Living Under Scarcity

Will you marry me?

Well-Being is a Skill

Build an igloo... Can't be arsed!

For survivalists, hippies and general outdoor types, the igloo is also something natural and therefore obviously better than anything man-made like a nylon tent. You can´t find loads of websites devoted to the construction of igloos and I'm quoting honestly one of them:

'Building an igloo is easy and fun; much warmer than a tent and can be built just about anywhere. It will take between three and six hours.'

I don't know where to begin with that statement.
'Warmer than a tent'? Yeah, maybe, but not warm enough for me. I bet my house with the heating on full is miles warmer.

'Can be built just about anywhere'? Right, there is at least a metre's depth of snow so hard that you have to cut it with a special snow saw. My, it's so convenient, it's like setting up a deckchair.

But here's the killer:
'Building an igloo is easy and fun... It will take between three and six hours.' Well, somebody stop me! I'm putting on my thermals right now. I can't believe people aren't building igloos all the time! Six hours in subzero temperatures cutting up snow with a saw? While the other guy with the nylon tent has not only erected it, he's cooked a three-course meal, had a good night's sleep and got up again for breakfast. The only person I've ever seen comfortable in an igloo is Pingu.

Building a teepee (also, obviously, much better than a nylon tent) is pretty much the same kind of back-breaking labour involving a dozen or so thirteen-foot poles and three miles of canvas. Don't forget to include smoke flaps and all joins must be hand stitched – oh, dear, it's raining.

People don't need to live in tents, there are houses and flats purpose-built for living in. Camping has never appealed to me apart from the cheapness – I like that about it – and you can do it in England, but if you must make things difficult for yourself by living where there's no running water or electricity, why make the process of tent building so laborious? Even the Native Americans don't bother to live in tents these days.

The TV presenter Bear Grylls is the kind of person who loves building tents out of canvas or houses out of snow, or beds out of stoat droppings but only because he can make money out of it through TV shows that dreamy fantasists will watch. And bear Grylls isn't stupid; he doesn't stay in the tent – after a day's filming he goes back to a hotel.

By building stuff like igloos and teepees you are supposed to become more like those deeply spiritual and wise people who used to live in them and whom the white, liberal middle classes, exploited years before we were born. The telltale sign of the aspiring Arapaho or wannabe Wappinger, who would perhaps rather be running with wolves on a hillside than running a family saloon, is the Dreamcatcher in the bedroom. So let's add this to the list...
Richard Wilson, in Can't Be Arsed

Gender and brain... Beware of speculation elevated to the status of facts!

"Then consider female ambition. In the 50s women appeared to have fewer ambitions beyond the confines of the home. When they got married, they quit their jobs. But as the barriers have come down, women have stampeded into the workplace, they've stampeded into previously male domains and they've worked hard to succeed there and they have succeeded there despite often having to put up with family unfriendly workplace policies and exhausting second shift of child care and house work, less pay than their counterparts, unconscious discrimination and in some cases work environments that are openly hostile to women.

Now this extraordinary social change in women's ambitions has presumably taken place in the absence of any such remarkable changes in their hardwiring."

Cordelia Fine

The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling

"Fairytale Castle" by Mikalojus Konstantinus Ciurlionis (1909)

Fantástico artigo, aqui

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes: aqui

Hedonometer (medidor de felicidade): aqui

Hedonometer - medidor de felicidade

It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, we’re very good at measuring economic indices and this means we tend to focus on them. With hedonometer.org we’ve created an instrument that measures the happiness of large populations in real time.

Aqui

The shapes of stories

When we hold space, we release control and we honour differences

HOLDING SPACE

"It means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgement and control. [...] To truly support people in their own growth, transformation, grief, etc., we can’t do it by taking their power away (ie. trying to fix their problems), shaming them (ie. implying that they should know more than they do), or overwhelming them (ie. giving them more information than they’re ready for). We have to be prepared to step to the side so that they can make their own choices, offer them unconditional love and support, give gentle guidance when it’s needed, and make them feel safe even when they make mistakes. [...] Keep your own ego out of it. This is a big one. We all get caught in that trap now and then – when we begin to believe that someone else’s success is dependent on our intervention, or when we think that their failure reflects poorly on us, or when we’re convinced that whatever emotions they choose to unload on us are about us instead of them."

Mais aqui. 

The Honest Body Project

Mais aqui

Drive at 100mph

Not that much of a tall order nowadays, as this can quite easily be achieved through sheer carelessness. Modern cars can touch a hundred at the involuntary twitch of a right knee.

But 'toning up' used to be something to brag about, like losing your virginity. The needle nudging up to 100 used to be so scary it made you wobble your steering wheel in disbelief.

These days 130 is probably the target; that, I think, is progress for you.

It was different in Aldous Huxley's day: traveling in a car at 60mph had such an inebriating effect on him that he declared speed 'a new type of drug… an efficient and less harmful substitute for alcohol and cocaine'. Ah, Aldous, you poor fool, on this as on so many things: totally wrong. Never mind the 'less harmful' bit, nothing is ever a substitute for alcohol. It just joins it in the mix, as the hundreds of thousands of people, whose lives have been ruined by drunk drivers since Huxley wrote those words, will testify.

