hoy te lo ponen hasta en la sopa. Y okay, me reí.

Aseguran que Chuck Norris maneja a Messi.

"Es un jugador de Play Station", fueron las palabras que pronunció el técnico francés Arsene Wenger al término del partido que disputó el Arsenal ante el Barcelona con respecto a la actuación que brindó el argentino Lionel Messi, quien marcó los cuatro goles de los catalanes.

Aprovechando los comentarios de Arsene y el "Día de Chuck Norris" en la red, un usuario de Facebook decidió crear el grupo "Chuck Norris es el que maneja a Messi desde su casa con el mando de la Play".

Explicaría muchas cosas.

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I went to the doctor. I have a colonoscopy on schedule next Wednesday because it was the obvious thing to do, nothing more. But let's not talk about that. I mean it.

My exam today went fantastic.

I have an appointment with the doctor on Wednesday because it will be an specialist. And I'm a worrywart.

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( Triggering and very graphic. Violence against trans women under the cut )

... is "Drop It Like It's Hot." Which is an awesome section, I'm not going to deny that.

Reclaiming UGLY:

Let’s think about this logically: what does me or you being beautiful do to improve the lives of others? Nothing, really. Certainly it does not do as much as passion, or kindness, or empathy, or bravery… these are the attributes that change the world… not beauty. And, even better, these are the attributes that have nothing to do with genetics. We can CHOOSE to go out of our way to be kind, to be brave, to passionately chase dreams, to harness our talents to change the world. At any moment, each and every one of us has the power to be a strong, compassionate, brave, and make a difference in the world.

You can’t wake up one morning and just decide to change your apperance to fit whatever mold beautiful takes on in your society (at least, not without a lot of money and pain)… either you fit the mold of beautiful or you don’t. We all know this and yet, we all seem to spend so much more time obsessing over beauty than we do over all of those other wonderful and useful qualities.

[...] Even the concept of “inner beauty” bothers me to a degree. Why not inner strength? Inner kindness? Inner AWESOMENESS? Why does it always come down to beauty?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am NOT trying to belittle the struggles of those who wrestle with body image issues. How could I be, when I am just as entrenched in this as anyone else? All I am trying to do is shed some light, shake things up, and get us to question just WHY it is that we feel so much pressure to look a certain way; to be beautiful.

Instead of trying to change perceptions of beauty, maybe we should just run with it… embrace the title of ugly and use it to force others to see the value in the rest of us; our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams… because at the end of the day, that’s where the real value lies.

Crazy

One thing these people are not: crazy.

I am crazy. I have mental illnesses. I am insane. I am loony. Sometimes, I may even be bat shit crazy.

I am not these people.

My identity is not an appropriate analogy to use to describe these people. They are hateful, horrible, terrifying, reprehensible, bigoted, scary, extremists. Some of them may well have mental illnesses. But you can’t tell that just by looking at someone. And even if they do, it’s not an appropriate epithet to use as an insult; believe it or not, people can have mental illnesses and also have political beliefs. Differing political beliefs and, yes, differences in beliefs about appropriate methods of political expression, are not rooted in mental illness.

[...] When I see people using my identity as a slur; when I see people referring to other people or things which they don’t like with words like crazy, insane, lunacy, insanity, loony, I am reminded of how unsafe the world is for people like me. How people who claim to care about social justice, who claim that being silent is part of the problem, are happily to carelessly erase me when it suits their needs. It’s a thread which runs almost continually through social justice activism. Activism is convenient as long as it does not involve any personal sacrifice or self examination, does not require the actual acknowledgment of other human beings. As soon as it does, there will be excuses, excuses, excuses.

LINKAGE: Veiling and "Save the Muslim Girl!"

Just about every book in this genre features such an image on its cover. These are familiar metaphors for how the Muslim girl’s life will be presented within the novel. The way the girls’ mouths are covered reinforces existing ideas about their silence and suggests that we in the West (conceptualized as “free” and “liberated”) need to help unveil and “give” them voice. The images also invite ideas about girlhood innocence and vulnerability, and invite Western readers to protect, save, and speak for these oppressed girls.

