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. 

A country I would like to visit

Hi, everyone! Today I am going to talk about a place I always want to visit: the Basque Country or Euskal Herria (in native language). I don’t know if you heard about this place before, but, if you don’t, I can tell you that it comprises the autonomous communities of the Basque Country and Navarre in Spain and the Northern Basque Country in France.

I like this place for a lot of reasons. First, because they speak a language, the Euskara, that it is actually one of the oldest languages that people still use. It’s supposed that it exist before romans colonized Spain.

Second, because there is a lot of beautiful places, like the city of Bilbao or Pamplona, which mixes the Spanish culture with the Basque one. When I was there, I’d like to visit the The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and others parks, museums and restaurants, but the only thing I don’t want to do there it is go to the San Fermín Festival on Pamplona, because I think it is a horrible performance. 

I’d love to live in this Spanish region, because it is full of history, and they have a pretty interesting culture. I also like because my great grandfather come from this place, so it is part of my history too, and I‘d love to know more about it.

My Ideal Job

I had never thought about this before, so I’m not sure about what my ideal job would be. But I always like to research, so I’m considering working as a researcher in social sciences, and specifically in psychology. I don’t know if I can earn a good salary doing this, but I think it is pretty interesting, and will give you the opportunity of learning a lot of new and cool things all the time. I have always liked to do this kind of stuff, since I was in school, so I developed a lot of abilities that may help to do this job, like being a good reader.

The only problem with this job is that you need to have someone who sponsors your investigations, and there are not too many people or institutions in Chile that do that. So I will probably not make enough money if I only do this, so I have in mind to work as a clinical psychologist too.