Sporadic Blogging

 This year I had the resolution of going back to blogging, and doing so weekly, if possible. Then something happened and I wasn't able to upload pictures. The reasons elude me, and I'm not in the mood either to go and fix anything about it. I did try, but in the end it annoyed me more than it was worth it. And yet, somehow, not being able to post pictures takes away my desire to blog. Isn't that strange?

Though I continue to use the internet daily, I'm using less and less social media platforms, and rather move on other paths of the "inter webs", and some people call them. I'm trying to move to longer format content, and written content, though I do enjoy still a good movie or a series. I moved away from YouTube due to their annoying policies on advertising, which allow undiscriminated exposure to blatantly scammy adds, while the options to report them seem to be there only as a decorative feature, or a front to appease the regulators. To fill the void, I've been using podcasts to get my dose of sound, and have been moving out of the video addiction with Netflix and Max. And slowly I move to written content: books and more blogs.

As I rip away from this milieu, I start noticing patterns: content is shorter and shorter, and even the longer content is peppered with more and more annoying adds, cutting up the content into the small little chunks some algorithm is using to ensure people's attention and memory retention gets halved and halved again, turning people's minds into Achilles' race against the turtle.

Once my head was out of social media, I did notice I was not the only one scrolling and scrolling, annoyed at content labeled "for you", but that had nothing of what I wanted to see. I'm awfully impatient and I won't scroll for 20 minutes to find one post from someone I know and follow, so it was much easier for me to get off IG, for instance. But many are trapped in there, mouses in a spinning wheel, spending hours and hours getting distracted, scrolling and looking for friends while consuming the content spoon fed to them, deemed "for you", and not questioning the why.

Easily bored people then click and buy a myriad of entirely useless things because "they are cheap" and "they seemed so nice/ingenious", feeling the thrill of receiving a package at their door, like a present, when they were the ones paying for it, only to enjoy opening the box, admiring the article and then condemning it to a corner at their homes, where things pile up, soon forgotten, as the very algorithm is teaching them to do.

Many are falling into this grinder, giving up mind and reason for feeble entertainment. I wonder how many are able to escape the clutches of social media.

Office-day Mondays

 You've probably have seen those pictures of "I hate Mondays". I know there are people who resent those who "hate Mondays", though there is a group that will always smile because we remember Garfield, the cat, but also Hoops&Yoyo. I'm one of those people who love the "I hate Mondays" kind of quotes and images, even though I tend to like the day itself. (If you wonder why I don't have any pictures on my posts, it's because Google refuses to let me, because, allegedly, I don't have space in my drive, which is ridiculous.)

I like Mondays because it's a fresh start, because it's the day after the weekend and I'm rested, full of energy. I like Mondays because these are the "moon-days", and I like the Moon. (I'm a Moonchild, after all.) And for a while, one of my favorite TV series had a new episode every Monday. You see, I have great reasons to love Mondays. But these days I don't love it so much: I have to go to the office to waste time on Mondays. And I loath it.

On a regular day, I wake up between 5:00 and 5:30 and start my routine: make the bed, brush my teeth, change clothes, water plants, put away dishes that have been on the dryer all night, wash the cats' dishes, do my morning exercises, feed the cats, shower, dress, do house chores, breakfast, eat breakfast and start my work day.  On Mondays I have to wake up between 2:40 and 3:10 to do all that but put to house chores, with a much elaborated dressing, putting on heels and then drive for a bit over an hour to get to the office and start working.

It is tiresome. At the office I have to get breakfast, which is not a simple, tasty thing but I have to go out and spend money. Walk to the coffee shop, order, pay and back, which is bracketed by lift travel and waiting. Each time I want to eat, throw away a wrapper or a coffee cup, go to the bathroom, eat, anything, It's a matter of walking and making everything inconvenient. We are becoming less productive, not only due to the time lost because now the cubicles (which are shared, because the effort to build "team identity" and "connection with the company" does not include making the place feel like your own) have no paper bins, and the only paper bin is centralized. We are moody and tired for waking up so late, for spending money we wouldn't have if we would have been home. The environment is uninviting and you are surrounded by everybody's conversations, which are annoying as hell.

After Monday, the rest of the day are work-from-home days, days that are not sacrificed to fragile egos that need stroking, and that makes them better. Or so we hope.

When the plan don't plan

 Sometimes what you need is a coffee and a moment to breathe, and sometimes you feel like you can't afford even that. Now, yes, that can be insensitive to say, when you think about the people who can't afford to buy coffee, but I mean that coffee in a figurative form.

Yesterday I had one of those days, when I felt that things were burying me under. I was constantly doing something, tending small tasks for a variety of spheres of my life - politics, union, office, personal, family - and from time to time I felt like I wasn't even making any advances on anything. Sometimes I also caught myself just staring blankly at the computer screen and had no idea what was I watching or what had happened in the last 20 minutes or so of the series or movie I was supposed to be watching. I was checking out.

I caught myself thinking why was I so lost, when I have a planner and I should be able to use the tools I have learned to organize my tasks in a manageable manner, and give myself plenty of breathing space, but a look at my planner told me that I was busy with things I have not planned at all. And I guess that was the root of what was going on with me: I was swarmed by urgent tasks and I didn't take the time to step back and make a plan to tackle them all. I was just too busy dealing with what was flying into my lap. Work plan ideas, help with contacting people, sending documents and e-mails other people are responsible for, signing myself for things that do interest me, but for which I have no time. And I wasn't looking at my planner.

You see, time is very much like money, but we don't have a time-credit card. With time, just like with money, we can imagine that we have more of it than what we really have. We may end up signing up to do more things that what we are capable of doing, or what we can afford with our energy level. Too many groups, too many get-togethers, too many meetings, too many appointments, too many plans. Then, when we realize, it happens that we don't have the time to do them all, and we start pushing and borrowing time from one thing to the next, doing things at the same time, squeezing tasks in time slots we view as "unproductive", and then we wonder why are we so wired up and why are we so tired. It's almost like maxing your credit card.

A planner is like a checking book for your time. If you stop seeing every single line (hour) as a slot that needs to be "productive", you can actually see where do you have time to do something, and how much time can you give to a given task. Time will also show you to learn and pencil in down times and transition times. Don't deal with tasks and requests as soon as they get to you, no matter how others say it's so urgent. Make your own decisions, and be willing to decline. If it's so urgent and you don't have the time to do it - and you must respect your personal times too - then kindly tell the person that they should find someone else to deal with it. Oh, there are recriminations and guilty trips? Well, if someone resources to that because you said no, that's not a person you should be listening to. People who do that is people who doesn't respect you, so why would you want to be associated with them, right?

So, if the plan doesn't plan, take a moment to analyze the situation and decide how much in on your plate and how much can you really afford to attend. And then cut the excess.

Take a Moment to Chill

Property of Stormberry

 The title is more for me than you, but if you feel like you need to chill too, by all means, apply it to yourself as well. These last two weeks have been full of activities for me, and even though the workload at the office have been low, my personal and social life has been taking a lot of space and time. This is what happens when you commit to a group and that group goes through a period of expansion.

