So today was my first day on the dunkan diet. I do not know if it will actually work. I started my day with a pancake made the night before with oat bran, 0% greek yoghurt and an egg. I have another pancake for tomorrow morning. I will take pictures when I make it again tomorrow night. Overall however, it isn't very good, but I will make do.

I then took thai chicken patties with a garlic dip to work. Everyone commented on how strong the garlic smelled, but actually it was only a very small piece. I forgot to add the ginger to the chicken paste, so it wasn't as tasty as it could have been. i think next time I will try changing the dip which had a yoghurt ase to a more soy sauce/spice dip. Or perhaps vinegar would be nice.

I finished the day with something very tasty: a mini corn-fed chicken with soy sauce, worcester sauce, sesame oil, chinese mala spice, ginger, salt & seaweed, pepper, water, onions and chives. I made it in the oven, but for tomorrow lunch I have fried some chicken breast to have at work.

Overall, my feelings for the diet are weird. It is supposed to destroy all the fat and transform it into muscle. We shall see how it works. I do not know if it will work, but I do feel a little weird, as if I'm missing something. I'd really like to bite into some bread, but that I absolutely cannot. Bread is over! But I will make konjak noodles for Thursday lunch.

D:1/180

It's very difficult for me to cheer myself up.

Life at the moment is hard. Waking up everyday at 7:15, and only going to bed around midnight, with little to no time to myself. The stress of impending exams, a long commute, and numerous personal issues make it so that I find life difficult at the moment.

Today, feeling tired and drained, I wanted to take some time to myself. Little did I know that I would just end up being talked about on the train, which obviously would bring my mood down. To lift my spirits, I called the one person I thought could cheer me up, but in the end it just ended up hammering the nails in my coffin of moodiness.

I wanted to write about something happy, about my views on inner beauty and the importance of valuing yourself and others by the love in their heart.

I wanted to write about the need to rid oneself of the pangs of jealousy or envy we often have when vying other people's achievements. I wanted to talk about my own desires to cope with these feelings.

I wanted to write about how to cheer myself on, I will create a song and sing it in the street, out loud, as others walk by staring at me, or about how I try to study regardless of the circumstances, and I recite out loud on my own in public. I wanted to talk about how I try not to care.

But in the end, I cannot lie to myself. I do care. And by lying to myself, I just deepen the already all too present cuts. So instead of writing, I shall go to bed and bid you all goodnight.

Aujourd'hui, ce sera en Francais.

Il m'arrive souvent d'entrer en conflit avec les gens. Ce n'est pas un trait de caractere dont je suis fiere.

Mes niveaux de stress, ainsi que les circonstances, font que ce n'est jamais facile au jour le jour. Aujourd'hui encore, une bonne femme m'a drolement enervee. Essayant tranquillement de travailler, j'avais pris le siege a cote de moi pour mon sac. Justement, quand je cherchais une calculatrice dans mon sac, une femme d'une trentaine d'annees s'approche de moi. Siege vide en face, et en diagonale, mais non. Elle veut s'asseoir a cote de moi, et quand je la regarde pour demander, "Serieux?" elle me retourne le regard. Pendant ce temps, le siege en face de moi me devisageait aussi du regard.

J'ai essaye de calmer mon stress en ecrivant sur mes papiers, et bien que ca m'ait aide, quand je l'ai vue marmonner quelque chose je n'ai pas pu m'empecher de marmonner a mon tour "Stupid." Mdr, elle arrive a galop comme un taureau dans une torrera, "Blablabla, seats are for people, not for bags, if you ever call me stupid again you will have problems. Because you don't know me." Et donc, elle se permet de me menacer avec un accent de l'Europe de l'Est. Franchement, je me suis demande, mais que compte-t-elle faire? Elle sait tres bien qu'elle avait tort, qu'il y avait une abondance de sieges autour de nous. Et moi, j'avais perdu mon surligneur par sa faute, et je n'avais rien pu faire pendant la demi-heure sur ce train. Et je lui ai dit "Byyyyye Stupid!" et je suis partie prendre mon deuxieme train.

Bien entendu, je ne l'ai pas revue depuis. Je ne sais pas a quoi elle pouvait penser en me menacant, allait-elle appeler son pays d'origine et dire "Oh non, quelqu'un m'a appelee stupide sur le train!" Mais bon, encore une bonne femme qui sait et veut enerver son monde.

Je n'aime vraiment pas le souterrain. Je n'aime vraiment pas le metro. Et je n'aime vraiment pas habiter loin de l'universite. Vivement la fin. Plus qu'un mois et des.

 'Tis true. Very true.

