Borrowed a book from the library as the holidays started: ‘Writings on an Ethical Life‘ by Peter Singer, who is an Australian philosopher and professor of bioethics (according to the blurb). It’s a collection of his writings from all over- books, interviews. It was a really interesting book, raised a lot of really cool questions! I want to share some of the fascinating things he brought up.

Do you think abortion is acceptable? I’ve always thought that it should be. I’m always against the ‘pro-life’  people over in America, it seems (does that mean I’m anti-life?).. It just seemed more rational to me to put the needs of the human that was already alive with connections to the world ahead of the foetus that hasn’t even been born yet. Singer is of a similar opinion: he defines creatures (humans or non-humans) as ‘persons’ if they are “a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places”. A foetus or infant, he says, is not a person. Therefore the needs of the actual person should be valued higher than the non-person….

Singer discusses infanticide as a logical continuation of the thinking about abortion. He has quite convincing and seemingly rational arguments… yet I squirmed at that concept a bit when I first read about it. He argues that in some cases, say with a very sick or deformed infant, parents should be allowed to perform infanticide. Why does this scare me a lot more than abortion does? In essence it is the same, just the baby is outside in the open and not inside the womb. Yet, thinking about it afterwards, my initial disgust has been subdued. It does make sense, on some levels. If the parents do not want to care for such a sick child, and the child itself would suffer throughout its life, perhaps killing the child could be ethical?

I wonder why I can accept abortion but the idea of infanticide is so repellent. Is it just because the baby has been born, or because it’s bigger than a foetus, more developed?

They’re sensitive subjects, but I feel I have to think about them (it’s seems downright unethical to avoid the subject!). I want to find more books about practical ethics, it’s fascinating, and I think making up one’s own mind about what ethics and morals one chooses to practice. Atheistic me is not planning on taking my ethical ‘rules’ from any holy book, I want to think about them and make my own decisions.

Woah this turned very deep Sorry. I like ranting about this stuff. I had one of the best debates in my life when I brought euthanasia up (also discussed in Singer’s book) when I was in the city with a friend. It lasted like 40 minutes, we sat on the top floor of some McDonald’s somewhere, to be able to sit down and talk about it… fun! Debates are really good, when the other party is willing to listen and discuss

But yeah. ‘Writings on an Ethical Life’ by Peter Singer.. it doesn’t only discuss abortion and euthanasia, but poverty, animal cruelty, ’speciesm’… If this stuff interests you, you should go over to a library and find it. A fascinating read.

I hope that if I offend anyone, you will debate the point with me, and have an open mind. Comment!

11 Comments | Permalink

Tags: book, ethics

I’m just going to admit it:

my half-yearly’s went terribly.

At least, it feels like it, and I hope the results will turn out not to be as bad as I think. Physics, admittedly, was quite an enjoyable exams (in the loosest sense of the word- still an exam, after all) but the other three I did felt awkward, cumbersome… Economics especially, where practically the whole paper targeted an area which I had thought was quite trivial and had only glossed over in study…

Hey, it’s better I get a ‘wake-up call’ now than later on. I’m glad I have these holidays now, because the stress of the past few weeks have been getting to me. Honestly, I’m going to do some serious work on my subjects, try and put as much time as I can while still staying sane and getting some relaxation time in. Because if I don’t deal with this now, this block that it seems I’m starting to have for the HSC, things will not…. go well. Hmm.

I’m keeping things in perspective, don’t worry! Though I must give myself more motivation, more drive to study. I think I’m going to change that word, by the way. Saying ’study’ over and over is starting to lost its meaning. It doesn’t really mean anything, anyway, a vague expression. It feels like it’s stagnating, I just lose any enthusiasm the moment I think of ’study’. What word could I use to counter this, do you think? I like ‘overlearn’, which I heard somewhere the other day. It suggests doing more than is expected of oneself, overperforming– your brain can never really rationalise to yourself that you’ve ‘overlearnt’ the most you can, though it can easily say you’ve ’studied enough’. Do you know what I mean? Other words, expressions… goal-actions, exam-luck-making. I dunno ;)       But I don’t think it’s a trivial thing to substitute one word for another in one’s thinking. I mean, thoughts are important, and words alter them, right?

