About Crying

People eat, people laugh, people pee, people shit, people sneeze… and people cry. Crying is nothing bad; it’s just something that happens naturally to human beings. Yet, nobody likes crying and nobody likes seeing people cry.

Recently I heard someone saying that crying is a sign of weakness. Well, what can I say, I totally disagree. To me it’s rather a sign of strength. I actually admire people who don’t feel embarrassed about crying in front of others. I have seen lots of strong people cry in my life, which, to be honest, has broken my heart, but hasn’t made me think any worse of them; all the contrary! When you cry, it’s because there’s something inside you that needs to get out. So, if it has to get out, let it out and, believe me, you’ll feel better for it. If we cry, after all, it’s because this is one of our full range of bodily functions. If we couldn’t cry, we wouldn’t.

Crying comes often as a result of some extreme emotional experience. We cry when something hurts us physically or emotionally, we cry when we are very angry, we cry when we’re really happy or sad or when we feel really happy or sad for someone else, we cry when we lose someone we love and when we miss someone really badly, we cry with frustration and we cry with laughter. It’s funny how so extremely opposite emotions can generate the same kind or response in our bodies, which makes me think of where exactly are the boundaries between extreme happiness and extreme sadness. Human brains are a real mystery!

About Facebook

I have been a regular user of the social networking website Facebook, and I felt I should write something about it.

Facebook is great to keep in contact with people with whom you lost contact a long time ago, such as school friends, or with friends in general. How many times friends have changed their mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses and that’s the last you’ve heard of them? So, it serves the purpose of a very useful agenda. It’s great for knowing what your friends and family are up to or sharing stuff with them, such as photos, music and videos. It is also great for learning and sharing knowledge. If I have the time, I like reading other people’s posts as well, which sometimes give me a better insight of things I knew very little about or even provide me with information I didn’t know anything about, and it’s a great tool for organising events and parties or creating groups supporting good causes... Oh, and I forgot, to make you look popular!

Now, Facebook has an ugly side as well. The amount of rubbish that sometimes goes on in there is unbelievable. Just for the purpose of structuring my thoughts here, I’ve decided to deal with each section separately:

Quizzes: Ok, everybody but their grannies can write a quiz! Some of them are very well done, but some of them... honestly... starting with a thousand spelling mistakes and ending up with how obvious the answer is going to be... So yes, if you want to be a Vampire, you’re likely to say yes to liking to attack people with your fangs and hating crosses and garlic!

Applications: Don’t get me started!! I believe some people have ignored the fact that some of their friends in Facebook are actually real, and have decided to ignore their very presence by getting immersed in the imaginary worlds of Farmville, Happy Aquarium, Mafia Wars or Café World, to name just a few... Most of them, actually, only use Facebook for that! Get an Xbox and play games instead, for goodness sake! Get real!

Status updates: Now here comes an interesting bit. It’s funny how when you post an update with some kind of insight or something that you may think will be of interest to other people, you hardly ever get any comments; however..., if you post the most stupid thing on earth like “I’m a lollypop”, sometimes you can have more than twenty comments about it! Weird! Then you have the little hidden questions you get sent via a message the answer of which is going to puzzle everyone because nobody knows where it comes from. So you might end up saying something along the lines of: “I’m a purple banana and I fly with fish because a fairy chucked a bucket of water over my head.”

And the fun goes on with multiple useless stats, name games, gifts and smiles... But, in spite of all that crap that goes on in Facebook, I have to admit, I love it :).

Thoughts about new beginnings

Another year done and dusted… New feelings of starting afresh… like every year. It’s funny how we measure our achievements by looking at them as happening in big finite chunks of time. A year… twelve months… 365 days of things happening to you good or bad, and the new year approaches as a huge blank book, a big white canvass, it’s all very exciting, all these new possibilities: I’ll go to the gym, I’ll change my hairstyle, I’ll find a better job, I’ll find the man of my life, I’ll travel to new places, I’ll meet new people, I’ll stop smoking and drinking… All looking great… Yes! Let’s chuck in the bin this awful last year! Let’s forget all about it and look into the new one! Time slows down, comes to a stop momentarily, and here we go again!

It’s as if everything should have a proper beginning. To open a new chapter we need to have closed the previous one properly, a kind of ceremony which often involves having lots of what we’re planning not to have anymore, like food, cigarettes or alcoholic drinks. If you go on a diet or start going to the gym, more often than not you will choose a Monday or the first day of the month for that, a proper start. If you choose any other day, it won’t feel like it’s happening, somehow…

We like celebrating beginnings and ends. Beginning or end of a year, start of the weekend, end of academic year, start of summer holidays… Yes, chunks of time… and if we don’t have these chunks of time as points of reference we are lost and it just makes no sense… Although on the first day of the year our brain is usually too muddled to handle all these new fantastic projects, so we make an exception and start everything on the second. It makes sense… Happy hangover!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s fine, I wrote it with a hangover…

The Xmas Factor

The Xmas factor

Christmas, Xmas… Whatever! Does it mean anything anymore apart from spending huge amounts of money to please people who you might only want to see once a year or maybe not even at all? Shiny lights, Xmas music, Xmas trees, everybody happy… or maybe not! Stress! Stressing about what presents to get, how much money to spend, what to cook, who to invite… Aaaaaarg! Yes, Xmas, happy times!

