If you’re lucky enough to visit Split, Croatia I recommend you drop into the beautiful Italian steak house, BAKRA (https://bakra.hr/). Competition for superior food is very high in this area of Europe so you will find many great restaurants but Bakra is above and beyond the rest. The food is stellar and the customer service is so personal it feels like your Grandmother is cooking and serving you recipes that have been passed down through the generations.
I had a rose infused vodka cranberry, premium ground steak mixed with bacon and cheese, and a slice of chocolate mousse cake with blueberry drizzle. Melt in your mouth A-MAZ-ING! They also had a large variety of gourmet pizzas that I will have to try. You’ll need a reservation, and it’s worth being a bit spendee but let’s face it – we all want to feel like a fancy bitch sometimes.
If you want to experience a European meal that you will remember on your death bed, this place is a must eat!
Tbilisi, Georgia has a vibe somewhere in between Albania and Armenia in terms of how it looks and feels. Tirana, Albania had the look and feel of a city and country that wants to be part of the EU, but isn’t really trying that hard. Mostly old, run-down buildings, with seemingly very few improvements happening, Tirana reminded me of an old woman, [if you’ll please forgive the feminine analogies], who’d been smoking all of her difficult life, had a husky, raspy voice, and just seemed resigned to the way things are. Yerevan, Armenia on the other hand, kind of reminded me of a Kardashian or maybe Scarlett Johansson. It may have seen some rough times, but it was a beautiful, almost pristine, city…and it knew it. The vibe you got from Yerevan was, “Yes, I’m beautiful, and you’re going to love me…but you’ll never deserve me.”
The early feeling I’m getting from Tbilisi is somewhere in between. Tbilisi, like the rest of Georgia, has gone through some hard times, both during and after communism. But it’s working tirelessly to improve and become part of the EU. It’s definitely a work in progress: you can see the old and the new built right next to each other all over the city, but it’s definitely a city that WANTS to be on the rise. Whether it is right now or not, it is determined to make it. It kind of reminds me of a girl who’s probably been abused, is tatted-up, smokes and drinks with the boys…and will usually drink them under the table! But she’s still really pretty, has a lot of character, in part because of what she’s been through. You’ll like her, probably even love her, but she doesn’t necessarily give a shit about what you think. She’s going to become the best version of herself possible either way.
I’ve never had a massage in my life. I’ve always felt very dodgy, not only about a stranger touching my body but, also about paying someone to do it. There’s an elitist element to the whole concept for me that I am very uncomfortable with. “Massage my feet, peasant!”, has always been the vibe I’ve gotten from the whole process. But, since traveling again, I’ve acquired some pretty major nerve pain in my extremities. Sometimes, I can barely sleep because my legs, feet, arms, and hands are either experiencing shooting pain or going completely numb. So, I finally broke down and decided to try out a Thai massage – for medical purposes only.
When we entered the hotel, the front desk lady told us that the massage parlor was on the 14th floor but when we got in the elevator, the floors only went up to 13 where the sky bar was. Okay…does this massage place exist in another dimension of reality or something?
Once we got to the sky bar, a hotel employee showed us to a dilapidated back stairwell, cluttered with random hotel debris, and we made our way up the concrete steps to the 14th floor. But, as soon as we got through the parlor doors, we could see that the place was beautifully serene; beaded curtains, golden Buddha statues, and soothing music.
A pretty young Armenian woman checked me in, and showed me into the changing room. I took off my shoes, socks, and pants to change into some canvas Capri pants, and slippers they provided. I was glad I painted my toe nails and shaved my legs for this.
I walked out of the changing room, and past my husband, who was sitting on a bean bag chair playing on his phone. The look on his face said, “Good luck, baby”
I was led through a beaded curtain into a candle lit room with tiny Buddha statues lining the walls, and a large wooden table covered in silk pillows in the center. It was so dark that all I could make out was the back of a willowy female form in the far corner washing her hands in a basin of cucumber water. She was so tiny, I honestly thought child labor laws were being broken in this joint but when she asked me to “Lie down, please.”, it was with an adult voice. Whew! I already felt like a snobby inbred monarch as it is without having a kid massaging me.
