Snu the Kitten

        Once upon a time, there lived a little kitten named Snu. Snu was the cutest little critter ever. Being abandoned at birth, Snu had wandered around until she was taken in by a pack of stray dogs. Perhaps it was the initial display of bravery the little kitten had shown, but the dogs had decided that she was worthy to be part of the pack.

        With that, Snu's life began to take flight. Quite literally. Barely 2 weeks after being adopted into the 'family', Snu had began to develop her primal instincts. But she chose the wrong prey and ended up being dragged into the air when she clamped down on a wild duck's leg. Being stubborn, Snu didn't let go as the bird took flight, with the pack of dogs below suddenly adopted human behaviour and stood at attention as they saluted Snu to her death.

        That was not the end.

        The duck was very aware from the beginning that the kitten did not belong anywhere. Snu had an unfamiliar scent on her, due to her being a feline that mixed around with dogs. The duck sensed that Snu was still young, and took her in as one of her own. By now, Snu was quite scared to death, hanging in the sky by a duck's leg. After another 2 minutes of flight, the Duck Queen(sudden character development!) landed in her kingdom of ducklings and....male ducks in general. Snu released her clamp onto the Duck Queen's leg and collapsed on the ground, exhausted from holding on.

         When Snu awoke, she felt the soft down feathers of ducklings cuddled up against her belly. It was so warm and fine, but it could not suppress her hunger. Snu was a sensible kitten. She realised that the fact she wasn't dead was a sign that the Duckdom was a peace zone, so to speak. So Snu got up and ventured out to the river, where more than half of the ducks were. The Duck King spotted her, and nudged her to the river side, despite Snu's instinctive fear of water. There, he taught Snu how to float and catch fish. After only 6 attempts, Snu nabbed her very own fish with a swipe, hitting the fish out of the river and onto the river bank. The Duck King was impressed.

          However, there was a sudden storm. A huge gust of wind blew, and began to sweep everything away. The ducks all waddled to the river and anchored themselves by half submerging their bodies in water, but Snu could not do the same. It was not before long, when Snu began to get swept away by the wind. a tumbling ball of fur. The ducks in the river quacked in unison to bid farewell to their newfound brother.

         Drifting along in the wind was not as great as flying while biting onto the Queen Duck's leg. While flying, Snu was clear of all obstacles; the only danger was falling 15 metres to her death. Drifting was a different matter though. Snu ran into almost every possible obstacle --- trees, rocks. fences, people even. It was a whirlwind ride for Snu as she once again passed out mid way.

         What happens to Snu now? To be continued...

Stress

Sources of stress  

      Stress has become something that many people have to deal with as of late. Ultimately I feel that its not just your usual activities which you consider a bore that are your sources of stress,  but many other things as well.

      However, let's talk about the main sources first. 

      Work or studies

       Certainly everyone alive would have some form of responsibility to deal with, and with the exception of those who are retired, people would normally have to deal with working stress or stress from studies. These two parts of our life can be said to be the most important and have the most effect on us. This is mainly why we are so careful when dealing with these two matters, and that makes us stress out. Though as long as the right attitude is adopted, these two should no longer be a source of stress.

      Friends

       Friends have a major influence on our life, and though most of the time they aren't a source of stress, they can be. Usually in growing teenagers who lack the capacity to make decisions while unaffected by their emotions, the wrong group of friends can be an influence on your lifestyle, often for the sake of appearing cool or popular. The stress often arises when a teenager has conflicting emotions, primarily caused by internal conflict while deciding whether or not to conform to their friends' ways. For example, Tommy started smoking, even though he knows it bad, due to constant pressure from his friends. Friends don't always have a negative influence, even though the influence may end up having a bad effect on the teen. A teen may start to feel pressured from not being able to be as sporty or as academically adept as his friends. This is the most common type of stress in teenagers.

