Minority Report

It's been a while. I guess you could say that 2006 so far for me has been a bit of re-adjusting to a new schedule. I'm now at school only 2 days a week and at work 3 days. On the 2 days that I'm at school I'm going at it non-stop. I'm trying to incorporate this new concept into my life, early in the mornings before my 9:30am class. Some of you may know about it already, it's called exercise. Yep, I've been going to the MRC gym each morning and trying to burn off some flab. I only wish that I was going to school more often, just so I could go to the gym more. Well, actually I've gone the last two weekends. Can you guess what my new year's resolution is?

Anyway, my new classes are as follows:

Religious Perspectives on Evil & Suffering
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Pyschology of Gender
Sociology of Race & Ethnicity

All these classes constantly remind me that I belong to two seperate minority groups. Number one, I'm gay. Number two, I'm Asian. Ouch, I never realized I've got it so bad. (I don't really.) As I sit in a lot of these classes, I find that so much of the material relates to me on a personal level. I keep wanting to express my own stories. Is it the same for everyone else in my class? Or are they all like "wow, I never thought of that!" I don't think so. Today my race teacher was asking "who doesn't know what ethnicity they belong to?" And there was about 4 people who had no idea, to them, they're just Canadians and nothing more.

Hooray for Brokeback Mountain!! It won a few Golden Globes last night. If you haven't seen it yet, please go. I was quite down after I saw it, it really made me reflect how far we've come. And have we though?

Don't read the next part if you intend on watching the film...
Something that I find interesting about it is that the short story by Annie Proulx was published in 1997 and it's partly set it Wyoming. At first when I saw the film I thought to myself that maybe this story was written in dedication to Matthew Sheppard, a gay martyr who was beat to death and left to die while roped to fence in Laramie, Wyoming. But when I came home, I researched a bit and realized that he actually died a year after the book was published, 1998. Geez, that even made me more upset. Is it a coincidence, or were (or are) these gay bashings such a regular occurence indicating that this is no coincidence at all?

Christ! 1998, that was only 7 years ago.

Why is this film so controversial though? There are a lot of gay themed movies out there, maybe not as popular, but nevertheless they're there. When it first came out, I saw this show (Showbiz! I think) and they interviewed this man from "Straight Alliance" and he was claiming that this movie is not sending out the right messages, etc, etc. He then went on to say that gay lifestyle is a horrible one, he should know because he used to be gay. This is not the first converted homo into hetero I've encountered. I've gotta say though that its Bullshit!

Anyway, enough advocating for now.