Things about living with other human beings

Hello my friends,

    Today I bring you matters of the heart (-- again, I might say). When you love someone, a friend, a family member, a partner of any kind, you make compromises. When you love someone, you try your best to let the right message come across, you are honest with them and yourself. These are things I am loving to learn, these are things that never made more sense to me then now.
    I don't know what happened but I feel much more... connected. I now know how to observe others and myself, I now know when I need time on my own and when to reach out for company, and I also feel more able to understand loved one's emotions and feelings... Of course this is yet something to test in the day-to-day life, but I can now say I feel much more... like myself. It's a type of balance I do not want to loose and I am willing to do everything I can to not loose it.

    I'm still on vacation so I've been playing a lot of an anti-social game called Sims3 (yes--- I know, it's a silly time-consuming game... but it's entertaining), sleeping a lot and almost never leaving the house for days and days. But my body is ready, bring it on world ! Tie me up, smack me hard, toss me around, and I will just rise from self-pity all over again. I'm ready to love.

Much love, 

Fawlin

 

Under Attack

    I'm being attacked by hyper-moodiness today, I was supposed to write something nice, I was going to tell you the story of two of my feline friends, Tashi and Pacholas... But I don't seem to be able to assemble feelings and basic concepts into words. I guess we all feel this every now and then, but I'm not quite used to feel like this so often, I'm under attack right now O_O. I hope my possibly-still-not-existent readers are feeling great, and not as moody as I am. I'm not being very good at mindfullness right now, my mind couldn't be more far away from a lake with clear water (mind's natural and best state, they say). Everything is not clear. I'm happy, yes, things are going fine, but things are also going. Usually things don't go much around here, now stuff is happening and for "once" (ok not once but yeah...) in my life I don't want to run away from anything at all. I want to face everything head on, proud brave heart and working good and fast brain.

    I hope I don't get too addicted to stuff happening ... or too overwhelmed

Academic Stressing

Hello person,

    Five years have passed since I met my ex-best friend, we are no longer together in any way we did in the past. For five years we talked everyday of our lives, for five years I didn't know I was putting her in a pedestal too high for me to actually reach in time to realize we always had a lot of unsolved issues cluttering our friendship. She herself climbed to that pedestal, and she probably is aware of that. Every person who thinks they're a genius without even accomplishing anything in their area of expertise is, I think, a bit delusional. They can, however, think and say they have genius potential,  that's called "recognizing our own potential to achieve our own greatness" (however great it may be). Five years of trying to make myself feel equal to her and always feeling like I had to look up to her. Now, in the sixth year - the first year I will spend without her - I realized some truths were always in front of me.  And still I sometimes feel this gigantic anger towards her that I cannot entirely explain.

    Two years have passed since I started attending University, I will now be a senior in my hopefully last year. For two years I got myself involved with, mostly, the best people I could find, for two years I almost always put fun with new friends in front of all the studying I also should be doing. I got myself in a hard situation, I was aware of it all year(s) long. Everyone has their trust for me a little bit tainted now, they know I can finish this and do a good job, but they will never stop nagging me about my past mistakes and I have to not feel trapped by negativity. Two years of wonderful experiences, adventures and an awful lack of self-control. Now, in my senior year - the first year I will spend apart from my ex-best friend and my last year of University - I must work harder then ever and build back my self-esteem, self-control and sense of worthiness as an independent but cooperative young adult woman (haha this so looks like self-pep-talk, doesn't it?).

I hope you are not an emotional nakedness prude hehe.
Have a good morning/afternoon/night : 3
And wish me luck for my next emotional roller-coaster...

Designing for the entire human race

Hello Internet people,

    Lately I've been watching several TED talks. So, 2 days ago I watched this TED talk called "How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)", by Margaret Gould Steward. This designer worked, along with a few others, in one of the last design changes on Facebook. The thing that got me was the simplicity needed to work with this giant websites: humanity-driven design. After talking about some of her project she said (about designing for Facebook and Google):

    "When you set a goal to design for the entire human race(...), at some point you run into the walls of the bubble you're living in. (...) we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phone to navigate to the next hipster coffee shop. (...) What if you had no access to public library? What if your country had no free press? What would this products start to mean to you? This is what Google, Youtube and Facebook look like to the most of the world. (...) If you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are."

    This didn't quite resonate with me until yesterday. Yesterday I was posting my second post on my Portuguese Blog and I was sharing on the Facebook account linked to that Blog. This Facebook account is public so while I was on Facebook I noticed I had one friend request, and then another, and another. Yes, all three of my new potential online friends had an app called "Facebook to all phones". Soon I was talking to a guy  from Ghana, let's call him One. Now One, who was talking to me trough that app, wanted to know if I'm dating anyone... I don't know why that was one of the first questions he did, maybe it's hard to date in Ghana? I don't know, maybe. Of course I told him that I don't date over the Internet (because I don't).

    But the point I wanted to make was that this was the moment the TED talk resonated with me because I realized Margaret is right: we live in our little "rich" (compared to some) bubbles, troubled by this tiny problems of ours (like temporarily having a slow internet connection) when in that moment another person in a less richer country is struggling with little or no internet connection, no electricity, often not even reliable and easily reachable clean water, no decent free press, and probably not a lot of freedom to date or relate with people the way they maybe want to, ... We never think about this, don't we? I mean, there's nothing we can do, that I know. But I guess it gave me a little bit of perspective and I finally understood what scale design really is (designing for giant websites like Facebook, Google and Youtube). This kind of apps can very well be a free pass to information, free, unaltered information;  free, unsupervised, careless human interaction (however restricted by writing speech it may be); free entertainment content also.

EDIT1: I'm not saying everyone who uses the app "Facebook to all phones" is the same.  I don't mean that everyone who uses this app has little resources, of course !

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And this everything from me, for now :3 

Enjoy the rest of your day,

Fawlin