Twitter Trolls

I won't go into the details of the 'Charlotte Dawson v Twitter Trolls' incident that is unfolding in Australia at the moment. You can Google all that unpleasantness for yourself.

However: It is circumstances like this, the nastiness of the whole situation, that generates so much social angst and disharmony.  Worse; it encourages and justifies the negativity.

The fact that there was (reportedly) over 100 other 'trolls' posting loathsome comments on Charlotte's twitter account, regardless of what she said in the first place, is shameful.  Mass bullying in its worst form. And even more horrifying, those individuals who made fake accounts to remain anonymous.  More shameful.

Some of my previous posts commented on life expectancy, stress and social media.  Draw your own conclusions, but I believe that judgmental people, whether they are the instigator or the receiver, can't have calm, serene or happy lives. Who can be truly happy if they know their comments and actions can cause another person grief and pain.  For a brief moment of misguided triumph, they have caused the detrimental crumbling of another persons well being.

No congratulations to 'Trolls' of all types .... I hope that bad Karma doesn't follow you.  Try and do something positive and encouraging for someone beside yourself today, to offset the negativity.

Let the sunshine in: The 'Tradies in shorts' thermometer!

Yesterday, in Melbourne Australia, there was further proof that Spring is on its way (beside the pages rolling over on my desk calendar and my restless feet whispering 'holiday .... holiday').

The sun shone

Yup, by 9am the sun was shining warmly and the temperature climbed up enough to feel warm-ish. 

The best bit?  The ‘tradies’ were in shorts!

I had solar panels installed at the ‘seachange’ yesterday, and four young tradesmen came to start the job at 7am (yawn!).   

They were all wearing long pants and fluoro safety jackets to start with, but by 10am they were all in tee shirts and shorts.

Is this one of the seasonal indicators?  The ‘tradie’ thermometer: With summer will it be shorts only (on the young ones) or shorts and blue singlets (on the older ones who can’t cut the naked torso any more)? Then when winter rolls in again, the knitted 'beanies' and khaki coloured long legged work pants and yellow fluro safety jackets get shaken out.  

Either way, I basked my cold bones in the sun shining through the window and sat outside with my cup of tea when I was having a break from painting (painting window frames is probably the most awful painting job in the world;  apart from skirting boards.  Hope to show some 'before and after' pics of at least one room soon.)

C’mon Summer!

Can you feel the change in the air ..... Spring, Saturn and other things too

Every year I get restless at this time of the year.  I feel sensitive to seasonal changes, and the spring season (southern hemisphere) affects me more than anything else.  Every year I get very restless and restive and day dream more and get motivated to do everything I have put off doing.  Maybe it is the sun shining and the warmth coming through.

However, this year it is also the time that Saturn will lessen its affects on all of us. 

Wha?????  I didn’t know that Saturn was affecting me ... until I saw the article I have reproduced below**.  

Of course ... I Google ... I need to know more.

Apparently Saturn has a major effects on us every 22 years of our lives.  So every 22 years we undergo a change in our lives and circumstances, and the way we see ourselves. 

Unverified evidence suggests that this is the time of increasing divorces (every 22 years there are peaks), burgeoning health fads, taking courses, visits to exotic holiday destinations etc, etc, etc.  

Try this: However old you are now ... take off approx. 22 years and calculate how old you were and where you were 22 years ago.  Was it a time of change? 

Are you considering any changes now?

My challenge to you ... think about the last two years in your life and read below what has been influencing your star sign. 

Then look at other peoples star signs and tell me ... does your sign seem more ‘you’ than anyone else? (From www.news.com)

“There are two months until Saturn changes signs from Libra to Scorpio.

Saturn helps us grow, but learning its lessons can be tiring. Where you are experiencing trials, Saturn is affecting you, be it on your natal chart (the chart for your time, date and place of birth) or solar chart (the chart for your star sign).

Here’s a rundown of where each sign is affected (and has been for more than two years): Aries – your relationships, but in some ways, your whole life! Taurus – the daily grind. Gemini – your ability to have fun. Cancer – home and family. Leo – your ability to think positively. Virgo – financially. Libra – your whole life! Scorpio – your fears. Sagittarius – your friendships. Capricorn – your work. Aquarius – your freedom of movement. Pisces – your fears regarding money and letting someone get close.

As the cycle draws to its October close, you’ll feel Saturn’s lessons more strongly, but hang on. Life could improve once it is over.”

** Take all this with ‘a pinch of salt’ (I am a scientist and shouldn’t even consider thinking about any of this esoteric ‘guff’, but I try to be open minded...there is something more out there... I just haven’t found what it is yet).