[...] To give you a sense of the range of meaning of the veil, consider for instance that in Turkey—a predominantly Muslim country—the veil (or “religious dress”) is outlawed in public spaces as a means to underline the government’s commitments to Kemalism, a “modern,” secularist stance. In response and as a sign of resistance, some women, especially young university students and those in urban areas, consider the veil to be a marker of protest against government regulation of their bodies and the artificial division of “modern” versus “faithful.” Similar acts of resistance are taken up by feminists in Egypt who wear the veil as a conscious act of resistance against Western imperialism. As another example, before 9/11, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) documented the Taliban’s crimes against girls and women by hiding video cameras under their burqas and transformed the burqa from simply a marker of oppression to a tool of resistance.

-- Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, excerpts from "Save The Muslim Girl!," a series on Muslimah Media Watch on Muslim girls in contemporary young adult fiction.

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I haven't opened a book this Eastern break (is there an equivalent in English for "Semana Santa"?). I have an exam the 7th, then the 12, then the 13. I have a long homework to hand in on Monday. What did I do these past four days? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I so deserve the guilt.

Oh God, this is why I love this woman:

the_future_modernes, Observations:

If you live in a country with as much outsize world power as the United States? You need to pay serious attention its foreign policy. The US has control over whether millions of people live or die, whether they will live in utter misery as a result of pushing free trade policies that bankrupt other people's economies and leave them vulnerable to corporate exploitation and pillaging while enriching some sliver of the elite and sending a bit of cash in aid; or not. You wanna scream about immigration illegal or otherwise? You need to look at the goddamn trade policies. Look at what NAFTA did to Mexico, for instance. You might also consider the US history in Latin America of overthrowing democratically elected leftist gov't and installing or backing dictators, unleashing year of terror and death and rapes and murders and land stealing and company exploitation on people whose right to democracy was trumped by US might.

In other news, I should be studying like mad and doing homework. And bathing my dog. So see ya, people.

Ugh. Today was the day of white, cis, able feminist (or progressive, whatever) women making me very uncomfortable.

Those naive ladies who think gender problems revolve around cis, white, rich, able-bodied women issues. And chose to ignore any unfortunate connotation that their critiques of "gender issues" of other people who are not rich, white, able or cis could have. Some people have a pervasive history of being oppressed by people like you. Things have a context, and some things are more complicated than the simple "you should be like me, the privileged woman who does everything by herself and acts by western/cis/white/able-bodied standards of empowerment."

My head hurts. Badly. Tomorrow will be a long day again.

ETA: What I also wanted to say is that power imbalances exist, and that a more powerful group of people "criticizing" and stereotyping a group that is historically oppressed by them is something that, in our power structures, has certain connotations and consequences that shouldn't be overlooked.

Ooku wins James Tiptree Award. It's the first time a manga has won. Ooku has also was "recipient of special prize at The Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy's fifth annual Sense of Gender awards (2005), Excellence Award for manga at Japan Media Arts Festival (2006), and Grand Prize in Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (2009)".

I post this because I can. And because, against all economy odds, I ordered the first two volumes. Oops.

Oh God. How much I don't want to study Biochemistry. Let me count the ways.

That was a lot of blood, I came home covered on it (lab practice, people). Then had to go to the drugs store. For anti-depressants (I just ran out of them).

So I'm kinda dead, but I still have two very good links to share:

Black Dahlia on Display. On tragedy porn, or consuming human suffering.

Watching people look at the different exhibits as though they were getting a peek at a real-life episode of Law & Order was incredibly disturbing. The fact that the “Black Dahlia” was, in fact, a young woman named Elizabeth Short who was horribly, brutally violated, tortured, and murdered, was totally lost. These weren’t stills from a movie; the body in the images wasn’t made of plastic. These were photos documenting how a real, actual human being suffered unimaginably…and they were on display for entertainment value, just one stop on a tour before moving on to see the exhibits about Marilyn Monroe and O.J. Simpson.

[...] the exhibit just made it incredibly clear that all these cases, and the human pain and suffering attached to them, have become gruesome real-crime stories and the people affected by them are characters in the entertainment.

