Religious holidays..

There is a bloodshed in the neighbouring apartment's backyard and I'm feeling nauseated.

More quotes..

Such a great night for soul searching and I just would like to share this quote with you. What I wanted to say has already been said before. In the most elaborate yet simple way it could ever be done.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-Ghandi

Quotations from Chi

Those who claim to need others the least are the cowardest of all.

-Chi

...then comes the realisation that Chi is not capable of building proper grammatical sentences while making up her very own self acclaimed quotations...

...which was followed by a bittersweet realisation that she has accummulated a heavy emotional baggage by taking coward people's shit and trusting them more than she did herself. They're not worth it. Better recognized late than never.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm not gonna write in third person anymore.

Your New Year's Present

Some of you will hate me after seeing this, but here is your new year's present. I was looking for something a bit more classy but youtube did not live up to my expectations. I still like the song and the message it conveys. Have fun!

Happy Holidays

Last night, I dreamt that I was back in Chicago, sitting in my room. I heard my friend speak to another friend in the hallway so I went out just to see her with her newborn baby. She let me hold her baby. He was very very tiny, and as I was trying so hard to see what he looked like, my other friend said:

"You are just like the baby. So young and gracious and beautiful".

Wow, what a dream! That just made my...er...night.

Merry Christmas everyone!! Your cheesy Christmas present is coming to this blog very soon.

About blaming other things/people as an excuse for retiring from life

What about it?

well,

you shouldn't do it.

beecaaauuuse,

When you tell someone that they are the reason of your sadness/procrastination etc. you're actually saying that the person is in control your life. It's like turning yourself into a victim. If they're on a good day and happen to be nice to you, then you can be happy with their consent. If they do something you don't like, you end up feeling exactly the opposite. It's also very unrealistic to be so demanding from your environment. Everything is obligated to happen a certain way to ensure your happiness. Taking responsibilty for our actions is taking back the control of our lives. Other people don't make us the way we are. Only ourselves are responsible for our actions. We should know better than to beg happiness from others because most of the time we cannot change or prevent other people's actions.

I love Einstein! (and myself?)

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
-Albert Einstein

It seems like I'm one step ahead of my "meditation club" teachings, for today we have talked about harmful "paradigms" which, in this context, translate as our irrational beliefs. The lecturer gave some examples of harmful paradigms we might have with regards to ourselves, others, and the world, then asked us to write our own. Here is what I wrote:

About myself:
1. People do not want to hang out with me because I'm not attractive enough.
2. I need to be beautiful in order to be loved.

About other people:
All people are motivated by self interest.
(This was the first thing I learned when I walked into college, although now I realize I might have interpreted the whole thing incorrectly, or taken it to the extreme, just like many others do. As an alternative study, I recommend this.)

Anyhow. I, now, would like to apply Einstein's legendary approach to my own problems. I obviously cannot deal with them by waiting to get pretty or screwing other people over because they are egotistical bastards and they deserve it if it serves my self interest. The next level of thinking, is recognizing that the above statements are false and replacing them with paradigms that are...er...not so false.

So here we go:

1. 99% of who I am cannot be seen or touched. I do not consist of how I look.
2. I shouldn't wait for other people's approval to feel loved. I can start NOW, by loving myself. I'm not a child anymore and I no longer have to turn to other people to give myself the care I need.
3. I want to help other people, love them, do something that will make them happy. Then why should I think that I'm the one-of-a-kind human specimen? If I think this way, there must be millions of people out there who do not act solely out of self-interest. It is, however, unrealistic to expect our loved ones to be there for us on every occasion since they may have some limitations or they simply might make mistakes.

Just as the darkness is the absence of light, pessimism is the absence of optimism. We need to let the lightness in and uproot our irrational beliefs.

On Depression & Letting Go of Old Habits

If you are feeling depressed, your body is telling you that there is something wrong with the way you're treating it. Depression is the symptom, not the cause, of the disease. I think that depression stems from the irrational beliefs you might have, usually regarding what you're supposed to be, as opposed to what you currently are.
Those irrational beliefs may follow many different patterns, but here is some of them:

• People treat me like [the way they do] because I'm ....(insert derogatory word here).... If I were more .......... then I would be successful and loved.
• I'm never good enough at what I'm doing. I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. Thus, I have nothing to offer to other people and I understand if they don't want to be around me or make fun of me. I need to be more ........... to deserve other people's love and attention.
  