Flu, flu, flu!

Sorry re the posts this week, been sick with the dreaded....
back next week once the head is clear.

xxxxx

Sorry to indulge.. me and Sir David!!!!!!!!

Hi All, 

Just a quick one .... I had the ultimate pleasure and excitement of meeting Sir David Attenborough yesterday at the Monash Science Centre.  

What a lovely, lovely, sincere man.  His documentary series and his book 'Life on Earth' were profound influences on me when I was in my late teens, and I am eternally grateful to him, even though he doesn't know it (although I tried to tell him). 

His legacy has continued to contribute to my life in many positive ways. 

Below - the proof, with my good friend Cilla who was as excited as me!!!!!!!!!!

What did we chat about????   For me to know ....

Many thanks to Steve Morton for taking the photo and forwarding it to me.

Social Media Angst and Blue Zone Longevity. Can Being Nice Help You Live a Long Life?

My last few posts have focused on social media.   How its misuse generates and spreads anxiety and unhappiness; both in the instigators and the recipients of the negativity. 

I have also mentioned about Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones and his philosophy on longevity.  I love one of Buettner’s ‘must do’s’ everyday .... ‘say something nice to the first person you see in morning.’   

We have probably all experienced how 'being nice' is infectious and gives you a warm feeling inside. 

Chatting with a stranger on a genuine level about things that are good in the world; or helping someone, without them asking; just because you can.  Getting a hug from someone you love, donating to a charity, etc... the good karma comes galloping in and can make the rest of the day wonderful.  How can this not be good for you?

Buettner’s importance of community and family belonging (nice-ness) rings true on so many levels. 

If you have a stressful job, when you go home to a family that is full of love and laughter, understanding and hugs, it is an escape into a healing environment. 

If you have friends to listen and laugh with you, to accept and share with; you always feel better for having caught up with them.

Doing something you love, every day, is good for the soul.  Especially if the effects of this are good for others around you too. (For example; exercise=endorphins=makes you feel good=happy with those around you).  Is this why so many people keep a pet?  

Many of the health surveys on the internet (Dr Oz etc.) have questions such as ‘Are you married?' and 'Do you have a strong family, social or friendship group?’  

The Blue Zone octogenarians, apparently, lack social anxiety, understand the importance of family and community and live in areas where the western world has only recently been introduced, or is shunned. 

Of the current generation of social media users: Those who read the hype, those who write the hype and those who believe the hype: I wonder what their level of social anxiety is. 

It will be interesting to see if the advent of the computer age coincides with a lowering of the average life expectancy in humans.  If the current younger generation living in Blue Zone areas carry on the legacy of longevity that their grandparents and great grandparents have established.  

Social Media misuse (Or how to be a bitch without really trying)

Below are two examples of quotes I found on the internet; if they were actually quoted (or misquoted) by the people credited for them.  The fact these comments made it to the WORLD is my case in point.  

Firstly, the sad, sad, sad, (and I hope misquoted) comment from fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, about the gorgeous Middleton sisters (of British Royal Family fame) ...

"Kate Middleton has a nice silhouette and she is the right girl for that boy," Lagerfeld said. "I like that kind of woman, I like romantic beauties.”

"On the other hand, her sister struggles. I don't like the sister's face. She should only show her back."

WHA’??????  

To use the acronym .... OMG!!!! Do I need to explain how awful this quote is? 

Karl, if it is true; have a good strong think man. 

The next quote is the antithesis of all the negativity. A wonderful woman, Gretel Kileen (who was the original host of the Big Brother series in Australia, and suffered from negative social media of her own) was asked to comment on the new season of Big Brother. (My additional comments are in red italics.) 

"I choose to guess it will be a great success because BB is a strong format and (new host) Sonia Kruger will be a terrific host. I choose to be positive because I'm tired of Australians (any nationality) unhealthily wishing failure on one another in vacuous displays of schadenfreude, a possible ironic consequence of 11 years of reality TV colliding with a nation suffering low self-esteem."

Go Grrl!  And good luck to Sonia (although I won’t be watching; not my type of tv).

To paraphrase Howard Zinn (possibly channelling Karl L.)

‘If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.’

Howard may have been channelling Gretel K. when he wrote this...

‘If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.’  

Why Is Everyone on the Internet So Angry?

I have never been a big fan of 'facebook'. I won't go into the 'whys'; but I prefer blogs, where you have to construct and consider what you write. 