Hmm.

Do you know, last year when I was in this rapturous state of enthusiasm and optimism for the HSC (and thus began this blog) I expected a period, in the middle, where I would feel hopeless, pessimistic, unsure of myself. I’m sure I wrote a sentence about it in one of my earliest posts– I may go back and search for it, quote it. The point is that I think this is that time– strange that it should come about now, March-April, just when I’d thought it would. Do you think I’m just very good at predicting myself, or is my current mood somehow come about because of my prediction? A subconscious fulfilling of a ‘prophecy’?   I’m not sure, but I sincerely hope I’ll get out of this state of mind. I’m sure you, if you’re a regular reader, are probably starting to get irritated at it, too

Some serious massive action these holidays. That’s what I need, to get myself back into ‘the game’ (I watch waaaay too much tv - why do I resort to these american clichéd phrases so often? I need to write more :/ ) …. to recover from this disappointing exam period and from this insipid negativity.

I can reach my goal! It doesn’t mean I will, but it is definitely not impossible. I just need to focus on its achievability.

Thanks for reading. More cheery stuff coming, I promise, I’m going to do some blogging this coming fortnight

3 Comments | Permalink

School is intense right now. Exams next week, with an assessable I have to finish and send on thursday, with an extension english assessment to worry about at the same time. Aah, so much to do! Yet it feels like I’m not doing anything, nothing feels enough.

Also, my energy has been really bad the past few weeks, though I’ve been sleeping lots compared to before. I’m thinking that it may be due to the complete absence of exercise since I broke my wrist, so now that my cast came off last Friday I’m eager to get back to the gym and hopefully get my energy levels up again. Feeling tired all the time is terrible! So irritating!

So I hope you can understand that I haven’t been blogging in a while There are a lot of things I want to blog about, and I think about it often, but I haven’t been able to summon the enthusiasm to actually write very often. I think that’s only going to get worse as the year goes on, so from now on I’ve decided that I’m not going to feel guilt for not posting– I’ll just decide I’ll reduce my posting rate significantly, perhaps only a couple of posts per month. But I am going to keep the blog alive, in a kind of hibernation, and then once the HSC’s finished I can renew it and start writing regularly again…

Ooh, news! Do you remember my idea about being an au-pair for a gap year next year? Well I’ve found a wonderful family that I’ve been in communication with and, fingers crossed, I can go to stay with them, and fulfil that au pair dream! I’m really excited. Now I need to dig into this mountain of HSC work and stay on top of it, try to get the best UAI possible…

Good luck for your exams, if you have them. I’m off to write a practice English essay….  see you!

6 Comments | Permalink

Tags: au pair, energy, exams, stress

I have to rant about last Sat’s experience with a university librarian (studid people annoy me so much!!!)…

So I went to USYD to do some research for the next cosmo assignment, on the evolution of models of the universe, and decided to go to the Science library first and see if there were any books to borrow, and if so, I’d wander over to the card centre at Fisher library and get myself a library card.

At the library, of course, all the shelves are marked with numbers (542.576-549.34, like that), because the books are arranged thematically, right? But I couldn’t find a poster with corresponding translations for the numbers, so I went to the librarian to ask whereabouts the astronomy shelf was.

Me: Hi, could you please point me in the direction of the astronomy/cosmology books?

Librarian: Well. …. Wha-?

Me: I’m a year 12 student researching for an assignment and I need to look at some cosmology books. I haven’t got a card so I can’t log into the computers to look at the online directory. Can you just point me the direction?

Librarian:  I don’t know if you’re aware, but, this is a University library. The material here is quite advanced, you may not be able to understand it… why don’t you go look in a public library?

