What is Beauty?

What is beauty? Many people have debated, discussed and fought over what is beauty(or maybe not). To me, everything around us are beautiful in one way or another. There are beauty in good things and bad things alike, with the good things being even more emphasised as beautiful than the bad things. The good things can be categorised as two parts, the inner beauty and the 'outer' beauty. The inner beauty also can be split between a person's heart and mind. The heart is beautiful because people can be kind, helpful and all those, and that makes them beautiful. The mind is considered beautiful when the person is smart, and that makes them beautiful, with the same reason as why being kind and helpful is beautiful.

The outer beauty have many different aspects. The biggest would be the physical beauty, which is the appearance of an object or a person. The most common definition of beauty would be of the appearance of a person or object, where it is more common to be the apperance of a person. The appearance of a person have many areas where it would be classified as beautiful, for example the body, the face or the proportion of the body parts. I would not go deeper into the aspect of the beauty of the body, because it is not appropriate to talk about it, whereas I can talk about the aspect of the face. The face is sometimes considered as beautiful is because of the position of the organs, and the appearance of the organs. Also, the organs must look good when placed together for the face to be considered beautiful.

The proportion of the body parts is also very important, because if the legs or arms are out of proportion(which means they are either too short or too long), the person would not look good, even if he or she have a beautiful face. Imagine a person with legs too short and arms too long! That would make him or her look not as good as a person with his or her limbs in proportion.

After the aspect of the appearance of a person, there is the aspect of the appearance of an object. An object can be beautiful if it is crafted to perfection or if the object is rare. If the object is very exquisite, the person who own the object would gaze lovingly at it, which proves that the object is beautiful to the person. If the object is rare, a person with an interest in these objects would want it, to either add to his or her collection or to brag about it to his or her friends who also hold an interest in these objects.

There is also beauty in evil, or bad things, usually actions. An example of a negative action that could be classified as beautiful would be a robbery. There are different parts of it that could be beautiful, for example the planning of the robbery, the robbery itself and the item that is stolen. the item that is stolen would be classified as the good part of beauty, the outer beauty, so I do not need to explain it one more time.

The planning of the robbery is an art, where it is important to plan which way to get in the premises, which way to get the item and which way to escape, and each of the actions must be completed without being seen or detected. In this way, the act of a robbery can be classified as being beautiful.

There are many other aspects of beauty for bad things, and some of them are too explicit for me to explain, so I will stop here. In general, everything can be beautiful.

My First Semester as a Secondary School Student

Now I am a secondary student, and I have already passed my first semester. I quite satisfied with my results, my class allocation and most importantly, my school. As expected, the workload this year has increased by at least tenfold. Also, the difficulty of this year's work has increased.

OVERVIEW

1.) Plus sides of this year
2.) Minus sides of this year
3). Interesting points of this year
4). Future Plans for this year

1). Plus sides of this year

• I have a CCA that I have am interested in, namely the school's Military Band. My instrument in the Band is the Horn, which is the second most difficult instrument in the whole Band, right before the Oboe. Sad face :(
• There is an IS(Infocomm Studies) lesson. Now I get to learn the basic skills of Macromedia Flash, Photoshop and some others. That is great, considering that I do not know how to use any of them, and when I found out how to use them, I saw that they were extremely fun, especially Flash, where I get to make my own animation, and hopefully flash games.
• I am in the GEP again in secondary school. That is excellent as it is very difficult to continue studying in the GEP after primary school.
  

2). Minus sides of this year

• The workload of this year has increased, plus the number of times I have to stay back at school for various reasons forced me to sacrifice some, if not most of my free time during the weekends. Before this year, I could go out and spend some quality time with my family, but now I have to stay at home during the afternoons and catch up with my work.
• The difficulty of this year's work has increased dramatically, forcing me to spend more time on individual homeworks, thus increasing the time I need to complete my homework(including this). For example, I could not finish this blog prompt during lessons, and I had to rush this piece of work at night due to an exchange program right after school.
• The examinations have changed. The formats of the examinations of various subjects have changed, for example the English subject's (now known as LA, ie Language Arts) examination paper has been changed from the standard MCQ->OEQ+Composition+Oral into the more difficult Literature Paper+OEQ+Summary(and maybe there's still oral).

