Promised prosperity

A friend of mine has a blog where he writes about Love, Life and APBA Baseball. The other day he posted some thoughts on online love, or rather: how people’s potential search for love can be set to a test:

Love, Life and APBA Baseball

Love In the Spam File

http://lovelifeapba.blogspot.no/2013/10/love-in-spam-file.html?spref=fb

Not long after I read this text, a letter dropped in my inbox on Facebook:

“Hello

I don't have another way to communicate with you by sending you this mail. I am in despair and my heart bleeds at the time or I make you this message which I hope will hold your attention.

I am contacting you today as true that we do not know this prevents this gesture on my part. Among many of profiles transected, you are the only person that I trust and I made my choice. I am madame Elisabeth FAVEUR aged 68 years, widow residing in London for health reasons. I take this opportunity to make you a very important proposal and confidential. I speak to you as that widow married fire Mr.D. F., a telecommunications engineer who unfortunately is
He died in a plane crash. For some time, I feel more good.

Since the death of my husband, I was overtaken by events, to the point that I can't get out me. Now, I sick and hospitalized. The reason that drives me to you is this: I would like to go through your channel to do charity.

It is a gift somehow and it amounts to the sum of EUR 20 million deposited by my late husband at a bank in West Africa more precisely in Togo. My marital status is that currently I am widow and still fewer children to whom I
could this legacy, and I am currently a throat tumor suffering I am therefore condemned to death according the nurse. That is why, soon would I and graceful manner in order to help the needy children give you this said inheritance that you use 70% of the sum to achieve this work of charity and the rest for you.

I beg you to give an ear to my proposal because I count on your good will and also the proper use of these funds for this work.

You can answer me directly via my private email (mme.exxxxxxxxfxxxxx@gmail.com) the most consulted for more of details or contacted me by phone at the hospital or am I currently hospitalized:

Waiting for your quick and prompt response for more for details.

Best regards

Mrs. E. F

In hidden text the contact information was added:

+44 7x xx xx xx 36

E-mail: mme.exxxxxxxxfxxxxx@gmail.com
Tel: +44 7x xx xx xx 36
London (United Kingdom)”

According to one of her many facebook accounts, all with the same picture of her, she went to London School of Business and Finance (LSBF). Which is, indeed, a very fine school. Or so I have heard.

There must be a lot of extremely skilled students there, financial experts too, who would love to take on the huge responsibility it is to use 70% of EUR 20 million on the work of charity and get EUR 6 million in pay for the effort. After all, all she wants is for the money to be used in the name of good, right?

I have never met this lady, I doubt she knows anything about me… well not much anyway. But she (if this is indeed a woman, that is) has been on Facebook screening profiles and found I am trustworthy enough to administer EUR 20 million. I bet she thinks I have the skills to do so, based on my blond hair.

The nurse told her she is dying, she is on her deathbed, desperate to do some good with the money. Who am I to deny her the peace of mind knowing the fund would be taken good care of would give her?

She even gave me her contact information, so I can get in touch and find out what to do to get my hands on the money, which is deposited in a bank in Togo by her late husband, who was a telecommunications engineer.

I never knew telecommunications engineers made that kind of money. Can’t help but thinking I have chosen the wrong line of career.

Encouraged by the sum of money in store for me I tried to call the number several times, but got no answer. Considering my eagerness to lead an easy life in prosperity, and the good prospects of becoming a full time philanthropist, with only good intentions in mind, I think I will call again. After all: who knows what kind of conmen would otherwise get their hands on the money?

neat-handed Knowledge

The greatness of the world we live in sometimes strikes me as incredibly amazing. The other day, as I was teaching about myths, I started to think about how God created the world: “God created the world in 6 Days and on the 7th Day he rested. On the first day God created the Sun in order to give light and warmth to the Earth. On the second, third, fourth and fifth day he created the universe. On the sixth day, He created man and the entire creation was completed”.

There is something mind-blowing about the Bible, when they more than 3000 years ago knew we have an atmosphere… just saying. Regardless of personal belief, I think that what was written down such a long time ago has something “new” about it. The ten commandments are so up to date, It is strange they were not a result of a meta study, to find out through surveys and research what to do to keep peace among people and in inter-human relationships.