Maybe I would have liked to say "who the hell thinks this shit is a good idea," but I don't live in a parallel universe, a pervasive and insidious part of media is dedicated to tragedy porn. Real human beings tragedies.

Do You Work? On our monetary system, and disability.

Truly. It's now so common to conflate employment and identity at a variety of class and education levels, so common that employment itself has become a marker of social worth. And in this particular economy, employment numbers (never the people, just the fear of the numbers) have become political talismans that the two parties sling at each other in order to try and maintain the illusion that they have a stranglehold on power.

Employment is such a controlling social and moral force. Work discourse frames the discussion of how, when, and even if women have children, their value as working parents, and how they might live/work afterwards. Work discourse controls who, some wild popular imaginations, is a productive citizen and who a "welfare queen." In accident reviews and, for example, in the post-911 insurance discussions, work discourse can help assign a monetary value to some lives..... You get the picture.

And if you are a disabled person trying to work, trying to get a job, trying to retain a job, you know how difficult things can be.

About to go to the meat processing plant (boy, that sounds very different from "frigorífico") for bovine blood. Biochemistry's practice today is going to be long (yeah, protein extraction from serum is you are wondering, it will be very tedious).

I would love to comment on a lot of things and respond to your comments, but right now I'm very stressed and very bitter.

I have also been pondering some things about fandom and me, and how, you should know, I complain a lot about anime fandom in general and (right now) Reborn's fandom in particular. I won't deny there is a lot of fail because there is, like in every fandom. Thing is I realized that a lot of things aren't exactly for me and that makes me even bitter. No, of course I haven't just realized certain fandoms aren't for me, but the negative effect they have may be kinda bigger than I thought. Leaving aside things I find objectionable (because that's fandom life), I don't find fanish joy in a lot of things those big anime fandoms find joy. It's saying something that Reborn's fandom (well, certain sections, I still can't get over Hibari's popularity and the moe/rape obsession) has treated me better than its canon.

The thing is, I have these unhealthy fandom relationships because I have grown up with shonen and anime and I just can't let it go. I would hate to do a dichotomy where there isn't one (tangentially, sadly manga/anime and the Hollywood are two of the biggest fiction markets and the ones I can access more easily), but Western fandoms of Western fiction sometimes excite me even less.

Anyway, going for the blood. *sighs*

I DID JUST ENOUGH TO PASS. Boy, never the minimal grade required to approve felt so sweet.

But I'm tired, I haven't slept in 48 hours. I kid you not. See ya, people!

Or something.

I came back! And you know what? I spend my days in Camboriú studying P-Chem. But I went to the sea once! And saw bell! And traveling in car for 16 hours? Boy, that was the best part: there was rain, getting lost and persecutions with shooting.

No, seriously.

See, there is something about coming back home, just crossing the frontier and finding oneself in the middle of a firing. Because this is Paraguay and we are extreme. And lawless apparently. You know the contrast with Brazil having actual laws and stuff.

We were passing Brazilian customs and my father was talking about how they don't ask for documentation because we were entering our country or something, he started talking about the two Brazilian cars behind us: a small Fiat, and the one behind it, a small white car which brad I didn't see. He noticed how a group of Brazilian cops immediately went after the small white car, he thought it was due to evading documentations or something, and well, this is La Triple Frontera, so that's routine. Then I saw the Fiat, whose driver probably didn't notice what was happening, giving space to the white car to let it go ahead. The white car did. Taking the Fiat's left rear-view mirror with it. Seriously. I just saw the mirror flying and hitting the floor and then the white car was behind us. Then we heard the shootings, and saw two armed Brazilian cops on a motorcycle following the white car. My father let them pass because he sure as hell didn't want our car end like the Fiat. And they passed some centimeter besides us (because this is "El Puente de la Amistad" and this is how you cross it) with the cops making shots to the air.

Next thing we saw were the Brazilian cops coming back without nothing, of course the guy went away (we theorize it was a robbed car, the guy driving wasn't armed and was alone), and of course there were our cops and militia in our customs looking very interested in all that was happening without moving a finger.

And yeah, when Brazilian people enter our country? They don't make any documentation, our customs are non existing. Paraguay, the paradise for... car robbers.

