ammar85's Xanga

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:52:12 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7675866.stm

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 05:07:02 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7644659.stm

i love how BBC does these photo shoots. in the first pic...yes that is people extending all the way outside the mosque. my only dissapointment is they are so small, when i know that these pics are probably huge

BWAHAHAHAHAH

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:57:56 GMT

http://www.sbs.com.au/salamcafe/

awesomeeeee...i love this! I'm watching them all =)

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:55:03 GMT

maybe education is like women

you spend forever studying them

but you are never really confident that you understand the material

hmmmm is it true? I said this to a friend without really thinking about it. i think it is kind of funny...we think its obvious, but that is only because its foundation is on an ontology that is quietly accepted.

I think people in general may have trouble understanding each other - it need not apply to simply guys or girls. Even the people who think that they have the best 默契 (mo4qi4) can still find themselves to be thinking on a different level.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:44:36 GMT

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah-palin-gender-card

AHAHAHAHAH...awesome. Daily Show knows exactly how to hit the issues correctly

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:43:43 GMT

我知道你最忙、也没有时间写信，忙不过来。因此，你周末，如此星期天，可以发个电子邮件。我不会生气

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:17:39 GMT

CONFUCIUS SAY: HE WHO HAS HOPE HAS EVERYTHING

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:31:55 GMT

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

====================================

JK Rowling spoke this year for Harvard here are some good parts......realllly good parts that just made me think "Dayum, any GOOD speech can be applied in any situation"

I watched it first and then read it...I suggest to do both

==================

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

Monday, June 02, 2008

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:54:04 GMT

http://womensinfidelity.com/
oooh interesting info! Men be careful of this information so we can defend ourselves, and women you should look for those signs in yourself! Can't live in a marriage on pure ecstasy now, can we?

Monday, June 02, 2008

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:32:54 GMT

to the CA culture night partly cause friends (one quit at the last minute grr) asked me to go and I could get some extra points. Not like I Care though...I'm trying hard not to fail everything lol. It was good; I did miss some parts, but I enjoyed it overall and was easily caught up on what happened.

It presented a story of two friends in the 1970s with immigrant parents; after high school ends they pursue radically different paths in life.
One pursues his acting career that he wants, and is subsequently dis owned by his family. However, he pursues the dream that he truly desires...and he finds out it isn't perfect. In fact, it is hard and at times he finds himself acting in roles he never wanted to do, or acting in languages that he doesn't want to act in (ie: 他其实想要用英文讲话）.
The other listens to his parents and attempts to ignore his passion for guitar - he studies the entire time because his parents want him to be a doctor. When they find out he has secretly been playing the guitar they flip out and go crazy and force him to give it up. later, he ends up meeting a girl, and before he knows it he is at a dinner table quietly questioning his past as his parents are over joyed at his being a doctor and having a wife (they even encourage his younger sister to go marry a doctor!)

The former realized that that he needed to pursue his own dream of acting as he prefers; but he has do it on his terms. Not pretending to live his life while doing the bidding of others. He makes a decision that does just that, although he learns to go from a wild dream about fame to being humble and appreciating the start of his own small theatre.
The latter finally wakes up and is reinvigorated by a chance to play the guitar. Even as his mother explodes at finding out that he did not give up the "child's toy", he stays strong and persists. He is in med school and his wife is pregnant, so she has to accept that there are certain things that he wants to do. When he foots a huge amount of money to help his friend buy the theatre, his wife who opposes and never really understands could not stop him from doing as he truly wanted. Besides, he is an adult, how can his parents control him?
The play ends with them searching for "younger" talent [lol at age 28 or so...] (although I left out huge portions, but I'm talking about what I'm interested in discussing) at their own theatre during auditions...

In the end I see it like this - we cannot burn our bridges and ignore everyone around us to pursue our dreams. We may find out that our dreams will not materialize as we envision, and instead we only find it hard, if not impossible to go back across for assistance.
At the same time we cannot allow our own will to be controlled by others, no matter how caring they are. The mom said it was the happiest day of her life when she admitted she was pregnant and the son going through Med school. She felt all the pain that she went through in their home country and coming to the US was entirely for their son, so he could live a stable life, and so their grand kids will never experience the same challenges that they did. But it makes viewers ask if stability is the same as mundaneness , and inability to control ones own fate truly stable? I wonder.

We need that middle ground; we have to acknowledge and thank those who have assisted us, but we need to create our own paths at the same time. We must ensure that no matter the direction we take - the path is open. Who knows if others will walk that path, but it should be open to allow that option.