GRRR  I’m so proud of my ability to stay calm in such situations.  What an annoying, dumb woman- where does she thinks first-year undergrads come from? Perhaps they pop out of the ground, or suddenly materialise out of thin air? Of course, they come from year 12’s! Is the intelligence of a year 12 really so far apart from the intelligence of a university-being?  Argh her assumption was so illogical, she was just…. aaargggh.  I don’t want to degrade myself to petty name-calling but I am so, so tempted. She still pisses me off, thinking about her a week later.

Luckily I managed to find the books anyway, then at Fisher library everyone was super-nice and pleasant. I win. Imbecilic librarian loses. Mwahaha.

8 Comments | Permalink

So, last Monday, instead of walking home from school to my old house, I walked the unfamiliar yet shorter route to our new house, and was greeted with a chaos of boxes and furniture, higgledy-piggledy… there is still a scrambling to find stuff- drinking glasses, toilet paper, but it’s starting to get better.

I won’t bore you with the quite commonplace act of moving, I’m sure you’re familiar with it. I want to talk about something I realised- the link between moving and habits.

I once heard someone talking about habits through a metaphor I really liked. (I should really start writing stuff down when I hear it, so I can reference it at times like these…). They talked about how one’s habits are like a little plot of earth, where you can grow flowers and vegetables and things- useful stuff. Good habits are cultivated, and you need to spend time on them, carefully watering and fertilising. However if you let things be and don’t actively cultivate your little garden, weeds will grow, just as bad habits do, and they can very easily become deeply-rooted in the earth, killing the good plants and making a lot of work for you if you want to deweed it.

I’m going somewhere with this, believe me 

But I think habits are often deeply related to where one lives, so if you move to a new place, you’ll start, essentially, with a new plot of land…  When you move, you’ll bring physical things with you- boxes, furniture- and you’ll unpack them into their new surroundings, getting rid of some things along the way. You bring some habits with you, too, taking little seedlings with you from your old ‘garden’ and replanting them into your new, clean ‘garden’. If you’re not careful with the fragile plantlings of your old good habits, they may not survive, with weeds taking their place, just as a great exercise regime or a nice morning habit you had going may fail when you go through the huge change of a move. However if you take that little extra care of your new garden, and cultivate your habits, the seedlings you brought with you may grow into the full plants they were before, and you can keep weeds - bad habits- from creeping into your garden again.

I love metaphors, can you tell?  Is this a bit too vague, or do you understand what I mean?

See, I’ve been very messy the last few months. I try to clean up, but any attempts to tidy up and make my bedroom nice are usually thwarted within mere hours by my bad habits of, say, dropping clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up again. However I found that right now, I feel really motivated to keep my new little room tidy, and it has been ever since I moved in (which, admittedly, was only three days ago, but I think if I never make the first exception- if I never neglect the flowers and let the weeds in- I can keep it going!).

I think moving to a new place is a great way to kick-start your habits, because it’s like a fresh start. A brand new plot of land, instead of your old one overrunning with weeds and mutant potatoes vines.

I hope this made sense :)    I really like the idea. I don’t care if it works in principle or not, because it makes me feel optimistic about change, and I like optimism

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Already, end of another week. Term 1 is almost over! Less than three weeks before the half-yearly’s start… frightening, and exciting…

I’m sitting here in an empty bedroom, apart from furniture. It feels very strange: the bookshelves look like little hollow rooms of their own; the walls are bare; my desk has nothing but a laptop and an economics textbook, whereas just a few days ago it was covered with all kinds of study junk.

It’s fun to move, but I should really devote next week to preparing for the half-yearly’s than unpacking my room in the new house. I suppose it couldn’t be helped, and I’ll try to make the most of it- but getting back into some kind of routine will take some real willpower on my part :)     I read, somewhere, about a study about willpower recently. Apparently, it’s not a renewable resource, which depends on you just being ’strong’ enough– it’s more like a muscle, and if you use it for too long at a time it becomes tired.  Which may explain why it’s easier to force oneself to do work in the mornings than it is after one comes home from a full day of school..