So yeah, pretty traditional welcome home.

(I will be talking about all the rest later because I have an exam on Monday, and I haven't studied for that one at all because it isn't P-Chem and I was vacationing. So yay me.)

I will be going to Brazil tomorrow, that means I will have no internet for at least one week, I know that doesn't mean a lot to you since I was supposed to be on hiatus because I have to study for my exam which is Ferbruary 9, but it means a lot for me because I'm never really on hiatus, and always connect to internet everyday anyway, so I will miss you guys, except you, bell, because I will be seeing you!

But yay! Brazil! Even if I will be studying. D: Will call you, Bell, but I advice you my spoken English is awful.

(The good thing is when I come back there will be lots of fanwork waiting for me, you know. It's not like there isn't a lot for my current obsession Yamamoto Reborn, but I have enough problems with that fandom to speak about it outside lock, so yeah. I like when I can be selective, I'm pretty sure I have seen everything good out there.)

Love you all!

Today was a... very interesting day.

I was out all day and managed to get lost twice: going to a friend's house and coming from the same friend's house. I drove there, and, funnily enough, going was easier than coming. I just confused some blocks going there. Coming back home? Oh boy. Because she lives in a neighbor city, changing my route totally got me lost. I ended... traveling for all my fucking city.

We saw two movies, 2012 and The Proposal. Both were amazingly bad. 2012 was at least (unintentionally) hilarious and managed to have characters of color. The romantic comedy was just depressing and extremely racist, even if it had a better writer than 2012 (it was still bad though).

I know you all are dying to know how I spend my days, and who can blame you? My life is explosive. Today, for a dramatic change, I tried to do something by starting to write an app (ya saben, gente) and failed miserably. So I ended playing Chain Factor for the rest of the afternoon. The sad thing is that I'm pretty mediocre at it, I can't pass three million points in Power Mode, you will say that's high, but the truth is that it's not that much since I play non-stop every time I get frustrated with something (I don't know, there is something about exploding balls...), and as you can imagine, that's every 5 minutes. My chances to reach 5 millions, much less 10, are atill low.

Also, the light bulb of the room I'm in right now (where my computer is) got burn, and I'm too lazy to change it, so since some days ago I'm in darkness. It's kinda annoying.

Fascinating, isn't it?

I have to dissapoint you, but let's talk about other things.

Gorgeous Shohreh Aghdashloo started her acting career in Iran in movies like Shatranje bad, Gozaresh, and Sooteh-Delan. She stared in Guests of Hotel Astoria, which was her first work in the West. She also was in House of Sand and Fog, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and did a lot of TV; more prominent, 24, Smith, Flash Forward, and miniseries House of Saddam where she played Sajida Hussein. She starred in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, The Stoning of Soraya M., X-Men: The Las Stand, The Nativity Story. And boy, she is working a lot. For 2010 she has six different projects, I will just link to her IMD profile later.

Enjoy the beauty you all.



( Shohreh Aghdashloo pics )

Born in Tehran, Iran. Completed her education in Englad, and has a degree in International Relations. Her IMDB bio says something interesting: However, it was not easy getting work in Hollywood as a middle eastern actress with an accent; she had roles in some decent, though not great, films, including Twenty Bucks (1993), Surviving Paradise (2000) and Maryam (2002). She had to wait quite some time to get a "Hollywood" break.. And still, seeing some of her roles, you know The West has issues. Filmography here.

I have an exam on Monday and the way I've been slacking is not even funny. I have... been reading shoujo manga. And my internet sucks.

But.

( Otomen vol 1-3 )

Yeah, I was postponing this.

Wednesday I have an exam, and next week I have a lot of things. The heat here is awful so I don't have energy to do much else.

So see ya, people!

My health actually got worse, that's why I disappeared. Thank you for your wishes again. Now I'm better, but tomorrow I have two exams, so yeah, still on hiatus.

Thank you all for your get well wishes, you are all amazing people. I already feel much better, I went to the doctor they applied something to me (omeprazole), and I feel much better, of course I have to take care of my alimentation drastically yadda yadda.

I was going to say something else, but I don't remember what it was. :)