My eyes were starting to get use to the dark by now, and as I laid back on the silk pillow, I finally saw my masseuse’s adorable face smiling down at me just as she placed a towel over my eyes. Uh oh. Why don’t you want me to see what you’re about to do to me, girlfriend? I took a deep breath. Relax, control freak. Trust the process. I suddenly noticed that the woman getting a massage in the room next to us was making sounds like she was giving birth. That’s not a good sign either! But, then my masseuse slathered my feet and legs in oil, and started rubbing my toes so lightly I thought, Oh, lovely! She’s an angel from Heaven!
She almost immediately asked if I had nerve damage. “Muscles twitch too much.” she commented. I confirmed that, yes, I have nerve pain in my arms and legs. “I can fix for you.” she said sweetly.
“Awesome. I trust you. Go for it!”
The light massage then quickly began taking a turn to medium pressure. Okay, this will be good for me, right? Soon, medium pressure switched to intense. My legs began stiffening, and she informed me that, “You must relax. Harder you fight, worse it hurt.” Isn’t that something the Thai military says right before they begin torturing you? As she rubbed my calves, ‘intense’ turned to outright excruciating. Someone call Amnesty International!
“Can you do it a little lighter?” I asked meekly.
“What?” she replied.
“Lighter, please?”
She replied with a confused, “Umm…”
“Less?” I ventured.
“Oh! Yes! Less.” she agreed.
Cool. Now this will begin to be enjoyable.
Then, I realized that she had misinterpreted ‘Less’, and was not actually doing it lighter. She was just doing it slower. So, now the pain would be the same intensity only drawn out longer. Screw it. I’m just gonna trust her and deal with the pain. Maybe this will help me practice meditation. It’s like New York city. If I can meditate through this level of pain, I can meditate through anything, right? Wrong. There would be no meditation this day, my friends. This would be an exercise in absolute surrender. I tell you, folks, she was right. The more I fought and resisted the pain, the more unbearable it became. The more I accepted and relaxed into it, the better it felt. Soon, the pain went from, “You will beg for death in the end!” to “Am I secretly a masochist because this sh*t feels good!”
She dug deep into the nerves in my legs and feet. I found myself contemplating, How are your tiny hands so damn strong, girl? Do you crush coal into diamonds as a side gig? There were moments when my entire body went numb, maybe out of self defense, but then it would come back to life, and all the muscles were more relaxed then I’d ever felt them before. She knew exactly where to put the pressure too. She dug into the precise spots on the bottoms of my feet that have been causing me the worst pain over the past few months. I honestly don’t know how she knew exactly where to go but she did.
After she was done massaging my legs and feet, she violently popped my toes one by one. It was as loud as thunder claps, and I was sure I’d be crippled for life. There’s no way sounds like that coming from a human body are okay! Maybe from a mechanic working on a car! I’m not walking out of here alive today! But, DAMN, it felt amazing. Trust her, I kept reassuring myself.
She then moved up to massage my face and scalp. Mind you, we only paid for a foot massage. But, this was my favorite part. It felt heavenly and I really relaxed into it.
Next she turned me over onto my stomach, jumped up onto the table, stood with her feet on either side of my body, bent down, put her entire weight on her elbows, and dug into my back, neck, and shoulders. Holy crap! Okay, this is the day I die. I better just make peace with my God now because it’s over! But, once again, the more I relaxed and didn’t fight it, the better it felt. By the time she began battering my spine with her tiny fists, I thought, I think I’m in love with this woman. I wonder if gay marriage is legal here in Armenia? At one point, I turned into Morticia Addams after a night of passion with her husband, Gomez, “You frightened me… do it again!”
When she finished, she sat me up slowly, and asked if I was okay. Surprisingly, I felt as pliable as a water balloon. She warned me that I might be in some pain in the next couple days but that my nerve pain would be a lot better. I thanked her profusely, and she bowed goodbye.
When I staggered out of the room, I looked like I’d been mauled by a badger; smeared mascara, disheveled hair, and the gait of a new born giraffe. But, I’m hoping, over the next few days, my sleep will improve, and my nerve pain will have lessened. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better though so I may have a couple of Long Island ice teas and Ibuprofen in the mean time.
If you’re going to get a Thai massage, get your inner control freak under control because you better damn well surrender to the process. When you do, you’ll be thanking your God for the tiny Thai lady who took you from Hell to Heaven in one hour.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
“Ooooh that smell Can’t you smell that smell Ooooh that smell The smell of death surrounds you”
– Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”
Few things in this world can trigger a memory the way that your senses can. That being said, I’m going to have a lot of unpleasant memories about this place.