3). Interesting points of this year

• I have gained many new friends, and have discovered that there are people who are REALLY irritating. The new friends, whom I have acquired, have been quite good friends, helping out when a friend of theirs is in need and always looking out for each other. However, on the other hand those who are REALLY irritating just disrupts the class until the teacher had to blow his/her top.

4). Future Plans for this year

• I plan to study harder fo the rest of the year(and the rest of the years too) because my results for term 2 was not good at all, despite having a MSG of lower that 2 for term 1. I found that it is because that the subjects havce become harder, with more facts to remember, and more skills to learn. Especially LA, needing to read a whole book and needing to annotate & analyse the whole book, because the common test at the end of the term or year would be talking about the book.
  

Vegetating

This is the meaning of vegetating on urbandictionary.com

1.	Vegetating	7 up, 1 down
	The root word of Veg meaning to loaf or to relax. Normally, vegetating denotes more activity than just sitting around. So what are you doing today? Nothing but a little vegetating.

This is the meaning on the dictionary

veg·e·tate (vj-tt)

intr.v. veg·e·tat·ed, veg·e·tat·ing, veg·e·tates

1. To grow or sprout as a plant does.

2. Pathology To grow in size or spread abnormally.

3. To exist in a state of physical or mental inactivity or insensibility.

4. Informal To engage in relaxing or passive activities, such as watching television.

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[Latin vegetre, vegett-, to enliven; see vegetable.]

Contrary to popular belief, vegetating does not always mean to sit or lie around and do absolutely nothing. From the dictionary, even playing computer games is counted as vegetating. As usually being blamed by Benny to vegetate at every free time I have, I just have to clear this up. Yes, I do vegetate, but that doesn't mean I exist in a state of physical or mental inactivity.

Racism(or is it supposed to be Anti-chinaism?)

I have been silent for too long. This is getting worse, and it must stop. I do not understand why most of the students at Hwa Chong is so anti-china. I have asked many, and most of them explain themselves by saying that everyone knows how lousy the quality of China-made products are. Gradually, they link that to the people from China and will say that people from China all sucks.

I feel that they should not think like that, linking the minority of the low-quality products with the rest of all the produce of China and going on to think that China people are all 'low-quality' bad, selfish and the like. That's just blind generalising. The students(and most of my friends and classmates) are all blinded by their hatred(might be too strong a word) against China and her people.

Of course, they may have some other reasons, like the reason of why some people like to bully others. They might be troubled and wanted to push the blame on to someone else who cant fight back or could not do anything about it, either because they would not care or that they could not have the chance to hear.

Now, the situation is so bad that if there is ANY mention of China, China-made products or China people, my classmates would all simultaneously shout their comments, mostly to insult, or state that China, China-made products or China people sucks or is 'low-quality'. I have tried to stop them, or at least bring them to their senses, but to no avail. No matter what I say, they all have, and will probably comtinue having, a low impression of China, China-made products or China people. If asked, they would just bring out examples such as the San Lu milk incident or some past incident about China-made products.

Blog Prompt(Computer Gaming)

Once I was addicted to computer gaming(and maybe I still am), and that was the worst year of my life. It went like a blur and till now I still could not remember any significant events. On average, I spent 3-5 hours on the computer a day, and up to 12++ hours during the holidays. Surprised? But that's what really happened. Needless to say, my grades dropped, my eyesight went from bad to worst and I was further and further away from the people around me. That was the only year I had with my mathematics teacher that year and I had wasted the time I had to know him better. That dealt the most damage. Because of that, I lagged behind while others strived in algebra, and seeing them talk to my teacher like old friends now pains me in the heart. It makes me feel like I'm the odd one out, missing out something that they know but I don't. For school work, I had meagre grades. I talked less with my parents, spent little time with my brother and was generally being a self-exiled outcast in the house. To the pleas of my parents for me to abandon my computer just for a while and spend some time with them at the dinner table, I turned a deaf ear to them and played on. I didn't know if I lost weight, but I definitely ate less, drank less and spent less and less time outside the room with the computer. I don't know what came over me. The period of time when I changed from a hardcore gaming addict back to a normal student was/still is very fuzzy to me. Somehow, I realised my mistakes, looked back on my actions and the outcome and discovered that what I have done was very destructive to my life and then, I decided to change. The results were very significant, seeing that my results rose dramatically and more time was spent between me and my family members(mostly because I needed coaching for algebra). And from then on, computer games were not as interesting and tempting as before anymore.