In the last days I've been working after work contacting people who want to affiliate to our political party and going through the mechanics of doing background checks - something basic and simple, nothing nefarious -, interviewing them and then adding them to the right chat. And at the same time, I - who am not fond of WhatsApp or group chats - have to go on checking so many chat groups that I am considering to write myself a "chat dictionary" so that I know which one is for which.

and next week won't be much different, as I'll take a workshop to be able to conduct induction talks to the new affiliates, which means that, on top of carding through lists of people requesting to affiliate, doing the background checks, and interviewing them, I'll also have groups assigned to give them induction talks at given times per week, for which I'll have to prepare. And that's just part of it! I have all this energy for action and I'm finding places to use it: help in a district improvement plan, work with the Women's Committee, tackle a project to systematize all the Bills the Party has put forth, make a financial analysis of the municipal budget, and so on. And I'm excited about all of this!

But, the truth of the matter is that we are finite beings with limited resources. Each of us only has 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and limited amounts of energy. We must prioritize, distribute energy and also find spaces to replenish. If we can take a moment to charge our phones, tablets and laptops, why couldn't we do the same with ourselves?

Unplug, journal, read, knit or just watch a series or a movie if you really can't tear yourself away from the screen (though it's better to do so). Step away from work and projects, grab that old record player and put on an LP. Take your time, concentrate on placing the needle, and listen to music for 20 or 30 minutes. Measure time in a different way, away from the trappings of modern life, designed to keep you scrolling.

Take a moment to chill.

Politics don't stop

 On February 1st we had the Presidential Elections in Costa Rica, with a disheartening result. If you believe in Democracy and the role of institutions as checks and balances  for Government, you certainly fear for this small country and its blind turn towards autocracy, extreme right and the plunge into a cesspool of misinformation. People in many parties are folding their flags, putting away their political paraphernalia and going back to their civil lives. And so I thought I would.

But, is politics just rallying for elections? Is that all we do? Many may think so, and there are others that want people to think so. Politics is just elections. Democracy is just elections. You go, you vote and that's it. Then politicians scream, do "political stuff", get paid, get rich, appear on TV and then people go vote again, and things start over again. And if something goes wrong, it's "politics". From prices to employment, from public health to the environment, everything that goes wrong or that we don't understand is "bad because of politics".

Politics seem to appear when something goes wrong and people can't understand why, and so "it has to be the fault of politicians", and that makes it "politics". What people fail to realize is that politics are far deeper embedded in daily life than they want to believe. 

Politics are in out education system, in the availability and shape our healthcare systems take. It's also in the price of every single thing we buy and whether we can even buy it in the first place. Politics shape our vacations, where we can go and how many days we have, and also in our jobs, whether we have one, how much are be paid, how many hours we work and in which conditions. As members of a particular society, the politics practiced in that place shape every single aspect of our lives. The question for us, people, is how much do we want to be part of those politics, and how much do we want to influence them.

I thought that, after February 1st my participation in the party would dwindle, but it only changed. We replace party t-shirts, flags and paraphernalia for notebooks and pens. Our political flyers are replaced for excel sheets and phones. Our work now is to recruit and holding informative sessions to explain our ideals and principles to those interested in forming part of the party.

We are working on brainstorming sessions, coming up with ideas of what can we do to improve our communities and determine what do we need to get to a better place as society. From creating content to inform and educate, to proposing workshops to help small entrepreneurs connect with new customers and navigate the fiscal system, we are changing the way we do politics. We are going to the community, to connect, to understand, to learn and to help.

And that is politics too.

A Lovely Printer (Another)

 I had fully intended to post weekly on this blog, but that's not something I can fully achieve right now. It's not only a matter of "life happens" - which is an expression, I know, but really, what the hell with "life happens"? Life doesn't "happen", life is lived. Gods, sometimes expressions can irk me with their stupidity - but more a matter of me being busy and my head being twice as busy. We had presidential elections last week, and sadly, we had to find out just how profoundly stupid the population can be, how easily they fall prey to demagogues and manipulators. I know, I know, "you shouldn't call stupid the people who choose an autocratic, anti-democratic figure, because they have been let down by previous parties". Can you read that again please? Why would anyone sane enough choose someone who has proven to be abhorrently bad just because twelve years ago someone was somewhat bad? I tell you why? Because people want to believe lies, want permission to be violent and lash out, they take what they have for granted, expect promises of abundance to be kept and threats of exploitation to be "just words. And they vote in real life, with their heads in a bubble, and think that they would be spared of the horror they wish on others.

Explain to me how is that anything other than stupidity, if you were so kind.

Yes, I'm upset, BUT I'll cut that thought thread here and concentrate on pretty things. Like my new portable printer. Goodness, I am in love!

Property of Stormberry

If you are a journaling enthusiast, you may have come across the portable photo printers. A couple of years ago they were the rage. If you followed social media - which I used to do back in the day - you've probably saw the rise of the portable photo printer splashed all over your feed, with wonderful tiny pictures being printed from your phone, idea to be added to your journal, as a way to enrich your record keeping. This allowed you to print out not only photographs you made, but also pictures you've found, interesting quotes and so on.

The first ones I saw in social media were printers that used heat paper to print, and they were mainly monochromatic. The paper was thin and it didn't add bulk to the journal, but I was worried about the longevity of the print, which most influencers using these printers didn't talk about. 

But, how long does a heat print last? Well, if you are used to request and keep the vouchers of your card purchases - you know, that curling strip of paper you can get with your purchases - you may have noticed, that many of them have significantly faded by the time you have to do your tax declaration. I happen to usually keep my recipes for up to two years, thus I know that these prints don't last two years. This bothered me about the heat printed pictures. Why spend money, print and glue down a picture only to have a piece of paper in your journal two days from now that has nothing on it?

Portable photo printers are a luxury. No, not like a luxury bag, but definitively they are not a necessity. Thus, though I was tempted to get one - because being influenced is real thing - I spent years mulling over it, researching options, discarding the idea and then going back again to it.

At one point I found this Kodak P210R Mini 2 Retro printer in a comparison line up, and it came up like the one that produced the longest lasting and best quality photos. They are printed, and you can actually see each color - yellow, magenta, cyan - being laid on the page, and finally being coated, so the end product doesn't look like those pictures printed on photo paper, where the ink clearly sits on top of the upper coat, taking away the satin of the page.

It wasn't easy to synchronize with my phone, and you have to make sure it is on each time you want to print, but other than that, I am pleased (so far) with the printer.

Something I like is that it reminds me of old photographing experiences. Pictures were more precious when you had a roll of 12 or 24 or 36 pictures and you had to make each one count. You would think carefully of each shoot and make it count, consider how many pictures did you had left, and then go and have them revealed. You would sit from time to time with friends and family, or by your own with your photo album and relive those memories. It was so different from today's pictures-in-phone, where people scroll unseeing from loads of pictures to find one they need, and just for a moment. It's like we are so flooded with pictures they loose all their value, all their interest.

A portable photo printer is not going to change the perception people have of pictures, but for some of us it's a way yo go back to those days when photos were scarce, reserved only for special events.

Printer Hell

Property of Stormberry

 My EPSON printer has spent a year - give or take - refusing to print in black. I've been printing stuff in blue but I had enough. So I bought a new printer. Not an EPSON because I didn't want to go through the same ordeal, and my parents recently bought an EPSON ECO tank printer and it decided not to work anymore before it  turned two years old. So yes, no EPSON.

On Wednesday I took my eldest nephew to dinner, to celebrate his birthday, and so I tied that with a couple of errands, that had to do with printing. Specifically, I had to have some documents printed for my mother, so that she can get some healthcare procedures done, and the one place I know of where you can print out things is at the Office Depot. Getting to the Office Depot takes me around 45 minutes. It's not sustainable.

