Good question. I don't care either way, but I do feel strongly about one thing.

Man wants to keep baby, woman doesn't: You can't force someone to have a baby. The woman can get an abortion if she wants. I support a woman's right to choose in every situation, even if US Law ever unfortunately changes to force women to have babies that they don't want. I will still support safe abortions.

Woman wants baby, man doesn't: If a man doesn't want to have a child, but the mother chooses to keep the baby, I believe that the man should then have no more legal responsibilities towards the child. Think of it as disowning a baby /shrug. I understand that there are many run-away fathers in the world. My own dad was one of them. However, my dad was never against my mother having a child. She knew from the beginning that he just wouldn't be an integral part of my life. He did his part in raising me, and then went back to his own life. Although I'd never want that for my own child, I can understand where he's coming from. Personally, if a man doesn't want to have a child and he tells his partner so, the mother shouldn't expect him to pay child support and take on other responsibilities that he doesn't want, because he's already said that he doesn't want a baby at all.

   

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So yeah, I often wonder what Japanese would be like if it hadn't stolen Chinese characters and continued using them. Korean and Vietnamese also used Chinese characters at one point, but as any linguistically inclined person knows... Korean switched over to completely Hangeul and discouraged the use of hanja. Vietnamese changed to a romanized version of Vietnamese made by the French >.> damn French. Anyway, Japanese may be the only non-Chinese dialect language that I know of that still uses the 漢字.

I can just imagine how much less popular Japanese would be without their cool-looking Chinese characters XD Although it's much easier to learn Japanese than Chinese, I think that Chinese would have many more students interested in it if they didn't have Japanese as an easy way out to learn characters and such without learning Chinese itself. But does that really matter? Not really.

As it stands now, I'm expected to have learned 317 漢字 by the end of 2002. Great... Like I said, I think I might know like 20 if I tried XD Ok ok, maybe that's a bit of an underestimation. I probably know like 50 or so by memory. Now my job is to go back and re-memorize how to write all these other characters so I can be at the top of my game when I go to Osaka. Sure, I should have been practicing this the entire time I was sitting around doing nothing over the summer... but whatever.

I keep thinking about the classes that I'm going to be taking over there. They're going to be classes for international students, which means English will be spoken. I can't help but feel like sitting in an English-speaking classroom is sort of defeating the purpose of going to Japan at all. Maybe the classes will be small enough that I'll be able to use Japanese only and not cause too much of a fuss? I don't know. I guess I'll see. All I know is that I've seen people come back from a 6-month study abroad before and their language skills were vastly improved... I can only hope that my Japanese ability improves so much after a year. It'll be interesting to see what I'm like after that year.

I'm so tired of the news things about how China is reluctant to open the internet to journalists and give free internet access to the city of Beijing when the Olympics are occuring. So, so tired.

1. In America, we're (supposedly) all about freedom. Guess what... China isn't America. China is about conformity and doing what the government says. If Beijing doesn't normally have internet access to banned sites like those involving the Falun Gong, then you shouldn't expect special treatment just because you're used to something different.

2. China is a foreign country. When visiting a foreign country, shut your mouth. No one wants to hear about how "Oh, well this is different in America. It should be like that." You're culturally ignorant. If you don't want to act as much like a Chinese person as you can while you're in China, then don't freakin' go. It's not mandatory to attend the Olympics.

3. The pollution problem. This is the ONLY thing I can see people having any right to complain about. I do believe that people should be able to breathe fresh air when visiting China. However, I think people are blowing it a little out of proportion. China took a hit to its air quality when its economy started booming. That makes sense. They're trying to solve the issue by shutting down factories and limiting car use. I can almost guarantee that America wouldn't even begin to think about shutting down large numbers of factories and cutting car use by 50% just to keep foreigners happier. Also, despite how bad the pollution is... people live in Beijing you know. A lot of people have been dealing with the pollution for years. It probably won't kill you to deal with it for a short amount of time... and if it might, then just don't go. Again, not mandatory to go to China.