• I'm actually intelligent, funny and fun to be around but I cannot really show my true self because I'm .....(insert derogatory word here).... If I can manage to .....(insert obsession here).... then I will be able to show my radiant, true self.
  

It's not always easy to change those irrational beliefs, or let go of them, because you have internalized them as your premises on which your every value judgment is based. They have accompanied you all your life, became your friends, and you cannot predict what your life would be like without them. That's why it's so hard to let go of bad habits and old thinking patterns. You fear the change; you fear the prospect of success and happiness for a change.
You make yourself vulnerable without an excuse to hide behind after every assumed failure. You open yourself to risks, remove the shield that protects you from the vicissitudes of life. You start living again, in the world, as opposed to in your head.

I'm in favor of maintaining a positive attitude when dealing with this however. I believe that it is possible to make your new beliefs and thinking patterns habitual just like the same way you have made yourself accustomed to thinking irrationally. This process may not make you gain money, power or reputation, but it will certainly make you gain strength and peace of mind.

What would make me really happy right now is learning how to post book links with pictures on this blog, for a change...

Coping

Whenever you think you've hit the rock bottom you have to realize a few things:

1.There are people who love you and who want to help you.
2. There is always a way out.
3. True hapiness lies in the small things of life, like watching the ducks on a sunny morning (and feeling that you're a part of this divine beauty).
4. You have to be patient, no change is quick and easy.

My mind seems to be blocked now, what else?

News Alert..

Turns out I didn't get the job because I told them the truth, namely that I wanted to get a masters degree in the next 2-5 years. My inexperienced, naive inner child thought that honesty wouldn't create a problem, but it turns out, somewhat justifiably, that the companies don't want to lose the staff that they've "invested" on for a couple years. And that's how it goes, at least here. So today I learned that I should lie the next time, despite what my intentions for the future may be, and so should you!!

I'm really in a great mood before my drivers licence test, which by the way is earlier than I thought it was. Both news indicate that I'll be doomed to taking "minibus"es for the rest of my life.

On Trust and Love

I may be diverging from my aforementioned agenda a little bit but I've just had an inspirational moment when I just got struck by an idea: We would be trusting people if our sense of self is not founded upon what other people think of us. Let me explain. If we feel that we're not getting enough love from people around us, then we probably feel betrayed when others let us down or don't live up to our expectations and we start thinking thoughts like "nobody cares about me", "I got ditched again", "I don't have any real friends", "Nobody understands me"... You get the idea. We all have different ways of interpreting and articulating it, depending on the person and situation.

What if we thought that people actually loved us and cared about us? What if we made ourselves believe that whoever let us down actually values us and likes spending time with us? We wouldn't be focusing on small things that much. We wouldn't be taking things personally as frequently as we did. We would trust people when they say something and not look for hidden subtext beneath the words.

For instance, the person who loves me the most is my mother. I think that she loves me more than anything else in the world and I'm really grateful for this. However, she sometimes says things that makes me sad, does something that pisses me off. This doesn't change the fact that she loves me. It just shows that nobody is perfect. People are humans and they're not infallible. Even the person who loves you the most cannot be there every single time you need it. Even the person who loves you the most may inadvertently say things that hurt you without realising it. I know my mother loves me because she is my mother. But the same thing should be true for everyone. We should just give people some credit, just to make it a little easier for both sides.

There are vicious and virtuous cycles in life (like in ecomomics). A vicious cycle starts with a negative thought and gets amplified with increased effort to seek for negative things. You start watching out for things that would bring you down and interpret them accordingly to reach your goal of self demeaning. This naturally affects your feelings about yourself and in turn increases your negative thoughts.
A virtuous cycle is basically the same except that your starting point is an optimistic, if not a positive, thought. If you focus on the times when you have enjoyed yourself, when you have done something nice for somebody else or somebody else has done something nice for you, then you will have a lesser tendency to think that others are trying to hurt you. Just by focusing on a different thing you your increase your self respect and give your soul what it needs. You'd be less likely to be pissed off, and take things personally when something unexpected happens. I'm saying unexpected because you wouldn't interpret it as "unpleasant" anymore.

