Music: Good for every moment in your life.

 It is important for me to listen to music the whole day. When I was a child, I learnt music studies, but I cannot play well any instrument. Terrible! Only the day I left the school of music would I realize the mistake I had made. I usually search in youtube some relax music when I am reading a good book. This video is one of my favorite. Not only the artist, but the ambience is amazing. The Alhambra is my place; this kind of music is my religion. I wish I had more time to spend doing that, I wish I could read and listen to Celtic Music more than twice a week…

I would like to share with you this video. It is appropriate if you are stress. Forget the world, focus on yourself.

In response to Estrella’s amazing article: Neuroplasticity

As a psychology student, I can no imagine a better comment like this one. After reading the article (Estrella’s comments too, of course), I should say that there are more than words on it. I have passed a lot of years hearing about how neurons can die, how they will not reproduce anymore. If you remember the cartoons called ‘Once upon a time… Life’, you should know what I am speaking about. These little red blood cells died at the end. Nevertheless, Science confirms nowadays that this is not true. Your neurons can be born in your mature period (not all of them but some specific ones). You will get this with practice. Little did I suspect that this fact could be real; surprisingly, it does.

Estrella told us about the happiness, the importance to find new routines in order to get it. She is right. Our brain is ready to get up if we fall, it is up to us. I would like to add that there are many different new solutions to discover how to be happy. Not only do you come across with them searching by the net, but you may look around and see them. One of this solutions that is coming to my mind is something called ‘Attraction law’. There are so many different ways to face this concept, but in summary deal with the fact that everything you can imagine or think, it will come back to you. If you see in your mind, you will have it. ‘Attraction law’ is in relation with the paragraph before because of the idea of habits. If you think every day that you can get whatever you want, turning your happiness into a routine, you will feel fantastic as a result of training.

To conclude I would like to say that my anxiety disappeared with exercises, I could fight against it with new habits, which support the theory that Estrella brought us. Thanks for your article, I loved it!!!!

RECIPES

No sooner had the class finished yesterday than I put my mind to work. I made a few recipes for all of you, I hope you like them. They are cheap and easy. (The photographs are real. I made them)

Curried couscous with chicken and raisins

Ingredients:

1 cup couscous                                                      ½  cup raisins

1 cup chicken soup                                                1 pinch salt

200 gr breast chicken                                            1 table spoon curry

1 onion, sliced                                                        1 dash black pepper

¼ cup white wine

                                      

Directions:

1.    Fried the onion for five minutes, dice the breast and add to the pan with the salt and the pepper. When the chicken is almost done, add the wine.

2.    After the wine is evaporated, add the curry, the raisins and wait a few minutes. Then, you can put apart the pan.

3.    Meanwhile, hot the chicken soup and stir with the couscous into a container. Cover for three or four minutes.

4.    Stir everything with the couscous and it’s done!

Advices:

You can add other vegetables like zucchini or red and green pepper (add at the same time to the onion).

You can also put some apple to this mixture (add with the raisins).

Sponge cake

Ingredients:

1 white yoghurt (take the yoghurt as a cup)

3 cups of flour                     4 eggs

2 cups of sugar                   1 cup of oil

1 pinch salt                           orange peel

1 table spoon leavening (an envelope) 

Directions:

1.    Put the egg yolks into a container and combine. Add the egg white and the salt. Stir everything. Add the sugar and the yoghurt and combine very quickly until you see a cream.

2.    Mix with the flour slowly, with movements from down to up. Add the leavening and oil, too. When the dough is almost done, add the orange peel and mix a little bit.

3.    Grease the container with oil and flour, put the dough inside and add some sugar on the top.

4.    Bake for 30 or 40 minutes in a preheated oven at 180º. Use a knife to check if it is done. It should be clean when you inserted in the cake.

5.    Let it cool on a table. The house ought to smell very well!!

Time to go, Lady Death

That is the way I remember her,

her wrinkled face, her white hair

her body expanding over the big mattress,

like a huge deformed mass.

That is the way I remember her,

With unintelligible speech

Not comprehending anything

Living prostrating in bed

Just watching life pass by.

Where is that one named Death now?

Where is she, who forgets that wrinkled face?

Maybe taking young people, full of life

Cutting their last breath and happiness

in a cruel, sadden blow

Always doing everything it shouldn’t

Damned Death! Learn to be fair!

Take her to a heavenly place with no pain,

Leave here other people, who should enjoy their life yet,

Don’t scare them anymore.

