March 24, 2006, 11:13pm

So, I went to the women's clinic today after a friend said abnormal bleeding can be a symptom of cancer. You see, I still want to live.

As usual, just whatever you tell them anything wrong down there, they would just make you do the pap smear. I just wonder if there's any paper written linking pap smear and health economics. They can make this test a ritual and you just have to pay for it. How many pap smear tests are done every year? How much people earn from making women to do that? How many women actually catch cervical cancer early doing a regular pap smear?

Sure, I'm biased. Probably read too much gender literature back in London. Pap smear is like rape. Pap smear is to control women's sexuality... Well, sometimes I think, after foot-binding, high heels, bra... pap smear is socially constructed to make women do it. You just have to do it. This is for your own good...

Just don't know how nearly everyone would tell you pap smear doesn't hurt... all that stuff. Then, if you don't do it once a year, it's like, you're not doing what you should do for your own health. Well, foot-binding was once "attractive." High heels are expected in workplace and the ballroom. Are these things good for women? From which perspective?

An Egyptian friend said some time ago, that white people said muslim women wearing the veil is oppressive. She simply wouldn't agree. Well, this is the never-ending (to me) controversy in multiculturalism. I don't know enough to say if wearing the veil is oppressive or not. Yet, for so many things, why are the traditions and customs of non-white cultures oppressive? Yet so many things white women do or are supposed to do are not made problematic?

Why is pap smear not oppressive? It hurts!

Postcolonialism.

Well, anyways, I'll have to do a blood test for thyroid problem and polycystic ovary next Tuesday. Need to do fasting for 8 hours... I'll have the blood test at 8am then will have my statistics exam at 10:30am.

This is crazy.