If you change the belief that "nobody likes you" to the belief that "you deserve to be loved", then first and foremost you would start liking yourself. In that case, even if somebody really screws you over, you wouldn't worry about it that much anymore because you wouldn't be basing your personality on what others think of you or what others do to you. The only person from whom you need love is yourself. If you can't give yourself this, then you're going to have to beg for love from other people and you know that you're not always going to get it.

You get what you radiate. If you radiate love and positivity then it's impossible for others not to honor this with love and positivity in return. This can only happen if you look for love within yourself.

The future of Turkey and The Pussycat Dolls

Hello everyone!
I'd like to infringe the principles upon which I've founded this website and share with you a pretty hillarious event that happened to me today. I was returning home from a movie theatre this evening and I hopped into one of the "minibus"es that I always take to go home. For those of you who don't know, these minibuses are locally very popular, primitive transportation vehicles with drivers who can be, suffice it to say, "quite a character". They look somewhat like the one below, except that most of them are worn out and generally overcrowded.

As I got in the minibus, I heard a Pussycat Dolls song coming from the stereo, which was unusual but not surprising. Even though American Pop is not the music of choice of your common minibus driver, some of them prefer listening to it or even to rap or hiphop as they drive along. However, as I've raised my head after handing in the money, I was dumbfounded with the sight of two LCD screens manually placed in the two cornerns of the minibus: a bigger one installed right behind the driver's seat, and a smaller one in the top right corner where the driver can conveniently see. What was actually playing was a video of the Pussycat Dolls in a satellite channel that mostly the upper-crust Turks can afford. (Translation into colloquial chi-ce: amcam teknoloji yapmis!!) I was certainly impressed by the innovative creativity and the determination of the person who came up with the idea of installing hi-tech satellite television in the sub-par minibus. As I was riding along today, I've watched the videos of the Pussycat Dolls, Xibit and Eminem, consecutively. I've also taken pictures of it with my cell phone; I wish I knew how to transfer them to my computer. There must certainly be a sociological lesson to be learnt from this, in the "what's really happenin' here?!" sense, but I leave it up to the reader to come up with his own conclusion.

My next posts will be about blaming other things/people as an excuse for retiring from life and my first meditaiton club meeting, quite possibly consecutively.

Thanks to all the good luck wishers. I think it worked!! At least during this morning when I had a car accident and didn't get hurt when I could have been injured.

Wish me luck!

For reasons to be announced later, if you happen to be reading this post, wish me luck and have your fingers crossed that I don't screw up. I need some karma, big time.

Thou shalt not eat! (without knowing the calorie content)

I was astounded by the text message that I got in my cell phone this morning. Apparently, my service provider has decided to do the society such a good deed that it makes you go O-M-G-W-T-F?! The message goes something like this:

"type 'calories-space-the name of the food you'd like to inquire about' and send it to the number XXXX. (Example: calories rice). Learn the calories of the foods. Each message costs blah blah blah…"

Wow! Such a novelty approach to dieting! I wonder whom they're targeting with this spectacular service... Let's assume that you have an eating disorder and can't eat anything without knowing exactly how many calories there are in the food you're eating. Let's also assume that you're away from the internet and cannot reach the informational database that would foster your eating disorder. In that case, your local cell phone service provider is there to help!! You can immediately learn how many calories there are in your food for a price and accordingly restrict your intake! At the end, everyone's happy.

