Liljumper’s Adventures

Sometimes, my partner tells me about her day. About how she tried to do something, and someone was uncooperative. About how the professors at the university are unorganized (http://liljumperaroundtheworld.thr3.de/?p=471). In these times, what that person wants to do, is communicate with me, talk to me. What should my role be? To listen. Obviously.

If only I would do that, I’m sure I would lead a happier life. Instead I start suggesting what could have been done to avoid this problem or minimize that risk. My initial response is to try my best to make sure problems don’t persist. To solve them.

While I certainly don’t mean any harm, I have to face the consequence of what I am essentially doing. Instead of taking part in someone’s problems, showing understanding and sympathy, I immediately critique actions, critique choices. I also have the advantage of doing so from a safe position. I know what the outcome of the choices was, that were made on that day. I know what happened as a result. Of course it is extremely easy for me to suggest something else, but we will not very likely go back in time as a result of it and fix it, trying my version of things. This means any suggestion I make can in fact be seen as blaming anything that went wrong on whoever I would be talking to. Easy. From my point of view, it was obvious that things had to happen the way they did, which is trivial, because of course that’s what happened.

The same problem solving approach seems to appear drastically in the pharma industry. Headache? There’s a pill for that (or rather a whole variety). Sleep deprived? Pill. Nauseous? Pill. Apart from some truly gruesome occurrences, almost anything can be fixed by paying a little price for a handful of pills, drops, you name it. Fix my sleeping schedule? Why not just buy sleeping pills, set alarms and drink coffee?

As someone that doesn’t reside most inside the USA, it seems rather stunning to watch the tremendous advertisement of pharmaceuticals in the states. Directly marketing to customers? That seems rather unsafe. And is a billion-dollar industry. According to Kantar Media, it will have been over 4.5 billion USD in 2014. It seems like “customers” will go to their doctors and ask them for the medication they saw on TV ads. That alone sounds dangerous but even worse is probably that doctors are bound to fulfill patients wishes, since they are interested in keeping both their patients as well as their pharma representatives happy. The marketing to customers? Only a fraction of the advertisement pharmaceuticals spends. The rest goes to free samples or other endorsements.

Our way of trying to find the easiest solution leads us to pay lots of money for products which sometimes only barely outperform simple sugar tablets. As my father always told me: current always takes the path of least resistance. We just rather buy our way out of a situation than really have to put in effort to fix it. After all, this makes us much more productive right? What if we had to build all our furniture ourselves? What about our cars? And when something brakes? Well you used to be able to fix it yourself, but with the complexity nowadays? Good luck to even find what’s broken.

I know that its cheaper to replace a complete transmission of a modern middle class saloon, than to higher a technician capable of diagnosing and fixing the problem of a clutch that keeps falling out of gear. We do what is cheap, not what is right. The process of tackling a problem and fixing it is overrated in most opinions it seems.

A software for a large company recently started running into trouble. The software must compute data for the company to work with each day. The allocated computation time for a process was no longer sufficient to calculate all the required data for a day and this triggered a warning, that employees were working with out-of-date data. When the technicians got word of this, they removed the error message. It took several days for someone to notice something was wrong. In the mean time the developers were praised for the fast and successful efforts.

This theme of taking the easy way, the quick way seems to be recurring way too much for my liking. I think problem solving is important, and we need to get better at it. Nonetheless we also need to understand that sometimes we need to listen to someone and sympathize, without our ever present suggestions and improvements.

My wrist hurts from typing my papers, so I need to take a temporary break until Monday to soothe my poor aching wrist. I’ll see if I can wrangle up a guest post contributor for Friday. Fingers crossed!

My papers are going well so far, done with one about 5 days early, and will put the finishing touches on it now. Then I have only one more paper and I will begin on that later this week or early next week when my wrist feels better.

I hope you’re all doing well! Enjoy your summer, because I can’t until my papers are done 😛

I feel so immensely guilty when I ask for things and questions.

There’s just something that I used to feel was so…forbidden? Not quite the right word. I felt that I shouldn’t have to ask for things, that I was intruding upon what my place was, that I shouldn’t have people take time out of their day to have to do things for me. That it was imposing. And there is a definite gendered nature.

Try to notice the next time you see a man and a woman ask for things. Even in the way they say ‘can’ versus ‘could’, in the way they phrase their question, if they say sorry before (like I sometimes want to do when asking questions), little things like that.

You may notice a difference, I did.

It’s kind of similar to my last post about posture, having self confidence and owning up to the space you have.

No man is an island, and at some point we will need to ask people for things. It should be okay to ask questions, even encouraged.

Maybe more on this later, but it’s just something to notice.

I have never had fantastic posture, I spend a lot of my time feeling tense and unconsciously having my shoulders higher than desired, but I have been making a constant effort to improve my posture.