Since I had some surplus money (a financial compromise I had didn't go through), and so I invested that in a printer. A Brother.

Yesterday I tried to install it. It's not the first printer I install, and it's not the first printer I install on my Mac, but this is the first that just don't want to cooperate. Boy. it's driving me crazy.

One of those "planner" times

Property of Stormberry

January could be called "the month of planners", though in the planner community, "planner season" happens somewhere between July and October, depending on the brand of planner or planners you subscribe to. During planner season, people who are into planners, such as myself, hunt down the planners they want to use the next year, and usually put them away until the fated date comes when it's time to start using them and filling them up with annual information such as birthdays, anniversaries, start and end of school/uni periods, tax filing days and so on.

In today's digitalized world, this is not a ritual many people have, as digital calendars (or social media) has all the birthdays already in for eternity loaded and programmed into your calendar (until such a day when you have to renew or update your app), and so with all the other days of appointments, due dates and due-payment days you may have to keep an eye on. Back in the day, before the internet and computers were inserted in every aspect of our lives, you know, when a telephone was always a landline, and stayed on a wall or a table, and not in your pocket, most people had this ritual of noting important dates in the brand new planner or on the calendar. Those planners and calendars, as far as I remember, could be found in school and paper supply stores somewhere around December, and not sooner. And most people spent either the last days of December or the first days of January writing in important dates, like birthdays, anniversaries, payments and check-ups that happened only a handful of times in the year.

Though I do know of cases where people used their planners and calendars to annotate certain events of their daily lives - I do remember I was told I should be keeping the record of my periods when I started having them - but in general planners and calendars were used to know which day it was, to calculate past and future days, and to know if you had something to do that day or in the future. If you wanted a record of your past days in more detail, you've got yourself a journal or a diary, which was a notebook of some kind, in which you wrote about your day. Or so was the idea, at least where I live.

With the era of the internet, you started to learn about other people, and how they did things, what they've got and how they used things. In the case of planners, one could find out that some people did use their planners as a daily log, where the book contained not only their plans and appointments for the day, but they also noted how many hours they did at work, the meds they took, or even a small summary of their day. I guess people started finding different practices interesting, cool or inspiring, and soon we were flooded with ideas of how to do this and that. I imagine that this may be were the planner world got so inundated with different practices and interesting ideas, that it may have given the impression to some, that you have to do all of them. FOMO became A Thing.

Soon you started seeing videos and posts in different platforms, about being confused about how to use a planner/journal, or feeling like they failed with this or that planner/journal, and going through planners and layouts multiple times a year and yet feeling like they are not reaching "planner peace". Goodness, in the 80's and 90's there was no such thing as planner peace. You had a planner you've got on December of the previous year and you worked with that. Your only concern was whether you remembered to check it often, and whether you didn't forget to pencil in all of your tasks and appointments. Today there is such a thing as "planner peace" and lots of people don't get to it.

Back when I had a planner channel on YouTube, I explained my mother about it, and she looked at me like I had sprung another head.

"What is there to explain people about how to use a planner? You open it, you write your appointments and then you check it."

And yet, today, in the era of more information than what you really need, and yet not enough of what you actually need, these are valid concerns.

For a while now I have been scaling back on Social Media, and now I'm off YouTube as well. Through this process I have realized something: I have no FOMO. I have a particular taste in most things, and I'm a little harder to impress, and yet, when I was deep in social media and YouTube, I did found myself wanting many of the things I saw. many I did not buy because I am not so easily convinced (so I went pondering a purchase of weeks and then suddenly it wasn't even that hot), but others I did got (like the six of so Kat Von D liquid lipsticks). After several years of watching unboxings, I finally took the step to get a subscription box, only to discover after some time, that this is not for me. For a while, I was also tempted by luxury bags, and had been seriously considering a Marc Jacobs The Tote Bag, since that was the one that stood closer to my preferred style.

And then I stepped off Social Media and YouTube. And I no longer feel the pull of subscription boxes and all sorts of specialized, strange stationery items that are all the rage. Last year, I went twice to Choosing Keeping in London, a stationery store where people make a line outside to enter. Like at an exclusive club. I went, I saw... and in two visits I spent a whopping £15. Two rolls of washitape and one bottle of ink. I was already de-FOMO-ed. I was no longer wanting a Marc Jacobs tote bag for €220, and instead sought out a €18 Merci Gustave tote bag I've got at the CDG airport, which has become one of my favorite bags. Well, not to mention that my already copious tote bag collection (39 tote bags) grew with the addition of three unexpected tote bags: one from Stonehenge, one from Waterstones and one from The Daunt Books. Two due to bag emergency and one because it came with the books. No FOMO, just need or gift.

This has got me thinking whether much of the issues many people have with their planners and journals and the expectations they set for themselves are due to the content they consume online. Do they really, really need to fill each page of a planner? Do they really, really need to journal everyday, many times, in many different books? Does every little thing has to make it into the planner and the journal? Do they really, really need to have X amount of "top priorities" each day? Do they really have to have to do lists that include things like waking up and eating breakfast? Do they really need mood tracks and reading journals, and morning pages and gratitude, and meal prep, and the-Gods-know-what other stuff?

What would Your planner and your journal and your daily practice look like if you were not spending a single minute on social media and content platforms like YouTube and TikTok? Would you find planner peace or maybe would be at peace with your planner?

End of the Vacations, Beginning of the New Year

Property of Stormberry

 There's something beautiful about ending the year away from home, taking a bit of distance to see things in perspective, recharge, and then come back with fresh energies. I love being in Europe, but my life has lead me to find my chances to work and earn a living outside my beloved continent. That income is the one that made it possible for me to save up and build my house, to be able to pay my debts, and to visit my darling Europe. I really love this place.

I'm writing this in the last minutes I'll spend at the hotel (less than an hour), and I would love to, at least, start journaling a little bit too, all before I have to go across the street, buy a new Navigo card, a new One Day Paris Visit Pass, because yesterday I lost my card. That really got to my nerves. I know, I know, there are larger problems to have, than having lost a public transport card you just recharged with €45,40 (a two day Paris Visit Pass), and now having to pay €33 or so for the card (€2,00) and the one day pass. Why one day and not just one ticket? Because I like being sure I am covered for the day, even if I only have to go from Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaule. I like to be on the safe side. 

I believe the card must have slipped out of my pocket when I put my phone in the same pocket and then pulled it out. Because the card is really gone.

Not having that card ruined a few things for me yesterday. I had plans and once I found my card missing, not only I didn't feel like doing them, at my age (that would be 50 years-old) walking that much, in winter is not as feasible as it used to be when I was 40. Now I like to wander, yes, but having a public transport card in my pocket that can take me back to the hotel when I'm too tired to make another step.

My plans had included going to Foucher, the chocolate shop, to get some chocolate and candied fruit for my mom, and then find a LEGO store to see if I can get a particular LEGO my brother wanted, but I forgot to buy in Budapest. Or check if it was already available. From the hotel, I decided to walk to the chocolate shop (a 31 minute walk that felt like 45 minutes), since the but I was counting on was not available due to construction work on the street. So, at that moment I may have had the card in my pocket, or maybe had already lost it. I went to the chocolate store, bought the chocolates, and when I was out and started looking for my Navigo card to have it ready for swapping at the Metro gates, I noticed it was nowhere to be found. That's when all got pear shaped. 

