Category Archives: meta

De recuerdos, de memorias

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Un recuerdo como flecha malvada
penetra mi sien destrozando mi concentración,
y como mis labios ya no tocan la tierra
recojo mis añoranzas y empieza la canción.

Nada es igual, pero todo equivalente,
siento la brisa moverse y saboreo el aroma.
Siento las vibraciones de las cuerdas
novatas y estúpidas, pero no, no es broma.

De sueños quietos y azules salen
voces que acarician pero no saben escribir;
entre prismas y señales veo jueces, muchos,
perplejos que dicen sin saber que decir.

Una sonrisa que sabe a naranja tangerina
quiero; tanas cosas, tantas cosas quiero,
sentir mi camisa, al caminar, rozar mi espalda.
Cuando recuerdo las cosas que tengo, no muero.

Los recuerdos, las memorias, no confundas
el presente; nunca nos deja, se ríe de nosotros.
El tiempo va lamiendo su camino a nuestros cerebros
para palpitar después, expresiones en nuestros rostros.

Todavía queda suficiente alcohol para soñar,
no para no recordar, sino para interesantear.
Hacerlos, hacerlas, mientras más pueda, interesantes.
Tu cree lo que quieras; déjame, la verdad, saborear.

Jamiel Almeida Taveras
2012-01-13

10 Things I Know to be True

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Cleo Abram posted an interesting “conversation starter” on TED.com conversations, here’s a link to the thread: We can learn by exchanging and discussing our own lists of “10 Things I Know to be True.”

This post, as the author mentions, is inspired in this TED talk: Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …

In this post, she says (as the title states) that we can learn if we share those few things that we KNOW are true. Yes, nitpickers will say “knowing” is subjective to beliefs and blah blah. I’m not interested in those comments, if you want/like just share 10 (or whatever number) of the things you know to be true, and let-be or learn from the few things that other people know.

Here’s MY list, in no particular order:

  1. Anyone can learn something even from the least expected people/things.
  2. Not everything that’s useful is fun, and not everything that is fun is useful.
  3. Action trumps words and thoughts.
  4. My perception of the world probably isn’t 1:1 to reality, but probably neither anyone else’s.
  5. Everything in the course of this lifetime, good and bad, has an end.
  6. You can’t describe a taste or a smell very effectively.
  7. Happiness doesn’t depend on what you have.
  8. The greater the expectations, the greater the effort you have to put into; you get what you put into something.
  9. “Some people like to make life a little tougher than it is” from the song: Tougher than it is by Cake
  10. The veracity of a statement does NOT depend on the who’s uttering it.

The post by Cleo Abram reads:

After listening to Sarah Kay’s beautiful speech and poetry, I tried to write my own list of “10 Things I know to be True.” I learned one thing immediately: I don’t know much. I learned a second thing more slowly: that’s okay! I tried to distill my limited understanding of the world into this list, without being overly philosophical nor literal.

One thing I know to be true, but that is not on my list, was that Sarah Kay was right when she said that if you share your list with a group of people you will find that someone has one thing very similar, someone else has something totally contrary, another person has something you’ve never heard of, and still another has something that makes you think further about something you thought you knew.

So let’s share ours, and find out! What do your lists have on them?

Here’s mine:
1. Fiction can, at times, feel more real than fact.
2. One person, with a good idea, can change our world.
3. There are things about our universe that we will never understand.
4. #3 is not an excuse to stop trying.
5. Everyone has a story worth hearing.
6. There is always another side to the story they tell.
7. Questions can sometimes teach more than their answers.
8. Children can sometimes teach more than their parents.
9. Everyone should travel.
10. No one’s truth is universal.

Caffeine & my all-nighter-early-wakeup-mix

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Disclaimer: DON’T BE STUPID. Read what caffeine does to you and KNOW how to dose it. It’s a drug, and causes tolerance, dependence and withdrawal. Be smart and do NOT abuse it. It’s always better to time/program yourself and still get your full night’s sleep. Nothing can replace it. And do yourself a favor, don’t do this often.

Given a scenario in which I’m still awake for whatever reason at 04:30 on a Monday-Friday (which means I’ll need to wake up in 1h30m if I went to sleep then and there), I have two options, either I go to sleep and be refreshed a bit, or just skip the whole thing and be a zombie for the rest of the day, which is 18h. I’ve explored what happens to me when I’m sleep deprived, and those effects are undesired. I can do a couple of things to wake up early if I’m going to sleep less than 4h, although most are VERY unreliable and will wake me up after I’ve had 3h of sleep at best (I know myself that well).

One of the things I can do to go to sleep between 04:30 and 05:00, and still wake up at 06:00 in time to give my dog some food and water, do my morning exercises, check my emails and whatnot is have my “all-nighter-early-wakeup-mix” (to give it a name). It is a kind of “caffeine nap” but adjusted to my body’s metabolism and caffeine tolerance.

The mix goes like this:

  • 1x 200mg caffeine tablet (this one is what does the trick, the rest is optional, and kind of a comfort food :P )
  • 8oz. of Milk
  • 2tbsp. of cocoa powder
  • 1/2tsp. of vanilla extract
  • 1/2tsp. of salt
  • 1/2tbsp. of sugar (if the cocoa powder used was unsweetened)
  • powdered cinnamon to taste

Good, so you’ve downed a pseudo-chocolate-milkshake and 200mg of anhydrous caffeine. Now you’re ready to sleep 1h to 1h30m and still be able to hear and wake up with your regular alarm IF you have a metabolism like mine.

