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hindustani_ogre_magi
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Name: Monkey
Country: Myanmar
Metro: Yangon
Gender: Male
Interests: Pookie, CSI, More Pookies, Pookie Pookie, Pooooookie, thi bu, 8 tot mal, Hinduism, Art, Making Music, Hanging out, holding against all beliefs, not following the herd, hating myself, hating everyone else, loving everyone, bitching over politics, coffee, tea, surfing, skateboarding , Staying up at night, Running around, Revealing, hiding, talking about god (if there was one), not believing in the almighty, impossibilities, possbilities, intellectual conversations, dumb conversations, pointless conversations, and conversations in genreal, winning, trying harder, slacking off, and everything else under the sun.
Expertise: Nothing
Occupation: Student
Industry: Art
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/21/2005
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| I have moved:
http://theburman.wordpress.com/
Don't ask me why, there's not any real reason behind it. But after many years of Xanga, I will miss this blog terribly.
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| By my calculation, its been a while since I have updated my blog. As such I decided it be a nice time to do so. So my significant other is far away studying, I thought it be a nice time to keep myself busy by studying, staying active and engaging in civil society. So far my senior year has been easier that most other years. There are several factors to why this is so, firstly I am only taking three classes (as opposed to my hectic five classes per semester junior year). One of them is a philosophy senior seminar that allows me to do the research on my own for the first half of the semester. This means that I am only going to two real classes (minus gospel choir for a one credit course). So how have I stayed active? Well for one I joined the gospel choir. I figure its best to breakout of my comfort zone and try something new while I was in college. Its a good experience going to gospel every Thursday to sing praises to Jesus for a good hour and half. Besides that I have been endowed with a dual position (one of them unwillingly) as the president of the International Club and the Philosophy Club. I figure in one year its my time to go, so I might as well try to go out with a bang. Having a kitchen, a close knit group of friends and a loving girlfriend, I have been blessed with the opportunity to break new grounds. Yesterday I accomplished the 62.5 mile bike ride in an effort to raise money for Access Carroll a non profit organization that helps in medicare for the uninsured. A charming letter to the president has allowed us a good endowment of 250 dollars for the International Day of Peace starting tomorrow, where I'll kick start the event with a speech on the importance of freedom of speech in an effort for peace. The philosophy club will start a Know Your Rights! event where students can talk freely with the Campus Safety and Residence Life heads towards what our rights are as students and whether or not there were instances of violations of these rights (I'll let you guys know more about it as it progresses). For that event I have read the whole student manual to keep myself informed about what can and what we can't do as students. Its always good to know the rules and regulations that one is exposed to in a community. Tomorrow I'll meet an idol of mine Alan Robinowitz he has written extensively on conservation in Burma and is head of Panthera a conservation base for saving tigers and here's the kicker! He a graduate from McDaniel College! One of his moving books is called Beyond the Last Village a book about conservation efforts in the North of Burma. The icing on the cake is that this is an invitation to two events: the Phi Beta Epsilon charter of Maryland Honors Students and the Epsilon Phi Sigma environmental honor society for Environmental Sciences and Policy majors. Making these two organization's lists are an immense honor for me and hopefully this spirited activism that's been burning in me will continue well after college.
Until next time.
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| Have you ever been engaged in a conversation where the speaker uses the words "umm", "like" and "you know what I mean" excessively? I am not saying that I am free of this fault. But whenever someone continually states such expressions, I find it hard to concentrate on the matter at hand. Instead, I become fixated on counting the times such expressions are used and lose all track of what is being said. The excessive use of these words are fillers in a momentary gap for people to think of the next sequence of sentences that they'd want to express. So far I have made an attempt to minimize my use of these words in an effort to be less distracting to an audience that might be annoyed by such excessive use. A momentary pause of silence can be as effective and as such taking a breath can help to build better coherence. In causal conversations the use of "umms" and "likes" are not easily noticed. However, in a professional setting a presentation with excessive use of these words creates confusion and makes the presenter less confident of the subject he/she is addressing to the crowd. I wasn't always like this though. My friend in college once pointed out this annoyance and I finally caught on. Now it seems as though its the only thing I pay attention to.
