177 - People who videotape lectures

The life of a university student is quite interesting. We are finally adults, responsible for our own money, time, property, physiological well-being, and general lifestyle, emotionally mature, with a supposedly more developed mental health, while also carrying the rights to marry, to vote, to work, to join the army, to drive, to travel abroad without parental consent, to drink, to smoke, to have sex, to gamble, and the list goes on. We choose how we want to live our lives, and in university, that largely includes the way we want to learn.

No longer must we conform to the timetable of high school, be obliged to attend classes, consult teachers about class content, have lunch at a reasonable hour, sleep at a reasonable hour, do our homework on time, or spend hours and hours studying for our tests. We are free of all obligations, our duties are for us to define. We can skip all of our lectures and seminars, we can forget about studying, get wasted every night, sleep in every morning, eat junk food everyday, revise for our examinations at the very last minute, and give less than a rat's tail about our assignments. The only drawback about that game plan is the fact that we would fail at the end of the year, and that's quite a lot of money to send down the drain.

One key thing that you may find different, is the fact that you don't need to take notes down anymore - it's not required of us anymore - as adults, we decide if it's necessary for our tertiary education. We can just sit there, cross-armed the whole time and put the gift of memory to good use by listening intently, taking it all in and deeply engraving it in our heads, or we could leave an audio recorder on the lecturing stand for aural replay on a later date.

But if you really wanted to capture the entire essence of the talk, if you really wanted to experience the lecture like it was exactly once again, you could get a video camera, and tape the whole damn thing.

I thought I've seen some stupid things in my lifetime. This girl put a video camera on the lecturing stand, to tape the professor giving the talk, and the reason for this was that there was nowhere else to put the camera. With the soft, cotton-filled, round-edged seats in the theater, the chairs were useless when it came to balancing anything on top of one of them. She could have just held the thing in her hand the whole time instead, but she probably figured she needed both hands to take down notes. The one thing she didn't figure beforehand was the fact that the lecturer didn't exactly stay at the stand, or in any one particular place.

In fact, the lecturer moved almost everywhere except the lecturing stand. When the professor was standing on the right, the girl student was happy, and she sat there - not listening to the professor - but always eying her precious visual project to make sure she was capturing the video (i.e., being distracted). When the lecturer walked over to the left-hand side of the lecture hall, the girl would get up from her seat, and turn the camera towards him. And then the professor would turn, and walk back in the opposite direction to the right-hand side.

This went on for about ten minutes, and the girl had gotten up seven times. She finally figured - she would have to stop getting up and sitting down - so she found a plastic chair and sat right next to the lecturing stand. This only gave her easier access to her camera, and she would tweak the angle at which her camera was pointed repeatedly at around one tweak per minute. She wasn't even listening to the man. The guy was telling us very interesting things, about the Azande people of Central Africa who believe in witchcraft, who purify their newborns by holding them over smoke, and whose criminal justice system involves determining a suspect's innocence in a crime by observing if a poisoned chicken dies or survives after ingesting a toxic substance.

And this girl wasn't listening to any of this. She kept adjusting her lens, tending to her sacred angle that had to be pointed at the professor at all times. She was distracting two hundred or more other students, and let's face it...

Why waste one hour or more in the future by watching it on tape?

You can just pay attention the one time, the first time, and that's the only hour of your lifetime that that lecture would take out of your time. If you videotaped all of your lectures, you would effectively be taking the same course twice, spending twice the time listening to the same content twice, not forgetting the fact that you would have to spend additional hours more dealing with the technology and the hardware.

Why bother?

This is a classic case of people trying too hard, but achieving less.

42 - Drug talks

I'm sitting at a computer in the Hong Kong Central Library. These stations subtly remind me of why I never want to end up with an office job. There are strange people on either side of you, and in the row behind you and every now and then, you might also share an awkward look with the stranger who dwells behind the wall in front of you. Also, these chairs are unbelievably uncomfortable and every time I look behind me, it's either some old person staring at me or some kid staring at me or some old person holding a kid's hand, both staring at me.

At least it's quiet. And with a cubicle job, you can also personalize your work area by decorating your desk and your walls. That's always fun.