Anyway. I’m going to set three goals for myself next week:

1. Unpack my room in the most time-efficient way I can
2. Do all the research I need for the next Cosmo assignment, so I can start writing next week
3. Do at least 4 hours of half-yearly revision per subject

I feel like I need as much of the cosmo assignment done, as soon as I can, because I know that I’ll be given notification of an Extension English assignment within a few days, due ~week 9, and the exams start week 10 (which is also when the cosmo thing is due), so everything’s going to be happening all at once  Better be mildly stressed and work hard all the way through the next few weeks, than relax now when I’ve got little urgent stuff and be super-stressed in a fortnight’s time.

. Enjoy your week, too, people!

**

Haha, I can write with my right hand again! Hurrah.

10 Comments | Permalink

Today I went to UNSW for an intense all-day debating session- we debated a total of three times. I actually really enjoyed the day, which surprised me, as I’ve never before actually enjoyed debating!

The first time I took part in a debate was around August last year, so I felt I was disadvanted compared to those who’d been practising since primary school, and it’s taken this long for me to get my confidence up enough to find some enjoyment in the ’sport’– before it just felt like this huge humiliation session, where poor unexperienced me and my less-than-perfect team members lost again and again to articulate and confident opponents..

I was really glad I went today and didn’t chicken out (I really wanted to!) because I feel like I learnt a lot and we improved consistently throughout the day— we even won one of the debates! (Finally breaking over a year-long losing streak  ). Now I feel really good about this, ready to take part in the actual competitions starting in Term 3.

This all shows that you can’t grow or develop yourself without doing something that you find challenging, or that scares you. We learn most through our failures, right? Hopefully, my team will start winning a few more debates from now on 

**
Hope everyone had a good week… I got a really shitty economics mark back for our most recent assignment, so I’m feeling a little stressed right now (though, only a 10% weighting (I got 78%) so I should be able to recover from it, as long as I do well in the half-yearly’s…). The good thing about doing really badly in some less significant assignment is that my motivation to work has increased exponentially- I was really proud of the ~4-5 hours I got in yesterday afternoon 

7 Comments | Permalink

Tags: challenge, debating, experience, learning, tough

I just had a little mini-insight and I want to share it with you.

You know how teachers and other study-advisors always talk about taking breaks during study, right? You must have heard it at least once, I feel like I’ve heard it dozens of times: it’s to take advantage of the Curve of Forgetting, the primacy/recency effect etc. Take breaks every 15 to 45 minutes…

The problem in my head when I was told this was what to do during the break. See, people said that you must not under any circumstances read anything, or watch tv, or anything else which distracts your mind and/or may persuade you to stay away longer than 5 minutes from study. But they didn’t give anything concrete for me to shape my mind around, so I was confused, and what I’ve been doing is just going down to the kitchen, getting a glass of water, usually being distracted by something…

Tonight I was making a time plan for tomorrow, because I have a very big English assignment due on Tuesday and very little had thus far been accomplished: I know I need to put some serious work in tomorrow, especially seeing as I’ve already got sleepover plans and picnic plans with people the rest of the weekend  ;)  Anyway, I’d done this plan, and in summary, it looks like this: 6.00, wake up, start work on english- 13.00, eat lunch- 16.00 stop working on english. Yaay.

Then I was doing something in my room and realised it was messy- there are batteries, copper wire, magnets lying around from my physics assignment, clothes all over the floor, wastepaper basket spilling over- and my first thought was to take time out of my time plan to do some cleaning. My second thought was- I don’t need to do that- I can do those menial clean-up things during the breaks!

