2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)

Hybridisation

Some science fiction story I read a while ago (I think it was David Brin's "The Uplift War" proposed that in the future almost everyone will be a near-uniform shade of light brown - that is, ethnic groups will pretty much disappear due to mixed marriages. I doubt that will happen. I don't have any structured argument as to why...just a feeling that people will cling to ethnicity and race will persist long into the future.

Even space exploration and colonisation, should they ever happen, will tend to follow rather than erase ethnicity, since nations will end up claiming planets and constructing space stations by themselves, once there's enough to go around.

What I've been noticing is that certain kinds of mixed relationships tend to be unidirectional for the most part. There are lots of East Asian women (ethnic Chinese, Japs, Koreans) married to white men, but no E. Asian men married to white women that I know personally, and only one such couple that I know of. On the bus and around town here in Madison, I see lots of black guy - white girl couples, but I haven't seen any going the other way.

I don't know enough about black and white culture in the US to speculate about the latter, but I can come up with theories about the former till the cows come home haha.

I dunno lah...if I'm going to fulfil any stereotypes about Chinese women and white guys, let me be the arse-kicking kungfu assassin babe.

There's a frigging EPIDEMIC of yellow fever at my church. It's kinda funny.

On my mother's side, my sibs and I are the only Chinese grandchildren because my mum's younger sisters married, in order, an Englishman, a Malay, and an American. It's rather ironic that it's my Malay cousins and not us who can speak Mandarin, however, because they went to Chinese school. I feel so bananafied.