The Sights
Some of you may have wondered, “Why didn’t they go anywhere in Vietnam? They went to several places in Hong Kong.” That is very true, but for those of you who are uninformed about us personally, here is the answer. We went to Hong Kong for a vacation after my last job [10 years long] came to a close, because I wanted to teach English overseas. Hong Kong was a luxurious stop for us; a chance to take a real vacation in what we had hoped was one of the most exotic and beautiful cities on earth. It was. Vietnam was where we decided to look for my first teaching job. So until I found work, we didn’t want to spend the extra money on trips inside the country. So we didn’t see the beautiful places of northern Vietnam, of which I’m sure there are many. We pretty much saw the Old Quarter, which isn’t quite so pretty. If you look at just surface stuff, you’ll see beauty here. The old French architecture, some of the sidewalks paved in old marble from the days when this was French Indochina, Hoan Kiem Lake, situated just 3 blocks from our hotel. However, look closer, and it’s not as appealing as the photos you can find all over the internet: The architecture looks run down, and covered in city grime that NO torrential downpour can wash away; the garbage of tossed away food, cigarettes, even feces, scattered along the sidewalks and curb-sides. Hong Kong was as clean, if not cleaner, than most American cities. By contrast, most Americans, including myself, would be disgusted by the sight and smell of just how dirty this place is.
The Smell
It was rarely pleasant. At best, tolerable. Most of the time, you smelled the moisture in the air. As soon as you step out onto the street most days, you are in a perpetual state of moistness. It’s like being a Duncan Hines pudding cake, but in my case, more fattening. I will say that the smell of fresh rain on a humid night here was delightful – as if the air itself was begging for the heavens to open up. Otherwise, it smelled like oppression, heat, garbage, and cooking dog, though in the case of the last two, it was hard to differentiate. You could also smell the exhaust of all the vehicles in the city. I for one, like the smell of burning fuel, but even this place was too much for me in that regard. Overall, this place smelled like sewage, a smell that never seemed to go completely away, probably because this place looks and smells like none of it has been cleaning since the Napoleonic era.
The Sounds
With the exception of later at night, in our room, there are almost always sounds being produced, whether it’s from other hotel guests (soundproofed rooms, my ass!), or from the constant din of traffic. Outside, it is virtually ceaseless, even at midnight, and this city has a midnight curfew, obviously not strictly enforced. During the day, sound fills the air; the sound of street food cooking on makeshift Hibachis, city sanitation workers banging on their giant garbage carts to let people know they’re ready to pick up the garbage, babies crying, people shouting above the rest of the noise, and always traffic, constant honking of horns from buses, taxis, private cars, and more scooters than the number of men who have masturbated to an image of Scarlett Johansson. They are everywhere, constantly, like a plague of locusts being chased by a plague of frogs. There must be more Vespas here than in all of Italy. Which brings me to…
The Traffic
The only time I’ve seen the streets ever come close to being empty is at either 1am, or on their Independence Day holiday, last night, when everyone was at the lake, watching the fireworks display. Nothing says victory over America than Chinese gunpowder making similar sounds to what was heard when the Americans were bombing this city 45 years ago!
The traffic seems, at first, to have no rules. However, that’s not true – it has FEW rules. My sister-in-law came up the best analogy. Pretend you’re the frog in the 80s video game, Frogger. That’s it. There you go. If you’re walking, that’s kind of what it’s like here. But combine that with what it’s like crossing Alder St. or Patterson, near the University of Oregon. Time it right, and you won’t have to worry. Avoid the cars and buses, sure, but dodging the scooters is easy. Walk with purpose, don’t slow down or stop while in the middle of the street, and you’ll be fine: they will dodge you…or at least I’m pretty sure they will…I wasn’t hit. Then again, I’m bigger than most scooters.
Tomorrow it gets even more interesting, as I cover the people here. Until then…
After that unforgettable early morning experience, I went for a walk around this massive city block, which was about the size of 3 of our city blocks back home. I saw so many shops, restaurants, bakeries, all in various stages of preparing to open for the day. The morning light was growing, and I began to see more people in the street. Away from that beautiful square, I got more of a feeling of the city. The sights and smells left me wide awake, and my eyes and my nostrils attempted to take in every bit of information. One moment, it’s bread, than coffee and tea, then it’s meat coming from some restaurant’s exhaust port; the next, pungent fumes coming from the city’s sewer system, up through the manhole covers. Bad and good alike, it was exhilarating, like that first cup of morning coffee. It was bordering on sensory overload, so I headed back to the hotel.