We have all heard of the awful ways social media is misused and generates and perpetuates artificial angst, bullying, unrest and social problems.  

I am all for freedom of speech, but at what price, and to what end?  

Should our opinions be used for petty and selfish reasons?

Public shaming based on 'small stuff' is shameful in itself, and belittles the instigator.    Let's try for a bit more understanding in the world.

The article I have posted below was in a recent Scientific American.  

Why Is Everyone on the Internet So Angry?

By Natalie Wolchover and Life's Little Mysteries  | July 25, 2012 | 47

With a presidential campaign, health care and the gun control debate in the news these days, one can't help getting sucked into the flame wars that are Internet comment threads. But psychologists say this addictive form of vitriolic back and forth should be avoided — or simply censored by online media outlets — because it actually damages society and mental health.

These days, online comments "are extraordinarily aggressive, without resolving anything," said Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "At the end of it you can't possibly feel like anybody heard you. Having a strong emotional experience that doesn't resolve itself in any healthy way can't be a good thing."

If it's so unsatisfying and unhealthy, why do we do it?

A perfect storm of factors come together to engender the rudeness and aggression seen in the comments' sections of Web pages, Markman said. First, commenters are often virtually anonymous, and thus, unaccountable for their rudeness. Second, they are at a distance from the target of their anger — be it the article they're commenting on or another comment on that article — and people tend to antagonize distant abstractions more easily than living, breathing interlocutors. Third, it's easier to be nasty in writing than in speech, hence the now somewhat outmoded practice of leaving angry notes (back when people used paper), Markman said.

And because comment-section discourses don't happen in real time, commenters can write lengthy monologues, which tend to entrench them in their extreme viewpoint. "When you're having a conversation in person, who actually gets to deliver a monologue except people in the movies? Even if you get angry, people are talking back and forth and so eventually you have to calm down and listen so you can have a conversation," Markman told Life's Little Mysteries.

Chiming in on comment threads may even give one a feeling of accomplishment, albeit a false one. "There is so much going on in our lives that it is hard to find time to get out and physically help a cause, which makes 'armchair activism' an enticing [proposition]," a blogger at Daily Kos opined in a July 23 article.

And finally, Edward Wasserman, Knight Professor in Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, noted another cause of the vitriol: bad examples set by the media. "Unfortunately, mainstream media have made a fortune teaching people the wrong ways to talk to each other, offering up Jerry Springer, Crossfire, Bill O'Reilly. People understandably conclude rage is the political vernacular, that this is how public ideas are talked about," Wasserman wrote in an article on his university's website. "It isn't."

Communication, the scholars say, is really about taking someone else's perspective, understanding it, and responding. "Tone of voice and gesture can have a large influence on your ability to understand what someone is saying," Markman said. "The further away from face-to-face, real-time dialogue you get, the harder it is to communicate."

In his opinion, media outlets should cut down on the anger and hatred that have become the norm in reader exchanges. "It's valuable to allow all sides of an argument to be heard. But it's not valuable for there to be personal attacks, or to have messages with an extremely angry tone. Even someone who is making a legitimate point but with an angry tone is hurting the nature of the argument, because they are promoting people to respond in kind," he said. "If on a website comments are left up that are making personal attacks in the nastiest way, you're sending the message that this is acceptable human behavior."

For their part, people should seek out actual human beings to converse with, Markman said — and we should make a point of including a few people in our social circles who think differently from us. "You'll develop a healthy respect for people whose opinions differ from your own," he said.

Working out solutions to the kinds of hard problems that tend to garner the most comments online requires lengthy discussion and compromise. "The back-and-forth negotiation that goes on in having a conversation with someone you don't agree with is a skill," Markman said. And this skill is languishing, both among members of the public and our leaders.

Natalie Wolchover

Routines Part 2 Cold turkey vs Easing into it

In my post the other day I mentioned that I was going to try and establish a routine.  

How am I going?  The first 4 days were a miserable FAIL! 

Couldn’t get out of bed in time, slept through the snooze several times, went away for the weekend and slopped (not a bad thing, just not good for routine setting!)

Then; I was thinking about why I wanted to establish a routine, and in the same thought  I made a decision about my lifestyle and my health, (which I may or may not tell you about another time – let’s just suffice to say I am a stress junkie, with all the repercussions...).

I would try the routine thing again, but not get stressed by it (which defeats the purpose); change my diet slightly, change my attitude slightly, and EASE my way into things.   

What am I doing?

