Vanity: A Vindication for the True Beauty in Women

 “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
~Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin

***

For quite some time now, I have been avoiding reading Mary Wollstencraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (you may have heard her as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) because I cannot the stand the run-on writing style of her period. The sentences overflow with tremendous commas that I find myself lost in the middle of a syntactical chaos. Then again, I have only read Wollstencraft’s work once in my entire lifetime and like any other piece of literature, a mere one-hour sitting is not sufficient to fully grasp its whole essence.

However, from that one-hour reading I can tell you she was quite the feminist writer who used the pen to rebel against degradation of women’s rights and status in a patriarchal society. From reading this text, I cannot help but ponder how we, women, have indeed gone a long way from being just mere “caretakers” of the household (more…)

Technology: A Modern Day Inferno

 In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

***

‘Twas a lovely Thursday afternoon and sleepy as I was, I woke up with a definite smile on my face. Yesterday, was a complete disaster since I got called in to work unexpectedly. It was a killer night and it was only for some miraculous reason that I actually managed to escape the office around 11:30pm despite the workload being similar to a Senecan greek tragedy- in other words, very brutal and bloody. After doing my “morning rituals” at 2:00pm, I went to hover on my computer, hoping for some comic relief and ironically, this message greeted my smiling face instead: 

Insufficient system resources to complete requested services.

Technology has been trying to spite me for the last couple of months and this frustration just keeps getting better and better. Imagine a figure in the form of Cerberus (more…)

Nothing Romantic about Romanticism

 I’ll follow you and make a heaven out of hell, and I’ll die by your hand which I love so well.
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II

***

 For the past four weeks, I have been trying to catch up on my readings for my Romanticism class. I remembered being so excited while I was making my fall and winter timetable last summer because of it… ENGC42H3: Romanticism, the course code that I have been eyeing on since first year and that “C” in the middle, have prevented me from taking it then because only those with the B-level prerequisites are allowed to take C-level courses. 

MERRIAMWEBSTER.COM

Main Entry: ro·man·ti·cism

Pronunciation: \rō-ˈman-tə-ˌsi-zəm, rə-\

Function: noun

Date:1823

1often capitalized a (1): a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms

Now, as I look at my reading schedule, I feel like a big boulder of insanity  towering over my head, ready to crush my petiteness out of perpetual existence. In all respect, the selections are not that long compared to the previous English classes I have taken.
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I R Crepe Hunter, Heart of Strawberry and Strength of Banana

 The belly rules the mind.
~Spanish Proverb

 ***

I woke up today and had a huge craving for mouth-watering food at Cafe Crepe’s. I have not been there in ages, more like a year. Ever since I moved to the suburbs, I have found it quite difficult to stay regularly in touch with my favourite restos in downtown Toronto. And one of them is Cafe Crepe. 

Located near the strip of downtown’s entertainment district, this place has been a part of my new world adventures as a landed immigrant in Toronto. I used to frequent this place every week with my highschool friends where, “penniless” as we were, six of us would still manage to order three
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Evolution: The Darwin in You and Me

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
~Charles Darwin

 
Charles Darwin no doubt was a man of science. His Theory of Natural Selection sparked controversies during the Victorian era and continues to do so to this present day. His published works, although written in a more concise and less run-on style, are not easy reads.

TRUST ME. I know.
 

Once, one of my colleagues at work had to read The Origin of Species for one of her English class and showed me  the book. I have to admit, I found the book quite interesting after reading a few pages of it but it does not erase the fact that its over 600 pages long. Compared to all those popular fiction such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings,
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