Once my wife woke, we went down to the breakfast buffet, which was extravagant, but expensive. We only went there twice – it just wasn’t quite worth the price. We started to slowly explore our new neighborhood together. Over the next few days, I bravely jumped in, going out and exploring in a 500 meter radius from our hotel whenever I could. We explored the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood, going into the little malls around and beneath the streets. We went up to the nearest subway station and got familiar with Hong Kong’s MRT (Mass Rapid Transit). It is a very efficient and inexpensive way of getting around the city, no matter where or how far you need to go. Later on in our stay, I was able to go from Sha Tin, in the New Territories, back to North Point in 45 minutes. That’s a about the same amount of time as it would be to take a taxi that same distance, but for about 1/10th the price.
We went to several street markets, which were filled with vendors selling clothes, fruits and vegetables, meats of every kind, knock-off watches, handbags, jewelry, and touristy trinkets. The markets would take up streets of every size and width, and go on for several blocks.
We had breakfast at a McDonald’s, which was conveniently located right next to the subway station, but looked much nicer and had better food quality than the McDonald’s in America. There was also a KFC across the way, which again had better food. I tried a bucket there that had all white meat popcorn chicken, with a spicy country gravy that most Americans are familiar with, covering a steamy pile of sticky rice. Best food I’ve ever had at a KFC.
But going back to that first day, that evening we went to YUE, the Michelin starred restaurant located on the 2nd floor of the hotel. My wife had sweet and sour pork, which she liked, but didn’t think it was Michelin star worthy. I had roasted pork belly, only because they were out of roasted suckling pig, a theme you will see repeated later in our journey. It was okay, the presentation was nice, and it tasted good, but Michelin star? No. If Anthony Bourdain had film this, it would have wound up on the cutting room floor.
So, the hotel had overrated, overpriced food. That was the last bad experience we’d have at this hotel. The rest of our stay there only increased my love for this neighborhood, its people, its food, and its feel. But that’s another story…
A few years back some male film makers were going to try and do a female remake of ‘Lord of the Flies’ but couldn’t sell it because all the backers thought that if a group of girls got stranded on a deserted island with no boys they wouldn’t try to compete to the death. They would just end up cooperating because without men or the patriarchy to influence women, everything would be fine… I thought about ‘Heathers’ and realized that maybe women just compete in different ways but perhaps even that wouldn’t be a factor anymore if girls were in a life or death survival scenario… Thoughts?
“We Indians know about silence. We are not afraid of it. In fact, for us, silence is more powerful than words. Our elders were trained in the ways of silence, and they handed over this knowledge to us. Observe, listen, and then act, they would tell us. That was the manner of living.
With you, it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the children that talk the most at school. In your parties, you all try to talk at the same time. In your work, you are always having meetings in which everybody interrupts everybody and all talk five, ten or a hundred times. And you call that ‘solving a problem’. When you are in a room and there is silence, you get nervous. You must fill the space with sounds. So you talk compulsorily, even before you know what you are going to say.
White people love to discuss. They don’t even allow the other person to finish a sentence. They always interrupt. For us Indians, this looks like bad manners or even stupidity. If you start talking, I’m not going to interrupt you. I will listen. Maybe I’ll stop listening if I don’t like what you are saying, but I won’t interrupt you.
When you finish speaking, I’ll make up my mind about what you said, but I will not tell you I don’t agree unless it is important. Otherwise, I’ll just keep quiet and I’ll go away. You have told me all I need to know. There is no more to be said. But this is not enough for the majority of white people.
People should regard their words as seeds. They should sow them, and then allow them to grow in silence. Our elders taught us that the earth is always talking to us, but we should keep silent in order to hear her.
It’s time for a very, VERY unpopular political opinion but – screw it – we all need to grow up and finally hear the hard truth…
America, your vote almost certainly won’t matter. On Election Day, work and donate your earnings to an uncorrupted charity instead.
I understand that no one wants to admit how useless voting is because it makes us feel safe to buy into the lie sold to us for centuries. But, as the comedian George Carlin once said, “That’s why they call it the American dream. Because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
We as humans want to believe we have control because it makes us feel safe, and voting looks and feels like control, but it does not mean you have made any real difference. The white, wealthy men who are spending billions a year lobbying politicians and securing judges in their back pockets, are the ones who hold the ultimate vote and they don’t give a f*ck what is best for everyone. I couldn’t possibly be telling you anything a person with a mind of their own doesn’t already know deep down.