       Society

        Another thing that all humans face are the humans around them. A person always has to adapt depending on what kind of people they are dealing with. While everyone would be under pressure to do so, there are particular groups of people who get extra stressed out in the situation, namely socially inept people. The reason why this is such a big deal is because we all have to learn to conform to others no matter what stage we are in life. You always hear all the motivational talks going on about being yourself and how it would build your confidence if you learn to make other's accept you for who you are. But clearly that is not the issue as everyone has to conform to someone else sometimes in their life. Clear examples are dealing with a difficult teacher, impressing your annoying boss, putting on a front around family members et cetera. Some people find trouble in facing these kind of situations.

        Yourself

          When all of the above combine, you arrive at the worst kind of stress--- stress that originates from yourself. As you start to realise that you are subpar, or you cannot deal with certain situations, you become stressed out as you try to figure out why. True, the onus is on you to improve yourself, and to a certain extent stress would be healthy. But a lot of the time the stress from overthinking things makes a person start to doubt themselves and their abilities. Self-inflicted stress is the worst type as it normally sprouts from external sources of stress, making it the hardest to reduce as you would have to deal with all the external stress first before actually dealing with the internal stress.

Is being open-minded really an issue?

Many misconceptions are arrived at when someone say they are open-minded or "sick". The main thing would be that said person is a pervert, or is a loner who can't find anyone to mix with him.

All of these ideas you have about open-minded people are usually wrong, as being open-minded usually means that you probably have a wider knowledge of things, as well as have a different view on matters. Of course, society tends to look down on those who have such attributes.

Why?

Because they find they are unable to keep up with what the person is thinking. Humans are comfortable because they are unable to understand to most extents what other people or animals are thinking, and thus they are able to devise methods to deal with certain problems when such psychology is involved. 

However, it is precisely because of such a factor that humans are in fact the slowest to adapt. 

Thanks to evolution of the mind, humans now make it necessary to understand something if they are to adapt. They worry more about risk and calculation than actual outcome.

Pulling the topic back to open-minded people, society tends to shun such open-minded people and their thoughts because they can't understand what the person is thinking. To them it's unfathomable why a person would be casually asking a girl how having her period feels like, or why men circumcise their sausages.

So really, when a person asks a question like that, it's not because they are having a hormonal imbalance and feel extremely horny at that moment, but that they genuinely want to know. And the easiest way to find out is by asking.

Of course there will be your usual perverted friends(let's not call them perverts) who crack sick jokes et cetera, but ultimately most open-minded people are just your average Joe with a broader mind. 

Is it really tantamount for open-minded people to conform the the limitations of "normal" people?

I don't think so. your thoughts should never have to be restricted by others just because a minority might be offended, excluding racism and discrimination of course.

In all honesty, I only hate Valentine's Day and not Chinese New Year, but what the heck.

Valentine's Day is mainly depressing due to the thought that you are single. Not that it really affects you much, but more of the feeling that you are unwanted. People tend not to mind so much towards their public displays of affection normally, but on Valentine's Day it's even worse. Imagine all the roses and all the cupcakes which are of course unnecessary.

Certainly, if you are really a proper couple, there is no need whatsoever for you to have that one special day of the year to really show how much you ABSOLUTELY LOVE your significant other. That's what anniversaries are for.

As for single people, it's good and bad. There are those people who get lucky or finally manage to impress their crush. Then, there are those poor lowlifes who get the shit rejected out of them. So bad that they might even commit harakiri(not literally cutting open their bellies though).

Chinese New Year, however, has only two things to hate. Firstly is unwanted social exposure when meeting with relatives you are not familiar with or you just do not like. The second dislike would be getting sick or fat due to overeatting. You know, because cookies taste sooooo good and chinese food can be a bit rich.

So to simplify things, in my opinion, Valentine's Day is absolutely unnecessary as opposed to the wonderful and much awaited Chinese New Year.

So, my birthday is on the 6th of September, which happens to be a really nice date because if written out in DD/MM/YY format its 6/9/98. So 69.....

ANYWAY, regarding events that happened on 6th September 1998,

1. The third and final penumbral lunar eclipse in the year 1998 took place on this date. The regions that were able to view the event was Australia, most of Asia, most of South America, most of North America. Without having any actual impact on the world, this was probably the last lunar eclipse some people saw in their lifetime.