First: I am trying to breathe.  A very, very dear friend of mine keeps telling me to breathe – to ‘still’ myself.   So, I am now deep breathing whenever I think about it, slowly and mindfully (I love that word; ‘mindfully’ ....)  Deep breathing forces you to think of stilling yourself, slow, even, deep breaths.  Calm, calm, calm.   

So, when the alarm goes off in the morning, I deep breathe, eyes closed, relaxed. 

Second: What do I like to do that will encourage me to wake up?  I love to read, so I have a good book within reach so I can read for 20 minutes before getting up (ha! once my eyes focus).

Third: Now I am awake-ish. I get out of bed and do some simple yoga moves without trying too hard.  All the time telling myself not to hurry, enjoy the moment, take my time and Breathe. 

Then; hot lemon drink.

Breakfast.

Shower.

Dress.

Go.  But not in a hurry.  If I am late, chill: Breathe.

For two days now it has worked a treat, and I have enjoyed it.  Not the waking up bit, but the things I have done because I have woken up. 

Trying too hard to change, trying to establish a routine that was not me, made me resentful, and subconsciously I didn’t want to do it. 

The new way seems, so far, easier; one step at a time, more me.  

Significance of the goats? Hey, sometimes you have to go out on a limb (sorry about that!).

Morning Routines (or lack of!)

I think I need some routine in my life.  Not to rule my life, just to help me get some structure so that I can take care of myself; prepare for the day, de-stress, find the time to exercise, particularly in winter (and this from someone who loves to keep moving)!

I Googled other peoples routines and they all involved getting up early (except for Hunter S. Thompson, who probably never went to bed anyway!), exercise (Hunter S. again the exception) and sitting and thinking peacefully.  I have outlined a few enviable morning routines at the bottom of this post. 

So last night I, full of purpose, went to bed early (9 pm) and set my alarm for 6.30am – not particularly early for some people.  And then ... snoozed the alarm for 6.45am, then woke up again at 7.24am.  Same old, same old.   Sigh.

I may have forgotten the most relevant point; I am not a morning person.  

It usually takes me a good half an hour every morning to remember how to talk – I tend to grunt in answer to questions.  My eyes stay half closed and I zombie walk everywhere.  No matter how much sleep I have – it is always the same. 

So, is it worth becoming a morning person? More Googling.   

Wikihow outlines ways to become a ‘lark’ (a cute name for a morning person). And also provides this sage advice:

 ‘Perhaps the most important thing is to persevere and be realistic. Remind yourself that today is a new day. Forget about what happened yesterday, it's in the past. Today is a fresh day, enjoy it!'

Hmmm, ok, I will try again tomorrow. 

Or, maybe I need to adopt Hunters philosophy:

“Anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast.”

Morning routines to envy:

Sarah Wilson: hot lemon in water, a walk and stretch/meditation ...  every morning ...  before anything else. 

Dan Buettner: (the Blue Zone/long life guru)

1.  At breakfast, eat fruits and grains

2.  Twenty minutes of exercise.  I either do yoga or bike to work. 

3. Say something nice to the first person you meet.

Hunter S Thompson: “I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon.... In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas …Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”

Leo Babauta of Zenhabits blog:

1. Wake at 4:30 a.m.
2. Drink water.
3. Set 3 Most Important Things for today.
4. Fix lunches for kids and myself.
5. Eat breakfast, read.
6. Exercise (run, bike, swim, strength) or meditate.
7. Shower.
8. Wake wife & kids at 6:30 a.m.

Connie from A Life of Perfect Days blog

1.      Wake up at 5am

2.    Walk in to the kitchen and chop up a pile of kale, cucumber, lemon, celery and ginger and make a fresh cold-pressed veggie juice, 

3.    Sip on the juice as I potter around

4.    Roll out my yoga mat and do 20 minutes of yoga and then sit for 10 minutes in meditation OR

5.    Head to the gym or outdoors for a light workout with a mix of cardio and strength

6.    Shower and get dressed

7.    Blend together some raw chocolate pudding for breakfast (recipe below!)

8.    Sit at my desk and eat it while I check my emails, update my facebook and twitter

9.    Walk out the door with a big, calm grin on my face.

Other people do these things – in the morning - before they start work:

-      Write. Creatively, for fun.

-      Cook. They enjoy making dinner for that night in a slow cooker, before the kids get up

-      Drink coffee. In bed and reading fiction before heading off to the office

-      Sit, and focus on my breathing. You don’t have to meditate — sitting still, contemplating, taking in the world, is a beautiful thing.

-      Read. I read a book. The paper kind, that doesn’t require electricity. I like reading with no distractions. I’ll read for about half an hour to an hour.