Already, the crappy "personal day" and the Chinese girl dolphin...

I'm taking a personal day off to run a few errands and it's already coming out pretty annoyingly.

I was barred from this lecture I wanted to attend this morning (which, by the way, had forced me to wake up at 8AM-- I could've slept in!) by these administrators who had given me wrong information about the event. And don't even get me started on their inability to accept responsibility for their own mistake...

So now I'm sitting around a Starbucks, updating this blog (for any of you who still read this)...

One of my friends is still unable to hear from her family in Rangoon, as they have shut out all outside communications within the country to the outside world.

I don't mean to make light of a very serious situation, but Patrick Chappatte made a very telling comic about the current state of affairs on Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoons website (http://www.cagle.com/news/MyanmarMassacre/1.asp):

And I just read a story on msnbc.com about how a father bound his daughter's hands and feet, so that she could swim in China's Xiang River (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21126016/):

He claims that she *wanted* to do this, so that she could one day swim the English Channel, but a newspaper report mentioned that she came out of the cold water blue in the face.

I can't help but use this as an indictment against traditional Asian parenting. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that many Asian parents (at least from my experience) force their kids to do, and then tell the public about how the kid did so on their own accord.

Of course, all kids need *some* sort of pushing from their parents, in order to get anywhere in life-- but Asian parents seem to take things to the extreme. And even worse, they turn it into a collective societal thing, where they're always trading bragging rights with other parents.

I could go on and on about this, but I'll stop now.