2.The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales took place in London on the 6th of September 1997. Well over a million people lined the streets and 2.5 billion watched around the globe on television. Many tears were shed.

3.In the year 1989, the French police computer network had one of its biggest screw-ups in history, resulting in 41000 Parisians being accused of murder and prostitution(whether they were actually guilty of it, I hope so). Due to the network having to be rewritten, most data on petty criminals were lost.

4.In the year 1949, 4 years after WWII, the Allied forces relinquished the assets of the former Nazi Germany(Hitler's party) to the New Germany, Germany was then able to rebuild and restore the country to a first-world country.

5.Princess Juliana of Netherlands ascended to the throne in the year 1948 after her mother's abdication. During her reign, Indonesia(Dutch East Indies) and Suriname became independent from Netherlands' rule. During the then Queen Juliana's reign, she personally helped in being supplies to storm and flood victims during a disaster in 1953. She later showed considerable interest in UFO's.

AND SO, no actual really impacting event really occurred on my birthday, leaving me with minor events to write about.

In all honesty, school is really a burden to me. That's how I feel about it.

Every day, sitting in class, you are either force to sit and try to listen, to learn things that you don't necessarily want to know about. And most of the time, you just feel really BORED and just want to sleep, considering that class starts at 7 in the morning.

Then while you feel excited when it comes to PJPK period or when recess comes, you sit through lessons after lessons, day after day. You feel really frustrated when the teachers sometimes mumble or teach so quickly, you can't catch what they are really trying to teach. And when homework is done badly or incomplete due to us not being adept at the topic, we get talked down. I mean, it's not like we really want to learn every single bit of every single thing, but more like there isn't really any other path.

You just get really annoyed when teachers or parents come and tell you, "If you really dislike studying, then just go out and work!". The very problem is not how many people have succeeded in going down that path, but more like how many have failed. And most of us don't have the innovation or the motivation to work extremely hard in order to become really successful due to the way we were brought up: Study hard, get good grades, and go sit in an office when you get older.

REALLY? Don't you think with this type of message we are given since young, we are all stuck in the mindset that "We have to study to do well" or "I can only go with the flow". It's downright condescending to think that everyone looks down on you just because your grades are bad, or you seem like a disobedient child. It doesn't matter as long as you aren't given the right choices, because we are only given one. Only the odd few out of a million would actually break out of the system and become successful.

Does our opinion as a student really matter? Probably not. Too bad then.

 Another day of school to go.

Since this post was meant to be a free topic, I'm just going to blabber on about an anime called Accel World.

Accel World has a spectacular background to it, as well as potential equally as good. It's basically a story set in a timeline where object called Neuro Linkers exist. Neuro Linkers assist in many ways, adjusting your vision so that it is always perfect, turning your regular vision into basically what is like a computer's interface complete with quick access to e-mails and what not.

The story is about  game called Brain Burst can only be installed by people who have worn a Neuro Linker since birth, meaning that only people 15 and younger can qualify(as the Neuro Linker was created 18 years before the current year in the anime).

Brain Burst has many functions, the main one being a battling platform that simulates the pain and emotions via an in-game avatar. In real life, it is capable of slowing time so much with an action called Burst Link. Time is slowed so much that it is practically stopped and the person's digital avatar is free to walk around and access the situation. The person's real life body can only be moved with a function called Physical Full Burst which is only available to level 9 players(the highest current level). However, this function uses 99% of their Brain Burst points.

Brain Burst points are basically a player's lifeline in Brain Burst. When your points hit zero, the game automatically uninstalls itself and your avatar is deleted. All memories involved in Brain Burst are instantly erased, including the meeting of any possible friends you have made within the program. This function has prevented the spread of Brain Burst to the outside world.

A player can obtain further Burst Points when they either beat another player or defeat in-game spawned creatures.

That's basically it for the rough idea of Accel World.