However, it is true there is something intoxicating about a minor infringement of the law, like breaking a speed limit, which makes you feel outrageous for a moment. There's a wonderful scene in the shit-but-still-watchable Roger Moore film, The Man Who Haunted Himself. Roger, an uptight city gent, is on his regular 30mph drive home to Weybridge when he gets a funny look in his eye. The famous eyebrow goes up and the foot goes down. Soon, Rog is doing seventy and appears to be morphing into a different person, and the eyebrow keeps ascending as he accelerates until he smashes his Rover 3-litre into some road works. The car disintegrates, his soul divides in two and another version of himself, more wild and daring and exciting than his old one, usurps his job, wife, house and family. Come on, it could happen. Somewhere out there could be another version of Richard Hammond who says to Jeremy Clarkson, 'piss off, it's your turn to drive the rocket'.

With today's cars, as any incarnation of Richard Hammond will tell you, how fast they go is not an issue, it's how resistant they are to flipping over and breaking up, like Roger Moore's 3-litre. But what is so appealing to humans about speed? Why is it like a drug? Why are we programmed to want to go faster?

I suppose it must have been good news for turnip delivery man in, say, 1930 when he discovered he could get his turnips from Grantham to King's Lynn in less than a week, thanks to his new-fangled motor van. But when sugar-beet man overtook turnip man in his brand new Root Vegetable Van mark II, the envy kicked in.

The problem with speed is that, technology being as it is, someone will always go faster than you. It's a metaphor for the whole of this book. What motivates people to cram their lives full of ever more amazing experiences is their all-consuming desire to have a richer life than anyone else they know. But the law of progress means there will always be a quicker way of doing something around the corner. look at one of the greatest labour-saving devices ever — the lift, or elevator, if this book should turn up in an American remainder bin.

Imagine a box you can walk into that will lift you hundreds of feet in the air to save you walking up some stairs! Even with such time-saving devices as lifts people cannot bear to wait an extra second. Otis Elevators employ dedicated experts in the field of time delays and waiting experiences — they have discovered that even a three-second 'door-dwell' (delay between pressing the door-close button and the doors actually closing) can be too much for some. There is so much unnecessary pressing of the door-close button in Japan and South Korea that building managers have, unbeknownst to the passengers, disabled the door-close function, so its users are pressing it for nothing. They leave the redundant button in place because pressing it makes people feel better.

I used to own a 2CV — a masterpiece of French design. Its size and shape was dictated by the brief to transport a hat-wearing farmer together with his wife and a tray of eggs across a ploughed field. Suffice to say I loved everything about it, especially when heavy motorway traffic allowed me to trundle past various high-performance cars stuck in the outside lane. Very few things have given me greater pleasure than the look on the Porsche driver's face as I crawled by his window.

Unfortunately there must have been another element in the design brief of the 2CV which ensures it rusts through and breaks in half after five years. So now I have a bicycle and, believe me, the effect on other drivers is just the same, if not better than the 2CV. The added beauty being not only can a bike freewheel past slow-moving traffic, it can jump red lights, go the wrong way down one-way streets, cut in front of buses and ride on pavements. Car drivers often rather stupidly ask, why is it that cyclists always jump red light? The answer is simple: because we can and you can't. Your anger brings us joy.

Fortunately, there is now a 'slow movement' afoot in Europe; it rejects haste and impatience and over-stimulation. It began in Italy and has now established a set of conditions (a bit like those for joining the Euro) that towns and cities must fulfill if they want to join. Appropriately, Ludlow in Shropshire and Diss in Norfolk are already in. Why not lobby for your town to join today?

Richard Wilson, in Can't Be Arsed

Relações

Question = What are the core reasons or the core things you see over and over, that either end or make a relationship challenging to be in. What are the challenges that come up over and over that you see?

Answer = There is always three questions, right?

 — What's a thriving relationship?

 — What can go wrong?

 — How do you fix it?

I think there are a number of things in a relationship that become corner stones of the demise. I'm not going to list them in order but they are all part of each other.

— INDIFFERENCE

— CONTEMPT

— NEGLET

— VIOLENCE

These are probably the four most important. I'm not talking about big violence. Micro aggressions are plenty. 

Indifference: when you start to feel like the other person fundamentally is not really caring about you or you don't care about them. What they feel, what they think, what they're about. It's more than losing of interest. It's also when you are indifferent you degrade the other person. They are less important to you. They don't matter. And ultimately what we feel in relationships is that we matter. It's the essential reason for connecting to people. We are creatures of meaning: "I matter to you, to some one. You care about me. You want my well being. You're proud of me. You want good for me. You're benevolent". All of that.

When you are indifferent, the whole thing goes. Then you start to taste that cold that creeps in. That sense of estrangement, that complete disconnect.

Neglet: when people just basically take each other for granted. They take more care of their car than of their partner, or their dog, or their yard, their business. Anything. Everything gets priority. Everything gets reviewed, evaluated, attended to… People have this idea that they put it all in when they were dating and then once they seal the knot, it's like now they don't have to do squat anymore. And they go into this complete sense of complacency, laziness. It's amazing, they just think this thing is going to live on it's own. Like a cactus.