Just like… The Bible is the only religious guideline to how to lead a good life which illustrates the importance, and consequences, of communication, or lack thereof. I use that story in class, not to preach or anything, but as an example to how good communication makes people able to cooperate and understand each other, and what happens if we don’t. And those guys back then, who wrote the story, had an understanding of that we most often tend to forget.

Anyway… old knowledge is only old because people knew it a long time ago. It is still valid, so it should be considered forever currant knowledge.

That being said: I have this bad habit of thinking about things which are too big for me to fathom. I like to twist and turn questions around and make up my mind on issues I know has already been answered, but which I can find proof of in old sources. The older the better. It is kind of satisfying to “proof-read” and think it through from different angles and see if it is really so.

Ok, a bit of deep thinking here tonight, I am under the influence of a book I am reading by Martin Buber. I find one “goldmine” after another of good things for me to think about. Many of them I forget about, even though I know them to be truths from way back, and it is good to be reminded:

“Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique....If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born." --Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78”

Martin Buber

Pretty neat, huh?

Having a week off?

Tonight I am rather upset about last week. It was initially a good week: a week off work. But having a week off, when most other people are at work has side effects.

Last week was for me a week off because we had Autumn Break. Back in the days, when I grew up, we used to call it “potato break” because it is about this time of year, the first week of October, it is time to harvest the potato fields.

Nowadays this week off is about travelling somewhere, for those who have saved a week’s vacation, or to worry about where the kids should spend the day, now that school is off and parents have to work. So, I have had a week off work, and I can’t wait to get back in action.

I had such great plans for this week. I had a long list written down:

·         Dig up and sort out the last flowerbed

·         One long walk, or mountainhike, every day

·         Clean the windows

·         Clean furniture

·         Clear out and sort the wardrobe

·         Review papers: getting ahead

·         Improve and edit tasks and exercises

·         Cook proper dinner every day

·         Write (for my own pleasure)

·         Clear out old toys

·         …. And then some

The list of things I would have loved to do, mostly because they are things you need to do to have a fairly organized home, was extensive.

Did I get any of it done? Nah, not really.

I did get the last flowerbed sorted out. Maybe I should explain why this is something I had to do: Thing is, through the last few years I have bought hundreds of flowerbulbs I never saw any sign of, after I had planted them. I couldn’t understand why, until I dug up a flowerbed to plant a plumtree. Deep down I found a lot of bulbs, which have slowly sunk into the ground. I wondered why, but a kind soul told me that soil is washed downwards into the ground, due to the land my house is built on is blasted rock.

So, what I had to do is to dig up my flowerbeds, put flowerbed fabric, and then add soil, before I plant the flowers and trees again, and new flowerbulbs (and the old ones I found). Very tedious, but I expect my garden will look stunning next spring.

Anyway, since school was out and my kids were at home I got a lot of help. Trust me: getting help doesn’t mean work is done fast. It took me several days to do something which would have taken me a few hours to do by myself.

In addition: many schoolchildren don’t go to before- and after-school care (my youngest do, but he wanted to stay at home because he knew I would be at home doing something he wanted to participate in…sigh. I can’t very well kill the initiative, can I?). The kids in the neighborhood knew I was at home, and my kids were at home, and they didn’t want to be alone at home while their own parents were at work (do you see where this is going?) so to make a long story short: I ended up having a house full of kids all week.

My kids had a lot more friends this week, than they usually have. They have a lot of friends (I feel blessed), but not the come-around-to-the-house-all-of-the-time kind of friends. The friends they have who come around are not plentiful. Just enough, and they are not moving in, so to speak.

One thing is to have playmates coming over. It is a totally different story when they show up before breakfast.

I can’t help but to be astonished by how messy some kids are when they eat. My dog had a feast which lasted for a week! And it took me quite some time to get the kitchen back in shape after each meal. Yes, we are talking breakfast, lunch and what we call dinner (we have supper in the evening). I could have chosen not to set the table and invite them all, but in my house there is no tradition for doing that. Children need to have meals, at least that is my rule and philosophy.