Politicians and political pundits have strategic reasons to push people to vote. They want to win, after all, to gain money and power. Don’t fall for it. Your vote almost certainly won’t matter. You have as much chance of harming others as you do of helping.
It’s just straight up incoherent to say every vote helps. Republican and Democratic voters always cancel each other out eventually. As soon as there is a Republican party in office, they will surely negate the policies that the Democratic party instituted before them, and vice versa. It’s always been just a perpetual political pendulum of pointlessness. We all have enough common sense by now to realize this fact, right?
So, about now, you’re wondering why I’m daring to harsh your voting buzz. Well, it’s because most citizens are ignorant of basic political facts. They lack the social scientific knowledge needed to evaluate these facts. They process news in biased and self-serving ways. Thinking you’re the exception to the rule — the rational, informed person among the unreasonable — is unexceptional. Everyone thinks that.
Your vote matters only if you break a tie. The most optimistic theory in political science estimates that voters in swing states have a 1-in-10 million chance of deciding the presidential election. Everyone else’s chances are far lower. Casting a vote is thus like donating a Powerball ticket to Australian wildfire relief: 999,999,999 times out of a billion, you’ll achieve nothing.
And don’t even get me started on why your vote doesn’t matter due to the corrupt loophole of the electoral college.
It gets worse, folks. As far as our best evidence throughout history has shown — it does not matter which side wins. In the American Political Science Review (the premier journal in political science), it has been carefully and rigorously measured how parties affect economic, education, crime, family, social, environmental and health outcomes. They find zero difference between Republican and Democratic state governments.
Voting also becomes pointless when we don’t hold the elected accountable for their corrupt actions while in office.
So there’s the harsh truth. Unless the 98% are ready to stop fighting against each other, and unite to fight and overthrow the REAL enemy (the wealthiest among us), there is simply no point in playing into their zero sum con game.
But, there is still something useful you can do while you’re waiting to get fed up enough for a revolution so, I will suggest it again. If you really want to help others in the mean time, do some diligent research to find an UNCORRUPTED charity, spend Election Day working, and then donate your earnings. You’ll do a thousand times more good than any voter is.
‘Maharishi Effect’: According to doctors and researchers (at the Institute of Science, Technology, and Public Policy) who were involved in 17 studies between 2007-2010, “When the participants in a group equal to or exceed the square root of one percent of the entire population are practicing Transcendental Meditation, (experiencing pure consciousness as a group), the field of pure consciousness is enlivened within the entire population. This positively influence all others in society, leading to a drastic reduction in crime and negative trends within the surrounding community.”
Basically, when 1% of a population is meditating, crime rates within the entire population plummets.
Doctors noted that the reduction in crime (28.4%reduction compared to previous four-year period) could not be explained by factors such as policing, and could not be predicted from baseline trends or seasonal cycles. The researchers were also able to rule out other alternative explanations for the effect such as unemployment or national economic conditions, changes in incarceration rates, police strategy or police technology, urban demographics, police reporting standards, or temperature changes.
The researchers estimated that in the 206 cities involved in the studies, 4,136 murders were averted, as well as an estimated 186,774 violent crimes, 19,435 motor vehicle fatalities, 16,759 accidental deaths, 26,425 drug-related fatalities, and 992 infant deaths. They calculated that the probability that the reduction could simply be due to chance was 1 in 10 million.
A total of eighteen peer-reviewed articles have now been published validating that the ‘Maharishi Effect’ would lead to reduced societal stress, as reflected in reduced crime, violence, accidents, illness, and increased positive trends in society.
In view of these findings, the authors invited governments to implement and evaluate this scientifically validated approach to reducing violence and other negative trends in society.
So far, no government has recognized the validity of these studies.
For much of human history, women were the primary caretakers of the dying and dead. ‘Watchers’ tended to the physical, spiritual, and social needs surrounding death. Layers out of the dead washed, fixed, groomed, and dressed dead bodies. These ‘Watchers’ included female relatives and neighbors. After these women prepared the body, it would be viewed by mourners for up to a week and then buried. There was little to no chance of any infectious disease being spread by a body that wasn’t treated with poisonous chemicals, and no pomp involved with the burial…
In the mid-1800s, American furniture makers learned of a French technique called “arterial embalming” that was being used to preserve bodies for anatomy education in medical schools. These opportunistic cabinet makers would profit off constructing coffins while also performing rudimentary embalmings on the corpses of civil war soldiers to preserve them for the train ride home. The most common technique involved replacing the body’s blood with arsenic and mercury.