Violence: the abuse, the level of disrespect. Most people talk nicer to anybody else than their partner when a relationship degrades. Because you can get away with it. Because if you talk like this at work you're gone! Because if you talk like this to the police you're gone! Because if you talk like this on the street you're being punched!

But with your partner you've got that sense that they're gonna be there anyway. They're just gonna take it because it's family. And family is this kind of thing that doesn´t dissolve so easily. So you can just lash out at them and talk to them with a tone, and a dismissal. That is phenomenal. I'm not talking about physical violence and those big things.

Contempt: I think contempt is the top one. Contempt is the killer of them all. because in contempt there the degradation: "you're nothing, nothing. I can kill you with that one gaze, with that one eyebrow that goes up… With, what the fuck do you think you are?". And that's it. You're done.

Rethinking infidelity ... a talk for anyone who has ever loved

Life While You Wait

"Reality is that which doesn't go away even if you don't believe in it", some one said.
"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.", some one else said.

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,

trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Humanos, demasiado humanos

"O mais doloroso era ter de guardar no íntimo todo o sofrimento. Não me sentia no direito de me queixar — aliás, ninguém teria compreendido que o fizesse. E ele, durante esse tempo, deixara de me dar parte de tudo o que o agitava, de tudo o que o atormentava. Daí em diante, era a outros que confiava as suas emoções, as suas dores, as suas ilusões, as suas decepções. Quanto a mim, ele não poderia suportar a ideia, disso estava certa, de que eu pudesse sofrer com qualquer faceta da minha vida. O meu marido tinha necessidade de me julgar insensível, inalterável, tão sólida como uma rocha. A rocha na qual se apoiava. Era uma esposa perfeita, uma mãe perfeita. Um prodígio de equilíbrio e de bom-senso. E, aos olhos de todos, constituíamos uma família ideal.

 Mas, então, eu já não podia desempenhar aquela comédia. Chegara ao limite.

A mãezinha teve, então, uma reacção pasmosa. Desatou a rir. Como podia ela?... De mim, que lhe tinha confiado toda a minha dor, todo o meu desgosto?... Olhava-a, siderada. Ela abraçou-me.

— Não estou a fazer troça de ti, minha filha — murmurou. — Mas devo confessar que acho divertido ver a que ponto o teu marido, o ateu do teu marido, se conduz exactamente como o mais dos ortodoxos. Com certeza sabes, ou talvez te tenhas esquecido, que é isso que, nos talmudistas, se exige duma mulher: fazer tudo para que o marido tenha tempo de sobra para estudar. Ele, não sei o que ele estuda, mas com certeza que, para si, tem o mesmo valor que o Talmude para os nossos barbudos.

Olhou-me meigamente e, com um gesto muito doce, enxugou uma lágrima que me corria pela cara. Não me disse mais nada sobre o assunto."

Nicolle Rosen, in Martha Freud

Molecules Of Emotion

Why do we feel the way we feel? How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health? Are our bodies and minds distinct from each other or do they function together as parts of an interconnected system? In her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries. Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- body-minds -- in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

Creating the Work You Love

meditação e sistema imunitário

"Buddhist traditions claim that meditation decreases psychological distress and promotes well-being (e.g., Dalai Lama and Cutler, 2009). Therefore, we investigated the effects of a 3-month meditation retreat on telomerase activity and two major contributors to the experience of stress."
Aqui

Yeshi Dhonden

Yeshi Dhonden is a Buddhist monk and was Dalai Lama’s personal physician for about twenty years from 1960 to 1980. His primary goal was to prove that these Tibetan formulas were safe and non toxic and have successfully done it. He now uses Tibetan herbal medicines and diet for curing cancer. Since 1967, he has long list of patients seeking his care and help at his clinic in Mcleod Ganj, Dharamsala.

Cancer and emotions

"It is becoming increasingly clear that stressful life events can affect cancer growth and metastasis by modulating nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. The purpose of this review is to briefly describe the process by which stress may potentiate carcinogenesis and how reducing body stress may prevent cancer growth and progression. The opioid peptide β-endorphin plays a critical role in bringing the stress axis to a state of homeostasis. We have recently shown that enhancement of endogenous levels of β-endorphin in the hypothalamus via β-endorphin neuron transplantation suppresses stress response, promotes immune function, and reduces the incidence of cancer in rat models of prostate and breast cancers. The cancer-preventive effect of β-endorphin is mediated through the suppression of sympathetic neuronal function, which results in increased peripheral natural killer cell and macrophage activities, elevated levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines, and reduced levels of inflammatory cytokines. β-endorphin inhibition of tumor progression also involves alteration in the tumor microenvironment, possibly because of suppression of catecholamine and inflammatory cytokine production, which are known to alter DNA repair, cell-matrix attachments, angiogenic process, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Thus, β-endorphin cell therapy may offer some therapeutic value in cancer prevention."
Aqui.

Tumor marker TMCA

TMCA is one of cancer diagnosis method developed by Dr. Tsuneo Kobayashi