A lot of my time was spent on all this. One thing is to serve my own kids, to serve a house full of kids is a totally different story.

I can tell my own kids to go get a glass of milk themselves, I can’t very well say that to strange kids. One thing is to know their way around my kitchen, another thing is to have kids rummage through my cupboards.

The hikes I was planning on, came to nothing. I could have told everyone to join me, but they didn’t have shoes or clothes fit for a hike. I didn’t want to leave the house either, so the plan failed.

When you try to do something, and are constantly interrupted, continuity is broken and things just don’t get done. Not in the speed you predicted, anyway.

Maybe I am just frustrated. Mostly because I see that keeping up the house and the garden really doesn’t get up to standards. I wish for so much more than what I have time to perform. Having a week off makes me predict a week of getting up-to-date. When it doesn’t happen, I just get disappointed in myself.

Thing is; this is nothing new. I should have learned what staying at home will be like, by now. What I really should have done was to plan on spending quality time with my kids.

A Teacher's Doodling

I always bring a writing pad with me when I go to meetings. Chances are there could be something important, I need to remember, said. I don’t bring my Ipad, as I haven’t got one, and I don’t bring my tablet (I have a gorgeous Android tablet). Many do.

I, on the other hand, know myself well enough to know I most likely will fall into the trap of “entertainment not on the agenda”, which is common to do.

I would play Sudoku, check on my Facebook for new updates, write on my blog, check headlines on various newspapers… I see many play Candy Crush and Farmville… even a game I never understood, but apparently; if you tap the screen 1000 000 times the egg will crack… and something will pop up.

Anyway, I got my writing pad and a pen. Very old fashion, but I imagine it keeps me attentive to a much larger extent than if I had some digital tool… or toy if you will.

But, and I am honest enough to admit this, so I should not be judged too harshly: I doodle.

My mother is a skilled talker on the phone. She can talk on the phone for quite some time. She doodles too. Her address book looks like something out of this world because when she is out of free space, she writes on top of what she wrote before. The pages are gradually turned blue and black, little by little, through the course of each conversation. She doesn’t make drawings or patterns; she writes words which catch her attention. Over and over again, until another word stands out. Quite fascinating, as you can follow the contents of her conversations by reading her doodling… if you can single out the words, that is.

There is something rude about withdrawing into a bubble, excluding yourself from what’s going on and embrace your own world. I think I pay attention, but sometimes the person next to me plucks the pen out of my hand to add something he or she thinks is funny or something I have missed or left out. For a split second I realize I to some extent entertain those surrounding me, as well as myself.

I searched on Wikipedia for doodling. It says that:

“A doodle is an unfocused or unconscious drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be abstract shapes.

Stereotypical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone conversations if a pen and paper are available.

Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes and patterns, textures, banners with legends, and animations made by drawing a scene sequence in various pages of a book or notebook. Many geometric doodles are really subdivision rules, where you repeat the same pattern over and over in a nested way.”

Seems to me my mother and I are classical examples of doodlers.

I am kind of relieved reading this, as I notice (and get confirmation) that I still pay attention, as doodling doesn’t steal my attention. It is rather harmless, as opposed to focusing on a game or a social media. So I stick with my old fashion writing pad.

I found one of my old writing pads the other day. On top of each page there are optimistic headlines in bold size and font, telling what the meeting is about,  but then the rest of the page shows how fidgety my hands really are, and how busy my mind actually is.

There are symbols, like a heart, with additional supplemental features: legs, winking eyes, mouth, busy hair, a hat, a big smile… I have drawn caricatures of animals from behind. Entangled flower vines… quite pretty, but totally senseless and absurd. Yet kind of cheerful.

I don’t have any clue where I get it from; I don’t even really know how to draw. Being a teacher I am fully aware that most of us are kind of fully trained pastime psychologists. Well, no one can find out anything about me by trying to do some kind of  interpretation of my doodles. They are, indeed, like Wikipedia says: unfocused and unconscious. It slightly worries me that it takes place when students are daydreaming or losing interest during class, but only slightly.

