Daily Thoughts and Random Ideas

Falling In and Out

2012-01-27T17:38:00.000+01:00

Friday. A peculiar Friday if one takes in consideration that this is the last one... in this place. Time to slowly start the Spring Cleaning and discard all that has no longer space in the new chapter of my life. Time for doing lists: what do I need, what goes in the luggage of my life, what must be viewed as obsolete. Time for packing, for making arrangements, for acquiring a thing or two, here or there. It's in moments like this when you get the chance - there rare opportunity - to evaluate what you've been carrying around. What are those things, those habits that you take with yourself that may have been slowing you down? Which things have been burried under tons and tons of other stuff, that should have been at hand's reach for ages?

There are many things that we do not question, that we do not notice or ponder about normally, when our life is settled on the rails of rutine, but when that rutine is to be changed, and you must fit your life in a suitcase, or your whole office in a box, you get them in your hand and think: what's the purpose of this? And what is the purpose? Are you carrying the signs that truly represent you, or are you carrying your traumas and limitations? Are we a bird that values its feathers and take them to the travel, or a bird that's slowed down by carrying also the cage?

I find myself strangely detached and reluctant to decisions. Decisions about what goes and what stays. I sit at my cubie, checking mail, following up on projects and in the odd moments, revisiting old matters, old books, old writings. I'm detaching slowly from my surroundings, watching places and people around me from a cold distance often thinking: "this is not going to live for much longer". A handfull of ties lie in my hand and I'm pushing them slowly between the scissor blades of my decision. Acquintances and friends are about to fade off my life without their knowing so. I'm falling, in and out, speed is definitive, moves are definitive... I'm falling, and oh sweetest thing, how am I falling! So many years worth of memories, experiences, and souvenirs, all to be evaluated and decided upon, and some of them are just so precious... so precious.

Change isn't an easy thing - who said it was? - and when in change you feel like falling... perhaps the best thing to do is to take pencil and paper and write. Trish, there's a chance I'll continue what I sent you.

The leeves, at the same time, are giving away, not without the laborious help of those who shouldn't be involved in the matter. Gossip, oh ever present, omnipotent Gossip! The grapevine is vibrating with so much charged buzzing. Information - right or not, concerning or not, entitled or not - must be shared, so that the fire touches it and explodes in millions of exciting colors. Gossip, oh Gossip... those grapevines of bitter harvest I won't miss.

Take Note!

2012-01-26T18:51:00.000+01:00

Recently Dr. Frank Buck posted in his blog Get Organized about a topic that has quite some pull with me: taking notes. From the most efficient, to the most modern, he considers in his posts not only how you take notes (paper & pen or digitally), but also what do you do with those notes. You know me, I love all topics related to organizing, and anything that has to do with pen and paper! (... and writing) Having been recently introduced to the wonders of smartpens - and I'm in love with my boyfriend's Pluse and can't wait to try out my sleek, fabulous ECHO - I replied to the first part of the topic (it's broken in two parts), telling him about my experiences with the smartpen and how it has improved my note taking.

As someone with a terribly bad memory and the tendency to wander off mentally whenever there's a less-than-exciting lag in the session, prone to projecting mental movies in the worse of times, note taking is actually one of the things that can keep me on the topic, on the matter and focused. From university on - when my note taking skills were honed to their peak - I devoted myself to the use of as much shorthand markings and speed up my writing as much as possible without rendeing my writing unreadable. Not an easy task, as I learned at the University, where more than once the solution was to chase the notes taken by my classmates to complete my chicken scratchings. And if you had to ever do that, you know it's a bitch, as not to students take the same notes, so matching them is quite a task, when you are trying to replace that couple of lines you jotted out that flatlined on you.

Once I started to work, the note taking didn't go away, as now it was about writing down the task you had to complete, or the directions to do something, the highlights of the seminars you are sent to, the laws you had to check out, the procedures that had to be followed, and not once, the notes of the meetings you attended. It was basically in these last ones where I saw the benefits of taking notes digitally. Typing as fast as I could to catch every word, taking the meeting notes on a laptop allowed us to be able to send them for review as the meeting was ended. Taking these notes on paper would have meant to take extra time from your day to type down you notes into the preselected format and then send it for all to check. Basically both systems have pros and cons.

Taking notes digitally, allows you to ensure they will be always readable, and often you don't need to check the spelling, because Windows does that for you. Repeating names and concepts can also be dealt quickly, and - what's most important - sending and filing is faster. No ripping pages or recopying them to a notebook or a file so you keep all the notes on the same topic in the same place, but there you are, already filing it where it needs to be. Also, it's much easier to find what you are looking for by opening the right file and searching in it, instead of paging through a notebook back and forth looking for a particular quotation.

Taking notes on paper on the other hand, gives you plenty of freedom regarding how and what you jott down. Going from words to a graph is no hassle, just draw the graph. It also allows you to use freely the space by drafting quick relation mindmaps of figures, if you are prone to them. Linking words, drawing arrows and balloons, or squares and brackets... whatever your method is. It's also much silent than typing, and for those exposing or talking at the meeting, you look much more involved with a notepad and a pen than typing on a computer - after all you could be chatting or looking up porn pictures while everybody else is trying to fix the department's yearly budget. Another great advantage of paper and pen is the fact that though it can run out of pages, or out of ink, it doesn't run out of battery. There were a laptop can go on for 2 hours to 6 hours (on average 2 hours), a notepad and a pen can go for months. And even if you run out of pen or paper, there's always a fast way to get around it, as usually when you take notes you are not the only one and there's always someone who can lend you a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil or a pen, which isn't the case with the laptop's charger.

Personally, I prefer pen and paper, and my smartpen is the best solution to my needs, as I can go back to accomodate myself on a small surface and jot down my notes and even my comments, while the pen also records what's being said, linking it to the scratches I make. However, when there's a meeting and I'm asked to take the minutae, it's always the laptop I resource to.

In this question, I believe we must also consider a very important component, which is the intent, the recipient of the note. Why are you taking notes and what are you expected to do with them, in what period of time? Are you taking notes for a news piece and need to post it as soon as possible, send it to the editor in the shortest time possible? Then maybe you should consider taking your notes digitally. You are preparing a piece based on something you are witnessing, and being able to draw graphs and make balloon-stick connections is important? Go with paper and pen. Are you in a History class and need to catch as much as possible? Go digital and if you can, connect your recorder as well... or go with the smart pen. Math or economics class with lots of functions, formulas and graphs? Paper and pen, absolutely, but consider pair it with the recorder or your smartpen. Inspiration can hit you anytime of day and you need to be prepared to scribble down that great post idea, or that verse for your upcoming wonderful ode to something, or finally have the piece you needed to close that chapter perfectly? Paper and pen, no doubt. Tablets can work... if you don't have to dwell with them too long to get a usable sheet you can write on before the fleeting spirit of the muse leave you for a writer much more prepared to take their dictating.

However, it's up to you. What do you feel comfortable with? What works for you? 100 gurus can give their opinion and 100 techno-whores could present you with the newest developments in the area, what matters is what works for you.

Concerns with Intelligence

2012-01-25T18:40:00.001+01:00

Someone wrote on their Facebook wall something about how "generational governments" didn't get that "major intelligence" is in the "new citizen" and not in the "intelligence departments". I bet it had some sort of deep and smart meaning, but the output wasn't certainly the most fortunate, after all, lets define "intelligence" and "major intelligence" and then "new citizen" and what the fuck do you cover under "generational governments"? We could assume the person meant to describe the nearly monarchy-like governments where the power goes from the current ruler to a heir of them, usually blood related. It's perhaps not the most democratic practice - specially if the people don't get a say in this - but let's let that slide, for this post. When it comes to the concept of new citizen and intelligence, there's no room for assuming.

A department of intelligence in the Government isn't a department that's in charge of intelligent people and looking for ways to make the population smarter. I believe that's actually called "Education Ministry". An "Intelligence Department" is more like a part of the Defense Ministry, and they work collecting data on other countries or on companies, or groups or people the Government believes could prose a threat to the country, or the system. It's like the CIA, you know "Central Intelligence Agency", you probably have heard of it from movies, where they have all those spies and stuff like that? Yes, that's an "intelligence department". The "major intelligence" definition escapes me, so I will assume that the person posting this meant a level of intelligence that surpases that needed to do sapping. As for the "new citizen"... either the person means the new generation, or it's leaning more towards Ubermenschen ideas so popular among the Nazis. Let's go with the gentler, and more politically correct interpretation. Let's say it's about the new generation.

So basically this person said that the Governments where the authority is passed down within a family group without possibility of transparent, popular, general elections, haven't understood that the "major" capacity to gather data on the countries and subjects that threaten the coutry resides in the younger generation and not in the departments of intelligence, like the CIA. Huh? Okay, the other possible interpretation is that this governments don't realize that the intelectual development of the nation is in the younger generation, not in... the CIA?

Well, this person is around my age, and works in Education. If this kind of clear minded thinking is what's being passed on to the new generation - which has been nurtured on instant gratification and Teletubbies - what's the actual, real hope the world has regarding any development of the popular intelect? Or is it that any development counts, so if the future majors or Nobel Prizes are on Kardashians instead of DNA decodings, that's ok?

The matter of the levels of intellectuality among the population has been a concern for ages, as from generation to generation the quality levels drop just as fast as technology raises. There's more bullshit to fill heads with, less regard towards hard work and actual knowledge, and more appreciation for gossip and the skills to cheat the system, find shortcuts and pulling out a job or a task without actually doing anything.

It's not a matter of what kind of Government we have, be it a monarchy, a full fledged, perfect democracy or a plutocracy, it's a matter of what - as society - are we doing. Yes, indeed a Government concerned with the life quality of its citizens can do more than one concerned by the private interests of it's representatives, but it also matters what the society demands, and what it does. It's irresponsible from adults to keep pushing the task to the younger generations, saying that "the future is in their hands". So what? Are you telling them to educate themselves? With what moral stand, when you don't take care of the present, you dodge your responsabilities, and the books and internet content available, has been written mostly by lazy people like you. So what are you expecting this youth to do? Expect them to do what you were too lazy to do yourself?

If you want to see a change in the way things are going, you gara get off your fat, lazy ass and do something. What? Well, how about starting with yourself, educating yourself, acquiring all the skills and knowledge you'd like society to acquire. Want the people to visit more the museums than the bars? Well, pick up your sorry ass and go visit a museun instead of warming a stool at a bar. Want them to read more? Then you pick a book instead of the remote control and read a book. Want them to be better educated? Then educate better yourself.

The change in society starts in you. If you want change, you have to be part of it, otherwise your bitching is as useless as you are. So, basically this whole developping of the people's intellect, this sought after "major intelligence", sparks up and starts from the individual. Starts in the present and doesn't need of a future generation to get ignited, but if a future generation is needed, we were a future generation, where's our contribution to the intellectual development of our kind?

Wherever we are - because I assume that not all of us live under a family-business-Government, though many of us certainly live in a Plutocracy - has the Government stopped us time and again from smarting up, or has it been our choices, the examples that surrounded us and the peer pressure what has lead us to be the way we are now? Was the Government and - lets say - a crappy educational system what kept us from reaching a higher level of intelligence, or was our inclination to slack on everything? So, why to place the blame on a type of Government, that has really nothing to do with our personal choices, that has no say regarding how much , how little or how hard do we study?

The opinion of this person falls through the cracks as a poor construction born from a weak logic and a sorry excuse of expression, but one truth does remain: the slumping on the levels of intellectuality is done also by the lack of personal, individual effort to nurture it and make it grow.

Beautiful María Of My Soul

2012-01-24T20:31:00.002+01:00

Another Era, Another Times

2012-01-24T19:13:00.000+01:00

Browsing through the net, I've been checking pictures of other times - the forties this time around. Enchanted by the black-and-white pictures, where the shades of gray replace color gracefully to throw back at us an image that lives and still remains out of reach, at safe distance from our daily rutine, gliding over the waves of time ethereal and dreamy.

Have you ever dreamed to have been born in another era? Or just another decade, another century... Well, probably you know you are not alone in your wish, but would we really, really want that? And really... why?

In a state of wonderment and arrested emotions, I feel like living in a movie of the 40's. Knee lenght clothes of heavy fabrics, clunky shoes and funny little hats, lighting cigarettes under the lamp posts and smeaking the mouth with furious red colors. Sitting at cafés nursing a black coffee and reading the papers, reading a hard bound book and rolling a handkerchief between the fingers while wondering about this and that. A life with none of the current matters, where pens were still fountain pens, penpalling wasn't a dying art, but the way you communicated, phones weren't granted at every home, and electronical equipment was expected to last at least 50 years. But if I had a time machine, would I go there? In the middle of World War II? With women still having to fight for opportunities and overthrow all sorts of ideas and judgments that kept placing them several steps behind men?

It's not a secret either that one of the eras that really catch my fantasy is the Middle Ages. The clothes, the stories, the root of so many fairy tales, the lush forests and woods, clear air, living closer to the Earth and nature... and would we go there to live? Wish badly to be there and live there? With the witchhunting (because I would surely be prosecuted as such just by general principle), the scum, the violence, the lack of rights, the health care... the toilets!... no running water, no TV, no books (unless I would successfully pass for a man and become a monk of a rank high enough to be let around books), no fanfics, and lots of public executions... Thanks, but no thanks.

Though we may feel identified with another era, and yearn for some of its best features, in the end we've all been born where we should be and where we can contribute to the larger cause. Yes, I'm one of those that - from as long as I remember - I'd LOVE to get the chance to wear long dresses and skirts, layered and following some sort of Medieval style - I'm not one to squeeze my lungs into a corset! Or go more primal and run around with just a sheet wrapped around, or naked - fuck clothes! (That way I could sleep longer and still get to the office in time :-P) - but if sent back, would I have the strenght to face the Holy Inquisition and make a difference for the freethinking women? Or just women? If sent to the 40's, could I stand up as bravely for the rights of my sisters and I? Could I stand up for the rights of the people of other races or fight shoulder to shoulder for the rights of gays and lesbians? Could I fight for the right not to be discriminated on religious basis? (I'm mainstream, ok? But just because I'm not gay or because I'm Christian, it doesn't mean I don't realized that stepping on the rights who are not like me is also stepping on my human rights as well. Any discrimination: in favor or against, IS discrimination, and we are all being discriminated.)

Fantasizing and wishing is fine. Hell, how many haven't gone further even and wished to be in the world of a movie or a book, or a comic book, or a game (Final Fantasy!)? Dreaming and escaping reality for a moment to live in a make believe world is okay, we are humans, and that's also why we made art. That's why reading novels is so cool. That's why fanfics are so popular and loved. BUT there's a difference between wanting to be there and not being here. If you are here, there's a reason for it. Find it and fulfill your destiny.

Gossip

2012-01-23T21:26:00.000+01:00

Office gossip is the kind of weed that does more harm than good - even though often is the only way to get information about the character of certain people (proper filters applied!) - and like the weed, it springs everywhere and you can't eliminate it. Also, you can't kill it basically because in every freaking office there's at least one - but usually more - people of the kind that won't do their jobs and their lives is so plain, so blah, so drab, so colorless, that they NEED the lives of other people to actually add some excitement to their tasteless existence. Gossip usually tends to be malicious and seeks usually to create a conflict where there's no natural conflict. Usually.

Then there's the gossip about what's not their business. The gossip about who is going out with whom, who went where in vacations, who bought what where, who likes what, who worships what and so on. I myself haven't been inmune to the general curiosity, either because of the size of my shoppings, and my prancing around everyday in Benetton clothes or something of the sort, and then also because I traveled every year to Hungary, or the malicious gossips spread because I often went out to lunch with friends, sometimes girls, sometime boys (because women who are single and haven't made friends in the office, are not allowed to meet with unknown women or girls because they are automatically LESBIANS, nor with unknown men or guys becuase they are automatically WHORES). It never bothered me much because I knew the truth - healthy finances, less acquired responsabilities, broader circle of friends than what they have - but this time around it's different. This time around the office and the plain-existence hags have fallen upon a piece of information I really wanted to remain private, and which relates to my future plans, and made it of general knowledge. Why? Do they profit from it? Is there something in it for them? No, it's just because they have nothing better to do. Oh no, but Bunny must come around and spice up their lives with the bits and pieces of her awesome life.

Do they get off pretending they are me? Does it make them wet imagining how my life is? Do they touch themselves thinking about being a day in my shoes? They must, as they evidently need so desperately to share the latest news of my life. Yes, I know my life is heading to something so much more wonderful, because I'll live where they only dream of going for a week or two if they can twist arms enough to get a seminar or a scholarship. I'll be living there. That's going to be my daily reality. Is that the matter? Am I the fairy princess in the fairy tale they can never catch because they never did the effor to make something nice and decent about it? Yes, I work, yes, I don't feed on gossip, yes I'm quite selfsufficent, and yes, my life is RICH. I've a wonderful life, I've amazing friends, I have penpals (something most of them haven't heard of), I've a delightfully marvelous boyfriend, I've two citizenships, I speak more languages than they do, I've a wonderful, colorful, shiny future before me, an open mind, a heart filled with hope, a soul blessed by God, a path splashed with flowers, the key to millions of doors... and I actually do my work, and love doing it.

Sorry their life is plain, I wasn't in charge of planning it, but that doesn't give you the right to feed on the headlines of my days.

In the Blogging

2012-01-22T14:01:00.033+01:00

I can't help but stare in sheer wonder at the bloggers who strive for recognition. From the constant effort to be read, to the writing always in the same style - maybe even in the same line - hunting for the best tactics and secrets to guarantee a high traffic... The question time and again comes and time and again is left unresolved. Could it be a sort of a cybernetic outlet to the need to get attention - as I've had the chance to meet a few blogger personalities, and some of them do strike me as what's called "attention whores"? Or could it be... a way to make a living? Then again, I also have known some of that.

Maybe the question with the blog is "do you want to be read or not?" Maybe, if you want to be read, you should do something to be read, and if you don't want to be read... well, why do you blog, right? However there is something about blogging that caters to those who want to write but don't necessarily want to be read - or widely read: a place to shout in anonymity. The blog can become a sort of personal, secret place - much safer often than the journal book you could be carrying in your backpack or your bag - where you can vent about anything on the world. (Like I do not so rarely ^_^)

There's this fairy tale about a girl who has seven brothers and they are turned to ravens and she has to save them by making during seven years seven shirts - one for each and must not speak a word during the seven years. Through this time she's married off to a prince and gives birth to children - all of which are snatched and killed by someone jealous of her. Unable to speak, she can't say a word to defend herself or express her sorrow, so one day when the pain is too big to bear, she goes out to the woods, digs a deep hole and cries into it.

Well, blogging often feels like that. A blog, if not much read, becomes the black hole in the ground where you can shout out everything that upsets you and pains you. It doesn't matter that unknown people who will never meet you read what you have to say - hell, in some issues a word of comfort, a good advise from the depths of the darkness can come so good! - but when you start realizing that people around you read it and know you... how free do you still feel to express what's going on?

As a blogger, yes, you can seek to be public, to be read by many to bring to their attention social issues and several truths denied from them - blogging becomes thus a tool at the hands of the people to gear up and spread the news corporations and governments don't want them to know. But as a blogger, you can also be ptivate, faceless, indentity-less crying into the dark hole what you are bound to say face to face. Has anyone blogger considered creating a new, secret blog, unfound, non-circulated, where they can spill their secrets safely? Ease the heart, but keep the issues well locked down?

Changing Your Mind or Not

2012-01-21T23:03:00.000+01:00

Someone once praised Marcel Proust - I believe it was him - saying he was a consistent man who had never changed his mind in his whole life. As a good thing, it was said that all his writings were consistent and had never, ever written a single word in his life - from the early age to his elder days, that contradicted any other. Instead of instilling in me wonderment and admiration - as the writer intended - it made me think about how sad and sterile has to be his life. This idea that this condition of always being the same, never changing positions was good has been defended before... though maybe it's not so cool to mention here that it was regarding how much cooler Son Goku was when compared to Vegeta, since Vegeta changed his character while Son Goku never did. Yeah, lame, nerdish even, but even then there was this thing: changing your mind, your character is a sign of weakness.

It's kind of interesting how this is seen this way in an era full of gurus that advocate for change. "Change is good", "you should change ever so often" and stuff like that.

Recently, reading a post by Fire Lyte, he mentioned an article he wrote some years ago, titled "The Pagan Secret", and mentioned how someone asked him whether he would remove it from where he posted it, now that his position and opinion has changed. (No, he won't.) I found it quite sad - to put it somehow - that he had to or felt the need to defend this right to change his mind, or even have contradicting opinions. I read his defense and thought about it, but can't fully accept it as my position on the matter is different: "yes, I wrote that, I believe that, I changed my mind about some parts - but I won't deny what I used to believe - and now I believe and stand for this as well".

Explaining the duality - more than defending it! - is quite a difficult task, because singularity is easier to process. In a show Chris Rock said "you are not just liberal or just conservative. You are liberal about some things and you are conservative about other things", so yes, duality is normal and can be accepted. Also, often the very people defending the fact that change is good, also advocate for the opposite: people who change are weak.

As in everything, extreme positions are not only not good, but they are not fitting. No matter what you do, no matter what you think of, or what do you defend, extremes are bad. In the particular case of opinions and taking positions, as humans, we don't choose a side and stay there, but what often goes on is a process of learning. You get in touch with something, or enter a group, and you start your learning process. From the begining you will form yourself an opinion about things, and that opinion could either be strengthened, adjusted, modified or proved wrong, discarded and replaced by a new one. Is this bad? Hell, no! You are not supposed to know everything in advance! if so, what would be the fun of life? So, from this side, change is neither a good or a bad thing, but a natural thing - just as breathing is neither good nor bad, or eating is neither a good or a bad thing (the good and the bad comes from the direction we want those actions to take).

However, in order to grow, you certainly need to deepen your contact with a certain opinion, a certain position, and explore it. For this you have to stay there and follow the very path you have chosen. Externally, socially, the consistent behavior or character of a person is desired for that gives it a vote of trust. A consistent person becomes dependable. Internally, for yourself, a set opinion gives you a philosophical platform from which you can explore the rest of the world, the rest of the areas of knowledge you are interested in, and against which you can compare, measure and relate. Changing, thus, isn't bad, but staying enough to form a platform, a life path, is esirable either.

From Marcel Proust, the general opinion I've got is that there is a person that has never opened himself to the world, never let it in, never allowed the external world to permeat his internal world, and thus his internal world - cut also from it's natural growth - died inside him like a stillborn and rotted inside him. I read of Marcel Proust and can't help but think: "what a sad waste of a perfectly good life". I think of Vegeta and what comes to mind is that there's a man who dared to learn, dared to adapt and was strong enough to allow his mind to break free and explore new turfs and adopt them.

Through our life we are given the oportunity to broaden our experiences, to accumulate knowledge and incorporate all that organically into our lives. We can access knowledge and live it - knowledge isn't just a sterile, burdening thing, but a building block to extend our lives. Realizing that our first impressions were mistaken, wrong or incomplete isn't a shameful or bad thing, but instead a very good thing: it allows us to later on understand those who find that same path correct. So, discard it and deny it when it no longer suit us? No, that would be like denying your path, your choices, your roots. Those opinions, now different from your current ones, lead you to these, and if you are proud of you current opinion, why should you be ashamed of the path that lead you to them?

My reply would have been simple: "why would I deny or hide any part of my thinking? We all have to come from somewhere, otherwise we are sterile, stagnating and dead".

To finish , I'll live with the words of Kierkegaard: "It doesn't matter what you believe in, as long as you are sincere". It's ok to change your mind, as long as you are sincere about it.

The Root of Power over People

2012-01-20T22:33:00.000+01:00

Through the reading of the book "The Gnostic Gospels" by Elaine Pagels, I came across the topic of clerical power. While cutting into the possible roots of discomfort between the orthodox Christians and the Gnostics, there's the matter of religion as a way to gain power. Basically, a system of believes such as a religion, gives a group of people, or a person, the right to rule over all the others. Through religion someone can say that God speaks to him directly and has appointed him as ruler over all others. This becomes more clear in different quotes and depictions where a parallel between heaven and earth is drawn, where basically as angels are ruled by God, bishops are ruled by angels and the people is ruled by bishops (or something of the sort. I'm not going into details here).

Through history we have also often said how kings claimed to be appointed by God to rule over their people. Also, religion makes sure you can't question God, God's authority or God's power. This secured air tight the system, ensuring that THEN the authority on Earth couldn't be questioned, for that would equal to question God Himself. In a way this gave also footing to claims of the "true religion", for only a true religion worshipped a true god, and only a true god could appoint a true ruler.

One would sigh releaved and think that's good that those times are over... at least for a part of our civilization, but as I mulled over this matter, I realized that's not true. Our senators, presidents, prime ministers and ministers don't claim to be put in power by God, (God-God), but they claim their power on the name of yet another god that's just as ubiquitous, and often more mythical that real, quite unsubstantial and also free from questioning: The People. But who is this People, and when does it appear? How does this People manifest itself and how does it appoint a ruler of all?

This People - who are supposed to be all of us - becomes visible at elections, right after the candidates have made many an offering to it so they would be appointed. In many countries where rulers also get anointed by The People, the arm of this empowering god is forged, but that doesn't stop them from claiming the same root for their power, and take over for themselves much more powers, many of them often aimed at looting at the actual people you and I make part of.

As the kings and often the bishops, anointed by God to exercise their power, current leaders claim a power from a root they then disrespect, ignore and often act against. So then, why do we let them do it? They say they have been appointed by the people and they represent us, but time and again they bow to the current court, the current nobles - the companies - and loot from us - source of their power - to give to their buddies and those that have bought their loyalty.

Cuts to taxes for the wealthy in detriment of the social programs that aid the people, or cuts on taxes for the wealthy compensated with a raise on taxes for the people. Permisive labor laws, or the execution of it, protection to the sources of income of companies in detriment of the income and access to services and products by the people. SOPA and PIPA are a question again of favoring the New Nobility against the People, and where is this Rulership appointed by The People aiming at? Who's the Rulership favoring - despite of what it says? The New Nobility.

Certainly as a Root of Power, this god called The People is more like a circus pet, pulled out every four years to do a show.