They were called “field embalmers”, nonprofessionals in makeshift tents set up next to the battlefield. At first, the embalmers approached soldiers directly before they went into battle. They provided soldiers with a card that stated that they had arranged for payment for embalming and transportation if they died. It soon became clear that this sales method was very detrimental for morale, so the military tried to stop it – to no avail.
As the war continued, embalmers followed the action. They would take over a barn or shed near the battlefield or set up a tent and embalm bodies there. At first, embalmers instructed soldiers to bring the bodies of officers only. Their families were more likely to be able to pay for embalming and for getting the body home.
Some physicians were so unscrupulous that they began charging extraordinary fees or threatening to hold the body “hostage” if the grieving family didn’t pay.
When president Lincoln was assassinated, he was embalmed for a “funeral train” that paraded his body back to his final resting place. Nothing like this had happened for any president previously, or since, and the funeral procession left an indelible effect on those who attended it. Most visitors waited in line for hours to parade by Lincoln’s open casket.
Lincoln’s appearance early in the trip was apparently so lifelike that mourners often reached out to touch his face, but the quality of the preservation faded over the length of the three-week journey. One bystander remarked that after a lengthy viewing in Manhattan, “the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln” became “a ghastly shadow.”
This was the first time most Americans saw an embalmed body, and it quickly became a national sensation.
With the end of the Civil War however, the practice of embalming died out for a time. As life returned to normal, people were likely to die near home and could be buried more quickly, intimately, and without so much expense.
But soon, the unemployed embalmers, began spreading misinformation that NOT embalming a body was ‘unsanitary’ and that the techniques female ‘Watchers’ used would spread disease and could even kill you. Obviously this wasn’t true because female ‘Watchers’ had been preparing the dead for centuries without incident. Nonetheless, this became widely accepted and laws were implemented to uphold modern day funeral practices.
There was one very disheartening side effect: Families could no longer intimately bury their own. More was needed than the assistance of friends and family to inter a corpse. Death was becoming professionalized, its mechanisms increasingly out of the hands of typical Americans, the cost of which can still bankrupt grieving families.
Thus was born the American funeral industry scam, with embalming as its cornerstone, as families were now forced to hand over control of their loved ones’ bodies to a funeral director. As a result, the cost of burying the dead has soared. The median cost of a funeral and burial today, including a vault to enclose the casket, is from $8000 to $12,000, with American funerals typically being the most expensive in the world.
The capitalistic funeral industry now generates billions of dollars a year for funeral directors, casket and vault manufacturers, cemetery owners, florists, embalming-chemical companies, and other burial-related businesses.
This unique Westernized approach to interment is unlike death rites anywhere else in the world, and no other country in the world embalms their dead at a rate even approaching that of the U.S.
America now struggles immensely to deal with overcrowding in cemeteries. European countries also struggle to deal with limited land resources for burial, with countries such as Greece requiring that graves are “recycled” every three years.
The majority of people in the rest of the world are cremated.
A GREAT THING TO KEEP IN MIND IF YOU’RE HAVING TROUBLE LETTING GO OF THE PAST…
The concept of ‘Reconsolidation Memory Updating’: Our memory is actually like a telephone game. Our brain distorts memories a little more each time we remember them. So, when we think about a memory we are not recalling the original event but actually remembering the last time we had a reminiscence of the respective memory. While remembering we also tend to “rationalize” the memory elements that we could not make sense of at the time by inventing new causalities. During re-remembering, highly surprising details may lead to more rational story changes, and unsurprising details may lead to more interesting distortions.
Basically, don’t identify too heavily with the emotional charge you may have on a memory. Let go of the fear that the past will repeat itself, and the pain you may have about those who have wronged you. You’re only hurting yourself, and what’s the point of that?🤷♀️
“Let us see whether the vast majority of the so-called ‘insurmountable barriers’ that the world draws are not harmless chalk lines.”
-Lou Andreas Salome (12 February 1861 – 5 February 1937. Russian-born female psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.)
DIARY OF A MAD EXPAT 