Since I have this interest in words, I thought I would see what Wikipedia says about daydreaming. There is something romantic about daydreaming, like the beautiful girl; resting her chin in her hand and gazes into nothing. Well, the explaination is not quite that romantic:

“Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one's immediate surroundings, during which a person's contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.

…the characteristic that is common to all forms of daydreaming meets the criteria for mild dissociation.”

Ehm… dissociation? That doesn’t sound very attractive or positive, does it? Again Wikipedia:

"Boredome is whereas anxiety
is a state of uneasiness and apprehension,
boredom is a condition of mental weariness,
listlessness, and discontent. "

“Dissociation is a term in psychology describing a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. It is commonly displayed on a continuum. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality – rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis. In mild cases, dissociation can be regarded as a coping mechanism or defense mechanisms in seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict”.

Further on, as I look up boredom, same source (A tiny bit embarrassing this, as I always tell my students to try other sources than Wikipedia: Find an authentic source, I tell them) with more worrying information:

“Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings.”

Did I just now find out why my students are so eager to engage in social medias during my classes? That WORRIES me A LOT!

Who you are - MUST watch for every woman!

Women's Liberation to a halt?

Being a woman is really hard. In many ways it is harder than it used to be before. I do acknowledge and appreciate all the aids we got nowadays; it’s not as physically demanding to do everyday chores anymore. I am grateful we have running water, laundry machines, electricity and everything else we install in our houses which makes house chores still a little time consuming (and it’s time consuming only because it has to be done, not because it takes a lot of time to actually do them) but not really straining.  We now have a different kind of pressure which to some becomes so overwhelming they run their lives by it: Appearance!

A survey done in Norway reveals that at least 50 000 women suffer from some kind of eating disturbance. 15% of 17-year old girls in our capital are underweight. Half of the girls in high school have tried to lose weight, or are currently on a diet.

Surgeon, or injections, to change looks are more and more common within all groups of society and age. And the guys fall into line in increasing number. So called beauty corrective procedures are spoken about as more normal, and a far more preferred solution, than acceptance of nature’s course and beauty of the human body.

The desire to be both thin yet (to some extent) curvy (not so curvy it is hard to get into fashion brand clothes, though) is greatly encouraged by the many who make money on selling us low self-confidence.

As a result of this, the survey I mentioned also say that the girls feel they have to spend twice as much time on their appearance than they do on homework and reading.

If you don’t live it just trust me: it’s hard and it’s never good enough! We try to be up to standards nobody really knows, set by… nobody knows. The rules to what and who is beautiful changes, like a forever ongoing urban legend.

It is as if what we suspect others think, when they see us, is what defines us as individuals. I know that it is very fashionable to pursue happiness more than anything else. But we are so desperate to show our happiness we forget to take a real good feel and think about how we really are. All those brave smiles on perfect faces seldom reach and beam through glittering eyes.

I know for a fact I am not alone in feeling the pressure of visual happiness. I am not the only one who is tired of newspapers, magazines and TV series telling me what happiness really is, how to become happy and how to be even more happy. And the recipe to happiness seems to be the same for everybody, even though we all know, deep inside, that’s far from the case. Nobody can really tell how to measure happiness anyway. The expectations and demands I face on how to lead a happy life sometimes give me a feeling of failure, even though I know I am ok.

Deep inside I know I am lucky because I can handle being miserable and sad for a while, and appreciate unexpected moments of pure happiness.

On the other hand I don’t post pictures of myself either. I don’t show off to the world, maybe in fear of what “they” might say if my love handles, double chin or not so perfectly plucked eyebrows show too well. I am far from perfect: I fall into the same pit “everybody” else does.

And then I start thinking how stupid it is to let what others may or may not think limit myself, even the least. And then I get into thoughts about how arrogant I am to think like that. As if I’m not part of the world, or that I’m perfect or something. If I wasn’t at all affected or influenced by what’s going on around me, and to my fellow-beings, I would have been a sole island, which I’m not.

It is so sad that even when you are the best at something, it is never good enough, because you should have been equally good at something else.

