Fuck New Years
In the first semester i took
1. Music
2. Japanese
3. Sociology
4. Ancient History
1) Music felt extremely challenging desipte me achieving 80 (which for me is pretty fucking extraordinary) I didnt realise until the last few weeks that there was no final exam. I thought up of all these really twisted tunes to help remeber key signatures and sharps and flats and their orders but ive since forgetten them all. The first listening / aural exam felt like a breeze but the second one was so hard that i was convinced that my score for this aural exam would surely result in a fail. It hit me time and time again how lacking in creativity i was to witness all the other students either being naturals themselves or grasping the concepts really easily. I myself struggled as i saw music as strangely mathematical and rigid in its foundations obviously i just needed more studying but hear me out (dont forget how lazy i am). The only reason why i picked up music was because i wanted to learn how to sing. Talking to the coordinators they told me the best they could offer was chamber/ choir classes at the conservatorium of music. They suggested that i take music 1 and 2, joing several musically oriented societies and write a letter to the conservatorium asking to be considered as a transfer student after a year. I joined some musical choirs but felt extremely out of place due to it being full of the types of students who seemed to party from dawn till dusk and do minimal work and just enough to pass and were already in quite tight knit groups of their own. Plus they happened at around 8pm every night which was too late for me. In the end i decided if in future i wanted to learn singing id do it in my spare time if i had enough money and time. Still it was interesting composing eight bars (after all the lecturere said just keep it simple stupid). 80 wasnt too bad i guess. Thus i didnt continue it in semester two.
2) Living in a chinese household has really thrown me off from learning chinese at this point. Since high school i have watched quite a bit of foriegn films / anmations. mostly from japan. Aside from learning to understand these things i find japanese to be a slightly more ejoyable language to hear compared to mandarin which probably due to years of household conditioning just sounds like angry arguing to me. Do i like Japanese people / culture?. Having been to Japan before but not for very long i cant really say anything. No doubt there are good aspects of their culture. I very much enjoy some music like Gackt or the composer Joe Hisashi. I have seen their capactiy for good in the coming of together of community help during the tsunami a few years ago, no bullshit christian praying. Oh thats right Japan once banned Christianity. This little tidbit interested me greatly. Taking Japanese though has revealed that they banned it because how can you serve the emperor if you serve god. So there was no great hidden atheistic or secularist truth. It was merely a political decision. When i went to Japan i was impressed by the architecture and beauty of the landscape (One thing ill never forget is sitting on the bullet train . I liked a few people i met but in the end detested their superficiality and rampant consumerism. Also being a twisted person who browses the web, one finds out alot of disturbing shit about Japan such as the extremity of their pornography and the recent revelations that due to the commercialization of almost every aspect of the human relationship (e.g. ranging from holding hands with a maid in a specialized cafe to flat out extreme sexual encounters usually run by the mafia/yakuza). Fucking weird eh. Still i find that i enjoy the thriller / pscyhological animes / various animated films that are produced as well as appreciating the intricacies of their language and hope that one day i can perhaps pick up a japanese novel and understand its contents.
3. I am currently studying arts/social work, a strange combination since arts really means (take whatever units you want but still remember to pick a major) and social work because some days i care about the world and people (animals more mostly) but some days i really fucking hate humans so this will be an interesting career for me i hope since ill be dealing with people all day every day thus in my regular future day dreaming i thought if im going to be dealing with people on a regular basis id rather come home to a house with just pets and minimal human contact. But im getting wayy ahead of myself. This unit touched on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, multiculturalism and indigeneity. What have i to say? As long as liberals dont go too ape shit with their tolerance for cultural bullshit i dont really have much to say about these things. Although it was interesting sitting in tutorials and seeing people argue over mundane shit. I found my heart racing every time i spoke up (though that might just be me being a fat fuck and having high blood pressure) for example, one guy on the subject of aboriginals spoke up and mentioned that the kiwis unlike the aboriginals in australia, stood their ground and fought back with whatever means they had and that is why nowadays they are not in the same dire social situation as most aboriginies in australia. i nodded in agreement but not before the entire class flew into a massive collage of liberal muh feelings outburst of my god you racist pig scum etc.. I once contributed to the class conversation on gun violence by quoting the work of one of my musical heroes Marilyn Manson much to the dislike of many of the uptight scumbags in the class but the same guy gave me an approving nod and a thumbs up and that was good enough for me.