Nowadays, I still remember her

Because she is still here, in moaning pain

Though she hurts everyone in the middle of her suffering;

She never feels any better

Get the torture out of her, please, Lady Death

Give us a little peace in our lives.

Review

 ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,’ by Isak Dinesen, was first published in 1942 in Winter’s Tales, the second collection of short stories written by this woman. Isak Dinesen was the name how she was best known, but she had a lot of them, as Karen Blixen, for example. She passed through many different tragedies like her father’s suicide at ten years, or the lost of her last love in Africa, where she was famous because of her stories. After this, she came back to Denmark and began to write her first collection of stories.

The plot of the tale it seems to be a simple tale about a sailor, but it goes farther. The main character, Simon, is a boy who one day rescued a falcon. Two years after that, he is a man on his seventeen who meets a girl. With the promise of a kiss he pretends to come back the day after, but he meets Ivan, a Russian sailor whom he has befriended. He runs to Nora, the girl, but he has taken by an old woman (maybe a witch), who helps him to avoid a murder by pretending that he is her son. This woman was the falcon he saved two years before.

Only after reading the tale you realize that it is a simple story which give us a lesson of how helping people can be the best way to live. Not only the lesson, but the transition to a man of the boy (into the typical elements of Dinesen’s fiction) is a point to be considered when you finish ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale’.

Would you reach your happiness in everyplace?

After watching a series named ‘Homeland’ and the article in which we were working in class the last day, adding the video we saw and the new one that Emilio suggested, my request is about how we can be happy. Where is the real problem?

In the show I mentioned before, an American soldier came back from the Iran war (after the fall of the twins towers) under suspicion to have been converted into a Muslim as they are. The problem here is that this man could be a spy and working with the others, a traitor, I mean. But, after six or eight years living in a very bad way, when you have lost your faith and someone offers you a hand, clean your wounds and make you a sense for your life, what would you do? This made me think a lot. 

Only later I watched and read this news it was remained to me the importance to find your own happiness in every situation. If we had a peek at the time magazine again, we would realize that they are fighting for themselves. The examples include people who normalize the way they live. They have a main street where they can buy things, even steal like they would do in another place. The most impression I had was that these people protect the area as a real home.

No far away from here we have the videos about the refugees. The one that was watching in class spoke about a NGO and the protection that it offers to the children. The link our teacher wrote in the website lead to suppose more example of this kind of life. In the first one we could appreciate how a teenager had to lie to their brothers about their parents. She hoped they were alive, but she told them they were death because of the protection of a new life for the children. In Emilio’s video, you can find hope too.. a father tells their children about their grandparents, making them to see how lucky they are because they are all together. In other situations, the family is also close, but they are relatives, not parents.

The point is that you can have a glance not only to the part of the feelings they have, but to the whole. All of us are trying to build our life as better as we could. Sometimes we have problems with money, maybe drugs, familiar troubles, diseases, it doesn’t matter. All of us choose a way to find peace and redemption in everything we do. So, if you ask whether you can be able to be happy with all this problems in the world, the answer is yes, of course. You can do that. Just think about they have found their own way. Happiness is not so far away from any settlement. When I peer at this kind of news, I feel that I can do something for them, like give some money, or even go there to set up some tents. In my really inside, I consider that, more than feel sorry for them, I admire people who can find flowers into the garbage.

Kronen's stories...

It has passed a lot from the last time. However, I am with you, my classmates… and I would like to share the first poem I read in English. It is not mine, of course, I will publish mine when it had finished. Meanwhile, I give you a little present. This was from a film I watched when I was seventeen. I loved this film at the moment I watched, but the book is always more interesting than the scene. The title is “Historias del Kronen”, a Spanish film from the 90’s where you can discover the dark side of the life. Drugs, doubts... and the wild side of life. The poem is not appeared in the film, but it does in the book. It is a song from a group named The The, from his album ‘Soul Mining’. I hope you enjoy as much as I did, and I do.

'Giant'

‘The sun is high and I'm surrounded by sand
For as far as my eyes can see
I'm strapped into a rocking chair
With a blanket all over my knees

I, I am a stranger to myself
And nobody knows I'm here
When I looked into my face it wasn't myself I'd seen
But who I've tried to be

I'm thinking of things I'd hoped to forget
I'm choking to death in a sun that never sets
I clogged up my mind with perpetual greed
And turned all of my friends into enemies
And now the past has returned to haunt me

I'm scared of God and scared of hell
And I'm caving in upon myself
I'm scared of God and scared of hell
And I'm caving in upon myself

How can anyone know me when I don't even know myself?’

The last sentence is the one that has walked with me during my whole life...