I always feel a little pompous walking like that, but it’s about owning the space you have. I was ashamed of the space I was taking up, thinking it was too much space, not wanting to intrude, subconsciously wanting to shrink into myself.

It’s been partly a mental battle to take back the space. To expand, not to shrink. To use the space, to own up to the space I take. I can stand out, it’s not bad. I used to think standing out in that way was dangerous. It seemed outrageous, outgoing, and dangerous, to be noticed and in the spotlight. I envied women who walked around confident, and it was something I didn’t posses.

But I am trying, consciously deciding to expand into the space, walk with confidence, with my shoulders back, my eyes upwards from the ground, and to grow into the space I occupy.

I also notice that a lot of people don’t have that great posture. Did slouching become cool? Maybe so, but there is a definite mental confidence dimension as well.

And I’m trying to learn, to appreciate the person I am and have my walk reflect that.

I love quaint small towns where you can walk to a city center, the buildings are old, and things are within walking distance. There’s something just so charming.

It’s almost as if there’s a small patch of society untouched by large stores, retailers, consumers. Untainted. I know it’s totally idealistic to want this, and I could never survive, or not easily survive, without the large retail stores and chains, but there’s something just so charming and nostalgic about the smaller towns.

I never lived in a town like that, I always needed a car to get around, and stores were grouped up, so that people could get their shopping down. There were smaller towns around, but I never spent a lot of time there or lived there.

And I’m sure if I lived there, it would get old, but I guess there’s something I enjoy about that. Maybe it’s because I really liked the town from Gilmore Girls? Or because I never liked living in large cities?

For whatever reason, seeing them all around in the UK was cute and refreshing…until it got old (as all things you wish for and then get, don’t they?) when I couldn’t find what I needed, when we were always late and never around when the shops closed at 5pm.

But I don’t want to write a post about fulfilling wishes, I want to write about that beautiful image in my mind, almost like a faded photograph of the past I can think of fondly, without ever truly living there and having the illusion tarnished.

I am a naturally very fearful person I think. And I thought it might be fun to go into some of my fears here and where they come from.

I watched Psycho for a music and film class, awesome class, but it did freak me out. At first I didn’t think it made any impact on me, but then I noticed really feeling uneasy when I couldn’t see out of my shower, and then showering with some of the curtain open, because I was just worried and always checking, even in my own home, and even today. This wasn’t only from the movie, for some reason, I remember this from forever, that’s part of the reason I like clear shower curtains, but it’s always been there on some level for me. So I guess I’m not sure exactly where this fear comes from, on a surface level maybe that film, but there does seem to be a deeper level.

Another fear I have is public bathrooms. I know exactly where this is from. When I was over at a sleepover, there were a ton of us and they all wanted to watch Silent Hill. I hate horror movies and thrillers, so much. So I basically watched the whole film through the gaps between my fingers, but even that, it was enough. I hate even talking about which part of the film specifically, but if you’ve seen it, you will know! This is to the point where certain restaurants I’ve been to is worse, especially if it’s well lit, and I need someone to come with me, not inside, just to wait for me, so I know there will be someone who will notice if I disappear and to be there after the fear and anxiety I feel inside, who will instantly comfort me. I know it seems crazy and when we’re in public and people see us, I know they think something weird or find it strange, but it’s now a requirement for me if I know we’re going to that place, to be able to count on having someone there. That helps a lot.

But this is one fear that I distinctly remember where it came from. I also can’t seem to shake either of these.

Oh, I am also afraid someone is going to break into my apartment when I’m sleeping, which isn’t even that far out of reality because it actually happened, even when I put that chain across the door!

So feeling safe to shower and sleep is a huge anxiety triggering feeling for me….I also believe I am naturally a very anxious person.

It’s not easy sometimes, but I’ve dealt with it, and besides these and maybe spiders, that’s about it, or walking home alone in the dark, oh wait that serial killer/person waiting in my apartment when I’m alone in the apartment fear is there too….I have a bunch of strange fears.

 

For a while I had about three blogs. I was separating my different pursuits, such as beauty related things and then my more political rant type of things and this has just broken down. I don’t even post on the other two, only this one.

For many reasons, for the non-beauty blog, I just decided to post the type of things I was thinking about here and say, c’est la vie. In real life you can’t separate that aspect of my personality from this, so why should I in real life? Especially since becoming a ‘blogger’ has never been one of my career type of ideas.

Also this blog shouldn’t even show up if people google it, so it’s my personal blog.

As for the beauty one, which is a huge passion of mine, I was just getting a lot of spam comments. I know it takes time to gain readers, and to a degree, you need to post about things that are popular, and I just don’t. For reviews of things that are bought here, the reviews are in German, which is fine for me, but that’s where the main draw I think is, and for the English stuff, or US based stuff, I don’t have enough access to new things to be on the trend or what not. Plus I don’t even have a handle on what I am doing for many reasons. I would love to experiment with it because I do enjoy it a lot, for myself, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be something I write about, I can just share my knowledge, tips, and ideas with my friends.

