supernova (1)
That’s not only a very good song from Moby, it’s kind of true – we are all made of star dust. Not only we, everything out there. That’s kind of really nice – it’s the circle of life in big. Someday our sun will explode and make star dust for other lifeforms someday…
There were lots of revolutions lately and in the few past years. There was the arab spring, the protests in Turkey, now there are some angry Ukrainians etc. … Well, also there were some Bulgarians on the streets since June (more than 8 months already). While the protests in Turkey and Ukraine are presented in the media very detailed and receive quite the support from foreign media, the protests in Bulgaria were not that present in the media. The important foreign media only reported about the protests in Bulgaria when there were escalating and there were injured demonstrators. As this was not that often, the media didn’t reported that much about this protests. After all – there were lots of other demonstrations and protests with much more injured demonstrators.
Isn’t it only fair to report more about the protests where more people get injured? Kind of yes… but doesn’t that tell people, that only a bloody news are news? At least that’s the message I get from the media and that’s kind of the wrong message, isn’t it? Why do we learn to solve problems without violence as children, when later on violence is all that counts? Isn’t “Eight months of peaceful protests in Bulgaria” a good headline? Not really, it’s just not that emotional as “100 injured in protests in …”
It is only logical that we react very emotional to violence, but that is simply because they shouldn’t occur on a daily basis, it’s something very extraordinary that normally shouldn’t occur that often. So the right message would be to show off peaceful protests as a good example, to report about them, simply to show that it is an option. I believe that it is the more mature option, it is the option that really stands for change as it doesn’t do things like the government but in the way we teach out children – don’t treat others like you don’t want they to treat you. But also the more difficult option, because you need lot’s of endurance to achieve your goal. So dear demonstrators in Bulgaria – I wish you all the endurance you need to achieve your goals!
PS. as Justine from Smiling shortly wrote, at least the european government is showing some interest in the protests and is trying to understand what’s going on, which is really difficult as there is no real freedom of speach in the Bulgarian media…
The godless paladin also wrote an interesting article related tot hat topic – check it out 🙂
Maybe you remember that I’ve wrote about the minimalistic game a while back. Me and a good friend of mine have tried our best at getting rid of useless stuff since then. Well, I guess she’ve done better than me, but that’s not the point… We are pretty flexible with the rules. It’s like totally impossible to go by the rules, if you do, you’ll have to get rid of 465 things at the end of the first month. And the next day it’ll be 466, then 467, 468, 469… Cudos if you can do that, but I’ll have to go buy new crap all the time to get that amount of stuff to throw away and it’s really like totally crazy. So it’s been two months since we’ve started the game. In the first week we’ve changed the rules to “you have to get rid of 15 things every week“. The first week I’ve put some old bags and shoes away and got the first 15 things. And then it got very quiet… Practically I haven’t done anything for the game untill last week. But last week I’ve used the sunday afternoon to sort out all my cloths (and my husband’s cloths) and got to 110 things at one. All of them went to the clothes recycling skip. But time flies and now I’m already behind the plan again, as I should have sorted out other useless things this week.
So the cleaning up is far away from over, how about you?
PS. the waffle iron is also rot living with me anymore 😉
I had to ask myself this question today and well – I can 🙂 Kind of… I was so confident about it, as I’ve butchered many fish and animals as a child, that I didn’t google it or something. I just filleted that fish like I’ve done it with other fishes as a child. And I was very pleased with the result, as the fish was tastier than the frozen stuff. So I wondered why is this so? Why does most of the frozen fillets have no skin and no fish-fat? At the end, that’s kind of the most healthy stuff about fish, their fat. And it’s really tasty. So I googled how to filet a salmon and like you can see e.g. here it’s a pretty clean job. Not only do most of the video show removing the skin (while of course some meat stays on it and get’s trowed away), but also cutting out the middle part with all the meat on it, so that you don’t have any fish bones on the filet. While this can be nice for restaurants guest, as they may not want any bone in their filet, what it does to the filet is simply trowing most of the fish fat in the trash with some of the meat too. And that’s like crazy when you prepare a fish at home.