I do have tunnel vision. I have wanted to write for a few days, but each time I tell myself off for wanting time to myself given that my looming exams are just around the corner. But now I shall give myself a quick break, before I tackle some more work.

There are a few things I would like to share today. Lack of time makes for lack of effort, and hence I shall start by copying and sharing a poem by Philip Larkin.

Why should I let the toad work

 Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

 And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

 With its sickening poison -

Just for paying a few bills!

 That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:

 Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

 They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

 With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

 they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,

 Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets - and yet

 No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough

 To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff

 That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

 Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

 And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney

 My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

 All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other

 One's spiritual truth;

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

 When you have both.

I think the theme is self-explanatory. I shan't comment on the meaning, after all poetry is meant to resonate in each and everyone both in similar and divergent ways.

But I shall explain how I relate to this poem. The toad that squats in me has been croaking for many years, and although I may not yet actually be earning a penny, the amount of labour the toad demands of my penniless self makes me wonder how I can stand him at all. I too wonder at times why I cannot let things go and see where they take me. This is something I would like to try to learn, albeit not right now as my exams are looming.

The theme of letting yourself go and accepting yourself for who you are is very nicely portrayed in Disney's famous movie Frozen. So widely distributed, I won't give a link to the original song. However, today I came across a version that I found quite amusing given my circumstances.

 

I wish I could feel this way. But cannot not care. Whenever I have such thoughts, I cannot help but remember all the great things I want to accomplish in my life, as well as the amount of effort I have already put into my studies and experience. I am tired though. Exhausted actually. I want this to stop. And I would like to be carefree for a while. I really wish I could take a break from everything soon.

I must return to my Accounting Analysis, and my Statistical Analysis, and my... Oh you get the gist.

So yesterday I mentioned that I had seen two different movies. I talked about the first one at length but I did not have time to properly describe the second one. The second one was also a comedy (I need those these days) called "Qu'est ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu?" (in English, What have we done to God?)


The movie is a reflection on interracial and intercultural relationships. Three daughters of a very French, very Catholic and very bourgeois family each marry a man of immigrant descent: a Muslim named Rachid, a Jew named David, a man of Chinese descent named Chao. The final daughter, Laure, is about to marry her black Ivorian boyfriend, to the great despair of her parents.

I found the movie to be great fun. I laughed a lot, but most importantly, it made me reflect on my own similar experiences. There are many issues I would have liked to address, but time constraints will only allow me to discuss one for now.

Sympathy vs. Empathy: how to understand others

Having been raised by a more or less atheist and very open-minded Northern European mother and very Catholic, fairly conservative Southern European father, I have to say that cultural differences do not make family life easy. Even if you stay within a single continent, the mentalities can vary widely, and it is never easy to change or see things from the other person's point of view. I myself have great difficulties seeing things as other people would see them. This does not mean that one does not take into consideration the circumstances of others, but merely transposes their own thoughts and opinions on the other person's situation. This simplification makes it a lot easier to understand, but it can lead to some counter-productive results.

From personal experience, I find Catholics (Christians?) tend to do this a lot. The Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would have them do unto you") is widely quoted, and yet quite misleading. Originally meant to keep everyone happy and satisfied, it overlooks the reality that each person's happiness is derived from different elements, and that one cannot simply transpose one's own desires onto others. It leads to a combination of condemnation if others express their different desires or perceptions of the world, and sympathy as those involved tend to be incapable (or perhaps unwilling) of altering their own perceptions in order to understand the other person's situation.

One might think that sympathy is not a bad thing. Indeed, in French the word "sympa" or "sympathique" is commonly used to mean a "nice" person. But in reality, sympathy can be very similar to condescension. If anything, it may even dismiss other people's pain completely. Therefore, one ought to focus on Empathy, which is the process of putting oneself in someone else's shoes. To illustrate this, this is a video that I recently watched that I personally really liked: 

In the movie, those who tend to make these mistakes are the parents, as the movie does not focus at all on the issues within the different couples. Rather, it is about the parents coping with their children's choices in life. The parents sympathise with their sons-in-law, but do not empathise with them. They know very little about their sons-in-law, and in all honesty refuse to try. It is only half-way through the movie do they all start taking steps towards understanding each other. The mother starts to take Zumba lessons, she makes three roast Turkeys: Halal, Pekin-style, and Kosher, and she connects with the mother of her soon-to-be son-in-law on their favorite part of the Bible.

The sons-in-law have similar issues among themselves, stereotyping the others and accusing them of various things. One thing I did rather enjoy about this is that the movie does show that minorities can also be just as racist against one another as "White" people can. This is a discussion I will have another time, but the concept that White people cannot be the target of racism or that minorities cannot be racist has always perplexed me.