Floating Garbage in the Pacific Ocean

Least you think it's a pile of figurative crap I'm talking about...

Here's the wikipedia entry

And here are some photos:

That's a man in a boat in the center of the island of garbage.

A satellite image - that odd pale-colored whirlpool thingy is the garbage patch.

Near Mid-year exams again...

To all my students:

Fight!

Good luck with exams!

(Remember to rest well too :)

A piece of writing to share...

The following was one of my compositions when I was about fourteen. I found it while clearing out my old textbooks and edited it again. Hope it's useful in helping you to write your own personal recount essays.

My Family

There are times you might wish you were different from everyone else around you.

Stronger. Faster. Smarter. Richer.

But most often you probably wished you were the same as them. For instance, the same as Richard, who’s good at Maths; the same as Emily, who’s popular with the girls and finds it easy to talk to boys; the same as Annie, who’s good at all the sports she’s ever come into contact with, and is a karate champion; the same as Keith, who’s able to put together a brand-new computer from scratch; the same as Veronica, whose mother was pretty and tall and whose father was nice and jovial and generous, and donated thousands of dollars to the school.

You know you’re not the same. And it takes a long time before you can stop wishing you were.

I was eight when my not-sameness was brought home to me. I had always sort of known that I was different. It’s not hard to see why once you get past the difficulty with the a-b-c’s (which I had; I kept writing ‘F’ and ‘S’ the other way round). My friends talked about their daddies and mummies. I liked to listen, because I didn’t know what to say.

One day my dad brought me to school. Usually it’s my mum who did so, but she was sick, and she thought that it was ‘high time that man did something that resembles fatherliness’.

My mum really dislikes my dad. I don’t know why. I picked up on it when I was about five, but I also knew instinctively that it was better to pretend to be stupid and not say a word. But I was eight. I was carrying my new black backpack with its tiny gorilla swinging from a zip, and daddy was holding my hand and leading me to the faded blue metal gates. He had come by the house to pick me up especially that morning, and I rode to school in a white Mercedes. It was different from my usual school bus rides, because the bus was small and dark and rickety, and the driver had greasy long hair and he looked at us funny.

“Hi Patricia,” said Mr Wong. Mr Wong was my Chinese teacher. He pronounced my name oddly, something like ‘Partisia’, but I knew better than to correct my teacher in front of daddy.

“Good morning Mr Wong,” I said brightly.

Mr Wong smiled at me and my dad. “Is this your grandpa?”

Time seemed to slow. I could feel the embarrassment trickling in, bit by teeny bitty bit, like ice-water dripping off an ice cube and each drop hitting that ticklish spot on the back of your neck and you can’t move away.

“No,” I said, not looking at daddy. “He’s my father, Mr Wong.”

Mr Wong looked embarrassed too, and I felt even more embarrassed than before, so I said bye to both adults without looking at them and ran, pell-mell, into the school and up the stairs and round the corner until I reached my desk and I threw my bag into my chair and stood there panting.

“What’s wrong?” my best friend Linda asked.

“Nothing. I just wanted to see how fast I can get to class from the school gate.”

Later my English teacher came in and told us to write about our families. I stared at the paper for a long, long time, trying to know what to put down on paper.

Every Day

Every day, I remind myself of my good fortune:

I have my health and I have my job.

I have my friends and I wake up in the morning.

I have a place to stay, enough to eat, some time to play.

I have my family to love, and I have people who love me.

And then I add a short prayer:

To those suffering in the world, may their sufferings be eased.

To those who hunger and thirst, may their hunger be sated and their thirst be quenched.

To the world, stop the nonsense and let's live harmoniously.

To the planet, an apology: I will try to live greener.

To God (or Gods, as the case may be), forgive and forget what I did wrong, help me live right, and may the weather be exactly what it needs to be.

Just something that takes up 20 seconds a day.

Review of How to Train a Dragon

This movie was far more enjoyable than I had expected, and I had expected quite a bit. It's light-hearted, but not silly, and the core of the story - a boy learning to find his true self and relating to his father - is always evident (Michael Bay, learn).

I'll give it an 8 out of 10 - it's intelligent, mostly, but could have used a little more on the interaction between father Stoick and son Hiccup. Overall an enjoyable film for anyone.