Which led me to think of things one can do during tiny study breaks that require little to no mental energy yet are necessary… therefore making one productive even during breaks 

• empty wastepaper basket
• water pot plants
• put clean clothes back in wardrobe
• tidy floor
• take used plates, tea cups etc down to kitchen
• make bed
• run up and down stairs a few times
• help parents out & empty dishwasher or something 

This may seem like a most silly or ‘loser’ish list to you. But for me, this is great, because it means I have some kind of dedicated time to do this stuff (which otherwise would be left totally undone for days, weeks at a time… you know how teenage rooms can look, right? hehe) and it doesn’t make them huge hassles. Also it breaks the task of ‘cleaning room’ down from one huge step to lots of small steps that, accumulated, make your bedroom a more pleasant place to be :)  And most important, I won’t be aimless and open to distractions (theoretically), because instead of thinking ‘oh, I’m taking a break now. what should i do? Ooooh facebook/little brother/watch tv’  I’ll have a thing to do: ‘I’m taking a mental breather by watering my pot plants. When I’m done I’ll study again’… it’s more absolute, you know? More manageable, less prone to distraction, less confusing…

What do you do when (if) you take breaks while studying?

***

My wrist has now gone from a sling and half-plaster-cast to a full fibreglass cast, and no sling, and some hand function. Which is staying on for 4 weeks…. At least it’s waterproof, so I can shower, and swim, again- yay! Will blog about left-handedness and ambidexterity soon. Being forced to use my non-dominant hand has taught me some things..!

8 Comments | Permalink

Tags: breaks, organisation

Dad’s in the process of converting some old video formats onto a hard disk, in time for some pre-move decluttering (turns out we’re actually moving in a fortnight or so, not quite so hurriedly as next weekend, which is good!).

These old videos are mostly holiday clips from the middle of the 90’s, and they are so cute to watch. You see yourself as a two-year old, waddling about like a duckling, and with probably the same level of vocabulary… It feels so strange watching yourself doing things, when you have absolutely no memory of any of it! I’m sure you have similar experiences with videos like it… worst is when the parent seems to find it so fascinating that they keep the camera on you for many minutes at a time, while you are doing soething not particularly exciting over and over again. The first ten seconds are cute, then it just gets a bit repetitive, you find yourself thinking ‘oh, just do something already,  you boring baby!’…

But yeah, it’s fun, and it made me think of how I want to record things like this, too.. Videos are so much fun, as are photos, or at least they have the potential to be. I want to record my life! The prospect of looking back on these things, in a few years, decades- they seem amusing, wonderful…

I’d just have to make sure I’d edit them down a little bit… I mean, it’s not a bad thing to take 7 continuous minutes of your toddler sitting gurgling on the carpet, and if at 4:08 they do something sensationally funny, then that’s great– but if I did it, I’d edit the tape down afterwards. You’ve got to make it bearable for the next generation 

2 Comments | Permalink

Tags: childhood, records

I hope you can tell what my crude little sketch here is meant to represent, though I’d understand if you didn’t- not only are my drawing skills not exactly amazing, but I drew it with my left hand.

That’s right, my right hand is in a cast!

I’m right-handed!

I’m reminded of the last comment Charles left:

Wow, it’s like destiny… karma…

On Friday, at lunchtime, we were having a bit too much fun, there was a minor … bean-bag accident… I was pushed backwards, landed on both my wrists, my right one apparently took a bit too much force, after a few minutes something like the size of a large marble had swelled up on it, I couldn’t move my wrist, I could hardly move my fingers…

SO now I’m in a half-cast, and doctor says I probably have a small fracture (the x-rays were unclear, apparently…).

At least I’ll get left-handed writing practice. LOTS of it.

Great news, isn’t it?

5 Comments | Permalink

Tags: accident

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• Hello there! I'm Jess, this is my blog where I talk about anything I want. I'm mostly experimenting with goal-setting and things right now: if I set a goal (like 100 UAI) and work towards it, could I get close to achieving it? All in fun and curiosity of course!

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  Latest on Mon, 10:12 pm

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