My next stop would have been Châtelet-Les Halles, where the commercial center was where the LEGO store was... as well as a FNAC. It was going to be a look-for-LEGOs-check-more-books kind of trip. I had no chance but to walk back.

That walk back felt annoying and long and more tiring. Though I logically knew that I could buy a new Navigo Card, that I could recharge it with a new Paris Visit Pass, even again a 2 day one, and honestly €45,40 isn't that steep of a price I couldn't afford, it felt like a catastrophe and ruined my mood. I went back to the hotel, bought food and holed up in my room, annoyed. It was funny because I was anxious about getting that big LEGO for my brother, and how would I get it through customs at the airport, as it surely has no "cabin luggage" size. Now I was off that task because I wasn't getting the LEGO, and still, I felt upset. I felt upset because of the card, and for disappointing my brother. Not like he can't buy the LEGO by himself, and all he wants is to have it before it arrives to Costa Rica, and not like I have the moral obligation to supply my brother with huge LEGOs every time I travel. Gods, I am not a courier! And still, my mood was ruined.

How many times have something small, logically irrelevant ruined your mood? Maybe more times that you care to remember. Through my conversations with psychologists, I realize I tend to rationalize a lot, and my first instinct usually is to think things through rationally. Well, I'm an economist, I work with numbers. However, there are times when logic doesn't help and may even make things worse, for instance when something small, irrelevant gets the best of you. Why bother so much for something that can be fixed so easily? No, I don't have €45,40 laying around idly, and yes, that is still money, BUT the point is that, if there was a real need, like the train is leaving me and I have to jump on it in that moment, I could have paid it again, and only be mildly annoyed about having lost the first card. So, if it was so "grave" why wasn't I going to the next station, look for a ticket seller and getting one? Because the point wasn't rational, it was emotional. I was upset I would not make my brother happy. I was upset he would be sad because I didn't get him the LEGO he wanted.

I was annoyed for the one logical, rational, material little detail - the Navigo Card and the pass already paid and lost - and getting riled up because it was so small and irrelevant and yet, I was thinking it was making me upset. But I wasn't really upset for the card, but concentrating on the card was easier that facing my feelings: I was upset I was disappointing my brother. Once I was ready and willing to face that, I could start working on feeling better, and I will. I still have to work on stop rationalizing everything, accepting that's how I feel and knowing that the feeling will be over once I see him, he makes a sad face and then we will move on. And the world won't end.

Sometimes it is worth to think a little bit deeper about what annoys us, give ourselves time and be willing to ask ourselves not from the logical, rational perspective, but from the emotional one. We are, after all, also emotional beings. All of us.

Getting Sick on Winter Holidays

 It has been happening for a while now, that I tend to get awfully sick during my winter holidays in the Old Continent. And that's not funny. It's annoying. Getting sick is annoying as it is, but getting sick on the holidays is doubly annoying because I can't get sick days out of it. And it's winter! I love winter. Even if it's not snowing - which I definitively adore - I would love to be out, walking in the chilly air, breathing hin the fresh, sharp scents of the season. And yet I am sick.

Last year, on my trip to Europe in winter, I've got very sick in Brussels, after visiting a friend, with some sort of stomach flu that pretty much floored me for days. It wasn't funny at all to drag my carcass from Brussels center to the airport, up the plane, down the plane and then all the way to my family's home. But I made it. I soldiered through it.

After a long period of not traveling - I was engaged building my house, so time and money went entirely into that noble cause - last year's extended trip was the first in a long time. I did remember, due to the symptoms, that I have had a similar experience in the past, also during a trip to Europe in winter, but then I thought it was due to some odd sort of beverage poisoning. (Now I have a different theory.) But now, as I've got sick once again - probably due to having caught a nasty type of flu on the plane here - I've started thinking about how many times have I had to suspend my plans to go places and meet people because I was nursing some sort of sickness. It didn't happen every time, but I have the feeling that it has happened more often than I care to remember. So, something needs to be done. (As for what, I'm still preparing my plans on that front.)

This year I've been to Europe twice, if we don't count that I started the year here already, and my plan is to continue traveling twice a year here: once in winter, which is my favorite season of the year, and once in spring. I don't travel to Europe in summer, because the heat of the summer is intolerable. In Spring, however, I was totally well. I guess that type of weather is closer to what I'm more used to, so I'm better prepared, but still, I don't want to give up winters. So, what should I start to do different to make sure my stays here are better? The things that are expected are: regular medical check ups, keep my vaccines always updated, always be punctual with my meds, though I actually don't take any regular medication right now.

Other things that come to mind always include improve nutrition with more fresh, natural, home made foods, maybe even include superfoods in my diet, though I'm not very fond of those. More exercise and all that, and all that is good, but... I live most of the year in a tropical country, and I come to spend holidays in the winter of Europe, so I suspect that there is a part of all of this that no amount of great nutrition and exercise is going to help me with. Shall I go with supplements? This things keep me thinking.

Then there is the other part of the question: how much will this cost me.

My whole budget plan for 2026 is already planned out, and tweaking it at this point is already quite complicated. My budget is really tight. There is a fund of health, and though I always make my best to get my health matters covered by the Social Security, I'm not sure how much out of pocket money would a potentially extended plan require. These are things I still have to think about.

Considering Going Back to Blogging

 It's been a while since I wrote last here, or more than a year, to be precise. I stopped for many reasons, none of them a conscious reason to actually stop blogging. 

The Reason

I just simply didn't post. My digital footprint was more in the shape of videos for YouTube, where I went from books to planners, both of them in Spanish. I was into booktube for a while, I was part of it with haphazard videos uploaded with no editing and no visible schedule, but that stopped at some point. From there I later moved into the plannerverse, with my own channel on planners and tips for planning. I added to the small community of planners in Spanish, which is not a group as bing as you can find in English.

That channel went well, though I do tend to keep small numbers in most of the things I do. I didn't break into the +1000 world, and was really amazed when people spoke of "small channels with +10k subscriptors". That was not me. I'm smaller than that, and I like it. My channel had a new video every Sunday, and I had a kind of set program that took most of the anxiety out of posting, and I did learn to edit. My format was simple, the editing was minimal and the content was reliable. All was well. Except that I was spending a lot of time in YouTube, and the algorithm was twisting around me with annoyance. I started hating YouTube, as a user.

The way I was using YouTube was as entertainment, also as a way to find information on things I wanted to learn, but then mostly I used it as background noise. I put some video of people talking in a calm way, or instrumental music. This kept me focused during work or at monotonous tasks. Eventually YouTube started bombarding me with annoying adds, all of which, by the end, where scam adds. It didn't matter how much I denounced them, they kept popping up, and they were notoriously scammy. This got to me so much, that I decided to walk off the platform, as a user. However, I couldn't, in good conscience, step out of YouTube as a user, but keep producing content to keep my viewers tied to the platform, subject to the annoyance I just escaped, so I moved out.

Finding your footing once you leave a platform that has consumed you online is quite hard, and yes, I miss the channels I used to follow, but now I'm finding other content and other content creators. I'm going more into podcasts, and searching more for blogs, though those are less common than years before.

The New Project

After all this, I feel that my content creator days are not over yet, and so I've been giving thought for a new idea: a podcast/blog on personal finance.