Unexpected

2012-01-19T22:09:00.000+01:00

The unexpected and unpleasant rumors cristalized. Bummer. Things won't be happening the way I wanted them to, so that means to buckle up and still try and make things work one way or the other. Adjust, settle and "fuck, I guess life isn't all about doing what I want" and "why the fuck do I have to take risks when I'm allergic to them? Can't the rest of the planet fall in line with what I want?". Yeah, the usual. Then again, I was given yesterday a potential solution for my situation, in case of need.

Guess then it's time to put my believes and my faith to the test and see how much I trust God, right? Well, then I'm passing the ball and hoping there are no interceptions! God, please run me a Touchdown! ^_^ I won't lie, the risk, the insecurity is killing my nerves, and I'd rather run across the planes and punch lights out until I get what seems to me as a completely irrational request straightened into what I find more suitable for my needs. Oh well, it could have been plain denied and then I would have to take more drastic measures (no! Not about the punching, you moron!), so maybe it's time to count the blessings and... let God run me the Touchdown. I mean, at least there I can do more than here to shorten the yards. :-) Time to prepare, gear up and get going.

Interestingly enough, I've been wondering around today about that message and the spark it brought. I nearly post about it, except that I caught myself in time, feeling "I've done this already". I have. Wouldn't write that down on a memory that poor, but rather on an event that remarkable. It is. As silly, unbecoming as it may sound, it is indeed a quite remarkable point in my life and a light in my memory. Sign or no sign, it is for sure a reminder, and I'm finding it sweet to revel in reminiscence...

Sweet and Bitter together... life is sometimes a mix that doesn't make a tasteful sense.

Faith

2012-01-18T23:59:00.001+01:00

Whatever is your religion, it's useless if you don't believe. Whatever you claim to be your system of believes, if you don't believe in them really, it's useless. Like Kierkegaard said (in a way) "it doesn't matter what you believe in, as long as you are sincere". In my current and personal interpretation, it doesn't matter what you claim to believe in, or the way you express that believe, as long as you put your heart, your honest believe into it, it will be okay.

I can't get enough of the people who attack other people's system of believes or the way they choose to practice it. Time and again have we read or heard self appointed "owners of truth" admonish others that "Islam is a religion of violence" and "Judaism is a religion of corruption", "Christianism is a religion of oppression", "Buddhism/Hinduism is just another word for Satanist", and "Paganism is the religion of the coocoo birds". Rumors spread as truth in and out religious circles, they nag at something they have no business poking at. (I once heard some Christian say that Islam was a religion of evil, so much that they couldn't worship God, only Allah. The moron - who claimed to have been in Arab countries and know deeply their religion, kinda forgot how Allah (Al-Lah) means "The God" in Arabic...) They have a problem if you wake up before dawn, wash yourself, and go to pray kneeling on a rug, and then four more times a day. They have a problem is you choose to call your prayers "spells", or if you dedicate a day a week to rest because in your religion, God said so, or if you make the sign of the cross before praying, if you light votive candles or keep a rosary... It doesn't matter why you do it, why you follow that religion or that tradition, the problem is why you don't follow theirs, which is "the true religion".

And even you you follow "the true religion" they have issues if you don't do it the way you do. Why? Because there's only one way, or so they claim. Truth is, no matter how much you seek to emulate them, there will always be something wrong, and that's expected, for this types of mentalities can't settle with anything if there's not a conflict, an enemy they can group against.

The truth is that these are simply sects. No matter the religion, these are sects that have nothing to do with believes or religion or the Divine or any of those things. These are groups to segregate people. Believes, however are something different, and come from within.

Don't be afraid of experimenting, mixing and matching, taking what's good for you and discarding the bad. Your believe - your personal believe - is your unique connection with The Divine, be this whatever name you choose to give Them. God, Gods, Goddess, Universe, Energy, Chi, Prana, Mother Nature, Gaia, Earth, Nature... you name it. You feel it in your heart and you can connect directly to it through any mean that comes natural to you. Try it out, and you'll see that when you find the way that's yours - whatever it is - things will align. No, it doesn't mean that you'll get all your wishes granted, it means that you will be not only more in control with your own destiny, but you will also understand better the things that happen in your life, trust more and be far more happy.

Often that feeling that "this isn't it" comes for the doubts. Don't be ashamed of them, don't stash them under the bed, but come close to them: what is it that provokes them? Can you find an explanation for them? Do you need an explanation for them? Or are your doubts arising because you feel insecure, or you already go into it thinking "this is bullshit and it ain't going to work anyways"? Self doubt is another matter, and it's something that can fuck up any system of believes. There's no path you can choose where you can find all the answers to anything, though in many paths you can find the answers you need. If you already doubt it, stash it. If you can't put your believes on anything because everything looks like bullshit, you may want to go atheist, though that doesn't give you the answers either. No church or group is gooing to cure what you should work yourself, and THAT's something many of these sects prey on: personal insecurity and disbelief. No, it ain't going to work, what they offer, but they get the Soul Miles for "converting you".

Through my personal projects, I have found myself in many difficult situations - some of them are still unsolved - and through which I've learned to separate them in two groups: those I can do something about, and those that are out of my control. For the first ones, I do my part and work them to get them. For the second I trust my believes, my connection to The Divine - which by being Christian, I can God - and act accordingly: I pray. It doesn't diminish my believes or my connection to God if one day I decide to pray "the Pagan way" and hold a little ceremony for a Sabbath, or simply take the prayer and add elements of Paganism to settle it in, or pray through my yoga class. Each of these are the way in which I feel that day, in that situation, in a better position to connect, to take my prayer through.

God is everywhere, in everything and in every way. The way through which we choose to approach him is personal, is human, it's for us, not for Him. So is there a true way? Sure there is, but that's not the same way for everybody. The true way is the one that works for you, the one with which you feel well. And you don't have to buy the whole package! Mix and Match! God is in your heart, in the details, not on the Full Pack and Accesories many are so set in selling us.

So the next time someone make those comments, or wiggle a finger before you, remember: As long as you are comfortable, and you honestly, trully, really believe in it, they can fuck it.

Rattled and "Starstruck" in a Good Way

2012-01-17T19:14:00.000+01:00

I'm shaky. I can't explain - maybe won't - but I'm so shaky right now! No, not too much coke in my system, but I've got... shaky. Topics for posts pile in my paper agenda - ah, the perks of going old school and planning on paper! - but right now none on them are up on my plate for the post at hand.

I received some unsettling information regarding a future plan I have on the cooking (non reasoned, just it seems that I won't get things exactly the way I want them, and sure, that can make me shaky with the fits of my upset control-freak self), but that doesn't mean that my plans - set in motion millions of years ago, nailed into place, hammered into shape - will be altered in the least. I'll fight and claw and tear up and punch if I have to, but I'll get my way. Always have. (Still, I'll be lighting a couple of candles just to make sure things are going smoothly and whatever the conditions, my further plans fall into pace with them.) I keep saying myself "no biggie, we will tackle it", and hope-believe I've the muscle it takes to get things done the way I want them. However - never the less - this is something I didn't need. An extra pound to carry around for this project. Oh well, didn't I say that God doesn't give us more than what we can carry? And haven't I said that it isn't God picking our load but ourselves? So, I bet you I can tackle this thing and still read my mangas and witchy books (I'm into reading witchy books right now).

I've got a message from the past as well. Oh dear, I think thinking of it also adds to the general shaking. When I thought all ties had been severed - though I have never forgot those ties as they were quite a milestone in my life - a small multicolor spark shot up in the air and made the memories real. Do you know the feeling? When a memory is so sweet, of such a fleeting moment in time, that after some years you start wondering if it was actually real or simply a trick of your mind? Well, this spark lit up the memory and brought it back to life. Right now. At yet another life changing point of it.

I'll take it as it looks like: a good sign. Things may look dire, may look obscured, but in real life, what lies beneath - even if facing a period of loss and confusion - is the brightest of all lights and the coolest of all paths. Thanks, my friend, you are a shooting star!

Can't Settle Yet

2012-01-16T21:40:00.001+01:00

This blog has changed faces quite often and quite dramatically in the past days. From black to white to brown again and a small window of time trying out some of the themes and proposed formats. No, I'm not one to easily fit myself in a pre-formed, pre-thought, pre-emptied scheme. That ain't me! I'm jumping on one leg, tilting to the side and rubbing my chin while saying "nope, that's not it either". A mix of pictures of colors of... je ne sais quoi that's missing, that's stating my current state of... me. Thing is that so far neither combination hits the mark, but one thing is for sure: I want the shot of the bathtub.

That godly bathtub! Has ever a picture ever described you so totally, so fully, so perfectly... what you feel you are, what you yearn to be, the absolute balance of in and out, of past, present and future... the very essence of you... that's the picture of the bathtub. And it's not even my bathtub! It's not even the best and most wonderful bathtub I've ever experienced (that's a tie between Sofia and Paris - for real! - though I believe that the one in Venezuela was also pretty amazing!), but that's the picture that contains me, describes me, summons me and resumes me. It's an icon not so much of luxury, as it is an icon of comfort, of time for oneself, me-time, and just chilling out. No worries in the world, no schedules to keep, no appointments to rush to, no deadlines to honor, no bills, no work, no pressure. Some may say they work better under pressure, but I'm not one of them, and though I'm perfectly capable of pulling my weight, stick my nose to the paper and do the job, this state of no pressure, or relax and enjoyment is what reflects me better the most. But how to splash it across the blog?

Hn, well maybe I need a hot shower, a Smirnoff Ice, snuggle in bed in comfy clothes and a good book (or manga) to figure that out. :-)

Post Note: Yeah, yeah, yeah... I changed it again. It seems all I needed was the thought of "comfy" for it to come to me. ^_^ I sunk in my mental bathtub, read my mental Kindle and mental magazines, paged across the mental glossy paper and... it happened. ^_^ I'm liking it, so it's staying... most likely. ^_^

Another Hectic Sunday

2012-01-15T21:10:00.003+01:00

Something must be definitively out of order whrn you wake up on a Sunday at 6:45 am all by yourself. No alarm, no plans, no trip to the beach only a disjunctive: join my usual yoga class at 10:30 am or join my friends for breakfast at this awesome location some miles away driving, with the opportunity to meet new people, update on information and plunge into the most recent topics of conversation hot on the cyberuniverse - which I may or may not know of. This was a Twitter Breakfast, a uniquete kind of meeting where you can synch with the rest of the community, or at least be updated on the latest trends without having to sacrifice your own usual search. (For instance, I'm quite disconnected of the local gossip and national actuality, as I'm more stuck in telecommunications, Amazon.com, books and American Politics.)

As I was starting my Sunday as any other Sunday, I realized that I still had to wash Sookie. But not only that. Kari and I had decided to take my older nephew for shopping to get him scubba diving equipment (he's birthday is close and his aunt - me - thinks that a T-shirt and a Chinese Chess game ins't nearly enough). Then I realized that I had to get going with Lau's scrapbook project, so either I worked on it now or I would never be ready. As result Sookie got washed and waxed, but neither the yoga class not the Twitter Breakfast were doable under my current situation.

It's kinda sad that two things that are important to me, that could be among the last one I can attend in my life, are moved for something one could say I can do any other time. Well, no. Yes, say, but I had to cancel on both for the reason that though I could do scrapbooking any other time - pictures are not going anywere - scrapbooking is a very time consuming thing and either you get doing it on schedule, or you end up with no margins of time left, holding into any available, free minute to work on them.

It reminded me of studying and even working. Sure, you can think you can study any time, you can work anytime, but exactly that sort of thinking is what pushes you later to be unable to do it anytime, because either you do it now or you'll never get done with it, and you'll fail or lose what you where aiming for with the project. I didn't plan my time well with this project and I ended up running out of time, and as result now I have to give up things I would love to do, in order to catch up on the project and get it by the last available time possible for me.

From this I leave you a question: Are you looking forward for Hectic Sundays? Is your schedule really as flexible as you pretend it is, or are you working yourself a whole lot of rushing and trouble? Pressure isn't fun and it can end up being really expensive.

Organize your time well. Plan your activities.

Scrapbooking!

2012-01-14T23:59:00.001+01:00

Today is my brother's birthday. ^_^ Watching him get older each day - and the years he's counting! - makes me remember that I'm not that young anymore. (He's two years my junior.) It's not like I'm delusional, thinking I'm still some snot nosed kid, but my actual age doesn't down on me as much as on the day of my little brother's birthday. Getting him a present is quite hard too - as it usually is for a woman to get a present for a man, because we can't relay on the easy things there are to give to women: jewelry, make up, body creams, splashes, purses... - but in the end we picked up a sort of organizer with many transparent drawers, where you can store screws and nails and tiny things like that. He'll probably use it to store his spare LEGO pieces. Another year solved, 364 days to go for the next one. Oh, sorry, 365 days as 2012 is a ... how do you say in English? Leaping year?

Aside from my brother's birthday, today is Saturday, which is usually a good "errand day" for me. In this particular Errand Day, I've got my first scrapbook album. ^_^ Well, not mine, as the project is going to be for my Mom and my sister-in-law and I are going to asseble it together. (I think I've explained this before, but it goes like this: Lau was making scrapbooks for herself, we decided to make one for Rose, then I decided to make one for Lau, and Mom saw it and she said she would like one for herself too. Then I decided to make it along with Yul, so the scrapbook contains the things of Mom's both kids ^_^.) The idea is to pick 100 pictures (50 mine and 50 Yul's), so I calculated how many sheets we would need to set the 100 pictures, and worked around a ballpark amount for the project. Then, thanks to my trusty datebook, I planned the benchmarking of supplies (album, extra sleeves, pages), and I decided to make it today the day I would go pick up the supplies we required for it.

Close to my old highschool, there's this tiny house that keeps odd open hours, which is filled with all sorts of scrapbooking supplies that range from the expected to the stranges and most unexpected things I wouldn't even know how to hold on the right side. I though I was going to last a couple of minutes in there as I already had a list of what I needed, but the salesgirl was soon instructing me on the techniques and arts related to scrapbooking. And here I thought it was about pasting the pictures and putting some decoration on it. Oh no.

She explained that two pages one next to the other should always match somehow. Didn't need to be alike, but a certain theme should always carry on. The sheets, which for me were just the base to paste the pictures, are supposed to be layered, often treated with special drawing chalk for an aged effect and nothing that wasn't acid free should go on the pictures. (Holy fucking shit! I must have been assembling Laura's the wrong way! Nothing of my supplies are acid free! They sure as as acid as lemons!)

She took the chance to show me her own "multi-topic" scrapbook album - many with pages I honestly considered down right of poor taste (not offensive, just terribly designed and envisioned) - and was quick talking to me about how wonderful the owner was, and how great her style and vision for arranging pages - and indeed the pages she told me the owner had helped her with were honestly beautiful! - managing the layering of different pages, and how a double sided paper (like all I bought...) were used only as accent as the back was usually plain, one color and build on that with the design.

... My boyfriend was, meanwhile in the car - BLACK CAR! - under the noon sun cooking himself extra crispy.

My eyes fell then on the stamps and I'm crazy for stamps!!! 'Letter decoration' I thought at once - fuck scrapbooks, I need something to eventually grace up my letters, and stop being the only penpal with plain paper... filled to the margings with words. Most of them where phrases and those with pictures were mostly about babies. There was one "October 31st" and what sort of witch (figurative or real-life... depends on how you see it, either as I'm a fun, crazy person, or because I'm observing ancient celebrations - now called Pagan celebration - or because you think I'm a monster who lives only to destroy the poorly done job of others and rip at their throats instead of being benign and let them be in their incompetence) would I be if I didn't jump at the opportunity of having THAT? ^_^

Seeing that I would soon be left with no boyfriend, but a big gooey mess of melted boyfriend in my car, I did my best to make my way out, however I must admit I was caught. I left the store wishing to know more, holding my purchase and a business card with their phone number, promising myself to recruit Lau and Yul to come with me to the shop again for a class. Is this the beginging of yet another, serious hobby?

The Old Fashioned Errands

2012-01-13T16:37:00.001+01:00

This post is coming out really difficult this time. Talking to my friend Trish the other day (on the net, because we are a ocean apart from each other), about bloggers, popular and all the matter about traffic and I was rolling the thought around the matter, and even considering to ask her to synchronize posts with me on the subject. However, as the topic is still up and running, I haven't gotten around enought to grasp it and add to the previous post (Blogger(ina)). Instead I'm caught here in the middle of daily little matters, with a peanut butter and jam sandwich by my side, concerns I can't voice around (yet), nursing a cherry coke and thinking - already two hours into my work shift, and about 4 hours since waking up - how I would rather be at home right now, spread across the bed, under my comfy blanket, with the wamr sun shining through the blinds and me surfing the egde between being asleep and being awake, pulled equally by waking up and grabbing a book or a manga from my nightstand and read it, or sinking in again into sleep and find out how the dream goes.

It's Friday, but not any Friday as I've errands to run after work, I don't want to do on Saturday. Please, I need to rest! I want to rest! So this means that today - of all days - may finally come the day when I drive to a certain city part famous for lodging the most prestigious university of Costa Rica - and some private ones too - one of the most famous malls, being home to several politicians and local celebrities, housing many of the most known bars and restaurants... and having the worst cases of traffic jam. On a Friday. Yes. I've been trying to avoid going there, but there's no avail. I must get this done, and the only way I can do it is personally and there.

What? What could it be, you may ask. Perhaps you think I must meet someone on a personal matter that's too delicate to discuss over the phone or through e-mails. A secret love affaire that shall end now inspite of our mutual feelings... wrong. I'm not mushy, I don't have an affaire, and even if I did, the first to know would be my boyfriend (I'm just that open) so there would be nothing secret about it. Or maybe a friendship that went sour, so I'll meet my soon-to-be-ex-friend to a coffeehouse where I'll tell her what has she done to disappoint me so deeply and why I believe that terminating our friendship is the only acceptable next step. Plausible, specially when you consider that I don't shy away from terminating friendship and I have been complaining about how some of my acquintances have a special talent for whining, which consumes all their hability to "do something about it". Thought the idea is tempting, that's not my business in Traffic Town either. My business this time is actually closing an account with a company. Account? Like there's money and now I'll have some refound or something? Wishful thinking, and then again wrong. It's one of those cases where once upon a time you signed up for an account that was supposed to make your life easier, and for a while it did. However things have changed, you've downsized many things, simplified many others and there you are with this membership card, and tons of no longer wanted e-mails and account balance sheets long in 0 because you haven't been using the benefits of it, though you've been charged the membership every year without fail.

So I was thinking "I don't need this anymore, let's cancel it and have less clutter in my drawers. Let's simplify". Sure, let's do that, except that this organization that has offices in every corner, is unable to cancel the account unless you go to the very place where you opened it because "that's where they keep your record". So let me see if I get this right: we live in an age of technology... for quite a few decades now, AND there's such a thing called "messenger service" for records kept physically, AND there's an organization that can't close an account if it's not where it was opened? What if I moved to the other side of the planet and now I remember I've this account and want to close it? Take a plane and do the line? Unbelievable.

But that's it, folks, here I am on a Friday, with my coke and PB&J sandwich, with all great ideas for a post blocked because I can't recover from the enormous imbecility of one organization. At times like this I look at certain acquintances who are engineers and spend their lives without fixing anything, but boasting about all the things they could create, brushing away the toaster that needs to be fixed only to make some aesthetically offending contraption of the size of a big cat, that can light one Christmas lightbulb while measuring some waves nobody really cares about. Those you loooove to go around "well, say what you want, but you couldn't do your job if it wheren't for us and technology. You need us, we make the planet a better place and without us you would be in the Medieval times". Yeah, those, I'd like to grab them by the neck, show them my account and say: "so you are so cool and you can't fix this? You're so full of crap".

Today is trip-day, so please wish me luck. ^_^

Honesty

2012-01-12T15:49:00.000+01:00

There's this woman, we will call, Joan. She comes from a humble family that got to a better position with time. Her grandparents worked the land hard to make a living and then make enough to move to the city and give their many children a better chance at life. Some of them did, some of them didn't, but all of them got pretty much better off, with nice jobs at different factories or even small businesses of their own. Joan's mom even ended up working in a school.

Inspite of being an only child for many years, and perhaps resenting the lack of a father figure, or a mother spending more time with her - well, Joan's mom had to work hard and study to provide for her daughter - Joan grew resentful of those who seemed to have a better life. Her neighbourhood, like any good ol' 70's suburban neighbourhood had a cluster of houses that started looking all alike, but as the owners got more comfy in them, theis houses started changing making them more a reflection of themselves and their conditions. There were thus houses of incredible beauty and lush elegance, and other houses more ran down and simple. Their home was on the simpler side for quite some time - which was expected given that a lot of people lived in that house and some of them liked lounging around and living from what the others made.

In the begining Joan was like any other kid on the block, but soon she started stealing the toys of other kids, or grabbing things from houses as she went to play with the kids. Many went easy on her, knowing she was poor, but others closed her out. Maybe all of this influenced her to become who she is now.

Kids grew up and many moved away, but Joan was one of those who stayed. Joan stayed. After finishing her highschool (though there's no prove that she did), she stayed home, showing apathy towards studying further or getting herself a job. Soon after she started dating basically to get out of the house where she was constantly told to do something with her life. She also went down the path of using men to get what she wants. Clothes, jewelry, dinners, travels, shoes, bags and so on. Eventually she also resourced to getting pregnant to secure herself a source of income even if the guy left her. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Be it as it may, this sort of life is taxing, as you basically reduce yourself to beg for livelyhood, lying and using anything at hand to make other to provide for you the things you are not willing to provide for yourself. The educational system in Costa Rica was abck then - and still is - quite friendly, allowing everybody with the will to study to do so. Scholarships are available, public education is affordable for any career you would like to choose (books might be expensive, but the libraries are free!), so Joan couldn't argue she didn't have the means to study. She, however, wouldn't work either in any capacity. With bitter envy she stared at the neighbours, new and old, who rushed in the morning clad in scrubs to the Medical or Nursing school, or the girl from one of the poorest houses of the block - if not the poorest - rushing in immaculate high heels and her perfectly pressed flight attendant suit and perfectly coiffed hair to the job, with a small suitcase. That girl of so dire conditions had fought hard for a future, clawed into every possible chance and now she was going to spend the night at a five star hotel in Houston, thanks to the fabulous job her efforts landed her.

Joan wanted for herself a life far more glamorous of that the dentist had across the street, from whom she stole Barbie dolls once upon a time. She wanted a life more glamorous of the business administrator had in the end of the street, who had an important position at a bank and recently bought a flashy new car. She wanted to shine like they all shone, and wanted to outshine them and for once be the one looked up to, be the envied instead of the envious. But unwilling to study, unwilling to work, unwilling to even care for the children she brought to this world for a child support check, she had no chances, unless she would marry a millionaire.

That's when she stumbled upon the social networks. There, in a profile of a popular site (lets say it: Facebook), Joan invented for herself a new life. She changed the way she writes her name, to become Yoan, and made herself a grandious, starlet profile. Loving mother of little angels she couldn't live without, graduated from prestigious universities from flashy careers like nurse or physio-therapist, manager of a company and married. It would have raised the eyebrows of only the few who overheard the loud quarreling that took place everyday at their house, to know that (1) she didn't take care of her children, but spent the whole child support check on herself and her boyfriends, (2) she had never set foot in a university, less got a drgree from any of them, (3) wasn't married even if her boyfriend was.

Flags jumped up, however, when people on Facebook noticed that her university and career changed quite often. What had she studied? Medicine? Law? Architechture? And how come she was a manager of a company dealing with cybercafés, or selling eggs or raising cows? Without the least of shame, she stole the pictures of her friends, passing a picture of a slender 15 year old girl as herself. Passing office pictures of department heads as her own office, and pictures of trips to places she didn't even had right as her own trips.

Her cynism was outrageous, which soon got people speaking. She spread lies about having married her boyfriend in a private ceremony at a given date, living happily with him and her children, when she moved with him leaving her kids behind, coming to visit them once or twice a month. Left to the care of her elderly grandmother, without a dime to look after them, she feld her family happily to be the kept woman of a married man, who didn't mind a woman who alienates her own flesh and blood. The grandmother, used to the hardships of her own youth, resourced to the old tricks of the poor to make the best of the little money she had, replacing a produce for another, keeping a close eye on the tabs, and even giving her own food so the children could be fed. She cared for them, washed them, clothed them, mended their old, ragged clothes, walked them to school, helped them with their homeworks and played with them.

Joan screamed at her each time she came to visit, humiliating her for her ignorance, trashing the homworks she helped her kids to do, calling them "crappy" and "shameful". Humble, cheap paper ripped carefully from the thin notebooks wasn't good. Drawings colored with a few color pencils weren't good enough. Joan demanded flashy folders and bond paper and stickers instead of drawings, and then mocked the old lady for not having enough money to afford such things, while she toyed with the brand new necklace she bought on the child support check.

"Old, stupid cow!" she called her "How dare you making the kids' homework, you idiot? They are going to mock them at school! Go back to the kitchen, where you belong!"

Her words were heard around the block as it's sound and strong. From the houses next to hers, and even two houses away, families in the kitchen or out the backyard stopped mute. She who's never there, she who can't care for her children, humiliates the one holding up for them? She, who don't give to the care of her children a dime she could spend on herself mocks the humble who gives them everything she has?

The family heard of this, and Joan's uncles and aunts demanded she took her own children with her and stop abusing of her grandmother at once. She yelled at them, telling them to mind their own business. Under pressure, she took her children with her, but unused by then to live with her, that first night away from the only home and the only family they've known, with a mother who rather turned to the computer than to them, they cried. Her boyfriend didn't want them, so she shipped them back to the grandmother the next day.

The tension continued mounting at the family, while she continued posting on her facebook page how happy she was and how devoted she was to her husband and children. People, fed up with her lies, called her up on them. "We know who you are and we know you are an unemployed, uneducated, irresponsible mother who lives out of what she can catch between the legs, or push out of it."

Suddenly she got offended. How dare they judge her, criticize her? All those professionals and university educated people, who pretend to be better than her "because of what they have", and don't see that she's also a hardworking person who deserves respect. Oh, but the tide can turn and "they don't realize that they are up now, but they could be down tomorrow".

Joan, wake up. People don't judge you because of what they have - you are the only one measuring people's worth for what's in their purse or on their name - nor because they have a job or a title - you are the one obssessed with this. You take your business to the streets, you lie in public, you misbehave in public, you shout for everyone to hear, all your personal problems. You've already made everybody's concern everything that happens to you, so shut up and shoulder what you've brought on yourself. Or did you actually believed that you could lie all you want and people wouldn't call you on it?