Sleep, I need it

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I’ve realized that sleep deprivation (on me, and by that I mean not getting the 5-6 hours of sleep I need each day, which I’d like to be more like 8-10) not only causes an all-day feeling of lethargy, it also causes a lot of sensory confusion (e.g., perceiving the smell of bubblegum when you’re smelling cake), short-term memory loss, lack of focus, lack of appetite, and the all-day super-strong longing of my bed and a cool, dark, silent room. Being sleep deprived is something I wasn’t made for, and after years of making myself more efficient at school/work (hence needing a LOT less to spend the night awake), I am less tolerant physiologically-speaking of a night without sleep than I was say 5 years ago.

Another of the adverse effects of sleep-deprivation (on me) is that it alters my basic-bodily-functions’ schedule if you want to call it that, in short, it makes my head think the night is for being awake and the day for sleeping, screws my meal-schedule by altering the times at which I get hungry, etc. creating a jet-lag-like effect, which I honestly don’t like.

So, before I head to try to sleep during this night, I’ll share with you some tips to help you sleep better (except in cases of emergency work-related situations):

  • When you feel you can’t sleep (i.e., insomnia), keep your eyes shut, stay in bed and breathe deeply, release your muscles, focus on all the sounds that are around, and try to keep your mind blank; helps me a lot, and even if I don’t get to sleep, at least I rest.
  • Organize yourself, you should have time to sleep (except in cases of emergency), for more on that, you can check out this previous post of mine :) . Always try to go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time every day, helps maintain the rhythm.
  • Having a reliable alarm clock for waking you up helps avoid those “should I be awake yet” wake-ups before time.
  • Use your bed for sleeping and sleeping only (when you can help it), try not to read, watch tv, or other things you can do out of the bed, so that your head has an “as soon as a pillow touches my ear I shut down” pattern in it. For other things you can’t do out of bed, well… figure that out yourself.
  • Try not to drink too much water or eat a lot shortly before going to bed, that way you won’t need to wake up during the night. This includes alcohol and coffee which might work as diuretics.
  • It helps me to have the room totally dark and with a temperature from cool to cold, and as quiet as possible.

And there you go, I’ll now go to sleep the best I can before going to work tomorrow again.

A new reason to live

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Lenneth

Lenneth

I wasn’t lacking reasons to live, but here’s just a new one, and a strong one at that. This is the daughter of two of the dearest and closest people to me. Her parents gave me the title of co-parent a couple of months back, which I received with honor and with intention and decision to fulfill the role. Now that I see this beautiful child here, I can only feel much stronger in that position.

I’m posting here just to share a little bit the joy of having her in my life now.

I feel her like a little spot of pink in all the see of green that’s my life :) (I like the color green). And even if I can’t fully describe what I felt when I first saw her with words, I know I felt that all in the world will be safe and well if I can continue to see her well. I felt I could stand there by her side seeing her sleep for hours, and I felt the most tremendous burst of joy and tranquility that has ever filled me when I saw her and both her parents well after childbirth.

But… I don’t have enough time…

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I don’t know a lot about Randy Pausch (1960-2008) (Randy’s Homepage and Randy’s Legacy), but some of the little things I do know about him, have served to make my world a bit more comfortable, and he taught me through two lectures.

One of them (His Last Lecture), I saw because it was a featured video on YouTube, and the one on time management was recommended to me by a good teacher (and later showed in class). I’d like to share these things I learned, as well as the lectures I learned them from.

Check them out on YouTube, they’re there, in complete length:
His Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (1:16:27)
His Lecture on Time Management (1:16:22)

So my recommendation is, take 2h 32m 49s of your time and check them out. I think that you, like me, will get more than that time back in “savings” with the stuff you learn from them :) .

If you’d rather see them embedded and/or want to read some points I learned from them, check out the rest of this post.
Continue reading →

Resilience

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Sitting there, feeling bad about something that happened, no matter how big it was, and how bad you feel about it won’t accomplish anything, it is in the past. My humble suggestion is, stand up and take decisions and actions for the present and future, taking the past as a reference only, because:

  1. Feeling bad and not doing anything won’t change the status quo.
  2. Doing whatever you do (up to my knowledge) won’t change the past.

And, if feeling bad won’t change anything, why revolve around that feeling? Not everything happens as you wanted or planned for. Don’t get stuck in a moment when something happened and isn’t under your control, because the world will keep spinning, time will keep flowing, and life goes on. Continue living and moving, working with the knowledge you now have to evade future situations as the one you are feeling bad about at this very moment.

So, is there a difference between your current reality and your desired state? Work to change it, and if you can’t by any means change it, accept it. It’s WAY harder than it sounds, but it is a great “skill” to learn to incorporate in your M.O.

Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.

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I took the pledge (quoted below), have you? I took it WITH a little modification, if I ever do send any other mail that could be seen as resend-able or forward-able to groups of people, I’ll use BCC and ask the recipients to do the same if they are to resend or forward said material.

Note: The following text is a quote of the article on Roger Ebert on Wikipedia (see the original text here).

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Ebert coined the term during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996. He wrote the text which appears above and encouraged everyone to take the pledge. It was subsequently published in the December 1996 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, where Ebert had a regular column, under the title of “Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.”