I've got into personal finance - the commercially available how-to market - last year, after I finished paying my debt on my credit card. I'm usually very skeptical of self-help anything, but after having gone through the process of becoming debt-free, I decided that I wanted more information and started looking for it. I wanted more tips and ideas to improve my finances and invest. Given my background in all-things-money (economics, finance, accounting), I had tools many people didn't have, which allowed me to discern better when someone isn't giving sound advice. I did find great content creators and quite good books, though I have to admit that many of those books are good, if you know what do apply to you and what doesn't.

I talked a lot about that to some of my friends - many of whom gave me input based on their personal experiences with money - and that's how this idea started to form: how about a podcast, a blog or both, where I can help people understand personal finances better, read a book on personal finances and know if they are being scammed or if there are parts that don't apply to their case, how to deal with their own risk tolerance, and how to actually determine if they should take risks with some parts of their financial lives.

I don't know exactly when or how, but I do plan on reading several popular books on personal finance, give them a review, explain what works and what doesn't, and concentrate on the Costa Rican market, how ever small it may be, so I can actually explain things that can be found in books written for the USA, applied to what's available in Costa Rica for the regular people.

I have other plans for the next year and the next few years, but I think I would love to do this.

A Question of "Girl"

Source: https://www.pexels.com/search/girl/

 Often times in our culture women are referred to as "girls". In documentaries about Playboy, for instances, the ladies who posed for the magazine or worked for the club are called "girls". They are legally adult women, but they are still called "girls". A group of women - almost regardless of their age - are often addressed as "girls", particularly if they are pretty.

In some online communities, also, women belonging to it are called girls, such as "planner girl", "bookish girl" and so on. Female power are also called "girl power", and there are a lot of expressions that describe perceived female capabilities (or lack of them) that make use of the word "girl" even when they are understood as expanded to all cisgender women. Here I think of things like "girl math" or "fighting like a girl". Yes, these are demeaning and stupidifying women (last time I checked maths had no gender and the hability of people to use them does not depend on their gender), but that's not my point right now.

One time I was at an online group chat and a lady made mention of something that "every girl needs". I was the youngest of the group (not of the females, but of the whole group) and I'm 48 years old. I felt odd because I'm not a girl and I haven't been a girl for... 36 years? I've lived more years being a woman than the years I lived being a girl, and all the other people who identify as a female were pretty much in the same situation.

At another time, in a podcast, I heard the two podcasters mention that they prefer to be referred to as girls, because "woman" is such a horrible-sounding word, and "girl" is much more nice. But why is that? What do people think of when they think of "a girl"?

Based on the references from media and social networks, online materials and conversations, girls are both young, female children as well as young women. Girls are pretty, innocent, playful but also sexualized. Women are coarser, antagonistic or broken into submission and possibly sexually savvy or frigid, boring. Girls are desirable, women are not so much. Girls are still youthful why women are not. Girls are fun, women complain.

The way we use language and the way language is being used makes "girl" to be the desirable word to be called, and "woman" becomes a label you do well to avoid. But to be called "girl" you must be a girl, or at least act like one and look like one: happy, pretty, fun... and dumb. Girls are not threatening, girls can be tricked. Girls can be manipulated, gaslit. Women would fight back, hard. The label "girl" takes power away from a female human. It diminishes her and make her complains a joke. And at the same time, it's sold as "girl" being a word of "care and tenderness". You are a girl, so I'll take care of you.

Would it be the same if we started calling men "boys"? What would happen if we made the word "boy" desirable and we would call pretty men "boys" and build up a social image that boys are nice, pretty, fun and innocent, while men are annoying, complaining and old (and thus, ugly)? What would happen if we laughed at a man that gets a calculation wrong and say "oh, it's boy math!".

I find the use of "girl" troublesome for the pushing of women into place where they are expected to be just-pretty-not-smart, and always deferential to others, accepting that they are lesser, always afraid of aging, and aging out of the "girl" label, but also because by mixing adult women into the "girl" name, actual girls become part of the same group and those open to be sexualized. Men stop being called "boy" clearly when their childhood ends, but women flow and remain in girlhood for years on end.

I personally don't like even being referred to as a "woman", and I prefer being seen as a person and referred to as a person, but if the situation or the conversation is so that my gender needs to be mentioned, then I am a woman.

I wonder how other people feel about this.

Budgeting and Achieving the Lifestyle You Want

Source: Forbes

 I was recently talking to a friend of mine (yes, I myself have noticed that most of my posts beings referencing a conversation with someone or something of the sort, but this is how my ideas for this blog happen to be born: through conversations or events in my life), and we were talking about budgeting, keeping to budgets and how people relate to that. My friend if a young lady still, and she's not in a very good financial position inspite of all her efforts and having a very good job. From what I see and what she tells me, she's the one working to keep her family afloat, as neither of her parents have a stable income, or a good enough one, and her one sibling is not working.

I insist: she's quite young, she's barely in her middle twenties (I met her some years back through a book club I used to be part of).

I believe her parents don't have higher education, and both struggle with some mild forms of handicap, which might limit their chances to access higher paying jobs. One of them also prefers to be an enterpreneur in an industry that's either seasonal or don't get much of a demand nowadays, and the other is currently unemployed as they were laidoff by the company in a "sizing down" strategy. Inspite of that, the family has a tendency of living day-to-day and are fond of hosting get togethers, parties or to throw special celebrations of holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, that all in all consume a lot of resources. She is, at a certain point, aware that her family's relationship to money may not be the best, and she tries to manage her own expenses and income in a better way, but time and again she ends up going into these big spending events, and then budgets and resources to loans in order to "break even". And this is what got me thinking.

My friend suffers a lot of stress and has health issues stemming from many sources in her life, and I can't help to wonder if part of it also comes from the weight placed on her young shoulders. She does have dreams that would populate a Pinterest-worthy moodboard, with achieving independence by her 30th birthday, living by her own, in another country and so on. But are these only dreams meant to stay in the moodboard of the year, or are these achievable dreams? And if so, how could she achieve them?

The capability to achieve our dreams depend on a lot of factors, and sadly not everybody can achieve them all, and in some cases people are not willing to take the steps needed to get on the road to achieve some of their dreams, for various reasons that make sense in their own realities. Setting aside the fact that nobody shall judge what others do with their lives just from what they see from the outside, these would be some considerations one could make when setting goals that one really wants to achieve:

1. Be aware of your resources and your commitments

It's nice to dream with being a millionaire or a princess or a super successful business owner, but where do we really stand? This doesn't mean that you can't dream with being rich if you are poor, but that you need to be realistic and consider what do you have at your disposal to achieve that goal. Sometimes dreams stay just as dreams because we think that just by dreaming things and manifesting them, they will magically come true. And be aware that I am a witch and I believe in magick.

Some dreams will take more time, more effort, and there is a chance that some dreams will depend on other people, and those we can't control.

Then, the other part of the equation is about what claims are on our resources. If you have debts, dependant family members, commitments that occupy your time, energy and resouces and leave you little space to maneuver or none at all. Sometimes it's not even something you could leave behind (in a sudden, self-centered, unemotional scenario), but it's something that goes along with you, like a condition or a sickness that requires treatment, or that keeps you from getting other sources of income to improve your situation.

This doesn't mean that, if any of these factors are present, you should give up your dreams, but rather that you must factor them to make better decisions.

2. Consider what you can actually achieve and how much time you would need for it

Once you have a clear picture of what your resources are and what are the claims on those resources, you can start moving around the pieces and deciding what would you need to achieve your dreams. The first step is a kind of reality check where we can actually see what do we have to work with to get what we want.

