crusin' for bruisin'

And so ends my cruise vacation in the Caribbean. I guess it was okay.

First stop was Labadee, Haiti. Apparently, the cruise company rented out a section of the country for our pleasurable use. That alone is pretty sickening, but juxtapose our private haven in the second-poorest country in the world against the recent uprising in Haiti (that doesn't effect us, we're told), and it's outright disgusting.

Climbing a waterfall in Jamaica was interesting if the place weren't completely filled with other people. And snorkeling in Haiti and Mexico was okay, though not as impressive as Hawaii.

I was blown away by Grand Cayman though; just absolutely stunning. The Seven Mile Beach is easily the most beautiful beach I've been to; the crystal clear ocean water against snow-white sand extends all the way to the horizon in mixtures of light blue and aqua. There were barely any waves, and even less people. We found a secluded spot with shallow water and no one else; it was like the perfect swimming pool stretched to infinity.

We also went to see the famous Stingray Island there, where decades of feeding the creatures have made them rather docile. We went into a shallow sand patch in the middle of the ocean, a spot crawling with people. Our guide went and caught a stingray, and brought it back for us to caress. It was a tender and loving experience with plenty of touching involved. I tried to ask for its phone number, but it said it's busy this Friday.

Being on the boat itself is a rather bland experience. Cruise vacations, I suppose, are for people who 1) likes to party and 2) goes to parties. I do neither, and as my typical self, I observe but don't participate in the fun. The trip marks the extremely rare occasion of me going to the gym three times in a week, so you can imagine.

Having so many people serving you food and cleaning your room is also a bizarre and not entirely pleasant experience. Can we be any more upper-middle class? I couldn't stand it. At least the food was great, but there was way too much of it. We were fed like cattle at designated hours, except our slaughter is delayed till hell (and rest assured we are going to hell for this). There's a chapel here providing Sunday service; at least some people are feeling guilty.

I hear the leftover food are chopped up and dropped into the ocean for the fish. This means that there are fish who live on a steady diet of beef. How's that for messing up the ecosystem.

The ship is also one of the whitest spaces I've been to. You can count the number of Asian families on your hands. This put me in a rather self-conscious position; everyone assumes I cannot speak English. They probably also think I eat their first-born sons, though I actually prefer daughters. Ah, we funny Asians in a white men's world, doing white men's stuff and eating white men's food. Welcome to the upper society, punks. Boy did I feel out of place.

In conclusion, cruise vacations are boring if you're not on your honeymoon with five hundred bucks a day to spend on alcohol. And your wife better be hot too.

A friend envisions a future where cars can read your mind, know where you want to go, and take you there. I think it'd be just too embarrassing when my car keeps stopping in front of the strip club.

My Tirade Against Finals

Well, so I've decided to be less clever with my blogs so that there will be some blogs. From now on, only mundane, boring ramblings from a cranky guy.

Do I have to rant about finals? Let me rant about finals.


We know that we forget the specifics of what we learn immediately. Such is the nature of memory. Yet this does not invalidate education; the details are lost, but the broad concepts stay. The point of education, then, is to train us to be able to pick up any concept easily at any point, when we need it. Pity be they engaged in majors like biology, where there are no broad concepts and only details.

Too many people forget this. We're not in school to learn; we're in school to learn how to learn, to develop the discipline to learn. That we have to choose a major is merely a dose of reality, the necessity of a job after we graduate, and the impatience of employers to train people from the ground up.

Unfortunately, of the people who lose sight of this, professors are among the most prominent. Those requiring students to remember every detail for the sake of remembrance forget the purpose of education and must be subjected to re-enacting a scene from Pulp Fiction. We all know which scene I'm talking about.

The mythical "final" then is a pointless, clinical requirement for you to recall one last time details that you've acquired from the semester, for no specific need whatsoever. It flies against the very idea of education altogether. It is a selfish, narcissistic act on the test-giver's part, and a useless, futile struggle against human memory on the student's part.

Should you, then, refuse to take your finals on these grounds? Only if you're a dumbass.