Then, yes, the tide can change, and those who live comfortably may find themselves tomorrow in a dire situation, BUT there are things that don't change with the tide. Nobody takes away from you what you've learned, what you've worked, your honesty, your transparency or your principles. We work hard and earn what we have, we forge our own destiny, but Fate may have it and take the fruits of our harvest away, but we still be clean at heart, honest and we could always hold our heads up high, proud of the people we are. What about Joan? She could marry a rich man, live drowning in gold and jewelry, and still she will still be that irresponsible mother, the disrespectful person, the compulsive liar everybody will always pity. Tide don't change that. You make that, and it always stays.

Evasion and Corruption, a Symbiotic Relationship

2012-01-11T15:04:00.001+01:00

Disclaimer: It's important I let you know that this post is of an economical nature (or socio-economical nature) where I'll go on explaining in a very rudimentally way how the market functions, what's the role of the State and what's the role of taxes. It also goes political and heavily biased (as everything I post here because this is my blog, these are my ideas and opinions, and if you don't like it, fuck it), so if you are not an economist, or interested in economics, OR you are but you are of a more liberal tendency, and strong about it, you may want to skip this one and wait for my next fluffy post - which should be out soon, if I keep my current tempo. I promise lighter stuff for the next one, so if you don't feel like reading a lot about why I think tax evasion is evil - after a lenghty exposition about economics and why taxes are good - then turn around right now.

Last Warning!

The topic of tax evasion is one that we find around quite often. In the case of some because they evade taxes, and in the case of others, because they know or hear about people evading taxes or planning to. This doesn't mean that they are all surrounded by groups of libertarians who proudly evade taxes and consume only tax-evading products. Tax evasion, as it happens, isn't only something big companies do, or organized crime groups, but something a lot of people do, regular people like you me, and even uncle Pete. But just because "everybody does it" it's okay if we do it too? Well, let's explain some about taxes.

Taxes: What Are They?

The way societies are organized nowadays - economically speaking - there's a private component: you me, the companies... who interact to sell each other things. We - individuals - interact with companies to sell them our work force, for wich we are paid a price known as "wage" or "salary". That workforce is then used to make - along with other inputs - into goods and services we may or may not buy or use, paying for them a price, know as "price" or "fee", "fare" or any other name we may call it. We all interact in a the market. In it every transaction depends on two factors: money and need. If you have money you can access to the things you need, as long as you have enough to pay for them. However, if you really need something and the person or company who has it knows that you need that thing, it can push the price higher and higher, asking even more than what if costs to make it, simply because you really need it and have to pay for it in order to have it.

If you would let the companies act this way - since they produce all you need to live, and they are the ones who can decide to hire you and pay you whatever they want - things could come to a point where lots and lots of people would work a lot, earn too little and still don't have enough to cover their needs, while a few would profit from it, having more than what they need, both in products and services, but also in money.

Some say that this situation isn't sustainable as if most of people don't have enough to live, they won' be able to buy up the things the companies produce, and thus the companies would bankrupt. That's not true. Actually, hunger and need will keep pushing people to continue working (or start stealing, killing and getting involved in criminal organizations), while the companies hiring all that people would adapt to what the paying segment needs. This way, for instance, the food the poor people who work can't afford, would become biofuel for the cars and planes of the people who can afford it. Sure, people will start dropping dead of famine, but currently the planet is packed with people, and by some insane reason, the poorer segments are the ones having more and more children, so that would be perfectly okay for the economy.

A rebelion of the proletars? Yeah... not in these time, when we've been all subdued to laziness.

Now, in order to prevent this situation and keep a sense of balance, there's in the market a third party that makes an effort (or should make an effort) to keep the score balanced. That's the State. As it's job - economically speaking - , the State should make sure nobody is taking advantage of nobody. No company is too big to call the shots, no wage is so small people can't afford a decent living from it, no work schedules too long and so on. In order to do that, the State makes Laws and other rules, and to enforce them on society (because nobody is going to behave well because Simon says), the State needs money. Money to pay people to keep an eye on everybody making sure everybody is acting acording to the law, and if someone isn't, that person or company can be punished. For this you have to pay a Judge, prosecutors, a courthouse, maybe a jail with a set of guards, and then some people to asses the assets of the person or company if found guilty and so on.

Also, since the State can't (or won't) force companies to give services and products away for free to those who can't pay for them, it needs money to pay for these, or make them and give them to the people. These things are stuff like public education, roads, public healthcare (for those who have such a thing - I do), public parks, unemployment checks, food stamps, care for those who need it, shelters, orphanages... you name it. Things that basically a company wouldn't produce because the people for whom it would be can't pay for it, so it wouldn't yield a profit, only losses. To do this, the State need money, and how does the State gets money? It actually have three ways: 1. prints it - which if it does a lot makes the money lose its value, so it ain't a very clever solution (the correct term for making money isn't printing, it's "minting", but printing gives you a better idea of what I'm telling you ^_^), 2. makes companies and sales services, which some States did, but then were called "too communists" and "too inefficient" and all those State services were given to private hands who do things just as crappy, but for much more money and hardly give back to society - except for show (and except those companyies that actually are non-profit), and 3. through taxes.

So taxes have a purpose, and if you are not some selfish bastard that thinks everything in this planet is put there to suit your needs, then you see that the fact that you pay taxes means you are a very fortunate, lucky person, and you should be happy because that money you give to the State helps us all, and helps those you don't know and need it more than you. Aaaand yes, there's corruption, which takes that money (not all, but a part) and instead of putting a book in the hands of an underpriviledge kid, it stuffes it in the pocket of someone who would use it to give more money to someone who already has a lot, or buy themselves a nice car, or pay expensive trips and live a life of glamour.

Evasion and Corruption, Justify One Another?

So we've seen that taxes are needed in order to keep the State going and the State is needed to make our societies a livable place for all of us - and not all of us the starving slaves of a few ones. Though yes, the State could get money by selling services and goods, this has the downside that part of the income from the sales must cover the costs and only a part of it can be used to the things the State needs them. The other downside is that the current predominant social ideology prefers all that profit to fall on private hands (specially because most of the services that the State used to operate are very profitable, such as telecommunications, health, education and the production of several goods). So, since printing money is a very bad idea in the medium and long term, taxes are the income source of excellence, specially because the biggest chunck of the income goes straight to the State.

However it happens that some people and some companies don't like to pay taxes. This is basically money they've made and they want it all for themselves, or they say that they don't want to give it to the State so that the State - being a corrupted entity - can steal it and divert it to it's own profit. So they better keep that money for themselves.

If you look at it, most of the people who evade, say the same thing: "they don't pay taxes because it upsets them how that money goes to line the pockets of the corrupt". But, does this justify comitting a crime that has as victim not the corrupt pigs lining their pockets, but the whole of society, starving for State funded services and products? The way I see it - and as it has been obviously put this far - no.

The thing is that the corrupt will always steal, no matter the amount of the money collected from the tax payers. Also, as a matter of fact, this corruption allows in a way, the evasion to happen. How? Well, those deviating money are busy deviating a portion of the incoming flow, which leaves less money to the tasks that should be funded - among them a decent and working staff of tax collectors empowered enough to catch the evaders and get the money out of them. Assembling and keeping a well working system of tax collectors demands a lot of resources, and those resources are rather invested in personal profit - in the hands of the corrupt. So you evade, corruption adapts to keep getting its cut, you evade more, they adapt more and the ones suffering are those who would make use of the goods and services the State can't fund anymore. This could eventually lead us to that scenary where there's no State because it has no more money to function and the whole society is at the mercy of those who hog the money - who are not the evaders, but the corrupt (who can also be evaders!).

If the evader is also corrupt by the sheer evasion is another topic (and I do believe it is, but in this post we refer to the corrupt as the one diverting the funds from their destiny and profiting from it.. which is also what the tax evader does, but on the other end of the scope).

Evasion and the Stupidity of It

One thing that amazes me the most, is how a lot of people who evade taxes claims to do it for a reason (as I stated it previously), so this way they try to actually legitimate their crime by infusing in it a pseudo-ethical spine. Question: Are they stealing from the corrupt to give it to the poor? Is that tax money going directly to help the poor, the sick, those in need? Any good evader would say: "yes, that's me". Thing is that they don't. They could mask it, as if they were helping someone who needs it, but they don't. Many down right hate systems based on solidarity, where those who have more share their fortune with those who have less. Their thought normally is "why should I help them if they are not my kin?" Well, in a way they are. The society in which you live has given you education, healthcare, roads... teachers taught you for your own personal growth, and nurses and doctors cared to make you feel better. Yes, maybe all those were paid for you, but does that mean that you have right to them because you can pay them, but those who don't have that money should not benefit from it? Stay ignorant and thus never get a chance to improve their lives? Or stay sick and die?

If the family is the base of the society, shouldn't then society behave like a family where we all care for each other? In the mind of the evader, no. You are out of the womb and that's no man's land, and everybody for him or herself. Well, that's certainly not the kind of world I'd like to live in, but in a world more caring and human, we all have to chip in, even to help those we don't know and may never meet. But evader don't see it that way.

Those who evade taxes, will probably do other things, cut corners and look for ways to get things withour paying for them, or paying the full price. Yes, there's a word for that, and that word is "stealing". And it's only natural: if they steal from someone as big and powerful as the State (that could send them on a whim to prison and take away their assets), why wouldn't they do it with someone less powerful? Steal cable signal, steal internet signal, steal phone service, energy, water, pay less on public transportation fares, less at the restaurant, the video rental... anything and everything is fair play as long as the can "outsmart" it, or in other words CHEAT.

So where's the moral fibre, the ethical stand according to which they evade taxes because the State steals that money? They don't want someone else to steal what they can steal? It upsets them that some corrupt asshole is stealing more than what they do?

If your problem is corruption, denounce it, demand the State to do something about it, but you can't fight crime with other types of crime, because that only fuels the circle. Yes, corruption shall be fought and eliminated, but what are we achieving with evasion towards that end? Cutting the fund to find a cure isn't the way. Nor is remain passive. Push for accountability, vote, get involved, do your best, refuse to join the long list of corrupts, and have a moral stand to demand transparency and honesty. Do your part as it should be done, and demand the State and everybody else to do the same. Teach that to the future generations, not only by words, but also by example.

Diclaimer: non of the pictures used for this post belong to me. They were taken from the Internet. If any of these belong to you and you want it back, let me know and I'll take it off.

Fuchsia

2012-01-10T23:57:00.000+01:00

From the past century there's a memory I use to recall about feeling on my own skin the social differences between people. It happened in Hungary at the dorms where I was living at the time, that I was with the Latina team, girl taking and one of them, a quite rich girl from Ecuador, lets call her Emma, though I forgot her name, was telling us stories about her friends back at home. Her stories were nothing like mine, about walking home from highschool - a distance of maybe some 10 to 20 km (that's like 6 to 12 miles) - just to save the busfare to spend it on candy, stamps or save it for a keychain of the New Kids On The Block. Her stories were about how her parents gave her and her siblings a lot of money every week to buy their things - lunch money, shopping money, etc. - but they spent it all on gas. They where the only ones of their friends to have a car (Emma had her own car, it wasn't shared with her siblings) - and their friends loved driving around, so sometimes they used up all their weekly money on gas in a day. She told us about the constant quarrels with their parents because all the money went to gas.

Then, she told us, one day to add to the matter, her friends decided to prank her by painting the bumper of her car fuchsia. I still remember Emma looking at us out of herself.

"Fuchsia! Can you believe it? Fuchsia!! I was so mad at them!"

I didn't get it. I mean, back then I didn't know how to drive, less did I have a car! I saved up money for a keychain, wore the same shoes to highschool for three years, the same uniform and the same backpack. I think I wasn't even sure what color was fuchsia exactly. (Yes, I could be certified as a 100% straight man, according to cannon perceptions.) I don't know if she was laying to us (she should have been driving in Ecuador at the age of 15-16, and I never bothered to check if that's possible), but she did love telling us all about her glamorous, rich life, and that was okay with all of us... I guess. But be it as it may, it stuck with me that - for some reason - fuchsia bumpers are bad. There's something about fuchsia on bumpers that sends rich people screaming and we all should understand why. Other than that for me it was just a color.

That was until yesterday. No, nobody painted Sookie's bumper fuchsia - if so I'd be blogging from jail - but as I was driving home, a black car rolled right in front of me.. with fuchsia rims. THEN I understood! Fucking shit! Fuchsia! If that color looks so bad on rims, how the HELL would it look like on the bumper! I tried to find a picture to illustrate the source of my horror and the reason of my temporary blindness, but there's no avail. All pictures of fuchsia rims simply look lovely and girly and only needing a Hello Kitty head with a lot of bling on it. No, this thing was so horrendous, so horrendous... that there are no words for it. (Specially because the car was pitch black and the rims were VIVID, LOUD, SHRIEKING fuchsia.)

Then it kinda got me thinking about something else: fashion. I know that back in our days Madonna and her raggy style with black roots and poor bleaching job was the headache of our parents, and today we have weird-faced, ugly-nosed Lady Gaga prancing around in clothes and hairdos so hideous I'm sure it's all to keep the attention from her horrendous face, BUT what has happened in the past 18 years that we got from shrieking at fuchsia bumpers (in the rich segment of society) to going bonkers for fuchsia rims? I turn again to Kurt Andersen's article for Vanity Fair, "You say You want a Devolution?" (January issue, page 40, with no other than Lady Gaga on the cover), and I must say, sorry, but there have been a some sort of evolution in fashion in the last 20 years, because we went from "No, fuchsia does not go on my car" to "yes, please, FUCHSIA!". But what else? Yes, we do pull from the past to do our fashion, even in the more "creative" and "evolving" decades, by taking a hint of Victorian here, some romantic Renaissance there, picking a thing or to from Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece, a flare of the Barbarians and even pulling inspiration from the Middle Ages. (Accents at the waist, flowing sleeves, certain types of layering...) So, we copy, and often the success is in what copies because we have seen it somewhere and we can relate. We copy in fashion. But then, there's something that doesn't stop and carries from one age to the next picking and pulling on the one before. Is it fashion, is it true rebelion or is it simply a generational temper tantrum that might not even find it beautiful or groundbreaking, or a way to "express themselves" but simply a way to piss us off, shock us and make us react, so that we notice that they are there.

It's like a generational spoiled child that chooses to grab the attention of adults by being bad, outrageous to earn a scolding because somehow it can do it by earning praises.

Evolution, Devolution, Fuchsia... the world doesn't seem to care where it goes anymore, as long as it makes the headlines.

Caught in the Middle of a Meltdown

2012-01-10T22:38:00.002+01:00

Here I was, happy go lucky, blogging my way into yet another day, remembering those old days when different realities were put together to share a space, all equal at that moment, but different in their background, when fuchsia bumpers were a nightmare and I couldn't start even grasping the idea of someone younger than me (and I was only 18) not only knew how to drive, but had a car and drove around all day. However as I was to upload a picture, Blogger froze it's ass on me. O_O Dude, you don't do that when I have less than 10 minutes before leaving and my blog is on European Central time, and I won't make it home in time!

What's most strange is that I actually had quite good ideas for blogs popping on my head, and even scribbled one down on my trusty notepad with a purple mini sharpie. (Remind me to carry around a regular pen with my trusty notebook... which also doubles as the cover for my Kindle.)

Be is as it may, it was interesting: the mind lights up and connects, download to the paper, idea deep from the brain splashed out and captured in an idea-net in the outside word... and the bigger net and transport decided to be uncooperative. Ain't that ironic, to say the least? (Or Murphy?)

Blogger(ina)

2012-01-09T21:22:00.000+01:00

Through the social networks I've got to a post about "15 Words of Advise to Become a Good Blogger". It was early morning, I haven't had my coke yet, so I was stupid enough to CLICK ON IT and READ IT. A quarter of the way down the super-moronic text, I was wide awake thanks to outrage and pissed-off-ness (a brand new word!). (I guess I was far more pissed by being directed to this article by someone I had on my social networks, whom I'll be probably be ripping out... once I discover who the offender was.) Now, what was there exactly that upset me? Well, I should have seen it coming from the title (the post is actually in Spanish, that's another reason why I'm not liking it), but it was basically about 15 dos-and-don'ts for so called "being a good blogger". It was filled to the brim with crap like "Good Bloggers don't use cursing words" and "you are a good blogger if your name appears as author of the post. If not, you are a 'content maker'". It was ironic also to read in the list that "good bloggers creat content, not re-blog (I didn't know that word!) or translate from other blogs", and yet the "15 Tips to be a Good Blogger" appear in other blogs in English. (Guess this moron blogger isn't a good blogger also by their own standards!) There were also simplistic tips like "don't put out only text, but add visual interest to attract readers", and other bull- about how you had to strive to get "traffic". Since when blogging is a socially tied down activity instead of an expression of freedom and individuality? I mean, if I wanted to read socially approve blank, bleached articles I would pick up any of Rupert Murdoch's papers. Now, give me some credit - this could have gone both ways: the bad way it did go, or on a snappy, funky, irreverent way, which is what I would have expected.

So, what is actually being a Blogger or Bloggerina, and what makes us Good?

Well, you make the Blogger. A Blogger or Bloggerina (female blogger), is someone who has something to say, something to show, something to express - something original - and does so, normally in a "blog" which is this: a corner of the Internet where you can write things and publish them for others to read. Like a journal or a diary. It's original, it's own and it's atuned to your soul and who you are. It doesn't need to encompass the whole of who you are, as you can blog only about one topic , or have several blogs to blog about several things, or blog in one blog about anything that comes to mind.

There's not one formula to make a post or a blog a successful one, other than the very spark, the very spirit of the blogger or bloggerina herself. No type of text or picture, no outlay, no language, no topic makes what only the spirit of the blogger can. When you blog, you are a blogger. Good or bad, as the one behind the keyboard and the screen, that should be indifferent to you. As a true Blogger, you write, to upload pictures and sounds and video because you have this unstopable need to express. You blog because you feel it in you - or that's why I personally believe you should do it.

The good or bad blogger exists in the eye of the reader, and it's not measured by the traffic to your blog (that shows only how popular you are, and popular isn't the same as "good", as you can see from the Jersey Shore, Glee and Twilight). A blogger can be both good and bad at the same time and about the same post, and it doesn't matter what's the majority of opinions, what matters - as blogger, to oneself, is what we express and how good, how originally, how perfectly have you managed to say what you wanted to. Paraphrasing Kierkegaard "it doesn't matter what you blog about, as long as you are true to yourself".

Sightings

2012-01-08T21:02:00.000+01:00

Today was the first yoga class of the year. Woohoo!! I was missing it! The energy, the meditation, the scent of burning ylang-ylang or peppermint oils or sandalwood inciense, the mats, the soft words and the waking up after shavasana that makes you feel like a goddess freshly come to Earth. Didn't miss the freaking chaturanga, the warrior in No.X position and all the freaking "stand on the ball of your foot and turn upwards stretching all of your limbs..." and other Plastic Man like positions.

I went as usual with Laura, and without Alix and MJ. Then again these two are long lost for yoga, for they haven't been skipping classes for many months now. The yoga class was easy, relaxed, though that didn't keep the instructor from twisting us into all sorts of half moons and grab-your-leg-behind-you in positions that made us look like a birdcage on a stick. Except me, who can hardly reach my leg or keep myself in that position. I'm really not flexible.

There was this time a newbie, an old university classmate of ours. Laura had ran into her some time ago and invited her to the class. It was cool seeing her again, and as usual, after the class we stayed behind talking and catching up. How much time has been passed, how we doing... and then came the time of talking about the "sightings". Who from the group have we seen and how they are. Baby-face boys gone fat and looking aged - or down right worn down by life - who has gotten married, who had children, and then the horrors: which of us - who were always crappy students - became profesors at our university. From the gossips to the realities filtering through them, it was sad to realize we studied in better times, when the focus was more on the quality of the education, on the connection between the academical knowledge and the applying to the real life, rather than what goes on now.

Mediocre students are now heads of Masters' Departments and get scholarships abroad, while the best students get fired because they dare to expand their horizonts by working at other enterprises, and that, inflaming the anger of the Director and his jealousy for having underlings making more money, cut them out of the payroll.

Who remained the same, who got fat, who went thin... why have we all stranded so far away from each other? I guess life has the tendency of changing completely your environment, wiping away friends and camarades, team mates and partners in crime if you don't hold into them with all you have. But from time to time, like the UFO sightings, a wave of time washes ashore an old friend, and thus you keep the fragile web alive.

This Weekend's Plans

2012-01-07T22:52:00.000+01:00

It's finally the weekend and that means I can stay in bed as long as I want! No alarm clock, no walking up sulking and wishing I was already retired, suiting up for work, rushing to get in time to punch the electronic card to signal that I've got to the office in time. Or not? Well, inspite of arriving nowadays early enough to my homecity to run my errands, I still had a nice pack of things-to-do to take care of today. So this is how my beloved boyfriend and I woke up around 7 am and dragged ourselves sleepy from bed to shower to dressing to breakfast until we left to do the errands at quarter past 8.

The list of activities was nicely detailed in my trusty, brand new paper agenda - eternal thanks to my former thesis partner, Mile, for giving me one. I would have never bought myself one, after I've made the transition to electronic agendas, but this one is giving me so much more, that this might be my coming back to the old school system! - with an aproximation of a schedule to get everything done in time, and the most efficient way. Well... maybe if I would have done it alone, I could have stuck to the original plan, but then things got changed a bit. The first stop was at the Post Office. I should have been posting some letters, which I have finished, but there were a couple of things I haven't been done with it, so for one thing, just one thing, I couldn't post the letters. This meant also that I had to get that one thing done as part of my errands. (I can't explain this exactly, but there's this add on to a letter I'm posting and there was one last detail to make it look real neat, which I wanted done at all cost. I can be just that... picky.)

Then we went to the bank - where I had to arrange those burocratic things all of us have to go through. To do this, we went to the office farther from us (though there's one much closer in our city), basically because I like this office better (not to mention there's usually less people in there, which now was also the case, with us being the second next in line went we got in). This bank is at the far East side of the city, while we live at the far West. The other office is exactly in the middle between the two points. This other one I basically don't like because they get a lot of people, queues are endless and the employees are mostly looking for a way to not do their job. The other one - being smaller - is far more attentive and receives less visitors, which make them almost try to make you stay as long as possible, so that they have something to do. All matters were dealt with swiftly and efficiently, which made me fall in love with my bank even more.

From there the next stop was to get the letter-thing done, which wasn't easy because (it was a printing), nobody seemed to be able or willing to do so. In the end we found a place where they were SUPPOSED to make it well, but ended up making a regular print. :-( Well, in the end it worked nicely.

Then we headed to a jeweler to get a small silver necklace and cross cleaned. I didn't realize until we've got back from Dominican Republic, that my silver cross and necklace had blackened up terribly (maybe because of the bathing in the pool of the hotel), but it had gone horrible. :-( We got to a jeweler, who at looking at it at once realized it was stained with sulfur. I was amazed. How could taht get in contact with sulfur? (Pulling out my Supernatural knowledge, I would say maybe I've got in contact with a demon.) The jeweler told me it might take a week to clean the necklace, however, to my utter delight, they called me back in less than 30 minutes to tell me it had been cleaned. Eagerly, they offered me a silver cleaning rag of some sort, so I can take care of my silver at home. I didn't purchase it, but probably I will, as I've an amber rose with a silver stam and leaves that could use some polishing. Have also been told of a way to clean. Here's how:

You'll need:

1. sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)

2. a drop of water, or

2. a bit of lemon

Mix about an 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda (like the tip of a tiny spoon) with a drop of water until you get a paste consistency. Rub the silver with it repeatedly until the black is gone. Rinse it with plenty of water and hand wash soap... liquid! If the stains are too big, too hard or too dark, prepare the solution with lemon instead of water. You can add more lemon and let the silver sit a little covered in the solution.

Baking soda for cleaning silver isn't a new, thing. I've found just now another recipe on the About.com site, which tell you how to do it. This one involves tin foil, baking soda, salt and hot water. Here's the link.

From there we went to the Farmer's Fair to pick up fresh veggies and fruits, and then headed to the hairdresser to get our hair's ends trimmed. Here I learned another trick, this time for persistent dandruff. (It happens that often that dandruff that appears and doesn't seem to want to leave your scalp no matter how good your shampoo is, is due to things like heat, stress or even a sense of general discomfort. Go figure!) My hairdresser told me that what we can do to make it go, is to rub mineral oil (the one used as a laxative) into the scalp where we see the damage (often it isn't on the whole head). We can also mix the oil with rose cream and apply that to the scalp. I'll be reporting on the results!

From there we headed home, not before making a small stop at a tiny Scrapbooking store. Me scrapbooking, I know, but it ain't as lame as many would think! Besides, from time to time I also knit, crochet, embroid and sew, so there. I do lady-like crafts as well. And thanks to my beloved friend and master, Dragonfly, I also can make jewelry, so scrapbooking was just a next step. (Though it does take a lot of time and monetary resources!)

As it happens, as any trendy craft or activity, scrapbooking is quite an expensive treat if you do it "professionally". Gorgeous but insanely expensive supplies deck the activity, and had this tiny, too-precious store packed from floor to roof and wall to wall. It's not like grandma's old album of pictures, it's a particular acid-free album, and acid-free plastic sleeves, and acid-free paper - some printed on both sides, some not, some thicker some thinner, some plain, some glittery - and acid-free, scrapbook designed decoration, which have a particular name an amateur like me didn't quite catch. I browsed for a moment, with my mental calculator on, as I added up the cost of the supplies I could need to make my Mom's scrapbook. (Mom wants me to make her a scrapbook, after she heard Lau and I made one. Ok, Lau made one and I helped, because I'm so freaking SLOW! I only contributed with a few sheets.) The amount was quite elevated, and I hadn't even considered the decorating things!

After this, sure, I'll make my Mom's scrapbook, and I might make one for Kari and I, but this isn't going to become a hobby of mine! Not sure I could or would afford it!

So this is my weekend so far, how about yours?

More on People: Cheaters and Self-Cheaters

2012-01-06T22:09:00.000+01:00

Yes, this is a topic I can't get enough of, but then again, when I'm surrounded by the Nation of Denial, how can I? It's there every step of the way, and time and again my anger halts for a moment as I stare in surprise and wonder "could it be they really don't notice?". Then I'm back at being upset because that's how I am: "I don't give a flying fuck they don't notice, they should". Then, though there are the cases of people who deny doing a poor job, and people deny not being as smart as they think they are, this post will be dedicated to those who purposefully ignore the conditions of their love life.