In the case of my friend, she tells me she wants to move out of her parents' home by the time she's 30. In order to do that, she should be considering things like where she wants to live, whether she wants a house of her own or to rent a place, where and how much could she spend on that, how much would she need for appliances, furniture and how much the utilities could dent her resources, but then also, she needs to consider if she would be still supporting her parents and her sibling, or if she's comfortable letting them go and allowing them to live within their means. In a cold fashion, many readers could think that yes, she should let her parents fend for themselves and maybe learn the hard way that they can't spend more than what they make, but if we are honest, that's not how families (or many families) work, and so, in the end, my friend could be struggling with supporting two households on one salary.

This should give her pause and make her consider what can she achieve, and which pieces can she move (say, talk to her parents that she does intend to move out, that she won't be able to help them anymore, so maybe they should start working on their spending priorities), which depend on her, which depend on others, over which she has control to change and which are out of her reach.

These calculations could help her design a timeline for her dreams. For example, let's say that she does talk to ger parents and her sibling and they agree not to burden her income up to an x%. She also realizes that she could do better if she has a degree in something marketable, or a particular certification, or maybe she would have a better chance abroad with companies that pay better her skills. If she decides to take that road, she would have to commit to getting that degree, enrolling into the academy to get that certification or start to apply to a work visa as well as to positions in companies in the country or countries she had found would pay her better.

3. Make a Plan

Finally, when the resources, the commitments and the possible requirements to get to our dreams are identified, and we can see what are our possibilities, we can start making plans. These plans include not only budgets, but also schedules and task lists of what we need to achieve our dreams. This is the point where we map out our road towards our dreams.

Now, plans can be the point where all comes crumbling down, if we make unrealistical plans. For this, not only do we need to have discipline, but we need to know ourselves and know not only how much leeway do we need, but also what do we need to stay motivated. Let's not make plans that assume we can save up the 99% of our income, that we will live from eating the grass of the park and will never get sick or have an emergency. Let's not pretend either that we can live a life that  consists constantly of days of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of study, 4 hours of side hussles and 4 hours of sleep.

To make a realistic plan you need to understand yourself. Watch yourself, check how much energy you have what can you realistically achieve in a week, how much you spend and how that changes for a period of time. Study yourself as you would study a research subject. Once you know yourself, your habits, your needs and your patterns, make pilot tests: try out different habits, the ones you have devised to achieve your goals, and see how you feel about them, how realistic, achievable they are. Don't worry, there's no failure there, this is just a test. Try it out six weeks, evaluate the results and tweek it, when you need to.

Maybe savings is easier to try out, but studying isn't. Well, check out some of the classes you intend to take, and do a mock-try. Go to the campus, stay there reading, maybe you can get into the class just to listen to it (ask the instructor for permission first!), and calculate the commuting time, and how tired you are after. To test out online classes, try watching videos on the subject of your interest, on the same lenght of the class, at the same time, and see how you feel. There are ways to run tests before you commit, all you need is a dab of creativity.

When you find a test-plan that works for you, recalculate your steps, how much resources you would need to invest, how much time it would take you, how you can take advantage of that time, and set it in motion.

To give you an idea, I recently decided that it might be time for me to move to another company to work. I do have a good income, but I feel that I could do more and that I could also be better paid for what I can do. Now, I still have some debts which I would like to pay off before I move to another job (as there is the chance that the entry level job of the next place I go to won't pay me as much as my current job initially). I made the calculations, and I came to the conclusion that, with a budget plan I have devised and I have already tried out, I could be debt free in two years. This means that I'll stay in the company at least two years (more if things change and a better position in here opens up). I won't use up that time just working and paying up my debts, but rather I decided to use those two years I have given myself to improve my CV. I'm checking jobs I would be interested in and looking at the skills they require. I write those down and I have started looking up free tutorials online to acquire those skills. Yes, I could go with paid courses, but why spend money on courses for things I could get for free to get the basics and then spend the money on more advanced classes? At least, that's my logic: now I place my priority on cancelling my debts, staying on top of my budget to be able to affort all my acquired commitments and then getting all the priming, basic knowledge I can on the things I want to add to my CV.

In two years, when I'm debt free and with a fuller, better equipped CV, I'll start the job searching process, hopefully allowing me to get to a position that would be higher and better paid than the one I could get right now. It could take me time, because I would get older and I'm already of an age that's not so desirable for many companies, or at least for certain positions, but I would be still, in a better position in two years, if I stick to my plan.

It could still end up in nothing, my plan could fail and I could remain where I am, with the same position, but this plan won't ruin me, won't require me to take risks I could otherwise avoid, and yet still it has a better chance to get me to where I want to go than if I sat on my butt mopping and dreaming of one day being in a better place.

End of Holidays

Source of the picture: Bionic

Today is the last day of my mandatory holidays, making tomorrow the first day of work of the year. Normally one does not look forward for the workdays, but I'm particularly bitter about tomorrow. I am angry. Tomorrow I'll probably have a chat with my boss because I'm not satisfied with the fact that I am being paid less than what most of my coworkers are being paid for the exact same job, specially after we went through a whole process aimed - allegedly - to order all job profiles, regardless of time at the company or degree (and I have more years than some of those who have the higher paychecks, and comparable degrees, not to mention the exact same career), and yet I'm being paid significantly less than them.

Well, the issue is not only for me, but also for another coworker... an Afro-descendent man, with equal degrees and more years than any of those paid more than us. And the exact same job description. I still remember the first time I mentioned the discrepancy, and I was asked in return "well, what were you expecting?". I just stared, trying to comprehend that someone was actually asking me that.

From a team of eight, I believe, this coworker and I were the ones paid less. Allegedly there was a "delay" or a "lapse" of sorts due to the previous ways of promoting people (people were promoted basically if they went to the boss and pleaded their cases, asking for a raise. It was dependant on how well you came along with your boss, and your lack of decency in asking for something regardless if your job merited it or not). The new ordering of job profiles was meant to put people in the cathegory they had to be in according to the tasks they actually did. It was through this process that my coworker and I realized that we all did the exact same job... sort of. Him and I did the job noted in the profile, the others may or may not, as I knew there were things I did that they didn't (but either way, you "only" need to surely complete at least 80% of all tasks), and we were assured that we would get a raise, we would all get the same wage. And we didn't.

I mean, sure, him and I got a "raise" of +$34 per month, but the difference between our wages and that of our better paid colleagues is $1000 per month. Him and I are $966 per month cheaper for the company than our other coworkers, and we do the exact same job. The excuse for this? So far I've heard "that's up to HR" and "well, your wages were already so low...".

After many years of this, honestly, I just got to the end of my patience. I am worthy, my capabilities and my skills are valuable. Not for my current company for sure, but they are valuable. And so I hatched a plan: I'll look for a better job.

The Plan

Now, my plan is simple but it will take time. There is a number of things I need to complete before I start doing my move:

1. I need to finish my MSc, so I can add that to my updated resume. Though my current "Lic" title is equal to an MSc, I prefer the MSc because it will have the emphasis in Innovation, and that could open better doors for me. ^-^
2. I'll work on my Excel skills. I'm checking up and taking notes on free, online tutorials aimed to improve and enrich my Excel skills, so I'll be better at using it. I've no experience with pivot tables or macros, and I want to add that to my skill "stock". If asked in an interview, I want to confidently be able to answer "you've got to be kidding me, of course I do know how to do that".
3. I want to learn Python, as well as get back on R and learn to use it fully.
4. I want to start reading a bit more financial papers and get better acquainted with the banking world, as that's one place where I want to go looking for a new position.
5. I want to cancel my loan with the workers' fund of the company, so I can retrieve the totality of my savings there, without anything being deducted from it.
6. I'll have to carefully plan and retrieve my savings, so the liquidation of my funds there won't be held up can caught up in the incompetence of HR when my resignation letter and job liquidation proceedings start.