I think that girls throughout the entire western world struggle to find courage to talk in class, meetings and gatherings because they know everybody’s eyes will turn their way as soon as they open their mouths. Some will measure and study, not only their body but also how they dress, how they talk and their gestures.

As a result of this there is less challenges on the structures of power established in our society, and we miss out on a lot of good thoughts and ideas which could have improved society as well as business.

Feminist is an insult and women who speak up to fight the unreasonable demands women face are called ugly and jealous.

We like to think that we have come a long way as far as Women's Lib is concerned. But when we let what others say about food, working out, make up, clothes and how it all affect us run our lives, how real is the liberation?

I like to think that if I just try to forget what I look like, act and talk I am actually pretty skilled... and good at it!

Own your beauty in your own way

What Your Coffee Says About You - Amazing Things To Know.

Somebody spent hours and hours to figure out and make this :-)
When I saw this I wondered: What happened to just plain, good, old fashioned coffee?

Does ancient knowledge become new?

A year and a half ago I was in Barcelona… and got my handbag stolen. I am not going to repeat that tragic story as I still find the whole thing very humiliating. I wrote about the incident on here, though, at the time.

When in Barcelona a coworker of mine and I were eating dinner at a fabulous (!) restaurant; I don’t remember the name… I asked for their card, and got it, but it was stolen, but I know my coworker still got the one I forced upon him: If ever in Barcelona again, I will go back. The food was beyond heavenly tasteful and delicate.

Anyway… I am not going to write about a restaurant I can’t remember the name of, so I will leave that for some other time, but during the meal it started raining.

You know: the kind of really hard shower which seems to rain upwards.

All of the guests dining outside pulled their tables closer together, to get out of the rain and under the canopy. It became a rather… intimate meal, shared with random strangers.

As it turned out I ended up sitting close to a man who was dining alone, and even though he had finished his meal, he took the time to chat with me when I approached him. You know, making comments about the rain, about the meal, the wine, where he was from…

He said things which made me think he was not just another tourist, so I asked what he was doing (I know, I am terrible like that: always interested in learning as much as possible about people who happens to be unfortunate enough to cross my path).

He was really easy going about my inquisitiveness and told me he was giving lectures and meeting up with scientists in Europe. And the field he was dealing with was astronomy. Imagine that! How exciting!

When I went to high school, I had a classmate who was very interested in astronomy, and he tried to make me understand the nature and principles of black holes. He spent an entire school year talking to me about it… and every time we had one of these discussions, he ended up shaking his head in resigned astonishment over my lack of scientific comprehension.

But this guy in Barcelona, Mark Neyrinck, had his own way to explain which made me understand what he was talking about.

He was working with (as far as I understood) a theory about: “Structures like galaxies and filaments of galaxies in the Universe come about from the origami-like folding of an initially flat three-dimensional manifold in 6D phase space”. OK, this is not a language I master. I understand it, but I don’t know how to create the sentences, so I stole the quote from http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4787 In short: The Origami Cosmic Web of Galaxies.

To me this makes perfectly sense.

Our planet is still shaping, folding and shifting. “The Indian plate is continuously moving north at the rate of about 2 cms every year. Because of this reason the Himalayas are rising at the rate of about 5 millimeter per year. This means that the Himalayas are still geologically active and structurally unstable.” http://library.thinkquest.org/10131/geology.html

(Internet is a great thing when it comes to copy and paste… why spend minutes pondering about how to put it in words, when someone else already did it so much better than I will ever be able to.)

The ravine dividing America from Europe is getting wider and deeper every year. Maldives may disappear from the world in next 100 years if the sea-level keep rising; Because of global warming, glaciers are melting so rapidly it results in sea-level rise. The entire planet is still changing and under construction. I used to think the world is changing, but the planet is constant. I am not so sure I believe that anymore.

I am not going to try to be scientific or anything, but as far as I know all ancient cultures have stories about how the world was created, and they refer to it as being flat.

I know for a fact that the stories which were told through times, and later written down, hold a lot of truths in them. They are wise guidelines to a good life, and are valid even today, thousands of years later. Those old guys were smart; they knew what they were talking about.

Maybe they knew this about the making of our planet as well…?