Through movies and stories (I would say books, but how many people read today to actually make books count as cultural references?)... okay, and books (just because shit-stories printed and bound in book formats should be considered so), and soap operas, TV series, telenovelas and others pound time and again into people's mind that there's one goal and one goal only in life: You've got to have Someone (preferably married to that person). In each fairy tale the pricess marries the prince, in each chick flick the girl marries the guy and in each action series, the dude gets the chick. It's not only from the side of the women, though certainly the products launched specially for us push this agenda with more muscle. Prince Charming is supposed to be the best thing in our life. Forget college and all you sacrificed and put up with to build a career, Prince Charming alone worths sending the whole thing down the sewer.

And also, guys, you don't get the girl and you'll end up forever being "the sidekick" of your group. You are the unwanted, the stupid, the funny, the unsuccessful, because you can't land a chick. A joke, always Robin, never Batman. You can become the best in your area of expertise, you can develop skills like nobody, excel in everything, if you don't have at least one chick under your belt, you are a weirdo, a not-wanted, a failure. Don't look at me like that! I can mention a couple of guys who have been the butt of every joke of the group they belong to - whether they are present or not - because of their inability to hook up with a woman.

This kind of environment breeds a particular type of people, who terrified of being in the target of taunting, or being labeled "unwanted" and "failure", they engage in self-destructive activities and behaviors, in a way to secure love (or the illusion of love). There are those who get obsessed with someone without having actually developped a relationship. Those who fall for a friend or a good friend, and imagine they actually have "something" going on even when there's no such something, and the friend is being just a friend. Such a case was this guy I knew sometime ago, lets call him Jack, who had a crush on a coworker of his, lets call him Vic. Jack was gay and the object of his affection wasn't, yet he talked himself into believing that Vic was developping erotic and romantic feelings for him, and so he imagined his mission was to help Vic transition and embrace his own homosexuality. To everybody he knew he told them that though Vic was heterosexual, they were having "something".

You are an outsider (I know, because the guy of this story never got hold of my blog address ^_^), and I bet you are rolling your eyes and thinking "what a moron!". Question is, have you been there? I know I had. Yes, I have. It was this friend, "Pat" - whom I love to bits and pieces - who had always been very special to me. I was sure Pat and I had a connection that was never outspoken, but was there, and it drove me crazy up and down. I convinced myself that I was head over heels for Pat and that Pat had similar feelings until one day I realized it was not so. That day I also realized that my feelings were called "friendship". So yes, sometimes it's good to take a minute to analize what's going on inside your head, and yes, accept that there are friendships that are more intense than others, but they are still a friendship, and not something else.

So yes, eventually keep a bucket of ice handy to stick your head in it and cool down a notch to get to reality, because these imaginary relationships bring you nowhere and can often be negative for you and your friend. How? Well, Jack was so obsessed he got pissed off everytime Vic when out with his girlfriend. If Vic broke up with her, he was happy, if he got a new one, Jack was back at being bitchy. Since there wasn't really any relationship between them, Jack started once spreading rumors about Vic's new girlfriend, which got to Vic's ears. Jack hoped to make Vic break up with the new girl, but instead, Vic got to know the whole truth, how Jack was spreading rumors also about the two of them being lovers, and that marked the end of their friendship.

See? Open your eyes and take a long, hard look at your relationships and make sure everything is really what it seems to be. Some surprises are not pleasant.

The second type of self-deceptionists are those who are in a relationship which is going down the sewer, yet continue to hang on thinking they are getting something out of it. They stay in a toxic relationship spitting venom at each step of the way. Believe it or not, I had also been in one of those. I was young back them and the guy... Rick... was a piece of work. It came the moment when I just wanted him away and looked at any moment spent with him as a chore, yet I didn't break up with him because I felt tied, as if I couldn't do much for myself if I didn't have him around. Couldn't keep the appartment running, nor pay the bills. (I was quite young then, if you wonder.) He wasn't aggressive either, just one of those that don't get anything done, and completely unreliable. Eventually I broke up with him (because I can delude myself, but my sense of "fuck it, do something or I'll have your heart for breakfast" is stronger, thanks Hyne). With him, however, I realized that when you are in a relationship and you can't say a nice thing about your "significant other" without a. thinking for a long time, b. not sounding like you are saying a cliché thing, c. no, you can't no matter how much you try, then it's time to break up. (Actually, if thining about your one doesn't bring the tickling of a smile to your lips, it's time to break up.)

As an example of this there's the case of a woman we'll call Ann. Ann had been dating this guy, Ross, for over fifteen years. They had a girl in common, Jessie, who is pretty much as old as their relationship. Since the first day Ann knew Ross had other women, one of them his own wife, Rebecca, whom Ross said he was divorcing from. Ann still continued seeing Ross, trying to get married to him. Years went by, Ross had a parade of mistresses longer than a beauty pageant contest, and Ann made a scene out of each and every one of them. She wore her nerves thin spying after him, cheking his phone recods, his computer, his drawers, his pockets, his online profiles and every official record available. Got sick each time he realized he bought jewelry or a car to one of his other women or his wife, and came up with demands about "getting her fair share". Not once Ross broke with her with the clear intention of dating a chick half her age, which only sunk further down her self esteem.

Whenever you asked her about Ross, or she told you about him, she could never say a single good thing, except that he had money and was a good fuck (which later she denied saying he didn't wash himself porperly, was lame and made demands she didn't want to fulfill). Though good sex is quite important, it's not nearly enough to stablish a relationship. A fuck-buddy relationship yes, but something more serious no.

I'd like to tell you that they eventually broke up for good, but that's not the case. Ross actually broke up with her once to chase a 20-something girl, and it was "for good". Sad, she got a new boyfriend who treated her well, though he wasn't a rich guy, and she resented he didn't lavish her with presents. Ann did comment it was the first time she felt in love. When the Ross' new girly broke up with him (he was too old for her), Ross went back to Ann. Ann was happy, but he then told her that he would marry her, and thus give her a house, a car and a company. She dumped the new guy and went back to him. He then walked back on the marriage, gave her nothing but sex and a couple of dinners, and so they went back to the old rutine... with the added bonus that Ann found out that Ross hasn't divorced his wife...

Why Ann isn't dumping that motherfucker? Why did she ditch the guy that made her happy for an ass who has always cheated her? Because Ann, like many, can't picture themselves without the other. For me leaving Rick was easy once I remembered that I didn't need him to pay the bills and help me with the rental, because I actually had a life prior to him, and I was freaking happy.

With or without kids or any new additions (home, car, mortgage, pets...), when a relationship isn't making you happy, you can always walk back, break it and land on save footing.

So the next time you will complain about the conditions of your love life take a minute to consider whether you are yourself the cause of it being so, and whether You could do something to be better.

Sometimes We Are Really Busy...

2012-01-05T22:01:00.000+01:00

... and I am REALLY, REALLY busy, and I shouldn't be blogging, but I can't stop myself. I need just a minute or two, a couple of sentences to micro-vent. I'm quite busy working, which is good. Which isn't good is that this job I'm doing is because the people who were SUPPOSED to do it didn't do it. Add to it, it's the the same sorry ass team I had so many issues with last year, as I TRIED to teach them how to ACTUALLY write a SENTENCE, not only in Spanish, but in ANY HUMAN LANGUAGE! You know, like "Um, this sentence should have a subject, you know? And like... point towards what's that subject doing?". Now they present yet another bullshit... crap that's titled "report", which has statistics without clearly stating the units (is it money? is it minutes? is it a ratio? is it an event?), but the tables make no sense, and their statements go on the line "we really need to do this, because if we want to be super-duper invincible we have to, and because we are told that that's what everybody else is doing". Yeah, ok, do you have evidence to support that? "It's because I say so. I work with this, I know, you don't. Don't question me! Our super-duperness depends on it!". And out of the blue, the tables of meaningless statistics morph into a list of "and we need also...". Okay, excuse me? How do we go from "each summer we sell ten pumpkins" to "and you know? we need an iron and an ironing board, and a scubba dive equipment". But the it isn't a "report", it's a "request". Geez dude, don't you know the words of your own language. Oh fuck, my mistake. Of course they don't! They don't even understand logic! That may explain why the request has absolutely nothing to do with the statistics or the missing stuff.

So now my job is to do the legwork they didn't to show them that EEEEEEEEEEEEEEH! Wrong Answer!

What's so fucking hard about actually making the job right? Is it so difficult to do something by researching, and properly doing the legwork, making sure you have all the data and then presenting the proposal? Is it better to dump a lot of bullshit only to be stopped midway AGAIN and going back to do the job as it should have the first time around?

The day the world ends I won't be too sad, because I'll find solace in knowing that these motherfuckers will burn and die.

Petty Issues

2012-01-04T22:12:00.000+01:00

January is usually a month of frugality for many. After receiving (in Costa Rica) an extra month's salary, and spending a lot on presents, office parties, family parties and what nots, many people actually end up either on a quite tight budget, or carrying more debt on their shoulders. Be it as it may, the end result is seen at the office during lunch, when the dinner is filled to capacity and the lines at the microwave ovens are endless. Indeed the number of lunchboxes have grown exponentially, compared with other months, as people now carry their food from home rather than buying anything.

Today I went to have lunch at 13:00 h, which is a bit early compared with my favored 14:00 h when normally the place is deserted. After having spent a great deal of my morning chatting with one of my coworkers about Scrouge and his issues (Scrouge was talking laudly on the phone all day about moving to a smaller house, because he doesn't mind living in a hut as long as he has the basics, then about lending people money at a 4% rate, and assuring that someone to whom he lended money was now talking to him through his assistent - assistent of the other person, Scrouge has no assistent - but that "he's going to pay, I don't worry" and then all that about his wife and yadda-yadda), and how he's so petty and lame he actually gets offended when you don't stop your life to serve his, here I was, with my Japanese lunch box filled with delicious Hungarian food, waiting for the microwave, when the woman before - who crammed three containers for five minutes in the microwave, was actually going to give space to a friend of her who was waiting on another line. Rude, considering there's a freaking lot of people waiting in line, and she was already at the microwave. However, passed the 5 minutes, she touches the containers and deem them to be "cold". Fucking shit, how cold can it be after 5 minutes?? 2 more seconds and the plastic of the containers would melt into the food!

I was about to tell her to just let me put my lunch one minute on the microwave, then she can go back again at her containers, when - leaving the door of the microwave open and the containers in - she took off without saying a word. I waited a little and was about to pull her containers out of the microwave when she appeared tailing a guy... who was the owner of the containers. He deemed them hot enough, packed them and left. She then moved with her friend to the other line, where her friend was already packing the microwave to capacity, and crammed her own containers in too.

Upset? Look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn't be in my place. It's a matter of consideration, which people seldom exercise and we all hate. What's on your mind when you leave your food in the microwave - AT THE OFFICE - and just wander off, and walk back when you remember you actually were heating your lunch? What the fuck is on your mind when you set the microwave to 5 minutes only to stop it a minute after because that's all you need to heat it? What the fuck is on your mind when you heat fish in spite of the clear sign saying "DO NOT HEAT FISH IN HERE BECAUSE IT STINKS"? What are you thinking when your food spills out of the container and leaves the microwave a mess? I wonder, do you have problems separating HOME from OFFICE or is just that at home you are taught to be a rude pig?

Sadly, like Scrouge, there's one too many people in this planet who walk around with no consideration towards others. They do not think of the uncomfortable situation they put others by imposing, by going to someone they are not really friends with, and ask them to give them some of their food. They don't consider that others also want to use the bathroom/microwave/teller machine/vending machine but rather hog on them like they were at their own house and the rest of the planet were invisible. Thing is that whether we like it or not, we live in a society, and as part of it, we must adapt. This doesn't mean to sell our souls and abjectly abide to every single demand, but it means that there's other people out there and we should behave in a manner that's polite and consider them too, just as we want to be considered. It means that you are not entitled to abuse of the kindness or politeness of others because "if it really bothers them they'll say so" or because "I have the right to do it".

Yes, these are petty issues, but no matter how small, and how no war can actually spun out of it, it's most unpleasant. One thing is that, ok, they don't have any respect for themselves - as someone who disrespects others often don't respect themselves either - but why do the rest of the planet has to suffer their personal issues?

When faced with people like this, suddenly the signs of attention to manners or polite behavior make sense. Yes, give your seat to the elderly, the pregnant or the people with special habilities. Now, can we get one for the office that says: "consider your coworkers and use the microwave to heat your own food. Maximum use: 4 minutes" or "if you are heating your food stay here and remove it once it's heated, otherwise you'll find it in the trash".

Things Are Not What You Want Them To Be

2012-01-03T22:37:00.000+01:00

I read today in Fire Lyte's blog, Inciting a Riot, about so called "Pagan" movies that ain't Pagan at all. In this post he makes an excellent point out of pointing out that just because there are pagan elements in a movie, that doesn't make it pagan. Some of the movies listed by him - allegedly Pagan, as viewed by some - would have never occured to me as such. Avatar, The Eagle, Agora, Thor... Wonder they haven't included Attila (with Gerard Butler), since there's a witch there helping him and his woman around, and praying to the ancient gods, or 300 (oracles and all that, and also with Gerard Butler), or let's get down and dirty and claim Spartacus: Blood and Sand as well as Spartacus: Gods of the Arena! Like Fire Lyte said, yes there might be parts that MENTION or hint or passingly refer to something of the sort, or even have elements od it, but that doesn't make it "it". A movie where there's one gay person doesn't make it a gay movie, even if said person is the main character and it's depicted fucking someone of their same gender. There's gay action, there's a gay main character, but that doesn't make it a gay picture. There's something called "a plot" which is kinda what defines what the picture is about.

Thing is, this attitude isn't only about movies and isn't seen only in the case of Pagan folks. There was also this letter in a column in the Washington Post about this woman asking advise about her boyfriend. Thing wasn't entirely clear at all, but it was as follows: There was this guy - let's call him Ed - who she had been dating. Let's call her Ally. Ally and Ed knew each other for a while now, and may have dated or been married or lived together in the past. Maybe they were just friends. Either way they are seeing each other now - says Ally. Ed has an ex, Emily, whom he dated before he went dating Ally now, and he's crazy for Emily. Things go as far as Ed dumping meetings and dates with Ally - whom he's currently banging - so he can go grocery shopping with Emily. Emily needs to eat, Ed is glad to help, Ally wonders 'is this a sign?'.

Worried and confused, Ally writes to the Washington Post asking for advise, because though Ed is uncomfortable with her feelings, goes over a month without calling her and don't mind at all who she is seeing, Ally really wants this thing between them to get more solid and turn into a full fledged relationship. As she explains to the columnist, she suspects it's all Emily's fault. (WP clumnist told her not to be a dumb bitch, go get professional help and yes, get the hint: Ed loves Emily, you are just a hole to keep it warm, but not in such a colorful language as mine ^_^.)

As with the people seeing Thor as an accurate depiction of neo pagan religion (Thor? Really? And are all neo pagan guys looking like Thor? Because if it is so, where do I sign?), Ally's case is another case of kidding yourself and ignoring the plot of things to focus on the tiny, insignificant details to keep deluding yourself to believe what's not real. Like Ally, you can find the battered wife that won't leave her husband but defend it, saying that he loves her, because he eats what she cooks. You find also the ravenous fundamentalist that can't see how anti-Christian their behavior is, but instead claims that they abide to what's commanded in the Bible. Or what about the people that won't stand up to an abusive boss or teacher because even if said boss or teacher is incompetent, they are "above them" and so everything they do is because they are right.

As in the case of Ally, it's common the case of "love delusion". Both in the case of men and women, there's an obsession about someone and the mistaken idea that "they can do something to win their love". If they are more attentive, if they are more permissive, if they buy them more presents, if they treat them more, if they are more romantic, if they are more understanding... A smile, which is only that - a smile - suddenly turns into a sign of hope, if not down right a sign of love. It is not, not even if there's kissing or some sex even, they have not won their love, neither are they in a relationship. But some people take this path, kid themselves and want to believe that they can make it happen, and when it doesn't, it's because someone or something else. The woman that got in the way, the guy with the big wallet that stole her, their family issues, their own family getting in the way... It's never about the fact: that person isn't interested! May enjoy the attention, might like the treats, but they are not even remotely considering a relationship of any sort!

And on a more global level, yes, democracy is great, better than tyranny in any case, but is that what we really have? Many boast about it, how we are so lucky for living in a democracy and so on, and actually the only thing we see that seems to be democratic are the elections. Sure, there's a parlament or a Senate, but can you do something when a party get's majority and passes whatever law they want? Can you, as voting citizen tell the Government to stop wasting their time and your tax money on pitiful matters and concentrate on what's really important? And even in your everyday life, do you have a say on the prices of the products you purchase? Do you have a say on what products should be made always available to everybody? Do you have a say on which products and/or services should be managed by the Government and given to those who need them? (Like streets, parks, education and health... as it happens in some countries.)

Well, certainly we are not there, and there's more than one wise ass saying that "democracy isn't about that", to which I would say, "is it then only about voting?" Because if I vote, I actually expect something in return. I voting a fucking lot of people to get in the power for a reason, otherwise I would go there myself, give myself a big paycheck, lots of benefits and use the power to suit my own needs. Truth is that - in the case of democracy - we are being told a fairy tale far more fantastic than Harry Potter, where supposedly democracy is the best thing on Earth, the last coke on the desert, and yet what we get isn't great and isn't even democratic, because we are treated like stock, a herd of voters to sway one way or another, requiered every 4 years to cast a vote, and decide who gets the Power, and those who win are not accountable for what they do with it. Does that sound like something great or does it sound like we've been sold a lemon?

But hold on your horses, I won't get in depth there, so you can mull on the topic, and the more you think about it, yes, that Democracy Movie ain't shit like the democracy we are given day by day. However democracy isn't the only thing where the reality isn't like the picture, and where were are being tricked into believing that what we want to believe is what it is, even though the reality is nothing like it. How about religion? And how about the church?

Oh, church is good and nice and a place where you go to replenish your soul with the serenity and the peace of The Divine. Or is not? How many sheppards, priests and preachers do you find that make a cult about themselves. Oh yes, they are "but a vehicle of the Divine", but sure they move people and money and all that seems to go to their interests. There's plenty of poor people in the planet, they should could have spend the money better than on expensive cars and jewelry, or real estate investments. And even The Church, so often mingling - by the alleged hand of God - in the matters of other people. They praise the poor and make votes of chastity (that do not seem to exclude raping children or fucking around men and women alike), and poverty (which doesn't seem to collide with their expensive tastes, expensive clothes and fucking expensive churches and houses), but is that what we really see? Is God really going to love you less or hear you less if you don't go to church every sunday and pay them some money? Is God going to hate you for fucking with a condom, or because you try to have children in vitro?

Is God going to hate you because He made you gay? (May God forgive me, but if God did so, He would be quite stupid. Why make something you hate? It's like cooking yourself the dish you like the less... and God's far smarter than any of us!) But let's not stop at that. Is it everybody against you just because you are... of a so called minority, or are you just picking up the bits you can twist into some sort of hurt? Are you really a victim in certain situation, or isn't more case of you posing as a victim because that's the way you want things to be? Are you truly impotent in the situation you are in, or isn't more a case of you being way too lazy to actually do something to change your circumstances?

So, do we see what we want to see, or are we taking a look at the larger picture? Think about it, measure it and get real.

New Year With (Re)Solutions

2012-01-02T21:09:00.000+01:00

New Year parties and all sorts of New Year celebrations are often a moment we take to revise our past year and make resolutions for the next. Not everybody makes the summarizing of the past year - except if they have to give a speech of any sort - and from those who do make resolutions, only a handful keep them. I'm one of the large flock that don't (specially because once the hangover is over, I forget what the hell did I made resolutions about :-P). Then there's people who don't even bother with resolutions and just toss, drink the sparkly and wake up the next day like it is just another day.

Well, we are not accountable to anyone for our resolutions and whether we keep them or not, and if we are not taking them seriously, what's the point in keeping them?

Resolutions are kind of like the Mission and the Vision of companies: they are supposed to have these, and probably a group of business administrators or a hired consulting team could come up with some great sounding Mission and Vision, print it out in cards, banners and calendars, but then what? So you could also write your resolutions down, you could make wallpapers for your computers and many devises to keep them in mind, but if you still don't do a thing about them, what's the point of them?

Like with companies, the resolutions of many people are basically for show off or shallow reasons. "I'll get fit so that my ex sees what's he's /she's missing", "I'll buy myself a newer car", "I'll travel to [insert currently fashionable destination]", "I'll get myself a new boyfriend/girlfriend", "I'll make more friends", "I'll reach 1 million followers in Twitter", "I'll get rich". Not all of these depend on you, so even if you wanted to do something, you can't really do much - you can't work your ass into getting a boyfriend or a girlfriend, as you can't make others fall in love with you, and trust me, going out more or spending more money on clothes, make up, hair and all sorts of personal advertizing don't do the trick. May get you attention, but it's not guaranteed to get you love. Some resolutions are not resolutions, but wishes. In this sense, it's interesting how people resource often to RE-solutions instead of Solutions. It's easier to wish upon a firework-star, bubbly in hand for a situation to go take care of itself, then sitting down to wait when will it happen.

This year I'm using a paper agenda again - a gift from my thesis mate. It's a wonderfully bound book, so of course I'm using it! I'm going old school again! - and there already started jotting down my notes, and also tasks, resolutions, hopes, dreams and loosely sketched plans for the future. There are my resolutions, but also suggestions for Solutions. For example, let's say... that I'm overweight - or I perceive myself as such, and let's say I'm not suffering from an eating disorder -. So:

Problem: Overweight

Resolution: Lose X pounds in one year/ Get to X weight by December

Solutions: In January I'll start walking more, Next month I'll drink more water, Next month I'll climb stairs...

(Honestly, I couldn't come up with any better example, but the point is that you not only realize something you want to change and make the resolution to change it, but also schedule it in easy steps and accumulate actions, or try out solutions until getting the result you want. Started with the example of smoking but that got messy! Though technically you can decide each month you will smoke 1/12 less than your current amount. I wouldn't know. When I stopped smoking was because my then boyfriend was smoking my cigs, so it was a matter of expenses versus profit. I'm an economist, so what do you expect?)

So this 2012, are you staying with the Resolutions or will you strip the "re" and come up the rest of the year with the Solutions? ^_^

Welcome to the End of The World - Been There, Done That

2012-01-01T23:59:00.001+01:00

Salaam alaikum and Blessed Be, my dear readers! This year started to me as many others before: celebrating the New Year abroad. Ok, ok, maybe Hungary shouldn't count for me as "abroad", BUT, as I've had had my New Year in Paris, my New Year in Sofia, this year the New Year came at the Caribbean shores of Santo Domingo, the capital city of Dominican Republic. This time around it was my boyfriend flying all the way from Hungary to Costa Rica for the end of the year, and not the other way around, for reasons well known for those who need to know them.

We talked about going to Dominican Republic in spring, but ended up going to Panama City due to lack of proper organizing. This time around, however, with much more time to do the planning - which is the key to everything - we made it to this lovely island, where we enjoyed the Caribbean culture and history. Yes, there were strange and odd things, like the tourist harrasing people at any step of the way, I wrote about in the last post of 2011, however all in all - particularly after taking a walk down Calle Conde - it was wonderful. I wouldn't say it was "magical", because there was so much earthy, human quality in it, that all supernatural forces were erased. Even the shores and the waves seemed like part of the effort of a nation that does know how to work it, but also know how to take it easy, not rush it, but live it.

Part of a trip - at least for me - includes the mandatory cruising of the tax and duty free stores at the airport, where I usually stock up with magazines and candy. My selection this time around included the december number of Latina - a magazine I haven't seen before, as I noted in the last post -, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Economist. Normally I would go searching for Marie Claire, which had been my favorite magazine for ages, but as things have come by, this magazine has changed going from a smart, women's issues focused magazine to yet another shopping catalogue, with all traces of brain neatly supressed. It does upset me how the roaring "buy more, think less" wave expands to more and more newspapers and magazines, making it harder each time to actually find an article that can absorb you mentally, show you something you didn't know about, educate you, fill your braincells with useful, interesting information, and challenge you.

After Marie Claire's plunging in quality, bigger concern with adds and pictures of clothes and accessories you don't really need, and lesser with showing the world of women around the planet, how can we otherwise get to know about them? What other way do we have to get informed from a different point of view? Which other source do we have to get glimpses of the history and the present of women all over the world? Yes, snipets can be found, but magazines are far more concerned with rags that won't last three months than the stories behind human trafficking, or efforts towards breaking new and more areas in women's labor fields. Glossy paper has become all about the superfluous and stupid, taking away any trace of thought, any trace of awareness, if not sponsored by a company or a group of them on a trendy topic, such as "Breast Cancer", or any other thing that doesn't challenge society or economical order. Anything to make you spend.

From the batch I purchased, gladly Vanity Fair kept up to the standard I set, though more leaning on the political matter, rather than foccused on the women's issues, even though this last issue had no other than Lady Gaga on the cover. I keep blinking in disbelieve how such an ugly, outrageous person can be so celebrated. Other than that, holding in my head a piece written by Joseph Stiglitz is delightful. However, before I even got around to Vanity Fair, I checked out the overly popularized and commented Vogue magazine. The magazine is an icon in fashion - as many know so - has been subject of songs, movies, books, documentries, and their Editor in Chief, Anna Wintour, quite known and celebrated. The magazine and Ms. Wintour have been also the underlying subject of the book and movie "The Devil Wears Prada" (a great movie, a terrible book, written by a disgraceful, untalented Lauren Weisberger). The magazine is certainly a stack of paper about fashion, with not much thought about any other issues - as I would have expected it to - so in that sense it came way under my expectations. Sure, "Vogue" isn't "Runway", but from no socially striking articles to no-brain articles there's quite a gap, and one that this famed magazine does not manage well at all. As you page through it, you can't see any of the "elitist" style oozing from it that the critics talk about - unless you call Kardashian-like no-brains-only-money style - but the kind of audience it seems to carter for is one you really, really don't want to belong to, specially if you have a university degree and believe in real hard work (not the maniac straining yourself for intrascendental things the magazine calls "hard work"). How can you monthly spend time reading pages that suggest you to dress like a clown, fast yourself into a toothpick and spend regardless of whether you have money or not, because "the trend" says so?

