Good and Bad Points

Hi everyone!

The first thing I need to say is: Finally, the last post!

We are on December, and it is interesting to remember which things go well, and, of course, which didn’t go so well. It is hard to remember everything that happened in this year. But, I think 2013 has been a great year in general terms, until now.

In the academic field, I think I learn a lot of new things this year, especially on the second term, because I choose the subjects I like the most, so I really enjoyed, most of them.

About my family, this year has been strange. Mainly, because my brother, who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, traveled to Colombia to achieve his compromises with his religion, and he will be there for the next year too.  And he is not the only one who it accomplishes his spiritual mission, my two cousins, traveled too, one of them is in Brazil, and the other one is in Peru. So we missed them all a lot, especially on holydays.   

And about my relationships, I think I meet a lot of interesting people, and made some fantastic new friends. But the more important person I know this year was my boyfriend.

I can’t remember any bad things now, so I think that they weren’t that important.

Finally, I need to say that I’m pretty excited about the next year, because I believe it will bring amazing things.

I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a wonderful 2014.

Cheers!

Food & Eating Habits

Hi Everyone! 

I think that almost everyone loves to eat.  But, obviously, not all enjoy the same food. Some people prefer just eat vegetables, and become vegetarian, which is not my case. Others love fast food, and I’m not in this group neither.  I eat this kind of food only because, sometimes, it’s cheaper, or when I don’t have enough time to eat something else. I don’t enjoy this food mainly because it is so unhealthy, so I think that a good idea will be not selling this food to the children, specifically on school cafeterias.

I consider that read the nutritional information on the food I bought it is pretty important, because it help you to know what you are really eating.  And it help you too when you are on a diet. I Have been in a diet just once, about 6 years ago. It takes only one month, and my all family does it. Was pretty effective, we all lost some pounds.  But I don’t believe I’ll do other one soon, I prefer to exercise, or just eat healthy food.

Finally, thinking about the food in general, I think it could be our enemy or something great; it depends of our eating habits. Some people spends lot of money on surgery, diets, or strange exercise machines, when the easier and simple ways of stay fit, as healthy food and exercise on a regular basis, are, most of the time, the effective ones.

Dreams

When I think about what a dream is, the first thing that comes to my mind it’s a Freud book, called “The Interpretation of Dreams”. In this book he said, basically, that dreams are the representation of a desire, and sometimes an unconscious desire. So, for me, dreams are actually a kind of message sent from our unconscious, but they are so hard to explain, and you need to study them a lot to understand what they are really trying to say. The principal obstacle when you want to do this is that you can’t remember what your dream is about. In my case, I remembered just a few, and when this happened, I try to write them, with all the details I can recall. Then, I try to understand them, but I think I’ll never sure if I do it right.

But when I think about dreams, I must include the daydreams, and, if you asked me, I have a lot of that ones. And I think we all need them, because they give meaning to our lives, and to what we do every day. So I hope you all have daydreams, and I hope you try to make they comes true :)  

HOW GREEN ARE YOU?

Hi everyone! Today I’m going to talk about how I tried to care the environment.  For me, it is so important to learn about new environmentally friendly practices, so I always look for it in the internet, and I think that this is the more common way to found out this kind of practices. I like, specifically, the ones that teach you ways of recycling old or disposable things.

Actually I recycle a lot of things in my house, and actually everyone on my family does it. We recycle the plastic and glass bootless, the paper, the cardboard and the plastic bags. Besides, we tried to walk, when we have time, because we live in a central place, so we are close to many places.  But I don’t use my bike, even though I want to, because my parent thinks it is too dangerous, and it is hard to convince them.

Nowadays, I’m not joined any eco-organization, but I expect to do it soon; because I think it is important to help the planet. Whatever I like to read about the work of different organizations, and tell about it to my friends or family. I a near future I hope to do something else, but I am not sure about what. I think I like to help to some organization who tried to reforest, or who cares about creating new national parks, or protect the ecosystems that are in danger.

I think that, in Santiago, now it is easier to recycle, because, there are too many places where you can do it. But still don’t enough, so we need to work on it. Besides I think maybe it is necessary to include a subject in primary schools, when somebody teach the kids how to recycle, and how important is doing it for the environment.

I hope you all star to recycling now, it's not this hard, and you will contribute to help the planet :)

Books & Reading

Reading is one of my favorite things to do. I learn to read when I was 4 years-old, because my brother does it all the time, and I asked him to teach me. So I become a good reader since this age. 
I remember that when I was a child, I read a lot, and I enjoy reading the suspense and thriller books that were available on my school library, and I think I read most of them. If you ask me, I don’t know exactly how many books I have read in my life, but I’m quite sure that more than one hundred, especially considering that I was in Humanistic Elective, and just in my penultimate year of school I read twenty five books.         
Nowadays, I still enjoy reading, but I’m tired to read about psychology subjects. I prefer the fiction novels, and for this kind of books, right now one of my favorite writers is Fiódor Dostoyevski, and one of their books, Crime and Punishment it’s actually one of my preferred books.  
I also love other books, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, written by Milan Kundera, which is also the last book I read.  It is an amazing book, so I didn’t take so long for read it; I think that maybe a week or least. The story, basically it is about a Czech doctor with an active sex life, who meets a woman, Teresa, and fall in love with her, but he is not capable to be faithful, so he has a lot of lovers, and this torture Teresa. All this happen when the Soviets invade the Czech Republic, in the context of the second word war. I recommend this book to the ones who enjoy the books that mixes fiction stories, with a little bit of philosophy and history subjects.

Is Facebook sharing making us more vain?

The Guardian, Wednesday, 25 September 2013 15.16 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/facebook-vain-tools-ideology-sharing-users

The article it is based in a recent psychological research about the question: is Facebook making people more vain? 
The research authors say that Facebook has given everyone the chance to be a mini celebrity, and, actually they mention that a Facebook profile acts as a personal Public Relation campaign. This self-promotion makes users want to compete with others to see who is more popular, meanly based on how many "likes" or "comments" they self-pictures had. The problem, they say, is that users apply this metric to rate how important, popular and attractive people are in real life, and they say this is not healthy. Actually, about this last point, they mention that there is a study that reveals that young women suffer extra body image issues as a result of looking at other people's Facebook pictures, and more than half of those polled in a survey for the Centre for Eating Disorders said looking at photos of themselves on Facebook increased their body consciousness. 
The article author concludes, based on this psychological research, that the central tools of Facebook, such as profile pictures and status updates, are pretty related with narcissism, and if that is then feeding into poor self-image and depression, the author point out that it is not something that should be ignored.

Anime!

Hi, everyone!

Today I’m going to talk about anime. I think we all see at least one when we were kids. But for the ones who never hear this word before, anime are Japanese animated productions featuring hand-drawn or computer animation, and there is a lot of them.

I don’t remember what the first anime I saw was, but I remember that when I was nine years old, after school my brother and I love to watch anime on my grandparents’ house, and the one we like the most was Detective Conan, because we enjoy trying to guess who the murder was, while the show was in commercials. We also love it, because we like to play the role of detectives after the program it’s over.

But we watch more anime, like Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Digimon, Los caballeros Del Zodiaco, Slam Dunk and many others I can’t remember right now. 

     

Although I used to see a lot of anime as a child, I don’t see any since a long time, so I don’t think anime influenced my life. Maybe the only important thing anime give me it is the chance to share this moment with my brother, and that makes us close.