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.