I know, sounds like a lot and it is a lot. The cancelling of the loan can't be done just yet, as I have a previous project in plan, aimed to cancel my credit card debt. However, if all goes as planned, next year I'll be able to start working on cancelling my loan, and that might take me a tad over a year. That means that I'll probably have about a little over two years still in this company. Too much? Well, no. Aside from the insult of the wage, the job isn't all that horrendous, and we are (still) working from home. However, I will have 2+ years to work on the first four items of my list, and that's not only plenty of time to achieve those goals, but also to become really good and maybe even pick up extra skills.

It was quite sad to me to realize after over 20 years at the company, that this relationship is a toxic one. I relied on my work being noticed for its quality, and thus being recognized the way jobs recognize good work: with a raise. However, aside from one occasion - and even then the raise was less than deserved - all I have gotten fof my effort has been sporadic praise. But "praise" don't pay bills. "Praise" don't pay for school or travels. I'm done with praise. I can praise myself and know that the praise I give to myself is honest. From my job I want money because I no longer trust their words, and above all, I don't trust their praise.

Last Post of 2023

Property of Stormberry

 I'm finishing this year with:

1. A lot of plans for the next year,
2. Resolve to endure to get much closer to my goals throughout 2024,
3. COVID-19 for the first time in my life.

Yep, that last one is quite a thing. For me. I came down with what I thought was "flu" on Christmas day, but it wasn't until two days later, upon the insistence of my mother (she suspected it could be COVID), that I took the test (there was one kit at home) that I realized I, indeed, had COVID. Oh goodie. I managed to avoid it for three years, but in the end I became a member of the club.

I guess I have this new Eris variant, but if you ask me, it feels exactly the way flu feels like. The first two days were horrid, and now I'm stuck with the Runny-Nose-From-Hell. I'm pretty sure I've blown my weight in snot out of my nose by now. Isn't that lovely?

The advance on the thesis front is really slow, as the current task isn't very inspiring and quite time consuming. But it is, nontheless, moving forward. I just really hope I can finish it this year, as I'm aiming for that in one of my New Year Resolutions. I just want to be over with it, so I can start working on getting a PhD.

Both the MSc as the PhD are a matter of personal goals, and not a professional goal, as my current job hardly even recognized the actual work I do, much less my preparation I have for it, so the extra degrees are simply a way for me to accumulate and explore new knowledge. What can I say? Some people colect stuff, others like travel, others rather party or date or have sex, and I like knowledge. Now, this doesn't mean that I only read serious, scientific or philosophical things, as nothing could be farther from reality. I like stories, and my favoured type of readings are novels. I guess I like knowledge because I like the stories that come within the knowledge I seek: economics (my favored area) are full of stories.

I can't blame COVID for the slowing of the progress of my thesis, but I do intend to use the days of vacation (of which half is already gone) to work on it, and present my tutor with something of an advanced improvement by the begining of next year. I really need to get going, get all this small details hammered out so I can go on with the story behind my research: innovation policy's effect on labor.

By the end of this year I've made a couple of big decisions looking forward to 2024. I paid in advance the whole year at a gym, and so I intend so go, at least twice a week, to get in better shape. With that in mind I also ordered a new fitbit to keep myself motivated to exercise. My weight has been going up and I moved into the overweight zone, so I have to start making changes to get back to the normal weight, not only because that's healthier, but also because I want to fit back in my clothes again. It would be just too expensive to change my whole closet. And I like a lot of my clothes, so why change them?

Every year I also tend to make big budget plans to rid myself of debt - inspired mostly by the incredible success I had in 2011 when I whipped out  a staggering debt by the sheer power of my determination - and this year I have made that same decision with a small added trick: a more detailed plan and an actual commitment to get it done. I have two debts: the credit card and the loan from the FGA. The FGA loan works down in a constant fashion, but the credit card debt fluctuates as here and there I find myself in need of using the card. After much thinking I realized that the trigger for my card is always the same: vet expenses.

I've changed vets last year, as our old vet has become hideous with cats. The new vet is a place that actually specializes in cats, but I have been noticing that - under the guise of worry and care - they have been pumping out loads of money from me (my card, to be precise) for a lot of check ups and test my babies probably don't need. One of my cats -Woody - has costed me a fortune with citologies and a biopsy of an unhealing nose problem. It turns out that he has feline AIDS and on top of that a very serious skin cancer. The outlook for him is bleak and his chances to get cured are minimal, yet the vet was pushing for an appointoment with an oncologist and maybe start a chemotherapy treatment. That's where I hit the breaks. Goodness, no. I won't run myself into debt to torture my cat and make his last days a living hell.

I've decided to limit the vet visits to vaccines and that will be that. And to kill my credit card. So I sat down, mapped up all my forseeable expenses and laid out a detailed fortnight by forthnight plan. It came out quite a strick one, with nearly no wiggle room, but certainly one that needs to be implemented.

Something we sometimes forget to see is our own reality. By turning a blind eye, by not making a plan, not looking at our balance, we try to pretend that things are much better, much easier, or running much better than they are. I did not delude myself, these are my expenses, these are the things I spend on, and my only "wiggle room" are my groceries, where sometimes I run amok packing up the cart with things I end up throwing out as they rot on my shelves or my fridge (my waste basket eats more veggies than I do).

2024 is a year for me to take a hard look at things, work for my goals, carve a path for the future I want from here on and get on with the program. It's not going to be easy, I know that, but it's nothing I can't deal with. I have proven myself time and again that I can adapt and I can flourish in any situation. I am resilient, creative and I can stick to my own plans with astonishing stubbornness, as my recent Mock Lottery Project showed me this year. If I want it, I can make it happen, and I will make it happen.

2024 will be the year I'll step on the gas on to reach my goal to become the Aunt March of my story.

The Invaluable Wall Calendar

 

Property of Stormberry.
Calendar: Llewellyn's Witch Calendar, 2023
Spanish edition

Today I looked at my wall calendar, as I do often when I walk by it, and I noticed that some chips I have in the pantry will expire in three weeks. At that moment I thought I should be finding a way to consume them all because I still have a whole bunch of them (that's why these wholesale-like places like PriceSmart make no sense to small families or people who live alone). My mind went rolling on and I thought about getting a kitchen wall calendar to note there the expiration date of all the things I buy, so I can plan their use or consumption to make the most of them.

I imagined a conversation with someone, and how someone would argue in favor of a digital option, and I realized that the digital option may not be up to task for this particular thing. Or maybe won't work for everybody.

I do use daily my digital calendars and mostly my phone alarms, to program my meals, my pills and my wake up alarms. However, even with their extensive use, I know how easily you can ignore the alarm, snooze it or down right turn it off because you are otherwise occupied. Then, the alarm is gone and you may forget about it completely. Unless you have the habit of checking your calendar daily. unpropted, you may not be aware of things that may happen in the near future you should prepare for, such as expiring goods and services.