I’ve more or less let go of all of these side projects except this one, where I have actual people reading what I publish, and where I feel a sense of need to be consistent.

Which is all a good thing, it’s a good thing to continue to remain motivated, if I had this on my other blogs, I know I would pursue it, but for the moment, there just isn’t any of that. It made me sad a bit, but I’ve more or less accepted it.

I don’t consider myself a very lazy person. If there are things that need to be done, I get them done. For example, for the majority, all my blog posts are prescheduled, and I usually write posts about once a week.

But this is totally different.

In the summer I just can’t focus, it’s not even because of the ‘summer’ mentality where I just want to lie around. I wouldn’t mind that, but I just can’t work in this heat. I only have a very small list of things that I need to do during the day, because the motivation just isn’t there for more than that. It’s so darn hot, today it’s around 90 degrees, and without a good ventilation system or an air conditioner, it’s been a struggle.

I’m not used to it, and it’s really affecting my productivity. It’s affecting all aspects of my life. I am sleeping outside because it is way too hot outside, and I always wake up really early due to the sunshine and the heat, so my sleep is disturbed (also throughout the night since it’s loud and not always completely dark). I never want to eat hot food or even cook because it produces so much heat that is just really hard to filter out of the apartment once it’s in. If I open the hall door and the front door and balcony door then I can get a breeze going, IF there’s one.

I am not cut out for  the heat. Which is totally true, because the heat is my least favorite temperature. Additionally summer is my least favorite season, because of the heat. If it never went above 25 during the day then I would enjoy it, but it’s rows of days like today that I just can’t. I also hate sweating! It makes me feel grimy and what not.

So to say the least, productivity is down, which isn’t good in general, but especially not when I have a paper due August 10….It’s a real struggle. I’ve done most of my work for the day, but for the next hour, I am going to work on doing blog posts.

Wish me luck.

I am usually a very neat person, in the sense that all my piles will have a purpose and reason in my own head. So I wouldn’t say I am a neat freak. But I would say that I really love, need, adore?, my plans.

I’m talking about to do lists, and day plans. I ask everyday, “what’s your plan for the day?” And it helps me organize myself if I know when I’ll be eating, when I need to work, and when it’s play time. It’s how I make sense of what I’m doing and stay sane. I like to plan when I’m working, so that I also get a sense of when it’s time to play and explore.

For me, as well, knowing when and what I’m going to eat next is a huge deal for me. It’s okay when I’m home and know I’m exposed to food, but when I’m on the road or what not, it makes me very nervous, more than that, it desettles me completely. I have a lot of stress thinking about needing to plan to have food as well as being uncertain when I can have it.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I were on my own, but on my recent trip, this lack of knowledge about plans, and especially food, drove me crazy. I spent so much money on food, just because I basically had to pack around food everyday that I could eat, in case we wouldn’t eat lunch (which happened twice), and I always had to plan tons of snacks and food. It was stressful and exhausting as well as wasteful in terms of food and money. I had to give some of it away because I just couldn’t finish it all some days and without fridges, it would go bad.

It drove me crazy, in a totally horrible way.

Whenever I’m left to sleep here alone in the apartment, my night fears come to play. Usually I can manage it because in my apartment I normally feel safe and secure. It’s a like a big comforting blanket holding me close and suffocating all my fears. But when I’m here alone, there’s no blanket and I’m exposed.

I am naturally a very fearful person, I don’t like walking alone in a stair well to get the laundry, or home at night from the train station. It doesn’t help that certain experiences have primed me to feel more fear than probably necessary, or that society creates some of these fears. It also doesn’t help that the things I enjoy to watch, that fascinate me, play into these fears. I don’t watch horror films, or what not, but I do enjoy watching things that have to do with the supernatural, and this doesn’t help when the blanket is off, and I’m exposed.

So what am I even afraid of? Am I afraid of seeing ghosts? Nope. I’m afraid someone will break in through the balcony, or the front door, or that they’ve been waiting in my apartment all day only to pounce at night when I’m sleeping. They might seem totally crazy, and to some extent as I fall asleep I know they are, but they have kept me up until 2 or 3 in the morning. Because isn’t the thing about fears? No matter how absurd they seem, there’s something you just can’t shake about them. Is it because on the off chance they happen, and they are that absurd, that it would be that crazy? Because if they happen, it will be the anomaly and that is also pretty terrifying.

Maybe I am just an anxious prone person, to some degree I think I might be, but these night terrors that are unleashed as soon as the sun goes down don’t help at all.