But let's get to today's topic. I was (barely) late for class this Monday morning and instead of apologizing to our teacher for being late, I found myself saying sorry to a young-looking Asian woman standing at the front of the classroom. I hastily opted to sit in the seat closest to the door, wondering what this could possibly be and oh, yeah, it was a drug talk. Whoopee.

We were given an hour-long presentation that supposedly raised our awareness of the dangers of consuming numerous stimulants, narcotics, hallucinogens and tranquilizers. I suppose the focus was to repulse us from the very idea of ever taking drugs and drowning our futures in a purple sea of addiction and short-lived euphoria. The lady spoke with a substantial Australian accent as she asked us several questions to find out what we already knew about drugs. Some of us knew nothing, some of us knew very little but none of us knew a lot. We've all been given the same old story before, though. Here's my understanding on the topic after being given four or five of these talks in the past few years:

Always say, "NO!" to drugs, even when it doesn't make any sense to respond with it. Don't succumb to peer pressure. Your friends are evil when they have drugs. Don't ruin your life. Drugs can do that. Don't find happiness in drugs. Drugs make you sad. Addiction is uncontrollable from the moment you take your first pill, sniff, injection or taste. Getting high will only increase the height from which you fall. Most teenagers don't even take drugs and that's because we give tons of these presentations. When you do take drugs, think of your family, even if it's weird. When you take drugs, think of your future, even though the LSD makes it seem like you have a pair of breasts right now. When you take drugs, think of your real friends that don't take drugs. It's nice to spare a moment of thought for those that couldn't join in with all the fun.

Seriously, don't take drugs. They're harmful to your nasal cavity, as well as your teeth, your gums, your throat and your esophagus, in addition to your tongue, your lungs, your mung bean-shaped kidneys, your hair, your head, your hands, your heart, your arteries, your veins, your capillaries, your red cells, your white cells, your B-cells, your T-cells, your sea shells on the seashore, and also, your liver, your pancreas, your stomach, your gall bladder, your spinal cord, your optical cord, your brain, your nerves, your CNS, and PNS, and ANS, and SNS, and SPD, and PSD, and your lymph nodes, your bones, and your genitals, your skin, your nails, your muscles, your joints, YOUR WHOLE BODY, OH, MY GOD! DON'T F***ING TAKE DRUGS, MAN!

You know what the funny thing is? If I'm being completely honest here, I still want to try taking drugs at some point in my life. Just once. Just a little.

I don't know about my classmates, but these talks have always appeared to be quite ineffective, to say the least. The worst part of the presentation we were given today was this fifteen-minute video. I had taken down notes in preparation for today's post but I've lost quite a lot of the frustration I was feeling as I was watching the video.

From what I can recall (and read from my scribbly notes) the video had a lot of sleazy animations, laughable-in-the-bad-way jokes and for no darn reason at all: child actors. A 'wise' teenager would ask some kid a serious question such as, "True or false: Consuming ecstasy will lead you into a deep state of depression." and the child actor would respond with, "Truuuuuuue." with an innocent voice. Why this was necessary to make the point is beyond me.

One the other hand, I guess the video was quite informative and captivating overall. The kaledioscopic colors succeeded in transfixing me and my fellow classmates and the over-the-top animations truly did mesmerize us for the whole duration the video was playing. It was almost like some sort of spell that had been cast over all of us. I caught a glance at them at one point and some of them looked like they were on the verge of being hypnotized. I was quite scared for their health. Man, don't play with vivid colors and crazy animations.

Anyway, the point that I have somewhat failed to elaborate on in too much detail is that drug talks and presentations are quite an ineffective drug prevention strategy. I believe that in order for one to truly fear the effects of drugs, one must first attain some personal experience and first-hand knowledge of what drugs can actually do to one's body and mind.

Sure, they're dangerous and they cause unpredictable effects. Sure, they're expensive, addictive and illegal. And sure, they can put you in a coma or worse yet, kill you. But, hey, treat the presenations a lot more seriously if you want to be taken seriously. Don't use child actors, cheesy jokes and unnecessary animations in your videos. Don't give us a wordsearch for us to find all the slang nicknames for drugs. And most importantly, don't think that talking about the ethics and the dangers of drug usage will convince us not to commit such acts. Us teenagers thrive on rebelling against society's moral standards and the highest part of getting high is the fact that we're snorting in the face of danger.