You may argue that an agenda or a calendar may not work because you are not in the habit of checking the agenda or calendar, and here I disagree. The trick with the agenda and the calendar is to have it always out, always visible. It might be hard to do with an agenda, but with a calendar - specially a wall calendar - the principle of marketing applies: if there is a picture, people will look at it. Just a glance, a passing glance and you might, within seconds, be reminded of subscriptions and bills that are coming due, a meeting or a get together, a doctor's appointment and so on. You may check your phone every five minutes, but how often do you check your digital calendar? Yes, alarms might help, but it's not much help if you have to prepare for an event and some of the things you need take time.

Penciling in a trip in a wall calendar may remind you to check for luggage, to pack, to make sure your passport hasn't expired, that you have your travel insurance, and so on. And it might be much easier that in your phone.

Think about it.

General Thoughts

Property of Stormberry

 Today I felt like writing here a little. I scrolled around the photos in my phone and I realized I probably don't have that many photos as a lot of people do. I mean, I do have a lot of picture - which I would like to tackle to reduce and "clean up" -  but not nearly enough to be able to retrace through them what had happened in a given day, if I don't write an entry in my journal (and I don't write everyday in my journal), or if I don't have anything noted for that day in my planner (which also does happen). Before I even opened the tab to write, I had some ideas of things I would have liked to develop in a post - as I usually do - but by the time I've got here, I forgot what I had thought to write about - as it so often happens.

However, this matter about the pictures stuck in my mind.

The idea came from a video I was watching, from this guy called Job, who journals beautifully, and who mentioned he, sometimes, "backlogs" entries. This means that he completes notes or entries from days past in his journal. I have seen videos of people doing this with their planners, where they not only write down things ahead of time, but also fill in the planner with things that had happened. The point of this is to give the planner a double use: as a future tool, to plan out our time ahead of time, but also to serve as a memory keeper or a record of how have we spent our time. This is quite useful in order to be able to reference things that had happened, without having to rely solely on our memory's strenght. 

I have done some "backlogging" here and there, both in my planner and in my journal, but it's not a regular practice of mine, and I only do it if it's something I definitively don't want to forget. In previous journals I have had even spent months recounting in detail a meeting or an event, and in some planners I have added annotations of meetings to which I had been called at the very moment, when I feel I need to write them down to have a better recollection later on, if I need it.

Now, this youtuber was mentioning the backlogging as a process he does in his journal sometimes, and here he mentioned that, when time has past and he forgot much of what had happened, he goes to his phone and checks the pictures he took that day to jog his memory. That's what got me thinking.

I remember the days when photos were made with a camera, using a film that usually gave you 12, 24 or 36 pictures. You had to use them wisely, and usually a roll lasted you a while before you carefully removed it from the camera and took it to a photo store where the film was developped. Pictures were like babies before ultrasound: you never knew what you would get. Pictures were precious and few. We kept them in photo albums. Years could go by without your pciture being taken. If you were a child, well, probably you could get your picture taken every year, on your birthday, and maybe on Christmas. Yes, some people could afford to take more pictures, but not everybody. You could certainly not backlog the events of any day based on pictures.

Now pictures are different. They are free and anyone can take as many as they want. They don't need photo albums or old shoe boxes to store them, but they stay in the same device that took the photo in the first place, and from there they can be sent and stored anywhere, and can even be printed, if one wishes so. Now you can chase the perfect picture by taking a thousand pictures of the same thing, then eventually going through every single iteration of the picture to use the one that looks better. The photo albums of a phone can look almost like a movie film, where rows and rows of pictures seem to look exactly the same, with only slight variations between one frame and the next.

It seems to me that pictures start to lose their value for us. The photo album can become a dumpster, or just a monotonous collection of photos taken, giving each moment the same value. How many times in a month do we scroll over all of our pictures, the way back in the day we would take out the family photo album and look at all the pictures, ask and comment the photos, ask about those old pictures of people we don't recognize of didn't get to see alive?

Checking in

 

Property of Stormberry

Sometimes one has ideas for a blogpost, but not the time or the energy, and other times you have the time, the desire... but just don't want to write about the topics you have already penciled up in a notebook or a notes app. One such a topic is "Opinions". How can you define an opinion and how to differentiate it from other forms of believes and communications, is something that has been consuming my thoughs. In a world so full of gaslighting, as we have today, where the truth is no longer true, and the biggest defendants of the "truth" are the ones that distort it and abuse lies the most. However, that's a topic for (maybe) some other time.

One other topic I've been thinking about is how people's communication skills seem to be shrinking. Maybe it's not everywhere, but where I live, the amount of people who can't stitch together the words for a decent sentence is mindboggling. Does it happen everywhere else? People speak Spanish where I live, and in written Spanish some punctuation symbols have an opening and a closing symbol. This way, you don't write "hey!", but you write "¡hey!". And it's similar with questions. You don't write "huh?", you write "¿huh?". I know it looks funny, but it's pretty basic. Or so you would think.

In "message writing", oftentimes people use only the closing sign, under the understanding that it's not to right way to write things. However, in the last couple of years I have found people closing exclamation or question phrases with the oppening symbol (what do you mean¿), which is disturbing, as these people consistently use the opening symbol at the end of the phrase as some sort of twisted trend. Then, there is the people who don't use any punctuation symbols at all. In a work setting this can be particularly problematic, as sometimes there's no way to differentiate between a question and a statement. And this grinds my nerves. And this doesn't come from young people, or people with lower level education, but often this sort of faux pas comes from managers or directors who are supposed to read many more memos and official communications than other people.

I don't really buy the excuse that "these people are too busy to type down a punctuation sign", because if they have the time to type down all the other signs, why would't they just press the question or the exclamation mark? If they are so busy, wouldn't it be better to get understood from the get go? Sloppily formulated questions also add to the issue.

"The invoice is in accounting".

Shall we understand that as a statement, that the invoice IS in accounting, or as a question? In the Spanish vernacular, the structure of the sentence allows for a question and a statement to be built up exactly the same way, being only the intonation the difference between one and the other. In a text, without an elusive punctuation sign, how is one to guess the correct intent?

What's happening is more than laziness, it's a trend toward the eroding of the written communications. People don't read, and much less write. Messages are mainly sent in audio format and received as audios. The reading exercise is reduced under the extent of a "tweet" of old, but probably no more than what you can fit in a traffic sign desiged for a highway. People don't read nor they care to read. People don't write either. And so, those who don't care allow their skills to fade, and even celebrate the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a way to pass onto someone or something else the pesky task of taking the care to properly communicate. AI reads up for them, takes dictate and slowly but surely, writes the entire communication up. No, I don't envision a machine uprising, but I see a generation of humans degrading, giving up their intelligence, becoming little more than ruminating herds who lose even the hability to check if what the machine did is correct.

Human ennui, human disinterest, and the penchant for posturing as well as the penchant to leave every pesky task to anyone/anything else will lead loads of them to self fabricated problems due to miscommunication.

Language is a delicate thing, and there is people abusing it. Knowledge is the most valuable treasure, and yet many allow their fistful of knowledge to get poisoned, rot, fester and eventually fade out of their skulls, the same way a negligent person would leave an open carton of milk out on the kitchen counter (assuming this very person has no idea how to make cottage cheese out of it).

I'm disheartemed at how stupid people is allowing themselves to become. Because nowadays people can't care less about being intelligent, they only want to look like they are.