Fishes have fish bones, that’s just normal and you can very simply remove them once the fish is cooked and still keep the fish fat and skin on. That adds greatly to the taste and you don’t trow perfectly fine fish fat and meat in the trash. As a kid the part of fish I loved the most was the fins – they’re so tasty and crunchy. But they get cut away most of the time too. That’s not really different from people wanting to eat only the bon filet and not the rest of the caw or chicken or whatever, but may be it’ll help a bit the environment if we would recall that most of an animal can be eaten, not only the bon filet.
Of course, you can always go vegan, than you don’t have to worry about it. But if you are going to eat meat, wouldn’t it be better, if you can butcher it on your own and try to use the most of it? When all we see of a caw is the filet packed up in plastic in the supermarket, it’s hard to be aware of the costs of it for the environment or even to be aware that it was an animal earlier – it’s only a piece of meat, or isn’t it? Well, it’s a piece of an animal and it’s not worth killing it, if you’re only going to eat the one bon filet piece…
Not that long ago I’ve written about Ironblogger and since then there really was a post every week here. So? There are two important conclusions for me by now:
1. Apparently if I would have to pay 5€ for not blogging in one week, I’ll blog. So this blog still isn’t dead thanks to Ironblogger, that’s kind of nice.
2. Mostly I would blog something I wouldn’t have blogged if I didn’t have this pressure. Since I’m at the Ironbloggers I had only two posts, that I would have blogged anyway. The other ones were done like that “man, it’s already Sunday and I still haven’t blogged anything, let’s see if there is anything in the drafts – no, OK, so let’s just write the first thing that kind of comes to your mind, OK, it may not be like a really interesting post or anything, but you don’t have any time more to do anything good anyway, so just write something”. So I just write something, since I have a smart phone often from my smart phone, e.g. while travelling from one place to another (hence the more spelling errors). And I’m not really sure if like that. Isn’t it better to have less content, but good content? But are the spontaneous posts automatically bad content? The most important question for me and kind of the reason why I’m still at the Ironbloggers is, would there be any posts, if the pressure to post every week wasn’t there? Probably I would often think about something I want to write, but I’ll forget it pretty fast and probably think “You haven’t blog for such a long time, so who cares, why bother?” So for me for now it’s kind of worth it to have this “have to blog this week”-pressure, let’s see for how long. It’s really hard when I’m away or during the holidays, but well – not impossible 🙂 So I’ll stick to it a bit longer and you’ll get posts like this sometimes 😉
It sucks to be sick. But it has something wonderful too. It gives you the chance to appreciate your health. How often do you think: “wow, breathing in and breathing out, that’s so amazing!” or “having a normal body temperature, that feels so wonderful”. Usually we just don’t feel these things, exactly because they are normal. But given the contrast of e.g. fever, you’ll be more than able to feel and appreciate your normal body temperature. And this normal body temperature will feel great. For like a little while. And then it’ll just become normal again and we’ll forget about the wonder of health…
If you were to learn about relaxation techniques, one of the first things you’ll learn will be to try to stain the muscle you want to relax as much as you can and then let the strain go and the muscle will relax automatically. It’ll be extreamly hart for you to try to just relax this muscle, but in the contrast of straining it the relaxation just comes automatically. Just like it’s almost imposible for us to appreciate the wonder of breathing, when we are breathing all the time. But if you are sick and your noise is stuffed for a couple of days, you’ll feel like reborn when you can breath freely again and you’ll be very very thankful about this wonder of nature in a very mindful way. Mindfulness is to live in the moment and be fully present and feel just exactly what is happening right now, which you can do best, when you get some difference from your “normal” state.
I could wish you to try to appreciate your health in that way more from time to time, but that’s really unrealistic. So just try to really appreciate it in the moments where you are getting better after being sick 🙂
Hey there, happy new year all!
