Okay, so I know this is somewhat a little too feminist, but I can’t help but agree with this one.
Think Out Loud
I am part of 1%
This just made me laugh out loud. Literally. So yeah, reblog if you’re part of the 1%.
(Random blogs pop out each time there’s a storm on a long weekend.)
You do not have a bad life.
With all the weird and awful events that occured in the past couple of weeks, I cannot help but feel somewhat shaken. I’ve always believed in this institution, even if most of my peers have remained less than optimistic. I think it’s the fact that I bear witness to the lives it changed, specifically the people who used to work for it, but with the strings rapidly unraveling the cloth, I don’t know how long it would take for this institution to regain its reputation.
But it kind of made me reevaluate my days. For the past three weeks, I have been working till 8 in the evening. I think there were only a handful of instances that I left early to run or hit the gym, but after that, I always came back to finish a page or two. And for a moment, actually for a week, I thought my life was awful.
It was very much like those first world pains that people (at least from Twitter) often joke about, like complaining about having too much food for lunch and now you’re tired. Or having to tilt the Pringles container because your hand is too big to fit in and you can’t get the chips.
So when I stumbled upon this pin from Pinterest, I was really slapped across the face. Then I read about Somalia, so I finished every morsel of my packed lunch. A little after that, I heard about the passing of an officemate, so I went to see a few faces I have not seen for a very long time.
That’s our fault; we complain too much. The moment comfort is denied, or even just diminished, it is already a complete injustice to the way we live. And that is not even an exaggeration.
Paulo Coehlo said “Everyday, God gives us a moment to change everything that makes us unhappy. Use it.”
You do not have a bad life. If your test script failed, it only means it needs tweaking. If the microwave is broken, it means you can digest your food even if it is cold. If it rained on your way to the parking lot, it means you haven’t ran for days.
You do not have a bad life. You’re just having a bad day. And acknowledging that would make all the difference in the world.
Keep ya head up.
Youth is wasted on the young
Sometimes, I feel sorry that we’re the Facebook generation. Or that the younger ones prefer Twilight over Dickens. Or that we spend too much time online and too little time among people. That we have resorted to emails and forgot the romanticism of snail mails. That we don’t care about librarians losing jobs, or museums having lesser and lesser visitors each year.
It’s been a really hard week here in the office. I didn’t expect anything like this to happen before I even hit my first year here. I seem to have floated with a heavy heart the entire time. And the current events, as they unfold, slowly show me how important it is to be firm with your principles and values. And that the heart can be weak, but do everything to not weaken the mind, to not break the spirit. I didn’t expect anything to affect me this much. Really. But…. it really is affecting me far more than I ever imagined.
I hope next week is better.
Suspended in a sunbeam
Carl Sagan (d. 1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, author and one of those people who believed in the existence of extraterrestrial life. To be honest, I have not heard nor read of him in any way or form, but I did see the movie Contact, which was based on the novel he wrote. I loved Jodi Foster there, and the gap where she talked and travelled time was documented as a mere drop of a hat in human hours.
And then I saw a print from Pinterest and I looked him up. Sagan led quite an interesting life; I think I was so drawn to his fascination for basically everything.
Plainly, the world held wonders of a kind I had never guessed. How could a tone become a picture and light become a noise?
I was transfixed by the dioramas — lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice; … a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, … an American grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye.
I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars … And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light … The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.
I wonder now when I lost my curiosity for things. How I stopped and when I stopped imagining and accepting the fact that some things are bigger than my hair, my weight gain, my shopping, my bills, and whatever shit I can come up with. That the world revolves, with or without me, never around me. And it is quite humbling to have stumbled upon something so grounded that the fine line between imagination and reality is a mere mark of a felt pen that easily rubs off in your attempts to see what’s under it.
Brilliant mind. I’m quite sad I missed him.
the salt of your skin 