It was still interesting to see Meryl Streep on the cover, so I had to read the article on her to see if there was any mention at all about the afore mentioned movie, where she played Miranda Priestly, the homologue of Anna Wintour. Well, it made me smirk how evidently the sting of the book and the movie hasn't been overcome, as the praising of the actress was all over the place, and the moving was mentioned only passingly, in the middle of a list of other movies. It seems that "the cool people" can't put themselves past the booklet a mediocre writer wannabe composes, and keep the grudge until the end of days. Then again, who are we calling a mediocre writer, when Ms. Wintour's editorial is flat and the rest of the "articles" are blah, abundant in a language that seeks to detail luxury and a sense of grandeur, but that never get's to the nerve of things. It's all on the brands, and the mixes of humble attitude with knowing what's trendy and luxurious, but with not a word thrusting deeper into the vein, going to what's aside from the brand and the fresh oysters and "working hard".

Work hard, work hard... a phrase used up and down to describe successful people who have lots of money and still don't hit the bed before 4 am, are up in 4 hours and do this "work" thing constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah... so, now tell me what's that "work" about. Is about organizing foundraisers and trips to bring aid packages to depressed areas, or is it sticking your nose to your computer trying to find a way to get millions of American workers to get rid of their debts, or how to create the missing 4 million jobs and make sure they stay? Is it hard work proselitizing for a candidate or a party, maybe a bill about tax cuts, or is it about waking up at 3 am to work on the fields? Or maybe it's hard work to be up until late trying to decide which picture would look better as the cover of your shallow, no-brain magazine?

So yes, there were no articles, so I paged through the magazine looking at the latest trends, what's to come and realizing once again that fashion lately has nothing that could or would hold my interest. There was then a piece (I can't call it an article) about the tendencies and how - unlike with previous times of economical crisis - the tendency isn't towards minimalism (which I like), but towards overaccesorizing. Necklaces and bracelets measured in pounds, not in units, and chandelier earrings. The lines to introduce the tendency were rather insulting, from the social and economical proint of view, basically saying "you can face the times of crisis with frugality and saving, bracing for the hard time, or you can give it the finger and put on every luxury item you can get". Okay, so we are living hard times, millions of jobs have been suppressed in the States, people have been unemployed for years, and their proposal is "overaccesorize and give the crisis the finger". The excuse to do this? "Because youth is doing it and many of them are unemployed and have no money". Oh really, so here we are, adults, trying to get a job or hang into the one we have, with bills and responsabilities to face, realizing that living on a credit card isn't doable anymore, and we need to cut the unnecesary expenses, save some so the next time the economy fucks it up we don't get it up the ass, and here comes a fancy little magazine telling you to fuck the crisis, let's go bolder and still pretend we can max our credit cards and everything will be dandy. Where are we heading to? (In Vanity Fair, meanwhile, Kurt Andersen writes about how it seems that style has remained stagnating the last 20 years, with much of the same when comparing 1992 and 2012, so that makes you think where all this "we like" and "we think" you see in these magazines actually get anywhere in a society quite depleted of resources, with trend gurus that can't get over themselves, but continue to push their own, little, outdated agenda everywhere.)

The way I see it, we are heading towards the absolute stupidization of the population, but not as part as some conspiracy, but also because of ourselves. If the magazines and newspapers dish us day after day articles and pieces of the lowest quality - and that can be seen in the very grammar and composing of many of the articles, where you would expect at least some average manage of the language - in every sense of the word. Shallow articles that not only don't grasp the surface of the matter, working the topic more as if it where a trailer of a topic rather than an article about it, but also because many of the subjects picked are not really that important. What would be more relevant, Demi Lovato's disorders or the levels of poverty reached by many countries, and what that slide down the socio-economical ladder entail? If you ask the magazines and the newspapers, Demi Lovato's issues, no question about it!

Yes, they are consistently working on making us stupid, but what are we doing about it? We keep buying their issues, we keep reading their shit, we don't demand for anything that isn't directly supplied to us. We don't demand, we take. So, demand. Demand! Don't buy the crap, but be clinical, and if you are bored, find new sources, but don't give them your money, nor be an instrument for them to get money out of you and your data for things you don't really want. We complain a lot about quality, but what are we doing to make them improve it? What are we really doing? Me, I'm doing something: Marie Claire is striked from my list, and so is Vogue now. Now it's up to you.

Vacations at the "La Española" Island

2011-12-30T21:37:00.000+01:00

This reservation certainly wasn't like any other I've ever done at any other place. Booking.com should, perhaps, be a bit more clear about things... or should the hotels? Well, as you might guess, a non-really-geeky person like me, needs, NEEDS! her daily fix of internet connection in any shape of form available, so it is a mandatory requierment for any, ANY reservation I make, that the hotel has wi-fi or any other form of internet available, preferably one where I don't have to wait for some sweaty ass tourist (even though I'm a tourist myself), to detach their fat asses from in front of the communal internet, which usually has a large screen and everybody waiting can see what you are doing on-line. Not like I do any unseeming stuff (except when I scout yaoi mangas, which I have been doing quite often recently), but still. There's an option for that, which Booking already clicks for me "wi-fi", so when I did the reservation for the hotel, I was under the naive impression that I could come up to the room, log in and tweet to all my friends and followers that I'm nice and fine and made it to the hotel just dandy. You know, the regular stuff you do within 140 characters on Twitter.

It wasn't so. I do got informed of this after the reservation but before the trip, however I was told that wi-fi was freely available at the common areas. Oh well, we might manage, all I need is Internet and get online to breath my daily dose of Mb. However as we actually arrived to the hotel, what would you know, but you can't actually get any Internet if you don't pay for it! US$6 for 24 hours. Ok, ok, it's not so. Once you can link up on the bar for 10 minutes without paying. Dude, really, what the fuck can you do in 10 minutes on the net? Check on the news? Google something? My Kindle wouldn't even be able to download a sample from the lastest book samples I've requested! (Which do not take 60 seconds to download, btw...) So, really, 10 minutes? If you wonder what sort of cheap ass motel are we at, no, we are not. We actually have reservations at a big chain hotel, which is why this whole picking and pulling with the tourist is so offsetting for me. But I shall not complain, I've my internet, right? Already reported to Twitter and Facebook, like any dutiful little cybernaut, and now I'm merrily blogging my head away while my sweet boyfriend sleeps.

The city so far has been... interesting. It is certainly upsetting the amount of people outside the hotel harrassing you into shoe polishing (Dude, I'm wearing linen shoes! What do you want to polish on them! my boyfriend also had some unpolishable shoes...), and guided tours on horse pulled charriots... and when the "no thank you" isn't enough - in Spanish, so that they see this is another Latin American fellow they are harrassing - comes the "I need to eat" line. Dude, me too! We don't have a DIME on their currency... or any currency other than Costa Rican colones, which we need, thank you very much. So, what do you want? They are rather unbeatable, and I honestly sulk that my boyfriend isn't a little darker in complexion and less... European looking. That was unpleasant. It was also quite unpleasant to notice the whole seashore littered. Dude, people come here for the beaches, so even if you can't swim in these particular shore, you should make sure there aren't banks of garbage floating on the water, and all sorts of stuff lying around the shore.

Historically speaking - and my history knowledge is very unreliable! - this was the Island to which Christopher Columbus arrived in his first trip, believing he had arrived to India. How far he was from the truth! The island was first called San Salvador (Saint Savior), because it appeared on the day the crew was going to dump him in the water and turn back. Later on it was called "La Española", meaning "The Spanish (woman)". The local natives, the "tahínos", were exterminated, leaving the island with no local people. The current population is also somewhat different from the Latin Americans you can see in other places, as in other countries the mixing of Spanish and Native blood is far more common, as well as mixes of white and black, black and native or all three of them, giving fabulous mixes of caramel skin or olive skin, high cheekbones, large eyes, small noses and abundant, straight, strong, pitch black hair. In here, missing the native component, most locals are rather a black and white mix, with milky caramel skin, curly hair and very prominent black features such as the magnificent cheekbones and expressive faces, and hairier limbs.

We haven't seen much yet, and honestly we have only one full day left - tomorrow - but so far, so interesting. Naturally, and as expected, I've got something pretty. ^_^ Once, in making a research on gems, I cam across a gem known as "larimar", which can be found only in Dominican Republic. Back then the research was tied to Pagan practices, and I taped a list of gems and their magical properties (many of which are often present in folklore, such as stones used for protection and things like that). For this particular stome I don't remember any of the properties, as what caught me was it's uniqueness: a gem that can only be found in one place and one place only in the whole planet: here. Abundant back in the day, though never used before as a gem, it was discovered as so recently - in 1974 - by a man named Miguel Méndez, who started a local project to use it stone in artisan creations.

In colorings that remind of the sky or the ocean, the larimar (called so in the honor of the founder's daughter, Larisa, and the sea, "mar" in Spanish), is usually blue with white ribbons and splashes that give it often a "sky like" look. Like a sky with clouds. Once here, I also discovered that it can also contain brown (that's like the crust part of the stone), which can give it really interesting shapes and forms. Mine was actually the smallest ring in the store - interesting for my hand isn't so small, and judging by the finger I'm wearing it, this should be at least a 7, and most women I know wear ring sizes 5 and 6, many even 4 - but also one with brown, which not only gives me a wider range to combine the piece, but also rips it from the sky-like look and lends it an ocean floor look. I totally love it. :-D

Well, I should get going, wake up my snoring boyfriend, and though the lunch time is over, maybe do our first "service room" order and fetch some lunch. It is late, for lunch (though I've met people who take lunch well past 6 pm), it was so hot earlier we could hardly think of eating. Yes, that's yet another great thing about this island: I bet in here you drop pounds off your frame like nobody's business! If that's what you are interested in :-D

Oh, one last thing: at the Airport in Costa Rica, I discovered a magazine I've never seen before. It's "Latina", a magazine aimed at the Latin and Latin descendent women living at the States. Guess living in a Latin American country you kinda lose out of sight the issues connected with our etnicity. Then, did you know that the "white-latin" mixes are called "beige". I don't think I like that. That's like being called a "blah" color, when there's nothing "blah" about us. There were quite a few very interesting articles, though when it came to fashion, the proposals were so bold, so sparkly, so flashy and so revealing, I found myself reaching out for comfort into my Hungarian heritage mumbling: "I'm European, I'm European". I'm Latin, only not THAT Latin. I like skirts at knee lenght, clothes that do not try to choke my body and quite muted colors. Still, the finding was interesting.

2011-12-28T05:30:00.000+01:00

Blogging starts first with reading my favorite bloggers and secretly yearning for the day I can read them also on my Kindle. Kindle. The word reminds me a story I heard from the Pagan Podcaster Fire Lyte, known by his podcast Inciting a Riot, as well as the podcast he co-hosts with the lovely Velma Nightshade, Inciting a Brewhaha. Fire Lyte said that he read somewhere that in the time of the Holy Inquisition, homosexual people were burned at the pyre with the witches, however that they were used to kindle the fire, not to be burn by themselves, and they tied them in fags, thus the term "fag" to refer to them - in a peyorative manner. Perhaps I'm insensitive - after all I'm heterosexual and Christian - but I keep rolling this idea over and over, trying to figure out the actual content of this information. Can people actually be used to kindle fire? For a pyre? Maybe I need to see to believe, but it does sound a little bit too much of a stretch of reality for me to believe it.

Part of the Holidays are over and only the last one remains, along with just a few days of the year and a few days of my vacations. I yearned for this break - I really did - but as things are, I don't mind getting back to work on Monday. A few days scrapped up for mandatory rest, and now that I'm not spending every single one of them - and others I can add to them - to fly to my beloved, frozen Europe, the days are... not particularly meaningful. Mean thing to say, I know, specially when my boyfriend is here and I don't have to wake up early and every morning we can stretch and roll around between the sheets yawing and enjoying either the iddle laying or the more active kind of pleasure. I have him, here, with me, in my days, so somehow the physical closeness, the physical togetherness isn't something so desperately cherished. Do I get my meaning through?

It's cool, though, to mash together the daily routines, the driving, pulling in more routinely conversations about the color of the kitchen, or how shall we manage with the closet space and what should be the first things that need to be taken care of, and even starting to work a long term plan about saving to get eventually a bigger place in the district I want (I'm so not moving from that subject!), because truth to be told, a small income from the rental could be much appreciated for other plans, and to get an extra margin for little indulgements and luxuries I love so much.

A cycle is slowly coming to an end with the turning fo the wheel of the year. Many things have changed and many cycles have been completed in this time. I've tasted into the waters of religion and phylosophy, and discovered things that tug my mind in directions that arrest my attention easily. I've also realized, after much time, that my writing should be rekindled, that the stories played over and over in my head are not enough, but that my skills should be put to practice, the word exercised and restrenghtened. As I stumbled upon my old writings I stood there paralized, almost scared at the skills I once had - the potential of what I could have achieved - and yet I let it all wilter so easily. It goes also to drawing. Perhaps I should try my hand once again at that, just practice and try to draw the things that have crossed my mind.

Unlike planned, I skipped the celebrating of a Pagan holiday: Yule, but also of a Christian celebration I have never kept so far: Advent. Maybe I'll have more knowledge and pay more attention in th next cycle of my life to keep the markers of these celebrations. I wouldn't make it a New Year's promise, as though I've tried, those bear not much meaning for me, but I'd like to make it a proposal for the new cycle of my life: make this new phase more life-aware, and that's own of the things these celebrations give to it. Of Advent I do not know much - therefore have no idea how to interpret it either - and of Yule I know it's the day when the Sun is born and the powers of day and night, dark and light are shifted again. The contemplative times are to be slowly set aside, and ease back into the active, working days. From the side of Christianity, with the birth of Jesus, we see the birth of Hope, Faith and Light, and with Yule, we see the preparation towards hard work.

As balance tips again, it becomes time to prepare for the work to come, so kindle the lands back from the iced embroidery of meditation, work it, masage it back to fertility and prepare it, work it, sow it with our effort to see in the months to come, in the stages and seasons of our cycle, our efforts and work to blossom and bloom and ripe to harvest. There is a routine, but not because of that there's no change in it. Not because of that there's stagnation.

Is change needed no matter what, as today's "enterpreneur gurus" want to make us believe? Or is it okay to say "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Nature certainly doesn't go around reengineering itself time and again, deciding that mammals will not hatch from eggs, and plant will give birth to their sprouts. Apple trees are not requested to produce now both tomatoes and jam, nor cows are expected to produce flavored milk and orange juice.

When is change needed? When does the monkey turns man? When it naturally happens so, but meanwhile, there is change. Nature works constantly in cycles, from birth to death, from the dropping of the leaves and the winter slumber to the lustful blossoming and the pregnant harvest. Follow nature, follow Mother Earth, your very humanity and you shall find out that there's no space for iddle stagnation nor discomfort, unless you are trying to escape from the natural flow and yearn for what's not out there to be taken and transformed. Change that comes with destruction or change that comes with construction? In this new cycle, I wish to open my soul, my skills, my spirit to this meditation, and so, as the Sun has been born, and the Lord has been born, the fruits of meditation, the blueprints of future, shall be worked upon to make them happen, rekindling the warmth to make that generous, giving Mother Earth receptive to our seed.

Happy Holidays!

2011-11-28T03:08:00.000+01:00

The end of the year is already a week and a month away. Those who celebrate Advent light today the first light in their Advent Wreath, but also there are other customs and celebrations being displayed. The stores that have been displaying Christmas decoration since August or at least October, push it harder as customers fill their aisles and many temporal helpers and salespeople are hired to face the flood of people spending their hard earned money on things they don't need, and plenty of presents, often for people they don't even like but feel pressed to buy something for.

However, thing is that this time of the year isn't only about Christmas and the Christian celebrations, as it happens that Hanukka is also around these days for the Jewish Faith, and Pagans celebrate Yule. There might be other holidays too - Islam celebrates around these days the Ashura, which isn't a particularly happy holiday - and so for those who are not Christian the overpowering Christmas mood, and the overstated "Merry Christmas" wishing can - after a while - become somewhat offending. Also, there are people with a very aggressive religious stance who get offended if someone wish them anything different than Merry Christmas, or even if they hear other people wishing anything different.

Logically speaking, it's irrational to act like that, but I believe all of us will agree that extremist or fundamentalist people can't be labeled as "rational". I wouldn't mind if a small group of close minded jackasses mumble and frown for themselves if they hear people wishing each other Happy Hanukkah, except that the whole thing is becoming a sort of passive-aggresive bullying, with little space or respect for other religions. Depending on the official religion of a country, or what the accepted majority professes are religion, basically that's the only holiday decoration and motives we can find, unless of course, we go to specialized stores where you can - I don't know - find Yule decoration.

Perhaps we are still far away from the day when all stores will give equal chances to all religions and all holidays, but we shouldn't be so far away from being tolerant and accepting the faith of those around us. Wishing each of us according to our holiday and our faith, or simply "Happy Holidays" can be the first step towards a better understanding.

Thing is that it doesn't make you less in your faith to recognize and accept people of other faiths, nor is your faith so weak - if it is a true faith - to be broken if you partake in the celebration of those whose faith is different than yours. So what do you say? Shall we receive these Holidays in our faith with the determination to open up to others and accept them in their own faith?

A Question of Bra

2011-11-20T03:57:00.000+01:00

If you watch those shows about taking some woman who has a poor dressing style and "teaching" her how to dress fashionably and in style, often the most important remark is "choose the underwear that's right for you". This "underwear question" is often directed to the bra, and not as much to the knickers, probably because there's more form fitting in bras than in culottes (or maybe because boobs tend to sag more than buttocks... or Hyne knows...), and either way, with today's tiny thongs what support and molding would it do?

Now the bra question in itself isn't as simple as you would think. It's not like a pair of knickers where you can wear anything size ... M, just to give you an example, but first of all you have to know your size. In theory to do this you must take two measurements:

1. First you measure yourself right under the line of the breast and around your back. (Around where the bra would go.) I'll assume we all use the inch measurement for bras here. (So conversion need to be done in Europe and anywhere where bras don't start at 31, but at 70.) So, you take that measurement and if the number is even you add 4 to it, and if it's odd you add 5. For instance, you are 28 inches around and under the breast. 28+4=32. Also, if you are 31 inches around, you are 31+5=36.

2. Then you measure again around, but this time there where your breast if the fullest. This is usually at the height of the nipples. Here you take the difference between the first number (with the 4 or the 5 already added!) - known as bra band number - and this number, and so you get your cup size. One inch difference makes you an A, two a B, three a C, four a D and so on.

(More on measurements here.)

However if you've been bra hunting, you know that all that's nice and good, but the world doesn't work like that. Oh no, it doesn't. You can know by measurements that you ARE a 32C, and when you get to the store there's not one freaking 32 C willing to fit you, and instead you end up walking home with a 36B or a 31D or any other oddity. The style, the stitching, the fitting and even the advise from some salesgirls who actually urge you to just "fit them into the cup" isn't much of the help you need either. Not much people tell you either that the cup should hold the WHOLE breast, and that means that the cup should reach quite close to the armpit, otherwise it's uncomfortable, it can look bad (like you have more than two breasts, or like you are fatty, which you are not), not to mention the pain and other unpleasant things that it can do for you. (I've heard it can provoke all sorts of lumps in your breasts, but I've not hard evidence on this.) So that "grab them and fit them into it" isn't really a smart thing to do.

Bras should go when they are stretched out, have lost their shape or are no longer the right size for you. If you are a flat chested chick like me, you can manage to use sport bras or little fitting tops or even go around comando, but if you are a bit more "generous" neither of these is really an option. (Many flat chested women are already used to this fact and don't mind it, so a sport's bra that usually flattens you even more isn't much of a problem.) Either case, the time might come when you need a more "dressing bra", something a bit more structured, that not only keeps your breasts in place and safe from unpleasant jiggling, but also something that gives you a better shape and allows you to fill your blouses and dresses in a more flattering way. This day is when The Hunt starts.

Unlike with the easy tops and sports bras you can get at your local drugstore or supermarket - often using a simple measure system as S-M-L - the shopping for a real bra undertakes a whole quest that starts at specialized stores, lingerie stores and similars. Here, from the wide arrange of options that go from half cup, full cup, sexy, support oriented and Hyne knows what other options (mainly you go there and see those that go from whore-like sexy to nun-like orthopedic), you must or should have an idea of what you want to get. It's important for all girls and women to remember that the bra is for you, so either you pick the whore or the nun bra, that shouldn't be influenced by your marital status, but only by what you want to wear and what are you comfortable with. Recently I was bra hunting and one of the bras I tried on was a "push-up and show" kind that basically grabbed my small boobies and smashed them together in front of my chest and pulled them up. I bet it's sexy for many and I looked like I had HUGE boobs, but I wasn't comfortable with it. They were unnaturally pulled to the center pointing forward like Aphrodite from Mazinger Z. Probably a dozen women would kill for a bra like that, but I'm not one of them. Some like their breasts to touch and form a line between them, others don't. Some want something pretty to show off with blouses and dresses with clivage, and others want something that fits well a shirt and gives structure to a costume. And so you must put on your comfortable shoes, wear pants or skirt and a comfy blouse or shirt easy to take off and put on, and get lots and lots of patience.

Unless you have a favorite, secret little store that always get you what you desire, The Hunt implies visiting an endless number of stores, trying an even bigger amount of bras in order to find the one or the few ones that are going to fit your needs. Trying on several bras and walk out of the store with none of them is not unheard of, but also it may happen that you visit store after store and you simply don't see a thing that would appeal to you. Or there's also the case when you find something that looks pretty, you would really love it and when you try it out it stands weird on you. This can be one of the worse cases, particularly if you've been already hunting for a good bra for weeks. (This is also why guys have to be so tremendously careful when buying us underwear. It might look like something you would looooove to see on us - only to take it off later, of course - but then it happens that we would like to wear it and the pretty little sexy thing fits us oddly. So, you can buy us underwear, just make sure you can return it and change it in case of need.)

As noted earlier, recently I was on a bra hunt, and to add to all the difficulties proper of this task, I found yet another one: many stores don't work all sizes. And I'm not talking here of the bigger sizes (over D) or smaller sizes (under B), I'm talking about many regular sizes. In this recent hunt I found out that many stores have huge stocks of B cup sized bras with lots of band sizes. Now, you can be a 32C, that the salesgirls will try to talk you into a 34B or 36B. Sure, a B will make you look bigger because your breast won't fit into a smaller cup, so it will swell up all over the place, from the top, from the sides and you'll look like you've overgrown your bra, but in my eyes that doesn't make you look bigger, it makes you look deformed. Smaller cups actually flatten even more your bra and give you that unsightly multi-breasted look you really don't want to have. Or, you'll look fat and flat chested. (Bras supported with wires have the tendency to mark your breast making it look like your breast is only what fits the cup, and the rest is fat.) So, in addition to everything you've already gone through you've also have to start by FINDING your size at the store, and then hopefully find it in the type of bra you want to wear.

Yes, a good bra can make the difference. It can actually make you look slimmer, more proportionated, mark better your waist or even make it look smaller, it can make your clothes look like they were tailored specifically for you, it can make you look groomed and perfect... or it can make you look fat, deformed and tacky. It can make you look like one of the boys or like a goddess, so yes, when the time is right and you feel like it's time to get that bra, and commit to the hunt, you will eventually get That Bra (and you know what I'm talking about. It's the Perfect Bra, the Sexy Bra, the Woman Bra, the Hmmmm Bra), but aside from that, aside from making you look the way you want, it gets more meaning for you, because of - yes - the hunt and the dedication you've put into finding it.

When Life is Rich

2011-11-14T22:40:00.000+01:00

There seems to be an idea rolling around among people, that childhood is an extremely happy and sensitive period in one's life, when we still believe in everything, we still believe that everything in the world is possible and fairy tales are an active part of our reality. Then, as we grow up there's nothing but a collection of deceptions and disappointments, facing a dull outlook of life, which has no magic, no wonder, no happiness, no amazement, only duties, bills and troublesome work environments. We are being constantly bombed with this message, about how happy children are, and how wonderful would it be if we could once again walk on the face of the world in wonder. It was particularly disappointing to find such a notation in a book I was recently reading (as a matter of fact, a sample of a book I've downloaded on my Kindle, which I doubt I'll even buy now) as part of this loose little project I have about the series on Religion. Coming from a book about Wicca, I honestly expected a bit more of seriousness, and not what seems to me is an invitation to yearn for the days when we were all ignorant and gullible. The author particularly used the word "rich" to describe the life of children in comparison of that of adults. Honestly, what sort of projection is that? Pushing forward the idea that life goes from good to bad, and that the older we become the duller and darker our life turns? And magic should be about trying to run back to that state of "believe" where believe is to let behind logic and reason and trust like a child in the words of the amazement?

These words are particularly dangerous if they come into the hands of adults who are still gullible, particularly because I believe that adulthood isn't equal to dullness or a life lacking of luster and shine. Perhaps my childhood wasn't a usual one, but for instance I feel I keep the same wonderment, and still believe in pretty much the same things, only now, as a grown woman, I can reach where as I child I couldn't. My scope goes beyond the books my folks keep in their library (which as it is typical of any Hungarian family, isn't a small library), and I've the freedom now to explore far beyond. As a grown woman I've access to other wonderments back then I couldn't even phantom, and add to it, the knowledge I've gathered and continue to gather has allowed me to find bridges among the daily and the exceptional, where "mundane" is the word that would designate the wonders of everyday life, in contrast with other wonders that appear much less periodically.

The main difference between life as a child and life as an adult, is the amount of consequences from your previous actions and decisions you shall live with. Is life richer when you are more dependant on others and can pin your misfortune on your parents, family or guardians? Does it become more dull when you must realize that you are where you are because of the choices you made? As a child, if you live in a poor hut, that's because your folks are poor and can't afford anything else. If as an adult you live in a poor hut, it's because you haven't done what it takes to make it different. As kids we have a potential, as adults we live out of what we've done with that potential.

Magic, ki, prana, energy, life force, God's will... it's a wonderful, powerful, fabulous thing, but it's not something to be attained by denying any part of our lives, or a matter to erase it. Childhood is a phase, and adulthood is another, and whichever is more wonderful depends entirely of what you do with them.