I wonder which exploiter marketing genius assholes came up with this idea. It's really bothering (and sad) because I believe that it wouldn't be there if there were no demand for it. The other problem is that these tiny messages concerning beauty and weight issues are everywhere and are so easy to notice if you look out for what's being fed into your brains everyday. Once they accumulate however, they can have a big impact on people’s physical and psychological health. And they do. How can’t they? People literally don’t know what to do with themselves because they’re getting mixed messages from their surroundings everyday and the extent of this is so intense that these messages get implanted somewhere in their subconscious regardless of their validity. “You should eat but you should not eat because then you’ll get fat”. “You should only eat if you are thin. If you are a woman, and weigh anywhere above 10% below your natural weight then you’re not beautiful and thus you’re not even a person anymore. In that case, you don’t deserve to eat”. (They’re also concerned about our HEALTH!! but that’s another issue to talk about). People then get bewildered because they can’t figure out what’s the healthiest way to live, the best way to look etc. and they don’t know what to do with themselves. They might as well send text messages to my so-called cell phone service provider just to feel assured that they’re doing the right thing.

Can they tell me how many calories it takes to respect and nourish one’s body?

On Obsessions

Even though we want to get rid of our harmful obsessions, we hold on to them for certain practical reasons. We woudn't be keeping them if they weren't serving a purpose for us. First of all, an obsession-free future would intimidate us. It would drag us into a realm of unknown and make us scared because we woundn't know what to expect. Instead, we prefer not to change the status quo, because it is what we are accustomed to and we know what is awaiting us. The second thing is getting rid of our obsessions would force us to deal with the real problem: the source of the obsession itself. In a sense, it would make us start living again because it would make us question our beliefs, feel our feelings, stop procrastinating and do what we need to do. Obsessions are self constructed veils that curtain our problems. We hold on to them because they make us feel safe and protect us from the "real world". Step one to becoming a more conscious individual is to recognize this fact.

Imagination

I think I have found something that's lacking in my life: imagination. Einstein might have said it before, but it took me a great deal of ruminations to comprehend that imagination is really more important than knowledge. It gives you the inspiration and the motivation to do things. More importantly, it makes you notice things that you haven't even bothered to see before. It makes your life a lot more colorful than the way it currently is.

Some notes for the faithful reader ;))

I'm learning new things everyday some of which being very hard to articulate. Maybe I should write a cliff-notes version of a few ones that I feel most strongly about:

• Pain and uncomfortable feelings are cyclical. I never thought that they would go away sooner or later if I didn't resist them so much.
• Forms, thoughts and most events are temporary and shouldn't be a legitimate reason for happiness or sorrow.
• It helps a great deal to catch irrational beliefs/value jugdements at the moment they arise and deal with them without giving them the chance to get you.
  
• Resistance shows itself in many forms such as self-victimization, frustration, despair, depression, fear etc. None of these behaviors are constructive and they will not assist you in accomplishing anything by any means.
  

More to come in the nearest future...

By the way, I'd like to announce that my friend has had a baby boy just two days ago!! His name is Oscar Yuxuan and is going to be the cutest half Sweedish and half Singaporean boy ever!! Welcome to the world little fella! I wish I were born yesterday too.

Do these pants make my insecurity look big?

We are living in a society which tells you that you are not O.K. just the way you are, especially when you're a woman. And by this, I don't even mean the unrealistic idealized images of women that you see on TV or magazines everyday. It's utterly stupid to look at the women on the cover of fashion magazines and feel ugly or bad about yourself. By "society", I'm rather referring to people around me, especially other women. (Not necessarily close friends or acquintances, but people that I interact with everyday). I think that it's not men or media's unrealistic expectations that are most detrimental to a women's self image. I seriously think that it is other women, or it has been in my case. Every time I witness someone looking gorgeous complain about her fat, her face or whatever, my self esteem goes a little lower. Even though I'm totally aware that this is irrational.

First of all, if those women are not aware of their beauty and cannot cherish it, it's the number one indication that beauty does not gurarantee happiness. Then, why do we see beauty as magic potion that is going to heal all the problems in our lives? Why do we wait to get beautiful to start living? I have known enough women, looking thin but extremely unhealty and miserable. I have also known quite a few women who has slept with a lot of men but still have a very low self esteem. I don't think that hurting yourself in the quest for beauty is about men.(You might think so if you're a teenager, but as you grow up you realize it isn't.) It's about proving something to the outside world. It's about making a point that you don't even quite know. Maybe it's about deciding how much you're worthy of being loved by comparing yourself to other women. After all, you wouldn't feel that there is anything wrong with you if all the other women looked just as the way you did.