I’m just so enthusiastic about photo-filter and all the editing software that is now available to all of us for absolutely free via smartphones etc. I’m even starting to love google, although it’s really bad, because it let’s me do fun stuff like adding structure to photos. That’s really cool, take a look:
Hamburg’s Town hall
One month ago I was thinking “filter and instagram – it really just makes all pictures look the same – a bit old and instagramy”. Well, may be it does, but some pictures really look better in their instagramy outfit. At least I think so now. Let’s check on it again in a couple of months, till then – just have fun 🙂
Still – I can’t get used to taking pictures with my phone. It’s kind of disrespectful and the quality is really not that good (this depends on your phone of course). The two pictures below are taken with a smartphone. I would think that without the filter-editing they really wouldn’t be worth showing. Or maybe with the filter all pictures really do look the same and we are loosing our sense and respect for reality the same way we do when it comes to the beauty of a women and publishing unedited model pictures in magazines…
But where do editing starts? Is fixing your “basics” like brightness, contrast, white balance etc. already changing the reality and making it more “prettier” or is this more like fixing the picture more like the way you actually saw it with your eyes… ??? I really don’t know, but I’m sure that we’ll see in the near future 🙂
Hotel George V in Paris
french breakfast
It’s really funny how little noteveryday settings like holydays or playing monopoly can show you sides of a person you’ve never seen before. I’m a fan of bringing people together for a bit too long so that they start showing their real colors. Everyone can be nice and friendly on a party and you can just chat about the weather, but try doing this a couple of days or something. You just can’t. It’s always interesting to get to know the real colors of someone, it’s mostly pleasingly surprising. Sometimes it’s surprisingly bad, but that’s even better. Real friendship begins when you know the bad sides of someone and accept them. In such cases I always wonder what are my bad true colors? But I’m mostly glad that my friends accept them 🙂
Lately I often think and hear stuff like “time gows by so quickly”. Then I wonder how come this wasn’t so when we were children. I’ve never heard someone saying “man, time goes by so quickly, all the sudden I’m 5”. I think that this has a simple logical explanation. Adults have so many plans, so many goals and wishes like ‘I want to be married before 30’ etc. Then all the sudden one is 30 but still not married. Then it’s easier to say “time passes by so quickly” than “man, I’m already 30 and I still haven’t done …/ am not …”.
Kids don’t really have this problem, because they don’t plan so far in the future and are more flexible in their plans. If Santa Claus doesn’t bring the yellow bagger, the red car is still fun enough…
When older people are satisfied with what they’ve done so far in their lifes, they are as relaxed about time as children. My gradma often says something like “I’ve lived mylife, have done this and this, that’s good enough, I don’t fear death” and that’s really cool.
But for the “middle age” maybe it’s not bad to have this inner dissatisfaction. We want to do a lot and time passes by quickly, so it’s kind of good that e.g. around new year we make a mental checklist of our goals and wishes and mostly see, that there is still a lot to do. We simply need this pressure to get it done, so that we can be satisfied with us when we are old, like my grandma…
I am driving regularly since a little less than a year now. At first it was really exhausting and stressful. Mostly because of all the aggression in traffic. Usually I am a very calm and peaceful person and I would tend to drive “patiently”, e.g. I would prefer to wait for this one more car to pass so that I can make my left turn in peace instead of getting fast in front of her… This is very hard to accept for most other drivers. So from my point of view you have two options in traffic – diving more aggressively like everyone else or not giving a f..k about how others feel about your driving style and just drive like you feel comfortable and force others to accept it.
I choice the second option more often and it feels great! It feels great, because it spreads beyond driving as well. Not caring how others feel about you and your actions and just doing what feels right to you is something very import in everyday life. (But here you have to keep in mind that most people in the modern world care too little about other people and not too much, so this strategy is only good if you care too much…) Since I am training this while driving, I notice that I can apply that attitude in everyday life more easily and often too. I am usually very very bad at asserting myself, because I tend to put the needs and wishes of everybody else at the first place and just let mine die unnoticed. After almost a year of driving this happens a little less often and that’s like awesome! I’m exited how far I would be after a while more…
FMTWG: vulnerable but invincible!
little coping koala 