Driving in Costa Rica

2011-11-08T15:50:00.002+01:00

Some months ago the Ministry of Public Developments and Transport (MOPT by its initials in Spanish - I used the word "development" to translate the word "obras" which would encompass public road infrastructure development) put in work a few cameras to watch the traffic and fine drivers who drove too fast. The cameras were installed quite ahead of time, and were extensively tested, and then they explained on several media that these cameras would take measure the speed at which the cars drove and issue tickets for those who exceeded the speed limit. People complained some, but then, when the cameras came to work and the first tickets were issued people went in a frenzy claiming all sort of unfair procedures and treatments, from which a "model" claimed that she shouldn't be fined because she works only at nights, doesn't watch TV, wasn't aware of the news, at that hour there were no cars on the road, so she was entitled to drive at +100 kmph on a 60kmph road, and 12 tickets in a week was unseen and she had no money to pay the tickets. Others complained that the amount of the fines wasn't proportional to the average income, and with such amount only the rich could afford a speeding ticket! A lawyer actually had the nerve to claim that the tickets were illegal because they were based on the plate of the car, so you wouldn't know who was driving.

Initially the MOPT held its position, though this was quickly eroding as it was made evident that the only tickets issued were for those who surpassed the speed limit by 20 kmph. (In other words, if you were driving at 80 kmph on a road allowing 60 kmph you are okay, BUT if you drive at 90 kmph on a 60 kmph road you've got yourself a ticket.) The complains continued showering, and people made huge lines to complain in an effort to get their tickets revoked, all of them with arguments that held no water. I mean, if you lend your car to someone - be it friend or family, coworker or someone who lends it from you for money - you are still responsible for your vehicle, and you shall face the damage done with your car. It should be up to you to arrange the matters with whomever was driving your car, not a matter for the Ministry to sort and solve. Then, regulations and laws are made to be kept. So, if there's a sign that says "MAXIMUM SPEED LIMIT 60 KMPH" it means that you are not allowed to go at any speed over that speed. However the Government wa lenient in that and sensing their weakness a population used to breaking traffic laws and invent their own pushed until recently the Ministry danced back and promised to check on the project of the cameras again.

Currently there's a regulation that seeks to reduce traffic at the Capital City, which bans certain plates from entering the Capital City on certain week days. The complaints shower tremendously on this measure, and only a small group of drivers keep it (me among them), with the vast majority still driving their cars on their restriction day, looking for escape routes and alternative alleys when they see a traffic officer. What would have happened if the camera system would have also checked on the plates and issued tickets for the cars that were caught driving on restriction days?

Some smarty-pants talked on the media about the whole system indicating that the new fines in Costa Rica were so disproportionate the same fine was cheaper in Europe (a 5 minute research proved them wrong, yet they still hold their stand), but also complained that it was irrational to demand you to drive at 60 kmph on roads that allowed higher speeds with modern cars that can go faster, claiming that driving at 80 kmph already created a traffic jam, so slow that speed was. This last arguments holds no water either, as I've personally proved that driving at speeds consistently between 40 kmph and 60 kmph allows a nice, fluent traffic and no, people don't honk at you and insult you for going at that speed. However these sort of shameless public declarations sadly put in evidence an undeniable fact about Costa Ricans: they don't know who to drive.

From the habit of paying off the instructors to get the License, to the idea that stunts and hazardous driving are part of good driving, to the idea that fines shall be affordable, it doesn show the need for tough measures, shows that high fines that can't be afforded are in need to keep people from considering breaking the law as their unallienable right, and constant camera surveilance on the roads to keep the Captain Americas fo the road from thinking they have any piece of asphalt at their mercy. Changing lines regardless of the cars behind on the same line, speeding up to cut through two or more lines, rushing into incoming traffic, disrespecting red lights, rushing through yellow lights, getting into the other line with vehicles coming just to pass another car, passing at full speed on the right side... next to a cliff, passing traffic using the shoulder of the route... these are more are among the bravados considered "skills of good driving" and here I haven't even mentioned the crass mistakes like phoning or texting while driving, eating AND texting while driving (that's right! Driving with no hands on the wheel, no eyes on the road), or driving ahead while looking back to attend a child on the backseat.

Yes, 60 kmph on metropolitan roads must be enough. There's no reason to claim the right to rush +100 kmph in a 10 km route that goes in front of a hospital and it's marked over 3 times with signs indicating you that the speed limit is set at 60 kmph, and yet drivers do and are upset when fined for driving at speeds over 80 kmph.

The picture I added to this posts was taken from this site ESTIMATED ROAD TRAFFIC FATAL INJURY DEATH RATE, which you can check to discover a few interesting fact, among them how the countries that some of the "experts" quoted as having "cheaper fines" have half or even a third on fatal traffic accidents per 100K people than Costa Rica, or for instance how Costa Rica has the highest rate of fatal traffic accidents per 100K people in the Continental Central America. (Mexico isn't part of Central America, is part of North America.)

Tough measures are needed, but also a Government with brass balls and iron fist to draft them, pass them, execute them and tell the complainers to fuck it.

Step Up or Suffer It Silently

2011-11-04T18:41:00.002+01:00

In the recent days a coworker of mine made a comment abouth another coworker, on the very same line she has done it basically since I know her, that got me thinking again why can't she grow some balls and do something about that. If you recall, I've mentioned before that we have a coworker with a peculiar predilection for leeching upon others, in several ways, from what I've gathered from quite a wide arrange of acquintances. On the personal level, he leeches the most on this coworker of us. For over eight years now he relies on her to get to the office and then back home. Giving rides to coworkers you live nearby and have no car or their vehicle is at the workshop isn't something strange, as many do it. Then, when the carpooling or riding becomes extensive, it is customary for the one getting the ride to offer pinching into the gas for the car, which can be either rejected or accepted by the driver. Normally one would think that there's a sort of friendship between the driver and the rider, when the rides are frequent, so one would assume that she and her freeloader are friends, and thus they act, but through her comments when he's not around or out of the hearshot, say otherwise.

At the begining of the week, the freerider was out of the office and soon she noted how early she arrived at the office, and how that showed that she was getting late on regular basis due to him. Soon she was also complaining that he hasn't given her a dime for gas in the past three weeks, and then today, after she mentioned it, he gave her a US$10. At this point I'm honestly taken aback, as it is unpolite from her to expect a compensation for doing a favor, specially after she has previously stated that she never mentioned anything openly about asking him for money for the rides. I mean, is it a service she shall collect for or is it a favor? Scandalized she noted how she uses to go to her Mother's place from the office to pick up her son (and he rides with her, nontheless), and if her mom invites her for a coffee, he actually complains that he had to wait for her in the car. Add to it, he whines half her lunch every day and got to demand half her breakfast as well, when she went to pick one at the canteen. I know the guy, and ever since he realized I've been driving to the office, he has tried to get me to give him a ride to the office and back on the days our coworkers doesn't come. Aside from two perfunctory courtesy rides (one on each way) - both of which I offered him - I've dodged every other request from his side. (It did upset me once when he carelessly slammed the door without noticing the safety belt got caught and then forced it closed, while it was impossible due to the caught belt buckle. when realizing the mistake, didn't even apologize.)

I know the sort of social leech he is,a s I've encountered many of his kind. People like him care not for the discomfort they provoke, purposefully ignore the indirect requests to stop, but use the same indirect manipulating techniques to continue milking their prey. I've stopped him in his tracks, giving back only for the seldom favors in rides he has given me in the past, but stoopping there, cutting it before it starts, as he actually waits nothing to impose on you, considering one favor as an invitation to regularly get it from the giver. I'm certainly not the only one, as another coworker replaced his car for a motorbike to keep him from asking rides on daily basis to the office.

On top of all that he makes a laughing stock for the office as he brags about his alleged businesses, his three cars, his big house, his alleged skills for commerce and his undying desire to give up his work and dedicate to his own company.

Either way, laughing stock or not, thing is that he's a lazy leech that would not shame away from begging and whining whatever he needs from others instead of manning up and doing it himself or relying only on his own resources. But that's his problem. The coworker's problem is her utter inability to stop him from taking advantage of her. Childish antics, bitching and bickering to others about what an inssuferable s.o.b. he is won't make him go away. Yes, she should woman-up, stand up to him if his attitude and his leeching upsets her as much as she says it does, and tell him clearly: "I've got enough". But, as cunning and witty as she likes to present herself, she's actually yellow backed, unable to stand up for herself. Sure, she let him get this far, and this far getting him off her hair will be a real struggle, but it's not impossible, and certainly more pleasing than her telling us mockingly how he dared to tell her he was making him a service by taking a ride on her car, for that way he protected her by simply being in her car.

As I look over to my coworkers I wonder about the other things in our lives we don't like but which we don't dodge and look for alternative ways to shake off us, out of a sense of politeness present only in us, and not in the other party. Some are really difficult to shake off and we must endure them (like out thesis tutor - we didn't confront him, but we worked around and we prevailed), but others are simply a matter of social muscle and social courage. Sometimes you shouldn't be affraid of appearing unpolite or rude in order to defend yourself or avoiding being taken advantage of. Think of this: if the other party is so blatantly ignoring social convention, why should you observe it?

As a final advise for cases when you want dump a leech or an uncomfortable freerider, remember it is polite to either tell the person you are no longer able to perform that service. That simple. "I must tell you I can't no longer give you a ride/help you with your job/babysit for you/do your errands/lend you money/give you my food". No explanations, just say in an even, calm voice that you can't do that any more. Yes, you'll probably be requested to offer explanations as to why, but REMEMBER you don't need to give them. It's actually unpolite to request or demand for explanations for refusing a favor. Insistence can always be batted away with "I've personal reasons (and I would appreciate you would respect them)". Further poking can be dodged with "I would really appreciate if you would not pursue with these questions. I believe this concerns only me". (In other words, turn the tables, and indirectly point out at how unpolite, rude they are for not respecting you and how such a thing makes you unhappy, for you never expected them to disrespect you in such a fashion while asking for a favor.)

So, remember, a favor is always voluntary and you can stop any time you feel like it.

Deep Consideration

2011-11-03T22:20:00.002+01:00

Though I need the income my job provides me, and I love my boss very much (he ranks 2nd, nose-to-nose with the best boss of all times I have ever had), certain things make me consider quitting as soon as possible. One of those is poor, poor, POOR! redaction skills. I'm tired of the looping message in my head that says "This person should die and come back as what it's thinking skills belong: a mushroom", however when struggling my way through extensive poorly written crap, I'm growing worried that so much disconnected, irrational, no-sense-making shit might affect my own thinking and logical skills. What if this typing-with-no-idea-whatsoever-you-are-writing, maybe even the dreaded copy-and-paste-to-make-volume-no-one-reads-anyway style is contagious? What if after so much exposure my own rationalizing and logical-thinking capabilities get handycapped? What's better "employed but brain dead" or "unemployed but thought capable"? I'm strongly leaning towards the option #2.

Good Friend, Bad Friend

2011-11-02T02:34:00.000+01:00

The Raja-Yoga chat of Saturday has stayed longer with me, coming back time and again about happiness, inner peace and the influences we let to get to us. In this chat one of the attendants made a question basically going on the line of 'what should one do when someone close to us is in a well of unhappiness, sinking lower and you can't do anything about it?'. The answer from the yogini was 'why is it your business?'. Thinking of my own situation, the answer came switfly to my mind 'because I care and I love them', but the answer of the yogini was much more simple, and could be summarized the following way 'you can't realize the inner self of them, nor can you pull them out if they don't pull themselves out'. This was a realization that hit me flat on the face, since though I'm quite individualistic and mind my own business, there are situations where I follow a care-code where I take to my heart the matters of other people.

Thinking about this matter, I was wondering about my role as friend. It's clear that the commonplaces and two-cent psichology lines of forwarded e-mails and text messages don't apply. That gooey, dripping sweet concept of "friends forever" and "BFF", "friends always support each other no matter what" and so on don't really apply. Or should it? Shall friends always be together and always support each other no matter what, and be in touch constantly, and depend on each other? If so, I guess I'd be better off without friends.

What make friends friends I don't really know, it seems to just spark up, happen, but how it is kept, that's the real deal! However, does this mean that you must nearly get into the other person's life or let yourself be sucked into the other person's life and become more than a confident, an agent of life? Does this mean you must not contradict your friends or you shall take to your heart if your friend thinks differently from you? If one applies the teachings of the Raja Yoga, within a friendship you must seek to be happy yourself, perhaps point out to your friend your perceptions of what can't help them to be happy, but you don't need to involve yourself and shoulder up the worries of your friend as if those were yours as well. This comes in clear contradiction with the friendship code some enforce where you are expected to care even when you don't, or you rather not put yourself in an uncomfortable position.

Friendship, like any relationship, requires first and foremost of a healthy dose of honesty, or shall we rather say sincerity. There's no real need to tell constantly the truth, as people are naturally unable to do so, as it happens that some truths are hard to tell or very intimate, need time or whatever, but aside from these, there is a need of truth in order to build it on a solid, real base. But aside from this sincerity, from which naturally comes to give what you feel like giving and accepting honestly what your friends feel like giving, what else could be needed?

So, if you are responsible of your own happiness, and you must allow your friends to find themselves and be responsible of their own happiness, what makes a good friend of a bad friend? Or there's not such a thing as "good friend" or "bad friend", just either friend or no friend?

The chat made me realize that really, though I can care for my friends, and maybe I can't avoid worriyng for those I love, it's not my place to interfere in their lives, not let them place me in a situation where I interfere in their lives. It is not my role as friend to be a yes-woman to them, nor to nag them to take this or that decision. It's a very delicate balance between how much you tell them, how much you help them and how much you must hold back yourself and give them the space they need to find themselves, exercise themselves and evolve towards their inner self and their natural hability to be perfectly happy.

To Aileen

2011-11-01T14:36:00.001+01:00

Hi Aileen!

Sorry I have not replied to you, but I've this stupid page blocking thing at the office, and lately I get home to do something other than getting on the net. Got your messages, but so far haven't gotten your letter. :-( But worry not, this is Costa Rica, and the Postal Service is really poor. I'll go this week to check up on them and threaten them some, to let go of your letter. Question, if you sent me a letter, does it mean you've got mine? Hope you did. ^_^

Thanks for the messages and thanks ahead for the letter! :-)

Love You!

Blessed Samhain!

2011-10-31T22:25:00.002+01:00

And finally this is my favorite holiday of the year: Halloween is here! ^_^ I've carved my pumpkin, baked my pumpkin pie, picked up some Halloween decoration (cauldrons and jack-o-lanterns), put out my plastic glow-in-the-dark ghost, wore my Halloween sweater (orange with coal stripes) and put candy on a round CD holder's top for the kids of the office. Completed the whole thing with listening to Witches BrewHaHa Halloween Special (WBHHfm), sent out greetings on the social networks and sms. The usual drill.

Truth to be told, I haven't prepared anything particularly for Samhain, even though it is the major Pagan Celebration - from what I gather. Alix was supposed to come up with something, but I haven't received as much as a peep about whether something will be done, shall I bring something, where, when and how will be done and so. If nothing, I was thinking anyways to make a small meditation ritual, the same way I did it for Mabon. (And right now Alix sent me an e-mail telling me she's out buying the stuff for Samhain.)

This celebration marks the Third Harvest of the year, your last bounty and starts the period of meditation, introspection, peace and poundering. Here you gather up and prepare to live from what you have earned. The darkest part of the year starts, which for me means the most stable, as night is usually quite similar through it's all its extent, showing none of the regular changes daytime naturally display. This is a great moment to gather your harvest, the last fruits of your labor and think about what you have accomplished, the meaning of it, and look forward to live from it. If your work's harvest has been good, and you can truly appreciate it, your time of peace and meditation - your winter - will be pleasant, but if your work hasn't been as good as it could have been, or you have neglected to properly appreciate your harvest, what you have accomplished, you will spend a bitter winter.

Many are prone to undervalue their job and their effort, and nothing they do seems good enough. Other on the other hand, seek to escape work and rather live out of what they can snitch from others. What last harvest do they have, when the harvest comes only from your own fields? How a winter will be spent when you sneer at your labor's result or if there's no harvest to live on, for you have left your fields plain and instead lived out of what you could steal from the fields of others, scavenging like carrion creatures.

This celebration is a good moment to take a moment and give ourselves a few slaps on the back, smile and make determinations about what would we want to achieve for the next year and the next Harvest.

Lessons to Learn from the Indiannapolis Colts

2011-10-28T05:19:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine said I'm a "black cat", because whenever I pick a football team to cheer, it is most certain to lose. Well, if you follow the NFL, you probably think that's true, as my favorite team - the Indiannapolis Colts - haven't won a single game since the start of the season. That's freaking unlucky, right? I'm already getting to the point when I rather not watch any game of my team, but watch other games and other teams play.

From the start, over and over the problem seemed to be the same: the teams Quarterback, Peyton Manning got injured and had to be operated several times, leaving him out of the game. This seemed to mark the team from the start of the season, connecting lost game after lost game. I remember I got to like the Colts because they were an aggressive team, that played always to win to to lose by the minimal difference. However this season, without Manning and lead by Curtis Painter, they have been playing like they would rather be doing something else. They step on the field as if thinking "Manning isn't with us, so we are going to lose anyway". They don't run what's need to be ran when chasing a player with the ball, they don't muscle up enough to stop the offensive, won't try enough to intercept... Last time the QB wasn't even paying attentiong at the begining of the game and didn't catch the ball when it was passed to him. What the fuck?

Then slowly I realized: these guys actually laid all the job and all their hopes on Manning. The current QB isn't prepared, wasn't prepared but isn't even trying to assume his role - because that's Peyton's job, and the rest of the team instead of actively trying to group up and make the game work, just hang around like a band of sorry assed livestock. Now sure, we could stone the Colts for being such bitches, but shall we?

Actually what we see happening with the Colts isn't something unknown to others. As it happens, in many groups and even in the individuals themselves there is a bad tendency to lay all the job and all the hopes on one skill or only on the one team member that can do the job. Often bosses and coworkers automatically give the projects to that one person who knows how to do the job. Of course, you want a job well done, and it's better if the one who knows how to do it does it, but in a team of many people, why the others don't try and work to get the skill needed to do it themselves too? In the family also people tend to leave certain tasks or certain chores or certain duties to one of them, and all the others just don't do it, nor try to learn how to do it.

As individuals, how many of us, for instance, put all our effort to develop one skill or bet everything on one skill. Women who put their entire future on their looks, guys who put their entire life on money, people who put all their hopes on their acquintances, on getting what they want through connections or anything as fleeting. Maybe something more broad, like focusing your entire life on your career, or your family or one hobby, or a political party... you name it. The thing is that when you put all your eggs in one basket - so to say - either because you depend on your partner to cook for you or fix the plumbing, or you relay on your coworker to take care of the maths of the project, or do the paperwork to get it going - despite that being their strong point, you are exposing yourself, or your team to a Colts-case. What if that coworker leaves the team? What if your partner and you break up or they die or get very ill? What if you lose your looks, lose your money, your connections and friends won't help you anymore or can't do so? What if something happens and you can't continue with your career, if your family decides that they want to do their own life or your hobby stops being interesting?

Well, of you centered all your life on that one skill, that one thing, that one interest, that one Peyton Manning in your life, when you lose it, you become a Colts team lead by a mediocre Curtis Painter. It becomes evident that your team can't even tie their own shoelaces, so their reputation at work will fall dramatically, the family that depends on one person to do something suddenly will be at loss and chaos will break, and the person... well, the person will feel like there's no way on Earth they can go on. It happens. Like a car from which you've ripped off the motor: just a pile of scraps.

Now, unlike in the stupid motivational tale of the Cow, where the lesson was "kill your Peyton Manning and raise new ones", I would say, you shouldn't have to separate yourself from your Peyton Manning, but while you have it, train all your other skills, prepare yourself to the eventual moment when your Manning gets pulled away of your game, be ir for a time or forever.

My team is now a load of crap, but at least they can teach us all a lesson: prepare yourself and prepare your team for the time when your best feature, your best element falls out of the game. Prepare yourself, your team , your skills, as a well working, cohesive group, where the sudden lack of one skill, one member doesn't bring down the whole.

Early Morning Grandiose Ideas

2011-10-27T19:41:00.002+02:00

I actually had two topics for e-mail posting, but as usual, by the time I've got in front of the computer, I forgot one of those and the other one doesn't seem so great anymore. Has that happened to you? So I sat here, staring at the blank e-mail thinking "so where was I going with this?". It's actually funny how these "bouts of inspiration" come to us at a moment when we are mentally "out of it", as if in a dry drunk state (dry because there's no alcohol to blame on our Genius Stupidity) and there we are, half way between the world of the sleeping and the awake, drifting in the semi-darkness of ungodly early morning, working fully on auto-pilot, dragging ourselves out of the devilishly tempting warm covers and soft pillows into the uninviting chill and activity, our mind willing to work only to make up excuses to stay "five more minutes" with excuses like "five more minutes won't make us late" and "I've everything prepared, I can really get ready in ten minutes", "I can take the highway and really step into it" to "I'm already late, so what difference does it make?" and "I can always blame it on the traffic". By the time we manage to pry ourselves from bed - assuming isn't late and we are running on alarm velocity - the brain again goes off to slumber while the body drags itself to the shower, and like a recording loop the only thing to be heard up there is "we want coffee". However, from time to time, a neurone or two stir up and the brilliant ideas spark up. In a "brain isn't in session now" state, these ideas usually go on the line of "let's blog about how nice it is to shower with purple shower gel!" or "you know what would be a great birthday present? A matchbox covered with beads!". Rationally you would laugh at the idea or dismiss it even before it surfaced, but at that early time of day, when no self-respecting sense of rationality and reason would be up (only chaotic dreams and emergency instincts are allowed to function), these unfiltered ideas break through and pin the note on your bulletin board "I've a great topic idea about purple shower gel!".

Little by little your functional brain wakes up - hopefully before you ignite your car and put it in gear - and there's this fancy little note stuck there "I've a great topic idea about purple shower gel!".You sigh relieved because there is a topic for the day and you don't have to worry about it, so you go about your day, get in motion to the office, tune in your favorite radio station or move to your selection of music, focus your effort on the work at hand, check on e-mails, read your news and then prepare to blog, call in the note... and it's nonesense! Frustrated you crumple the mental note into a tiny, tight paper ball and throw it into the waste basket. Time to think of something actually useful or let another day go by with no posts.

Lost in Here

2011-10-26T23:50:00.002+02:00

Once again this post started with bitching. And it's not like any of you would honestly care how pissed off I am at the latest I.T. sponsored brainfart - because you are not (except maybe Dragonfly) - but really, keeping me from properly posting Trish' comment, or read her post when I have the time and the energy to do so is a motherfucking abusive thing to do. And what for? I'll tell you what for. It's not stupid controllitis, no. You would think so, but no. This is a plain case of "I won't do my job as I should, because I'll get paid the same whether I do it or not". Yes, it's a self-indulging, incompetence favoring attitude. But not only it's the steal-where-you-can mentality going on, because these same people - and Dragonfly doesn't let me lie in here - actually PRIDE themselves on being "hardworking" and "breaking their backs on the job" and "giving their best", not to mention "being honest, commited and responsible". Dude, you've no shame.

Yesterday I was at the most terrible seminar-workshop invented by men. It was - ALLEGEDLY! - about Strategic Planning and Risk Management. The invitation said that, the facts said different. Two "professionals" - and this is where I'm so fucking proud of being able to call myself a Scientist, so I won't be put in the same category as them - in Business Administration, one of them from some sorry-ass-big-name private university, presented the weakest, most biased ... program, I guess... where the main topics were cut in half in order to accomodate two more topics, unannounced, probably under the philosophy of "more is better", regardless of the utter lack of quality of the end result. Not like it would have held any water, mind you, as the adding of two more topics could have been the result of the fact that both "professionals" (who also prided themselves of being university professors), probably couldn't say a thing (more) about the main topics. It didn't matter either, mind you, as they came with their neatly pressed black suits and close cropped hairstyles, pretending to be top excecutives and ultimate connoisseurs of the matter at hand, and yet turning the seminar into an entropic clashing of disjoined false-based or biased stories aimed to undermine the image of public institutions and uphold the idea of privatization on wild, grand scale.

Did they know the matter they were talking about? No, and not only because they claimed that "Steven Jobs was the greatest CEO in the planet, even if as person he was terrible" (OK, I'll stay still with Jack Welsh), or because us economists are biased about BAs and think they are our "unhinged, braindamaged sibling", but because for anyone could tell that the throwing around of terms in English that went unexplained, and the grandilocuent way they called on the name of indexes clearly, CLEARLY showed it was all to cover the fact that they have no idea about what they are saying, less even about what they are SUPPOSED to be saying.

Professional papers are filled to the brim with self-help-cut articles that praise mediocrity - openly or not - as the way to do business. The same worn off formulas are passed around like the biggest secrets of Freemasonry, when they don't say much, and skip the matter, the core of everything: You must work hard to get where you want.

Truth is that working hard, being honest, being able to settle, knowing oneself and thus knowing when have you reached your Point of Satisfaction, allowing yourself to be content, are no longer values to hold up to. It's not a virtue to work hard and earn respect for what you do and are capable to do, but instead the promoted new virtues tell you that you must always seek how to pull more profit, either by working less for the same money, or get more money for the same work OR get more money for less work. Back in the day that would have been a SHAMEFULL thing to do. That would have been called "stealing". Today it means being cunning.

You are not supposed to work, you are not supposed to know, you are not supposed to get prepared, and by no circumstance you are supposed to work hard only to be better and be proud of what you do - oh no, that's being stupid - but you are supposed to pretend, and see how can you pull it out with the less amount of effort possible... if any.

So yes, I am blogging from my e-mail account, while the I.T. people act as if every update of the firewall resets the entire system and take their sweet time setting it back. (Sweet time which has been reported to last over 2 months...) And morons charge large paychecks for seminars they are not qualified for, as they can't even be qualified as professionals, and the people attending nod at them like the Taco Bell Chihuahua (I was reading a novel the entire time). And so, are we surprised that the multimillion street recarpeting washed away with the rain? The fixed bridge didn't got fixed? The school connectivity programs don't work? The Enterprise Social Responsability programs drown in a pile of unfulfilled promises while eating up large pools of taxpayer money? Big banks fail and get bailed out only to use the money to pay their overpaid executives? Greece goes down the sewer, Italy can't be held up, Spain is sinking bellow the level of its former colonies and on and on?