If you think about it, really, it’s a bit of a carry on, a grotesque kind of show, even…Who’s the tackiest of them all! In a way, it makes me think of the first stages of an X-factor contest, a competition to show off…

Possible entries to the Xmas factor:

- Getting stuffed with food and drink to the point of vomiting on Christmas Day, and actually vomit.
- Working as Santa in a Shopping Mall and having a fag and a pint on you break in front of the children.
- Dress as Santa in your work Christmas Party and end up sleeping unconscious on the street with a Kebab in your hand.
- Dance around the Christmas tree singing “(I want to give you) one 4 Xmas” by Hot Panz.
- Trying to snog the security guards on New Year’s Eve.
- Telling your boss, he or she can get stuffed like a turkey on Christmas day after having a few too many Glühweins.
- Explaining in detail your latest sexual encounter to anybody who would care to listen at your family Christmas meal.
- And so on… and so forth…

So, who's the winner?

Have a Happy Christmas! :)

About men and shoes

Let’s go and get some shoes! What do I want the shoes for? I want some shoes for climbing mountains, strong, resistant, comfortable, long-lasting, waterproof, and practical, like a good friend that is always there for you when you need him and who’s never going to fail you…

Should I spend a lot of money on party shoes? Well… The shoes have to match that dress that I will probably only wear once in my life, so I’d rather not spend too much money on them. They have to look what they’re not, that is, good. So they have to look pretty and amazing without particularly being of good quality, like a one-night stand…

What about getting some nice good quality boots for the winter? Should I spend a lot of money on them? Aw, why not? Let’s use the credit card! Nice pair of black boots made of patent leather, good for any weather, will go well with any clothes and last for years… Boots that you will probably wear until the seams start to wear off, because you will become so attached to them, like an interesting, good-looking and faithful guy that you’ll love to bits and will be there for you for a long time, a sort of long term relationship…

I wouldn’t mind a nice lovely pair of party shoes, not too uncomfortable, which should go well with several outfits and I could wear several times but only occasionally, like a love affair…

Let’s not forget about those shoes that I really like, in the shop I go past every morning. Far too expensive, but… I can feel an unresolved sexual tension between us…

A random thought about organized chaos

I recall something quite amusing that happened to me a few years ago, when I was a teenager. A friend of ours had just come to our flat for a visit and, for some reason which I can’t remember, he’d asked if we had a pair of scissors. I just happened to notice, by pure chance, that the scissors were actually lying on the floor, under a cupboard. So, I just pointed them out to my friend. My friend went and picked up the scissors from the floor under the cupboard, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for them to be there and, when he finished with the scissors, he went and put them back under the cupboard. A little bit bemused, we asked him why he had put them there, and he replied that he thought it was where we usually kept them. He probably must have thought that our place was a bit unusual, which it was, I have to admit, I mean, you can’t have six children in a house and not expect some degree of chaos in it. What surprised me was his logic. Obviously the logic of someone used to organized chaos.

When there is organized chaos around you, you know exactly where things are without having to tidy up the place. For organized chaotic people there’s nothing more irritating than those people who decide to put things were they think they “should” be kept. So, you come back home thinking “I’d love to listen to that CD I was listening to last night, I could do with some relaxing music just now.” Then, you go and look under the bed (that’s where you remember leaving it the previous night, therefore where it’s supposed to be) and realise, to your horror, that the CD is no longer there!!! What’s happened? Where is it? You start cursing everybody and start thinking of all the possible places where it could be, by which point your stress levels start getting higher and you need more than ever that relaxing music. You turn everything inside out, upside down, you look inside bags and paper bins, under the pillow of your settee, in your coat pockets, inside your shoes… and finally… There it is! You find it in the CD rack and, what’s worse, in alphabetical order!! Wow, so you’ve looked everywhere apart from the place where the bloody thing “should” be!! Damn! So that makes you feel even more irritated than before. That relaxing music would do you some good after all!

So, remember, if you live with a chaotically organized person, don’t touch anything!!! You may regret it afterwards. You’ve been warned.

Understanding People

Very often we think that we understand people, but… do we really? On a daily basis we see things happening around us that we consider out of order. We wonder what made some people do this or do that. We wonder why some people are so stubborn and will never change their minds. We wonder why some people never take what we consider the “reasonable” path… The problem is that we take these things absolutely out of context and we only think about them in terms of our personal life experiences, because that’s all we know… and that’s why we don’t understand them.

Do we ever stop to think about the socio-political environment where these people grew up? Do we ever think about their family circumstances? Do we ever think about the gaps in their education? Have we ever stopped to think that each person’s values and beliefs depend on all sorts of environmental circumstances including their religious upbringing? And, sometimes, we think we are clever enough to change all these aspects of someone’s life which, as a matter of fact, are so deeply rooted that have become part of the people they are and can’t unfortunately be changed. And not only that, we also sometimes think we have a right to criticise them as if their unusual behaviour was just a sudden twist in their minds, that they’re just thoughtless unreasonable people who don’t want to listen to anybody… Well, think again.

It is very difficult to understand some people’s actions and feelings simply because it is very difficult to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. And that’s a fact! And we will never fully understand them unless we’re put through everything they’ve been through in their lives. We can only try… and maybe misunderstand.