4. In high school i wanted to study ancient history (but was forced by my parents to learn engineering and physics instead of biology and ancient history, although i did enjoy learning about physics in the end) but over time i realised that id rather just occasionally read in my own spare time much like music/singing. I learned all sorts of things about ancient greece, was forced the read the odyssey which turned out to be one of the most brilliant works ive ever read and engaged me to the point of reading it in bed and non stop between classes i think i shall read the illad now. Anyway we learned about festivities, the lecturer made the brialliant comparison between Dionysus and Jesus and the primitive idea of sacrifice (e.g. dionysus god of wine, came down as a bull to be sacrificed and eaten among the people). Reading myths and tales and just understanding the context of everyday life in ancient greece right up to alexander the great was interesting but the lecturer sometimes just bored me to fucking death which his approach to powerpoints. I also felt very out of place because almost everyone else had studied ancient history in high school. I had to do a presentation on Thucydidies (a historian who sought to use an understanding of human nature to explain things like plagues, massacres and wars) whose 'Melian Dialogue' turned out to be a most riveting exposition which told of an imaginary dialogue between Athens as it demands the tiny island of Melos to either join tis empire or be taken forcefully.It dealt with the ideas of the corruption of too much power and while the representatives of Melos saw this as a bullying tactic athens merely saw it as the law of the jungle. The one thing that reallllly fucking pissed me off about the exam was that the lecturer laid it out as the following. 60% of the exam was to come from 2 essays and the remaining 40% to come from 25 short possibly one word answer questions. He specified that we should prepare to write about the Odyssey and the topic which we presented in tutorial. In the end theres was none for my topic so i had to bullshit 2 fucking essays on the odyssey. Its a miracle that i even got a credit. The teaching style of this unit, despite its interesting content was what made me shy away from taking further units like ancient rome.
In the second semester i took
1. Japanese 2
2. Writing 1001
3. Atheism, Fundamentalism and New Religions
4. Sociology 2
1. Not much else just more work and a really cool teacher bro who let me barge in on his lunches to ask his questions (which ironically since i havent studied i dont remember shit). After a while he would start offering food demanding that i take a piece of orange or else he would tutor me. The most interesting thing that happened during this unit was being in a group with a korean dude who had recently acquired a prositute for a girlfriend and a portugese guy who apparently had a fight with the vice chancellor of the uni. Basically these two were invovled in things i had only ever read about in the papers on the internet or from tv showsand movie movies. The portugese fellow told me about taxi scams where they somehow rig the credit card readers in taxis to remember all your details but then they wait at least 3 months before they clean your accunt out so you wont remember where you might have used your card last (not too sketchy on details but it soudned something like this). The korean guy during our practice for the japanese speaking test asked loudly would you rather your cocaine be packaged from korea or india, as they both discussed where they were going to meetup to cook up the next batch during the holidays. Well at least in arts you get to meet a wider spectrum of characters. I guess i should start practicising my japanese or else i will forget everything i learned and that would really be a waste of money. I currently own the government at least 5 or 6 k :(
2.Not much happened here, mostly bludged and just fucked around till the last assessment which was an essay that i wrote on New Atheism it was SUPPOSED to be an objective criticism of atheistic work but being biased as an atheist myself i tried to be as critical as possible but couldnt resist showing off stats and rhetorical devices that in my own opinion highlighted why atheists are right are theistic people are plain fucking stupid with regards to matters of spirituality.
3. At first it was interesting. The lecturer who i suspect is an agnostic kept issues fairly evenly spread and i was most amused by his constant walking around sometimes looking like he was about to walk right into the wall. However soon we hit fundamentalisms and their cult like behaviours, fear of modernity and a desire for the end of the world/ return to traditional values (or was i like to think of it, a return to theocracy so they can begin enslaving everyone again for their fucking stupid ideas, think the vatican in medieval times, bring on the tortures you medieval faggots). Anyway it soon started diverting into shit that was either boring to me or just downright retarded like people believing the realm of the lord of the rings and its characters were real, people who believed they were fucking vampires or fairies or other weird mythical bullshit or psychics and bullshit artists like Deeprak Chopra making money off gullible idiots looking for a quick and easy guide sprituality by choosing a variety of spiritual beliefs and mystical customs and forging their own religious / mystical perspective. (e.g. mix some taoism with quantum blah blah and some other fairy shit) Because atheism has become a major part of my identity i the last couple years, i naturally just bludged the rest of term until i had to write the essay on 'What is New about the New Atheism".
4. This term in sociology things became slightly more interesting covering topics such as deviance, family, religion and spirituality and contemporary media with issues like religion and wikileaks and government corruption and war being tasty topics for classmates to bicker on about as i sat there listening with intent. There was one dude who kept running off his mouth about how if you didnt realise the jews were behind most of the conflicts in our world then you were blind as batshit (i took every fibre of my being not to burst out laughing in the silent classroom at this fellow /pol/lack). I was extremely glad that the sociology lecturer was kind enough to let us all take 90 multiple choice questions exams as our final. However next year ill have to take very essay heavy units on mundane yet necessary ( for my degree ) units such as introduction to aboriginality, social research and inquiry methods and australian social policy. I am absolutely NOT looking forward to this year.