Geez, why do you wonder? This is the less effort world we have all chosen, isn't it? And sure, you can say "no, not me", but just look into yourself and judge. Have you stayed true to yourself? Have you willingly chosen the easy over the honest? Do you openly or secretly admire the people who pulls it effortlessly? Do you want to be the woman who marries a millionaire and doesn't have to work anymore? Do you want to be the guy who has a friend who gets him a CEO position or any position with a big paycheck attached? Do you dream with winning the lottery and have all your worries vanished? Dream with being rescued? Dream with having the magical powers to make everything better? Then you are one of them.

Sudden Baseless Unattached Inspiration

2011-10-18T21:30:00.001+02:00

The learning is in each one of us for each one of us decides the path we take towards better and further understanding. There are no mysteries hidden from the wise on this earth, none that can't be apprehended and turned around for admiring as long as the mind is set on the task and the heart open with humble attitude towards the immensity the universe and God as it. For the universe is God and God is the universe and so is anything under it, above it, next to it, inside it and in between. For there is nothing that isn't God nor there's anything that's not made of God and part of Him. And floating in the immensity of God, as the mind leaves behind the mindless struggling to possess and acknowledges that possession is nothing but a futile substanceless, matterless illusion, for we are all possessed by God and the universe as one, all belonging to Him as we are all him, the understanding becomes clear, as one part can't hold inside the whole, nor it needs to and so the knowledge yielded for the wise is precious and the persecution for more isn't fueled by an insane and greedy ambition of claiming for what falls outside the rights of the part, but as an exercise to know the boundaries of what the part can contain of the whole, as an effort to make the best of what has been given to the part, all to the honor and the glory of no other but the one and universal God.

Preparing for My Favorite Holiday

2011-10-17T03:51:00.000+02:00

There's still over two week for Halloween - my favorite holiday of the year, even if we don't get it off at the office - and I'm slowly preparing to it. I've already made a few small purchases - two small plastic jack-o-lanterns and two lovely plastic cauldrons filled with candy and plastic spider rings that look so delightfully creepy, you can rest assured I would make people scream at the office by wearing them and letting them know that a huge, fat spider is walking on my hand. ^_^ I also plan to find a way to decorate Sookie, bring the Halloween to her too, though I bet plenty of people think that the dreamcatcher I've pending from the rear view mirror is creepy enough.

I've also spotted a place where I can get my lovely pawns on a medium size pumpkin for carking purposes. This actually happened yesterday, when - for the first time ever - I took the insane idea of taking Sookie out to run a few errands in the city. Yes, a Saturday, right around 11 o'clock, when the city is the bussiest - because there's nothing like Heredia on a Saturday morning-noon - and the traffic is so dense, the whole city transforms into a big, smoggy parking lot. Yet I did it becace it happens to be one of the rainiest, most freakiest days of the year. Rainy season's poster-day, plus some tornado and what-not has brought my beloved rainy mornings and rainy days and all cool and chilly... with the downside of lots of rain, getting wet every step of the way, and your laundry not getting dry all week. It's a bitch. I mean, I ACTUALLY had to iron all of my clothes - including jeans and t-shirts, which I never-EVER iron - to get them to dry.

However I've got an e-mail from my shipping company, that my Colts stuff was finally on the counter (and I had to pay for their services around 50% of what I paid for the stuff itself, which wasn't pleasing me at all), so I drove there. The place is in a particular location at a commercial center that looks onto a really bussy street. Coming out of there was going to be a real test. It seems however, that God was really on my side as I actually got out of there quite fast and easily. I didn't need to wait much for my stuff, and then though the road was packed to capacity and the cars weren't moving at all, and I actually needed to cross the line in front of me to get into the other line (not just melt into the flow), all I had to do was to roll down my window, smile pretty and quite soon a guy stopped and signaled me to go. The priviledge of being a woman. ^_^

From there I had to go to the supermarket to pick up a few things I've written up on a list. Some beverages, bread, paper handkerchiefs (it's flu season) and some cold medicine. Yeah, like that was going to be the only thing I would buy. Not so lucky. I was quickly pulled towards the veggies, because "hey, I shall cook something for next week to take to the office" (and lets not talk about the fact that Monday is a holiday), so I went to the veggies and got myself some mushrooms, zuccini (because it really seems that the only thing I think about when it comes to veggies is zuccini. Really, could someone please, PLEASE give me a veggie cookbook for Christmas so MAYBE I get a hint about how to actually use and incorporate other veggies in my diet?), some potatoes, some apples, chives... and there they were: The Pumpkins. Halloween pumpkins are not all that common here, and actually the first Halloween pumpkin I saw was the one Alix, her husband, her daughter and I carved last year, so finding them there, just waiting was a wonderful revelation. Now I can actually get my own pumpkin and carve it at home! And of course gut it and scrap it and make pumpkin pie from the scrapping!

There were smaller pumpkins too, but I'm not sure I'll be skilled enough to carve those too, though it would be fun to carve a small one and take it to the office. If it could safely house a tiny votive candle inside it would be a success! Not like anyone at the office cares for Halloween, but I'm a total sucker for the holiday! (Like you can't tell that already).

Also, as you can imagine, I also plan to somewhat do a Samhain celebration in the evening. In good theory we'll celebrate it again at Alix' place and this time it will be her time to preside the ceremony. However not much has been said, and it seems to me that there are big chances that she won't even be available for that day. (The first time we gathered for a celebration was for Lughasadh, where I was asked to preside and it came out really whacky.) However I'd like to plan and have my own - shall we call it Solitary - ceremony too, to meditate a little about the meaning of the Third Harvest and what it brings to my life, what it has summoned, what it has given and what's to come. It's important as these days feel indeed final, and I can't stop thinking with a certain, ethereal feel of peace, that this is my last October here.

For this purpose I have yet to read and yet to prepare, though I've already prepared a script for the calling of the corners that sits well with me, as I have paired it with my Christianity, seeing in each element an element related to God. This I wish to try out for the new start.

I must say that I'm feeling quite happy and accomplished. I'm proud at the resilence I proved with the thesis, at the strenght both Mile and I had, the determination, the supporting to get this through and conquer our goal. I feel it as a lesson that teaches us that though things ahead might seem hard and impossible, by persevering and keeping our eyes on our goal, by pushing, by not letting go and finding the right way, we can and will always succeed. It tought us also that God is there, that miracles do happen and the impossible becomes possible when the time is right and the star align for the purpose. I feel at peace and much calmer, more focused, centered in myself. Obstacles do not frighten me as I know there's always a way to reach to them.

This Harvest has brought me lessons, has brought me yoga, peace, determination, the closing of many cycles and forethoughts for the cycles to come.

Perceptions

2011-10-15T18:03:00.000+02:00

Probably a lot of people do the same - I know for a fact that many of my friends do - namely, to have a coin purse. You know, those lovely, little purses that fit well in the front or back pockets of your jeans, which hold all those coins you wouldn't or can't put in your wallet. The coin purse has an interesing life, with a "basic state", which is usually half-full to rather-empty, but goes towards full and towards "moths and a button" from time to time. It also feeds usually on change - well, that's what you keep in it - with the seldom crumpled low denomination bill and maybe a few recipes from the grocery store.

The coin purse can also be your best ally, when you are in a "less than good" place and you must go to some place to make an important payment, or someone decided to pay you an important amount of money in cash rather than doing a transfer. If the amount can be fitted, you roll up the bills and squeeze them into your trusty, humble coin purse. But these are usually extraordinary cases, as the coin purse usually houses change. You normally don't take out your coin purse to pay for the groceries at the store, nor your pay the fee of the movie rental from your coin purse, nor the movie ticket, nor your clothes or new smartphone, unless, of course, you've prepares ahead the money and put it there. So, what do you think of when looking at your coin purse? What do you usse it for? Here comes the funny thing.

Up until now, I used to associate my coin purse with the public transportation. My coin purse was the source to pay the bus fare (in Costa Rica, as well as in many Latin American countries, you still pay the bus fee to the driver in cash). It was also the source to complete the taxi fare above the amount I should pay in bills. In Europe, where you don't pay your bus fare in cash, the change in my coin purse mean a hot coffee or a hot cocoa at some local bistro, or change for a newspaper, a magazine or some candy at some traffic booth or at the nearest gas station. It meant also to eventually do the effort an empty it, count the change and see if I can do something to get rid of it, OR - like my dad and brother do, who have no coin purses - dump it into a jar and leave it there, for taking when needed.

The other day, however, as my coin purse got in my hand, my thought about was "change for the toll fare". The thought came automatically an suddenly I stopped in my track. When had the "bus fare" morphed into "toll fare"? Not that I pass through toll booths all that often, but this change in the way I regarded my coin purse made me think.

As your life changes and your conditions and circumstances change so change the way you see things. That's notthing new, but often we tend to forget about it or dismiss it as something small. If you have worked hard all your life for the things you have, the experiences you've earned, your perception of them is different from that of someone who had the same things given. For instance, if you have competed and worked hard for a good position in your job, you get there with a certain degree of appreciation, and knowing all you had to do and endure to be there, you'll make sure to keep it, continue working hard to prevail in that position. BUT if you've got to that position because you have a friend, and that friend has power and offers you protection, and part of that protection is that awesome job, then you can't care less about that position, but you will do your best to stay in the grace of your friend so they keep you protected, and if you fail at your job and you must go, your friend will get you a better position. It's the same job, just as it is the same coin purse and the same change in it, BUT the way you relate to it change.

As it happens, people for instance relate differently to life after a near-death experience, or after the death of someone close to them. It also can explain how people who started a path together, but have different circumstances and different experiences end up seeing the same thing in very different lights. Among other things, this coin purse made me think of my friends, and how some of them don't see the things the way I do and how I often struggle to understand what the heck are they seeing when I see something completely different. In the end, it's the same coin purse, but one of us see the future contents of a coin jar that eventually will make it to a bank, another sees teh chance to buy a couple of cigarets, or a cup of coffee ot a shot of vodka on the way home, to pay the bus fare, buy some candy, get the morning paper, make it for the next issue of their favorite magazine, or may the toll fare.

Let's not forget that we all start on the same place.

The Reason I've Been Out

2011-10-14T15:18:00.000+02:00

You probably don't wonder anymore why on the freaking earth I haven't written in a while, because after several steady months with posts on the single digit figures, me falling off on you again wouldn't be strange. Yeah, only this is due to something else. It seems the office updated the WebSense again and that means that they went back to filtering justa bout everything, which includes the blogs. It's strange because I actually have access to Twitter and Facebook, but I can't access my blog nor newspapers. Really, we go through this on every single time there's an update and it's getting old. Can't they just get it right at once? Why do they subscribe to a system that resets every single time? Or why can't they do the job properly, and have the settings done for once and just upload the updates in a seamless way? No, they have to be a pain in the freaking ass and go moron getting in everybody's way.

Sure, I could post from home, and eventually I'll do so - when I don't get home all tired out and wishing just to roll into bed with the remote, a book and a BIG mug of hot cocoa. Meanwhile, I'm back to hectic and in-and-out posting.

Pride as a Virtue

2011-10-09T18:40:00.000+02:00

It seemed up until a few days ago, that I would manage to write one post per day. It would have been nice to do so, to add up 31 posts for October, and round up, pair up a month with a number signaling my favorite celebration: Halloween. Before you ask, no I haven't started my planning and rounding up for Halloween/Samhain yet. According to plans, Alix shall "lead circle" for Samhain, if we actually decide to keep up this strange decision to celebrate in a Pagan-ish way the cycle of the year, so it's not like I must be working on it, planning and coordination - no matter how poorly the end result comes up - though most likely I would end up doing something small and private - Solitary Witch like - just like I did in Mabon (though I didn't took pictures of that).

In the past days, the days I didn't post a thing, I took part of two activities that made me think about pride in a very positive way, a way that should be kept and nurtured inside everybody's heart.

On Friday seven of my coworkers and I went to a work tour to know an Eolic Power Plant and a Hidroelectric Power Plant. Our company - which is a State Owned Company - started originally working on the energy sector, aiming for many years to bring power to every corner of the country at affordable prices. The ideal back then was to work hard and do the best to ensure the country could grow and develop. The company gave jobs and made sure to have the best professionals in every area, sending them to study, giving them chances to be better and serve better the country. Years after the company also took care of the telecommunications sector, also seeking actively to interconnect the whole country, ensuring low prices and access to phones to everybody. The level of penetration in both sectors was quite high, earning the country the first place in electrification, and I believe telecommunication reach in Latin America. (Or so we have been told.)

With the years, many upper tiers got corrupted and soon we found our labor force filled with people more interested in pulling personal benefit, sucking the blood of the company for the sake of their own pocket, than that of the country. Service degraded, poor choices were made, elitism sneaked into our ranks, with many middle and high management elements too quick to outcast the poorer segments of the country in favor of big companies, ready to give away important chunks of service and price, not thinking twice before fucking up the little people. The phrase "they don't make us so much money, they can go to anyone else" has been said more time than I'd like to recall.

On Friday, however, we were packed into a small mini bus and drove to the far West province of the country, Guanacaste, where in Tilarán and Sandillal we've got the chance to see an Eolic Power Plant (Tejona) and a Hidroelectric Power Plant (Sandillal). Aside from the tremendously poor planning and evident adjust-as-we-go system, it struck me how so far from the putrid higher management spheres, there were people still living the ideal, plausible proud of wearing the uniform, eyes filled with stars of love and pride when looking at the logo of the company. It got to me how these simple engineers, working in far away locations, among machines, staring intently at control panels, still had that unadulterated pride of being part of a force that's there to serve the country. They may not make as much as any of those working where I do, and yet they relate to their jobs, they would give their lives and souls to serve the country. In they lived the kind of pride many have forgotten, with their minds clouded by greed, juicy paychecks, big titles, work paid trips to anywhere in the planet, and the handshake from corrupted politicians who wish to break the company to pieces and give it away to their larger campaing contributors.

It made me think that Pride isn't a capital sin, but the sin is to forget pride, to outcast it and thus be open to sell out one's soul for money, for greed, forgetting the noble ideas that can make you grow by serving your country.

A second type of pride I learned of was the pride of being able to help. It happened on Saturday, when a former coworker of mine, Andy, and her sister, Cucha, took part of a walk for Breast Cancer Awareness. It was particularly meaningfull, because Andy and I have very different political backgrounds and positions: me more "State oriented", she definitivelly more "liberal", and yet it came the day she and I walked for a common cause, and donated for a common cause. Without any discussing, fight picking or anything (we never got into arguments anyway), we took part of a huge Pink Force, among men and women proudly sporting pink ribbons and pink t-shirts, surrounded by people who was there for a family member, a friend, and acquintance or simply for the world, in an effort to do something to help, to bring awareness about this illness and others like it.

Here differences went up in the thin air, made smoke and it didn't matter if you were against or in favor of this or that, didn't matter if you were of this or that religion, of this or that sexual orientation, poor or rich, healthy or sick, strong or weak, fit or a potato couch, what it mattered was that you were there, helping to bring a message to the world, to your fellow citizens, donating time, effort or money - as little or as much - to help those in need, to contribute with the recovery of those stricken with the illness and wishing them for the depths of your heart, without knowing them, to be better. You walked there in support, showing respect and sharing the pride of those who survived and made it, infusing your life strenght from close and from far, to those who are still in the battle. They are not alone and we, a big pink sea, came together to send them our thoughts and positive energy to encourage them to defeat the illness and soon walk with us.

This is Pride, and this isn't a sin. It's the pride of being helpful, of sharing, of doing something for others, it's the pride that doesn't seek to raise above others, but to pull others along, infect them with the feel and the happiness and move them to be part of a greater good.

Be Proud. It's a Virtue.

What's in your Head

2011-10-05T19:47:00.000+02:00

Let's not make this about self-help. I'm not a self-help person. Do I ever struck you as a self-help kind of person? Right. Let's not do it either about yet another post ranting about what a piece of motherfucker someone is. By now we all know I happen to be surrounded by motherfuckers that can't differenciate between their mouths and their asses, and usually connect their dysfunctional brains directly to their rectum. FTTA. Fiber to the ass.

There is a positive thing about being surrounded by assholes, and that is that you get to appreciate even better the handful of wonderful, thought-capable people that have been put in your path.

So this time the thing is about "speaking out".

As it happens, when you are tangled on the social networks, a lot of crap is pushed at you. Whether you want it or not, you are witness to the conversations of your friends, and also have a front row seat to the awkward moments when they feel they must "produce" and look "important", resourcing thus usually to common places or quotes. It raises my eyebrows... in the best of cases, particularly because a lot of them are not well thought through. Sure, Sheldon quotes are fun, but do you make noise about freedom of expression only to flaunt the fact that you have nothing to say, but instead decide to say what other people said before. Nice.

From time to time you happen on an original thought, typed down from brain to fingers, and you connect. Aha! That's it. Not always, but happen. Then, it happens that you type down something that you haven't ripped off a quote site, but something that comes directly to you, like ranting somewhere about someone, or just about a situation in general. Yes, it happens. It happens that you keep being nice to someone and decide to keep things on the veneer as they were so far, but you are so fed up with that person, you've decided that you are going to let them go. You are fed up with the stupid lies, you are fed up with the peti little dramas, with the games of envy and whining, putting up faces through which you can see clear as day. It happens that you are getting tired of the regularly scheduled load of crap, and so you blow out some steam, and the steam catches the person, and they actually feel offended about it. Yes, it happens.

So, this time, plain and simple, I want to state that though you shall never forget you are accountable from what comes out of your mouth, bitching about freedom of expression only to abuse the right saying only what pleases others is hypocritical. The world won't end because you dare to say "I hate this person", nor will hunger strike the planet because you dare to say "dude, you are wrong, and this is what's right".

It wouldn't be right to say that you shall only defend and advocate for the rights you would use, as I advocate for same sex marriage, but I won't marry a woman or anyone for that matter. But if you advocate for something, use your head, be consistent, and don't go advocating for freedom of speach when you can't take the truth from others nor you have the guts to dish it out.

Books Never Written

2011-10-04T20:38:00.000+02:00

For those who write - be it on a professional level or amateur, be it books or fanfics or blog posts - a few things are as dreaded as the infamous "writer's block". Not like it seems to be so freaking bad, as this phenomenon when the brain goes on vacation, inspiration exhales and the "working process" takes a moment to go "writing yoga" and "plays dead" to relax, is actually inspiration - or excuse - for many more stories - Californication among them.

Question: Do we really, truly, absolutely know what this writer's blocking is? Because we can call with this name a wide arrange of things that basically add up to one result: nothing to publish. It can be the "brain shavasana" (or muse plays dead), or the "brain goes half assed" when there are thoughts and ideas floating around in your mind but none of them seem enough or good or complete to be written down. Of course, some even gather up these pieces and publish crap like "Twilight", which is worthy only to be flushed down the toilet.

The techniques do you use are up to you. Maybe you decide to gather all those pieces, type them down and keep them for the future, if a day comes when your brain does go playing dead on you, and then any scrap is better than no scrap. Maybe you treat those bits like cosmic junk and push them away like annoying bugs, trying to keep your mental slate clean for the eventual landing of the next Literature Nobel Prize you are hoping to write.

Or maybe you are like me, and walk among the floating bits, like in a dreamstate, something pulled out of a Daliesque picture, a Sommerland with bright berries floating around you rode by little faeries or whatever. You look over some, pick one - anyone that seems particularly pretty - and play with it, develop a movie in your head with an implausible plot that could never see the light of day, but fuck if it amuses you! Words and images that never reach the pages, never to be recorded, unfold in a movie just for you. Non Commercial, fluffy, weak, but who cares? It's thew kind of story you like, you enjoy, even if you'd never be caught dead admitting to it.

Worst thing about this floating bits? Sometimes it's so enjoyable, it tortures you that no one ever wrote it down. So why don't you? Because you only have bits and pieces, the movie in your head doesn't need so much, can skip scenes, but if you write it down, who shall you do it?

Understanding or Rightful Raging

2011-10-03T23:21:00.000+02:00

For a moment there I thought the Internet was flatlining on me, until I realized that the cleaning lady had pulled another of her usual "mess with the rest" stunts and pulled the cord half out, which considering the usual architecture of the Internet cable, that's pretty much more painful and irking that it would otherwise be. Let's leave to the side how the hired cleaning company hires a crew that can't leave things where they found them - in the best of cases - which makes coming back from lunch a real adventure of "Find The Pendrive With Your Week's Work" game a regularly scheduled one-hour entertainment, if it's not a case of "thought it was helping by sending to recycle all the papers on your desk" and had shredded an important expedient full of un-digitalized originals. No, let's concentrate only on the technological damage.

If you work in a large company where everybody has a computer, and there are printers, phones, fax machines, scanners and so on around, you're probably acquainted with the post-its fixed on the screens saying "DO NOT CLEAN HERE". It's not by mistake. With unexplainable strenght cleaning crews can punch keys out of the keyboars, fragment a screen, send hardrive into a coma no I.T. Master can bring it back from. It escapes anyone's mind how is it possible that there's a human being not secluded in the desert, who doesn't understand how delicate and important these machines are. Maybe they don't have a computer at home, but shouldn't their employer tell you about how to clean around a computer and what should they pay attention to? But even so, have they really never, ever touched a computer in their lives?

It happens also with the hired help at home, for those who have. I've heard of the cleaning lady sticking a metal pot in the microwave and setting it for 20 minutes to make soup, or smashing the phone with their hands as if it were made of egg shells. One would say that it's not like you expect them to have these same things at their own homes, but if their job involves handling these things, shouldn't they know better?

Some would say that you should be patient and understanding that "they are humble people" and "not everybody knows how to handle these things" and so on, BUT STILL, it's their job. Should't they know? It's like, if you are a doctor, shouldn't you be aware of what hurts and the damage something you do to cure, can do? As it happens, it's not a matter here of how humble you are or not, whether you actively use these things or not, but a matter of work attitude, and this happens outside the cleaning and housekeeping industry. It's not strange to find professionals who display their diplomas and all sorts of titles around, flaunt them like a peacock tail, and yet are incapable of doing a job well. People so incompetent they can't even compose a remotely sense-making letter, who can't add too numbers and get the result well, who can't follow a simple one-o-one logic to explain something. It's their job, but they are blatantly ignoring the details and parts that would take you from a mediocre hacking into the task to a work properly done.

So, shall we rant at the cleaning lady for nearly breaking the Internet cable and leaving us for over 15 days without internet while the I.T. department processes the request for a new cable and install it, or shall we put her in perspective regarding the mindblowing incompetence of those sporting three-letter titles before or after their names, who don't even know where to put a period in a sentence? And whatever we do, shall that move us to understanding, filing the incompetence of others under "you can't expect everybody being as knowledgeable as you" or are you right about getting upset at people for refusing to put to work a small portion of their Hyne-given-brains and do the small effort of actually doing the job they are paid to be done?

Needless to say, I take the second choice on both takes: nothing excuses laziness and incompetence.

Labels

2011-10-02T21:10:00.000+02:00

The topic of labels, just like the topic of "judging" seem to be of the kind that never reach to an end. In each case the bottom line of all mainstream publications, postings and speeches is basically that people don't like to be judged or labeled. People - either from minorities or from mainstream ranting against something or someone - pull out the bleached, worn ragged card of "you can't put me/us/people into a small little box, cram them into a category", and this does sound like such a big, strong, revolutionary argument, when in real life it's an argument suffering from the same short seeing as that they are accusing.

The particular case of labeling shall be taken carefully, being this a particular case that can get really messy, being not as simple as all its detractors want it to be seen. Labeling, just like judging, isn't by nature a bad thing. In a sense, labeling is often the staring point of judging (you first name something before you consider it inside yourself whether that thing is good, bad, likable, dislikable, neutral to you...), and the finishing point (like a second name of a better name you give to something after you have decided how will you relate to it). From here, labeling is a step each of us take tobegin understaing our environment, our entourage, and then it's also a tool we use to order the world around us. These labels come in a wide arrange of forms and types. Successful, failure, happy, sad, big, small, average, extraordinary, rich, poor, alien, local... Some are hard to change, like those related to what we've been born into, or what we've grown into, but others depend often on the choices we make. From this later batch many are labels we seek. When you choose your career, you are choosing also a label for yourself. Driver, teacher, philosopher, writer, matematician... Other labels require you to put a given level of effort. Best Player, Most Valuable Player, Successful, Nobel Prize, Best in the Field, Employee of the Month... You also can do something to earn other labels such as loyal, determinated, hard working, efficient, smart, resourceful and so on.

There are negative labels as well, which are earned the same way: by what you do and how you do it. Lazy, careless, liar, incompetent, stupid, unpleasant, disrespectful and so on. At the same time one single person usually has a ton of labels, depending on the spheres they move. One person can be at the same time a great sibling, a terrible child, an funny friend, a disrespectful worker and a fierce sports fan. It happens, of course, that some people, at the same time, pick on label of the many they have and hold to that one and only that one and try to live their whole lives only through that one. Shedding everything they pick to be known only as "married", "parent", "boss", "independent worker", "football fan", "otaku"... It's a personal choice.

Labels, on one direction or the other, are simply the mind tags we stick to things and people to arrange them, order them in our head, in our world so that we can relate to them according to our appreciations. You won't relate the same way to someone labeled as "unreliable" as to someone labeled "trustworthy". You also may choose to know better someone and thus get in touch with more of their labels, though often people tend to pick one particular label to stick it on that person and use it as a "Main Tag". Take your best friend, for instance. You know a lot of that person, job, family, political views, favorite sports team, quirks and fun things, and a bucketful of tags. However, when you think of that person, the first label that comes to mind is "My best friend". Is that wrong? Of course it isn't! Labels are just like the name you put to files in your computer so that you can find them easier. So, when someone protests and says that they don't want to be labeled, it certainly sounds like they don't want to be known, acknowledged, recognized... and still all they achieve is to get yet again labeled.

We all are, and we'll always be.

In a way, one could say that labels, like magic and like anything human and organic, are not good or bad, light or dark, right or wrong, but they are one way or the other depending of the heart of the person who sticks the label and interpret it. Thus, the name of a label can be changed a thousand times and that won't clean it or improve it, as long as the heart of the person isn't also changed.