I might have diverged from my initial point a little bit, but my point is that I just want to be over with being negatively influenced by other women around me. Most women that I know are on a diet, somewhat restricting or starving herselves, has previously had plastic surgery or are spending 3 hours a day in front of the mirror for the sake of looking more attractive. I no longer want to witness this and feel bad about myself just because other women are feeling bad about themselves. I chose to invest my time on something more meaningful, something beyond the mere appearance. That way, I will know that I will be able to better handle hardships whenever they come. To look good is of course important but looking better is not going to make a difference in your life if you don't have the self esteem to go with it.

Paradoxical Commandements

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

by Dr. Kent M. Keith

Having a bad day?

One thing I realised that I should do when I'm having a bad day is to first acknowledge that I'm having a bad day. Things are just not going the way that I wanted them to go and there is nothing I can do to change what happens. Resisting, denying or fighting against the situation will just make things worse. Such actions would only serve to hide your feelings just like sweeping a bunch of dirt under the carpet. The feelings are there to be felt. And what happens doesn't mean that you're a bad person, that you mess things up, or that you don't deserve the basic emotional necessities that every human being is entitled to. It just means that you've had a bad day and the past should be history.

I feel that beneath most anger, lies a lot of pain. And the resistance to the false thought that you don't deserve to be loved, which you've made yourself believe subconsciously.

This money monger of a shrink that I've seen today gave me some exercises to do for the rest of the week: I'm supposed to write down what I have done for the sake of "love" and "goodness" everyday. The thing is, this would make me do things just because I have to do them, not because I want to do them. Then I wouldn't be acting like myself anymore. I'm gonna try doing it for a week though. But, I doubt that this shrink is "the one" for me.

Self Parenting?

I don't remember where I've seen this before but it goes something like this: "you should love yourself like a parent loves his child and treat yourself the way a mother would treat her baby". I'm sort of nervous about this whole self-parenting thing. Who gets to decide the right way to parent? But still, there must be some universal things that are desired in a good parent. I believe that a good parent should accept her child the way she is and still love her despite her shortcomings. (You can still oppose me on this one. What if the child is doing crack? There is nothing acceptable about that. But I'm referring to more "uncontrollable" aspects such as physical appearance or some chararter trait that has been a part of that person's "ego" for so long that it's hard to get rid of.) I assume that self-acceptance makes it easer for oneself to deal with her shortcomings. You have to start the change from the inside. Then, maybe one day you might eventually realize that some of those "shortcomings" are really magnified by the self.

Perception of misery

What does it take for one to say “I have all the reasons to be depressed”?

During the summer, most of my complaints went something like this: “I still don’t have a job and still don’t feel like doing anything about it, I’m such a lazy bitch” or “Gee, my ass looks big, my legs are too fat”. (mostly the latter, sadly). I also can’t do without mentioning my constant pissed off state towards the stupidity, jealousy and the fake-blondness of the common Turkish girl. During the summer, I sometimes thought that my life really sucked. (Needless to say that those thoughts were false and temporary)

Then came a sudden realization along with a heavy feeling of guilt, after reading the blog of a Lebanese friend written during last summer's Israeli occupation. I'd never really contemplated about what war does to somebody’s state of mind. Somewhere in her blog, she wrote: “All the time that I have spent structuring and maintaining, organizing and deciding, all the effort that I have made into building a self seems to have been broken against this enormous hegemonic body that is forcing its existence on me.” That really struck me. I never had to suffocate from the smell of dead bodies or constantly hear the sound military planes flying over my head and live with the fear that they might drop a bomb or two and I (or worse the people I love) might get killed any second.

Can it be true that, all the effort that you’ve put into establishing a sense of self, everything that you stand for can become meaningless under such great duress? And if so, why do I still worry about the size of my butt? Shouldn’t I be grateful that I’m in a state to worry about my butt or other trivialities in the first place?

I guess it all boils down to that famous quote from The Fight Club: “We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives”.

I learned how to upload photos today! It's like my life has found a new meaning. I'm hoping to make an extravagant comeback.