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| As I start of my year with R.A. training I am again forced to confront long days of team-builders, group sessions and seminars on "how to" that are at times blatantly obvious. Maybe I am just not a touchy feely person that likes to share stores about myself or express joy in having to work together as a "team". To me many of the activities that we participate in during R.A. training seem unnecessary. I don't need to know the students that I share duty with in order for me to enforce and assist college policies. But I guess from the stand point of the college, everyone has to go through R.A. training to make sure that their asses are not on the line if in any case the shit hits the fan.
However, being back isn't too bad either. For the first time in my years of college I have been granted the privileges of a kitchen, a private bathroom shared with only two others and a living room. For the first time as a college student I am able to keep my toothbrush in the bathroom along with all the other necessary items without having to carry it back in a basket. I feel privileged and blessed even though we jokingly call the house "third world" based on its appearance and relative lack of appeal as compared to the other house. I bought a new laptop that to me still seems freakishly small, but for the price of 300 dollars I could have settled for it with great comfort. As par the agreement that I made with my Area Coordinator last semester, I was given his old T.V. I never really knew why I wanted it, but I took it back home plugged in the cable and lo and behold, the first thing to appear on T.V. was the travel channel (which happens to be one of my favorites). While watching the travel channel, I stumbled upon a program called "Wild China". To my understanding the series portrays China's flora and fauna. This time around the series was talking about the South West region of China. The series was an extensive portrayal of the lush forests surrounded by the high mountain ridges that eventually connect to China. Overall, it was an informative program, but eventually to me- as a Burmese- things started to get insulting. The first scenes were images of people fetching water and pouring it over a Buddha statue. Many of the women were wearing longyis and they then describe how the "Southern Chinese Buddhist" celebrate a festivity of water. They then describe the event as a blessing for the crops, rainfall and abundance that the people enjoy. Although they rightfully identified these people as "Tai" they failed to describe that a fair majority of these people are NOT just "Southern Chinese". The Tai happen to be fairly spread throughout the regions of Southern China, Burma, Thailand, India, Laos and Vietnam. The water festivals are not a mark of blessing for plentiful rainfall (based on the humidity and regularity of it they might even want less), it is in fact a new year's celebration. Sadly none of this was mentioned. Then they went on to explain the forest areas in Southwestern China describing its abundance while failing to mention the extensive network of biodiversity that spills over to the Burmese region. Don't believe me? Even Alan Robinowitz wrote a book on this area. However, I have to give credit when credit is due, the area does predominantly reside largely in China. Then it goes on to talk about the Lisu people, again using the term interchangeably with South Western Chinese. Was it not evident that when making this documentary that about 350,000 out of about 1 million of them reside in Burma and its recognized as one of the seven minorities of the Kachin people? Then for some reason they talk about an exotic way to build with bamboo and eat it too. For one its not native to that area, and secondly it isn't exotic. More of the population of Asia practice that than the whole population of the United States combined (okay maybe that might have been a bit of an exaggerated number but I hope you get my point). Cheeseburgers are exotic, a billion plus Asians eating bamboo is the norm, live with it. They then talked about a path that lead to the South of China that was accessible throughout the year. They descried how wars were fought for the access to this path for centuries. They fail to describe what I believe is called "THE BURMA ROAD" a quick and easy access path to get resources from China through Burma into India. It sad to see that a very well edited documentary failed to engage viewers to realize the multicultural, multifaceted and geographically diverse areas such as the South Western region of China, the north of Burma, North West India and the tip of northern Thailand. I guess in their minds for them to appeal to an audience here in the United States its best to keep it simple: They are Chinese, squinty eye people eating lots of Bamboo and that's all they need to know. Too much information might cause their fellow audience's heads to explode. Maybe one day they'll realize that Asia means more than China and Japan and maybe (just maybe) that might throw them out of whack.
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