Logging

2011-10-01T22:05:00.001+02:00

After a rather interesting project reaching its blessed end, I decided to put up a log - which should I thought about it before, I would have done since the begining of the project. In this log I carefully noted each memo, each relevant e-mail and each meeting where notes were taken. In the systematizing of the information several things became quite evident, things you don't often notice - or not as clearly - when you are in the middle of the action. The lags in replies, or even the lack of replies but rather the ranting and havoc wrecking some decide to implement when reason is no longer on their side (or the illusion of it). Once I finished (it took me a while going through notes and e-mails to sort out the historic log of all the activities involved with the end result of the project), realisation hit me that this would actually be a great thing to do with all your projects and all those things in your personal and professional life where you'd like to keep a record of what has been done and maybe what's still to be done. Be it a party you are planning, or all the preparations before a vacation, a personal project you are working on, track on the medication you are taking, or someone should be taking or also work related stuff. Keeping an activity log can be a very useful way to keep a clear track of what's being done.

I made my activity log on Excel - I found it easier to handle, but you can pick any other way, be it Word, Project, a notebook, a blackboard, Internet tools, you name it. Also you can change, add and take from the columns or adjust the spaces for the information the way it suits your needs better. In this example I picked an activity: Preparing Halloween Celebration (maybe I should have picked something else, but nothing else came to mind). For purposes of making it clear, I prepared four columns: one with the date when the activity starts, a description of the activity, what was the activity (meeting, e-mail, letter, document, note, memo, phone call, etc), and when it ended. Other columns can be added, such as "Next Step" or "Responsible", "Task Manager", "Percentage of Completition"... it all depends on what's important to you and what you work better with.

If you keep a log like this for each activity that you feel needs to have a follow up, or you'd like to keep a track on, first you need discipline, and then you also need to be clear as what you want to keep your eye on. Do you want to keep an eye on the time it takes you or your team to get something done. Do you want to keep an eye on the people doing it, and check how's everybody working in the team. Do you want to keep a track on the "paper track" or what's the most used mean in getting a project done. Do you want to keep a track on the nature of the activities and how many of them actually add to the project and how many are just a waste of time.

A log like this could also be of use in your daily life if you make an effort to write down quickly what do you do in your day, how much time you spend doing it, what it takes you to do it, and whether you finish the task or not. In this case this log can help you see clearly how do you use your time, and eventually help you plan better your day to make sure you only concentrate on the things that are really important and thus make the best of your day.

So think about it, and maybe you'd like to give this "logging" a try out.

Mabon: The Second Harvest and the Thanksgiving

2011-09-28T04:43:00.000+02:00

On September 23rd my friend Alix, her daughter and I did a makeshift celabration of Mabon. I had been planning on taking out the time and celebrate this Sabbath as well, in my very own way, and soon I found that Alix wanted to celebrate it too. It surprised me then also to find out that her daughter, MJ, would be attending our improvised celebration.

Mabon is a name that was born in 1970, in the Wiccan religion to refer to Autumn Equinox, so we could simply call this celebration "Autumn Equinox". Madron is another usual name for the celebration. It marks the Second Harvest and also the day when the day and the night are of the same leght. In this spirit, and according to the books I've read, one can preceive the Autumn Equinox as a celebration of balance, and also as a celebration to be thankful for what we've received during this period. In this sense I set three little "reminders" or "decorations" (I can't call them altars as they are far from it): one at home, one at the office and then the one Alix, MJ and I set at Alix's place.

It may have looked strange to my coworkers, but no one said anything. Besides, it just looked like decoration, and since I still wear my silver cross, I guess no one would think I'd gone officially witchy, though if I do no one would be surprised (perks of being the official weirdo of the pack). Through the day, and as the days have passed (the bread and orange are gone now) this simple arrangement have served as reminder of the cycle fo nature and a particular part of it. This celebration is a moment to remember that with the bad comes the good, with the good the bad. Positive and Negative walk hand in hand just as day and night, sowing and harvest, work and rest, struggle and success. It serves as a reminder that things are not bad and there's mo such thing as bad luck or mean people out there to get you - though not once you may find ill intentioned people out there to harm you or profit from you. There are things that are yours to make and yours to worry about - that's your sowing and harvest, but there are others that also play in your work, that also add to your harvest, but that are out of your reach. And everything is part of your bounty.

Mabon makes me think of the organical us, that we are not alone in the world, pure individuals single handedly forging our destinies, but that the world, Mother Nature, the Universe, Prana, the Chi, God is out there and He also has a say and He also plants seeds in our life, and He is the Sun that warms our crops just like the rest of the world is the wind, the crows, the bees, the ox or horse, the basket, the scycle and so on. Yes, our choices are in our hands and we make them and we should shoulder them, but Mabon remind you that no element, no part is alone, that we are all together and we are all part of the harvest and you shall remember your fellows, your country, the nature, the planet, and don't just write it down on your stars. We are more, everything is more and God in His infinite wisdom has created such a perfect Mother Nature, such a perfect Universe, such a Prana, such a magnificent Chi, it is balanced out to bring to our harvest always the best our actions can achieve.

As a Christian - though admitedly it is not the path religion or the church encourages - I feel curious of the celebrations of other religions, of their ideas and what they hold up. In this sense I like and admire the Wiccan or Pagan celebrations as a wonderful way of reminding us of the Work of God reflected in the nature He has put around us, which we, as social and economical beings, are set on ignoring and destructing, pretending that recycling and reducing our carbon emissions is all we need to "respect nature".

Our celebration was simple and quite trampled. I must admit I'm not a very good ceremony leader, specially not when suddenly appointed. :-P Armed with "Wicca" by Scott Cunningham, we set on the dining table a small arrangement of eight red tea candles to represent the Wheel of the Year. In the center we put two candles - a red one and an orange one - presumably to represent the God and Goddess, though no one was appointed officially (God and Mother Nature, maybe?) with two cups to hold the offer (beer and chips). Outside the Wheel of the Year we set the four elements corresponding with the four corners of the world (North, East, South and West), and then did the small ceremony. Each of us made an offer of chips (cake) and beer (ale) before partaking the bounty and then shared an experince of somethinggood that has come from something bad. Without question mine was the experience of the thesis, and how we had to put up with so much crap from the tutor only to prevail in the end and come out rewarded in so many ways.

The experience was wonderful, truth to be told. Pagan music in the background and a shy attempt to raise energy. The fear to cast circle - so we left that out for another time - the insecurity of looking dumb doing this, and the awesome sense of sharing something deep with willing people, something from the core, unattached to any socially bound religion to be deeply human, deeply introspective and naively reaching out to God to say, "Dude, you are so awesome!".

Yes, I may climb one day on the roof at 5 am and make my attempt to sing Adhan (Muslim call to prayer), then roll out my yoga mat and pray on it. I might, and I strongly believe it doesn't make me less Christian, but instead it makes me a human being seeking to reach out to God in as many ways as He has inspired mankind to reach out to Him and communicate with Him to request, thank and simply tell Him, "God, you rock!".

Book Review... On the Go

2011-09-16T19:07:00.000+02:00

It's not strange for me to pick up a book - buy it even - and find out it's crap. Some seem to start like crap but then get good - such as it was the case with Sunstorm by Asa Larsson, which ended up being one of my current favorites. However this book I'm currently reading is crap on crap and 215 pages into it (from a hideous grand total of 372) is a nightmare and a qualified atrocious tree murder. The book in question is "Chasing Harry Winston", by Lauren Weisberger, a writer who made a name for herself with the book "The Devil Wears Prada", which was later brought to the movies, under the same name. A movie, I must say, I absolutely love. My msitake was, perhaps not have read the book of Ms. Weisenberger - The Devil Wears Prada - before embarking on another of hers, particularly when the Internet - as I later found out - is plagued with negative criticism for her terrible writing style and the way the book is actually constructed. This is one of those few cases where the movie is better than the book.

Before even getting my hands on the book that served as base for this great movie, I latched onto this book, which portrays on it's cover a very iconic image: three diamond rings full of bling on the best Gangsta-Style (to my liking) and white fur Louboutin plumps. Looks, to my liking, like a hideous slice of the some small white dog (fur looks coarse) pimped up. Maybe that should have warned me.

The book is about three friends - Emmy, Leigh and Adriana - who are reaching 30, have slightly different lives but are good friends, in a too Sex and the City style. They love and resent each other constantly and are absolutely displeased with the turns their lives have taken - though Ms. Weisberger makes an exagerated effort to prove how wonderful and gradious their lives are - and so, they decide to turn their lives around on a one year bet. (Because that's what 30 year-old women do.) It's also somewhat odd how Ms. Weisberger insist on calling her characters "girls", when by their age, it should be more proper to call them "women". They do act like girls - all fluffy, manipulable, insecure, unable to get a grip on their lives, and drifting away in the shallow shades of existence - so maybe the word is well applied, but still, there's no clear indication that the book is about three dysfunctional women fucking it up every step of the way.

In this book you have an Emmy, who is the "Charlotte" of the book: longterm relationships only, few men in her life, and constantly dreaming about a romantic life with a husband who adores her and Children! Oh, she can't live without children. There's then Adriana, the Trust Fund girl, Portuguese who constantly dishes out Spanish words - which also exist in Portuguese, but never a 100% Portuguese word that doesn't exist like that in Spanish. She's the "Samantha", dishing out advise and tricks that truly makes you doubt of the wolesomeness of the men that might fall in the "trap". Finally there's Leight, the "Carrie/Miranda" of the book. Perfectionist, workaholic, with a perfect boyfriend/fiancé, perfect appartment, perfect job, but hates the woman upstairs because of the noise she makes, dislikes her boyfriend because he's perfect and sweet and feels bad about herself because she shouldn't be like that.

The whole plot is pretentious and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Descriptions are about prices and brands and expensive features. Does it make a difference if the bag of the character is Fendi or Prada? Do we need to read the brands and the magazine-like description? Why do we need to know that a person is looking up from her Vogue, instead of simply saying "fashion magazine" or simply "magazine"? It is indeed troubling to read how what any sane woman would call "harrassment" is depicted as welcomed "compliments" and jealousy is something invited upon as a token of love and interest. The profuse brand describing to painful extents was ok in "American Psycho", where it represented how shallow and pretentious the protagonist was, but in here? In here it's the way the writer has found to make the readers believe that these women are "successful" by anybody else's standards.

Now, if you are an ignorant of the "rock world", you probably didn't know that Harry Winston is a famous jeweler and a company of jewelry. When it downs to you, you get that the book is about three women of 29 looking to secure an engagement ring before 30 (you know the stigma: if you are a woman, the ultimate purpose of your life is to get married and have kids, and the success of your life is measured in the wealth of your husband), and not any ring, but a big rock, because the bigger the rock the bigger your success. And you can pretend that the bigger the rock, the bigger the love (because a man who isn't so interested wouldn't sacrifice so much for you), but then again that implies also that poor men can't love you enough. Nothing to worry though, as the "girls" don't have to deal in the book with the Americans who lost their jobs and can't sleep at night because have a foreclosure pending on their homes.

They look for the proposal, they look to be validated from others, get the attention of others, so instead of saying: "Fuck this, this isn't making me happy. I'm leaving all this behind and going another direction before it's fucking late" they rather keep the scheme going on, pretending everything is awesome to then collapse like damsels in distress, regardless of all the damage they've done, to be saved, pitied - because that's such an amazing and validating feeling to convey from others - and washed clean and pure, to then be resettled in the old track.

Banks have collapsed, economies have cracked, poverty has been poking out it's head for over a decade now in the U.S., and yet books and movies and series keep pushing the life in the fab line, the excesive spending, the abject dependance on fashion, the American Psycho twisted and overly praised lifestyle as the only one that can make you happy, even if you are not.

10 pages into this crap and your brain is so numbed you would actually believe that yoga is a way to convey dark arts to summon Cthulhu. Why I keep reading it? It fucking pisses me off to have spent some $16 on it, so now I'm finishing it just to know how much shit $16 can buy.

Can't wait to be done with it and then either toss it to the trash can, leave it on a park for someone to do something with it, donate it to a library where people can read it without buying it and so saving others the $16, or try and get some of that back selling it to a used book shop.

PS: Yes, we defended our thesis and it went really well for us. ^_^ I'll be posting about that in the future.

Our Last Mile

2011-08-31T23:37:00.000+02:00

Damned, I'm nervous! I've been nervous and on mounting proportions since Monday afternoon, and the reason being that on this fateful Monday afternoon, some minutes after 17 h I received a call from the University: we've been given a date for the defense of our thesis. Yes! A reason to be happy! Ehem, yes, for this Friday at 14 h. *screeching sound* O_O Come again?

Mile and I met this Saturday to work on our presentation. Didn't get around practicing our presentation, only discussing what goes in the slides, but then again, though we knew the deadline for the thesis is, well, this Friday, we had no news on when the actual defense date would be and we were thinking more on the lines of preparing to ask for a extension, since we would evidently run out of time. I remember telling Mile that it would be a HUGE MIRACLE if we've got to defend on Friday, but that was so impossible, so out of the realm of possibilities, that honestly, in the best of cases, we would defend NEXT Friday. We even made an appointment to meet on Saturday - this Saturday - to practice our defense presentation.

This thesis has been a war through and through. From the struggles with the tutor to get things going on, going over and over the same issues, trying to get information, facing open opposition and animosity, all sorts of strange things to debunk the lectors we really wanted, obstacles and whatnots to get in the way to the people ready to help us... For years it seemed like a monster working against us, trying to force us to desist from the attempt, in way that defy any sense of logic. People from other Faculties stared in amazement at our recount of the things we were told and were exposed to. Then, step by step fighting to get it done, then the struggle to get it approved, biting back the impulse to just slash out and dish a few truths in the open.

Mile and I grew closer, like two soldiers left alone behind enemy lines, holding to our helmets, fisting hard our rifles, and pushing, pushing, pushing.

Then the "administrative mistakes" such as "oh yes, you are in such a hurry, and I know, and I still forgot entirely about sending your request for over three weeks, and were you not called me, it will still be sitting in my desk waiting to be sent".

For years - and literally, YEARS, since 2007 - Mile and I always turned to each other and said, "we are one step closer". It was like a mantra. We only had each other, and we had to stick together, and so we decided not to look at the dark side of the process, but look only at the positive. "We are one step closer". We could be at the begining, the job opportunities and promotion chances sliding past us, chances gone for good, or another set back hideously rolled before us, and still we held our hands hard like two lost little girls in the deep, dark woods and say "But we are one step closer".

Step by step we celebrated each finished stage of the process and took strenght to face the next. In the end, for over a year now - since May, 2010 - our mantra changed to "We are close".

"We are on the last mile," we said to each other "we are done, and these are the last steps."

Used to fight against all chances, we prepared a slideshow "just in case". We fought constantly to stay one step ahead the process, whenever we could have that step given. We tried not to get our hopes too high, so that we didn't brace for the possible blow, and it worked every time. We struggled and we fought and we gained our turf slowly, and inch at the time. I guess we didn't expect this. It is finally here, our last step.

I'm nervous, I won't hide it - not here - and I feel like screaming and crying. It's like I must be on my toes all day to keep my tears from rolling down my cheeks. I'm so scared! We were prepared to keep fighting the system, and now the system has finally yielded, and - I'm so sure - all by the hand of God. We weren't supposed to defend on Friday, but God made it possible.

In a little over three days time we have to prepare for the defense - practice our presentation - and handle the logistics: snacks, coffee, name holders, water for the table...

This is it. This is.

I rushed yesterday looking for a suit, nothing too fancy, but then again anything that doesn't look like what a whore would use to play the part of the naughty executive lady, is truly overpriced. I found a suit at ARMI. The pants are huge on me, so Mom and I will work on taking it in and fitting it, but it was that or see what can I use from my currently depleted suit collection. I was really on the point of "buy a suit or get used to having only informal clothes".

Tomorrow I'm on vacations - from work, that's it, so as Friday, as fixing a permit for thesis defense on such a short notice with the appointed HHRR is next to Mission Impossible - so you weren't going to hear or read from me in the next two days, but now you know why else you won't.

Wish me Luck! (and calm)

Beware, Beware of the Way You Get There

2011-08-19T20:56:00.000+02:00

I'm at a "meeting" posting from my phone. The meeting haven't started because the person who summoned it is otherwise engaged in another meeting of an entirely different nature. She hasn't called off and rescheduled this one - as any sane person would - but instead "promised" to be here soon, leaving everybody enjoying the benefits of wireless internet and smartphones, which each of us could do anytime at our own offices/cubicles.

As I sit here, wishing to be somewhere else being productive - there's plenty of work on my "In" tray right now - I can't help but notice this guy next to me. Burried in his laptop, which isn't even one of the new ones, as it's sported by the young collegue in front of him, and I recognize him as a former head of department. But not any head of department, but The First Head of That Department. He's a guy who didn't have the background for the job, like an engineer leading the Accounting area, or a nurse as head of the I.T. unit, nor any type of knowledge, experience, hint, divine inspiration or anything to give him a direction, a light about what should he do. Others with a bit more sense to themselves, better survival instincts, honesty or whatever, would have declined as the offer landed on their desks, but he did not. His first steps were terrible, heaping up mistakes on mistakes with no one to turn to for help - or not knowing to whom to turn - then some of his subordinates openly saying it was his arrogance in the way of listening to the problems happening, accepting the offered aid or requesting it. He shouldered the job for many years, made mistakes, learned from them.

Now here he sits being "just one of us". Not a middle management, not even one of the lowest management position, but just another working ant with no one to give orders to, except when placing them at the local McDonald's. In his place sits now a rookie who has no experience on the matter. The guy has been the assistant of the current Mega-Boss who has. among his areas this Department. The guy haven't worked on this area before, started with little idea of the job, but he trusted his boss - he's an easy push over for his boss - and has taken the job of destroying all of his predecesor's job because it's "crap, doesn't work". All sorts of strong words were said about that First Head and his job, stopping short from calling him incompetent. He doesn't ask, doesn't question, but does as he's told, thus though he hammer-balls eight years of work but has not a clue what to put in its place.

The guy has had to face the many shenanigans of his superior, and his lack of preparation keeps him from making rational, smart decisions, which ends with him contradicting himself, contradicting his boss, even if his boss is the one going against what he said first. One day he wants a "continental breakfast", then he says it was not "continental" only a "regular breakfast". Then it wasn't even that, it was just the money for the breakfast, but then it isn't that, it's the continental. Then, really YOU understood wrong! It's not "continental", it's "consulting". As result, though his boss is a bully and people know better than to trust him, he himself, wrapped on the tricks of the boss, has lost his credibility.

They ignore it, but nothing they suggest will be accepted unless it's backed by someone who's trusted. (Not even in written are things accepted as they deny the very documents they write and sign.)

I look at the First Head, now just another John Doe, humbled if not dowright humiliated for the change in his position, and I remember the guy put on his place. One thing that hits me is how both First Head and Second Head have taken the position for the position, or taken it without having the proper background, thinking it's the natural way to progress in the company. In both of them I see the same: people who wanted the position, not the career. It's like in a movie, where cool thing is to be a boss, have the cool office, but there's nothing of substance about the job itself.

First Head is now relegated to a cubicle, stashing his presumptuous paintings of picturesque huts of white walls and red roofs, and his souvenirs from providers and nameplates and office decoration in a cardboard box, but here's Second Head, trying to be a good sport, a useful element for the boss who put him there, and as result, just like George Bush's disgraceful A.G., he's soiling his image, trashing his own principles, walking back and forth, for how long, for what? He's not there because he knows, because he's the one, he's there because he was put there and could just easily be removed for someone more "purposeful". And then what?

One could say that this is the "way of the office", and you "must take the challenges if you want to get somewhere", but there are a few of us - Dragonfly is one of them - who work to forge a career, to grow within a career, not within a company, next to a boss that will put you here or there. Is refusing a promotion to a position you have no preparation for a good thing or a bad thing? Shall you be open and take the challenge, or shall you be honest, know what you are capable of and act accordingly?

First and Second Head show the case of the people who work for the money, or work for the status. Those can be lost, and are often lost. As result, you become a failure by default. It's not something you can hold into, and it's void as your whole job is to just ditch the bads and try not to sink instead of building - because you are not qualified to build or develop - knowing that any moment you can lose your position, your "achievement", for which you weren't really responsible and thus you have no power over it. This sort of labor-behaving puts you on a position where you are subject to the whims of others, accepting arbitrary behavior and decisions for others. You might concentrate on being friendly with the right people, neglecting your job because a) you don't really know how to do it, and b) that's not how you get your job.

In the light of this, doesn't this make you a person who shows up to a place for a wage? Always freithened of the chances you can't control? Hating your job?

The batch of John and Jane Does I know, and I proudly belong to, those who rather develop as professionals or scientists, who rather grow in our career and become better at what we do, regardless of where we are or the status we get. In this sense, we are inmune to the corporative failure, as our goal isn't to become a superior, but to be a better engineer, better accountant, better programmer or whatever. Being promoted or demoted doesn't affect us, the status, the wage or the size of the office is not our goal.

In society, we are taught to shy away from failure, inspite of all the "self-help" and "instant-richness" pseudo-literature available today. What is failure then? To lose face in front of your peers like First Head did, or to fuck it up while on the "top" like Second Head does? In my perception they are both a failure for putting their eggs on a basket they have no control of, when they could have put them in a more productive basket. Failure, real failure is when you betray yourself, when you sell out for an external ideal, instead of continuing with your personal project, to build and grow.

Popping a Belly

2011-08-17T23:45:00.000+02:00

An acquintance of mine is pregnant with her second child. She's really happy and has been getting blown up like a balloon fish. She's all giddy and happy, telling everybody who will listen to her, or seem like would about her pregnancy, and even show the video of her first time giving birth, as well as an unending sequence of her first child, her belly of her first child, minute by minute. As a woman, you are expected to ohhh! and ahh! and smile a lot and squint your eyes and baby talk and say "oh how beautiful!" and "you are so lucky" and "I'm so envious of you". Of course, if you are like me, and merely forcing a demure, stiff smile why holding back the gag reflex and strongly considering submerging your head in the nearest trashcan and blow groceries into it, then you are seen like the "odd duckling of the pack". Oddly, though you are the one on whom the whole "maternity crap" is imposed on (you never ASKED to see the fucking pics, vids, nor you are interested in the least on the process - neither have you imposed the "we don't speak 'Children' here" policy), you are the one making excuses, which are met with patronizing lines about how you will "get it one day when you have your own" and so on.

Pregnant as she is from her second offspring, she has come to use a picture of her blown up belly as icon for everything that requires or could use an avatar on the net. Basically you are exposed at any given time to see a huge, Malignant Mellon looking lump pop up and down in the corner of your screen every so often, depending on the quality of her connection. (Have tried to block her, but the freaking new messenger has hid the option away.) Malignant Mellon has not once used her pregnancy to shake off work related issues (yeah, like if you go on vacation you are no longer accountable for the progress of the work assigned to you, or what you did on the days before or after it), which sounds really somewhat besides the point, except that this kind of pushes you towards an important root of "evil". Malignant Mellon is just a small appendix of what's going on, of what stands behind the whole matter of having children.

As a woman submerged in the society Malignant Mellon represents, you are not expected to work or to be good at working, you are just expected to give birth. It's beyond the point whether you are good at what you do or whether you are bad, it really doesn't matter, because women's "destiny", their ultimate goal and purpose in life is to give birth. People around mommies are lenient, and don't bitch if they skip the office early, or are systematically late, if they are shabby looking or underperform at their office duties. It all goes understood and accepted because "they are mommies, and mommies priorities are the children". Of course, where a dad to skip the office, get late, be shabby or underperform... that wouldn't be tolerated. He is a man and he must perform.

This, however is a double sided thing, as since Mums are unreliable on the laboral sphere, and all women are supposed to become at some point "Mums" because that's our manifest destiny, employers rather stir away from hiring women, or by default, make sure to fire them as soon as they get pregnant, or not hire them back when the maternity leave is over. What for? A company can't be run half assed just because the workforce is "otherwise engaged".

Some of the arguments I've heard when wincing at the sight of a pregnant woman, or children is that "well, you wouldn't be here if your mom wouldn't have gone through the same process", or "you were a baby too". Okay, in my case - as the case of many people - I was born from straight parents: does that automatically exclude that I could be gay or bisexual? What if I were transgender? Yes, my folks when through the whole make-a-babe process, but why should I too? Should I also be a shoemaker if that's what my parents are? Shall I also be an alcoholic if that's what my parents are? And also, just because I was a baby, why should make I one? And on that line, if I'm Asian or Black or Caucasian, shall I also make one like me? I was a little girl, must I also make a little girl? What if I get pregnant and it's a little boy? I wasn't a little boy, is that agains the "norm" then?

Though I understand that Malignant Mellon has all the right to flaunt her condition and her "achievements" and regard them as she pleases, I also have the right to react to it, and for me it is deeply distasteful, and insulting as well. Sure, maybe it's just me, but forgive me if I'm touchy when mothers are crass about their state, their condition, their "status" while us, Childfree are bullied and called names that don't even apply to the reality of things.

We are being pushed with lies - because that's what they are - seeking to disqualify our choice, calling us unfulfilled, or as someone said "living a superficial life" or "passing on a life with more purpose". Right.

Let me put things in perspective:

1. As a Childfree, when my significant other and I, or my friends and I, decide to go out, all we do is say when (which can be spontaneously), where, and go. Okay, maybe some dressing up is required. We go, have a good time, laugh, if we are driving we are careful about what we drink, and when the party is over, or we get tired, or we decide we must wake up early to work nect day, we go. We get home, take off the clothes, shower and hit the sack.

2. A person with children must first decide whether the children can take being away from him or her, look for a nanny, or start bothering friends and family looking for someone willing to look up for the kids. When getting ready they still have to deal with the kids, hopefully not with a temper tantrum and "I want to go too" or "Don't leave me", which can end up in picking up the phone and cancelling. Or maybe the nanny cancelled and nobody will take YOUR children, so you must cancel. If you manage to go, then you won't enjoy yourself all that much because you are thinking about picking up your children - you are subjected to a curfew! - while keeping an eye on the phone in case it rings, and if it rings you get upset, worried and spend a part of the evening calming the children or explaining things to the nanny. You will be prone to leave early, while all your friends are still feeling good and enjoying themselves. You get home and you still have to check on the kids, clean up the messes left, maybe wrestle them into bed and make them promises to atone for leaving them.

Yes, a life without kids is a life with less worries, with more time and more energy. It's a life fully balanced - or better balanced - between work and relaxation time. Any physician would tell you it's a healthy lifestyle. We can better apply ourselves to what we do, have better chances to be good at our jobs, at our hobbies, at our passion. More room to improve, more time to work on it. Is our life lesser in purpose? Is our purpose inferior?

It's different, it suit us, it makes us happy, which is something some parents can't say about themselves.