Australia Cheered Me Up

I've been in Melbourne for a week now. I feel quite good.

I don't know, it's always easier to break free from the world that is hard on you, and just get a fresh start somewhere else. Maybe that is also part of the reason why I can never stay at one place for too long? Saying goodbye is really hard, everytime, but thinking about it, I probably prefer quitting while I'm ahead over staying long enough for drama to catch up with me. Sounds like I'm the type who likes to take a run when it gets hard, no?

I'm not, actually. But I won't deny running away is always easier. (And the convenient thing about not having another choice is that guilt just doesn't drown you as much).

I've reunited with family members that I haven't seen in years. Leave one family to get to another. Yeah, that's not so bad if done once in a while. I'm happy where I am right now.

Also, Melbourne reminds me of someone. A pretty cool person from a long, long time ago. You know that feeling when you're trying to meet up with someone you used to have a crush on, and while you probably aren't crushing on them that much anymore, you still get that nervous and tingling feeling in your stomach? I don't even know if we can meet, but my mind has already conjured up endless of possible scenarios already. Everytime I think about it, I grin like an idiot. Silly me...

Well. Let's just see how this Aussie land treats me, yeah?

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ETA: I can't believe what just happened.

I watched a weird youtube video with my 4-year-old cousin and almost blurted out, "What the f--", but stopped myself just in time. I was like, phew, nice save there, Phiphi.

Ten minutes into playing another game, she burped out of nowhere. I laughed at her, but she turned and said into my face, "Fuck you!" And ran away crying with laughter.

W.T.F.

I was paralysed right then and there. Just like that one time in Singapore, when Quynh threw such a filthy word at me I was in shock for the rest of the day.

Sigh. Kids nowadays...

Someone Give me a Surge of Strength, Please

I never thought that one day, we would be in this situation. I never thought that it could ever happen to me. I really wish I could turn back time to re-do things I wish I had done differently, but then I also think that it's not only my actions that has led to this outcome. It breaks my heart over and over again, every time I think about it.

Some people think one needs to let go, when one loves someone and they don't love back. Others think it is a gift, the act of loving in itself. I don't know what I think. I don't think it is ever going to be easy for me to stop loving once I truly love someone, even though at times, love can be buried by other consuming emotions. But I have to let go eventually, don't I? Because I also don't think that I can live with being constantly hurt...

"Love is not a reason to tolerate disrespect." I just read that quote recently. It's true, isn't it?

[But don't you understand that I find giving up on you just as hard and as hurtful as keeping loving you? Why do you have to put me through this? Whatever I try, it always results in me being heartbroken. I wish you could be different, but oh what do they usually say? Do not try to change others, try to adjust your attitude. But I'm really at my wit's end here...]

Nothing is going well for me in the past two months. Nothing. I hate that last year was so hard towards the end of the year, and this year it is just the same. I won't break down, but it is about goddamn time that something good happens to me again.

That Random Post in Autumn

Well, hello there. It's been quite some time, hasn't it?

We're waist-deep in the season of falling leaves and windy weather now, yet I'm missing the usual calm and peace I'm used to feeling every year. Life is tossing me around a little bit these days (again), not as gently as I would like it to, but no tossing at all would be boring, too, right? I'm trying to make the best out of it, because what else can I do?

Suddenly I want to lit a perfumed candle, cook me some warm tea, and just sit here writing while the rain is drumming on my window from the outside. I guess this is the calm and peace I wanted. (Hang on a sec, let me do just that. I'll be right back.)

(I'm back already. There you go, much better now.)

Things are slowly changing, some for the better, some not. Especially the better changes have been long overdue, definitely. I want to push for some more changes, because I'm not very satisfied with all the circumstances I'm in right now. Of course, I am reminded to keep my expectations in check, as I know my resources and options are limited.

When I look around me, comparisons slap me awake again and again. Emphasize my dissatisfaction. Bring me down a little, but push my motivation up again. I wish I could channel all my negative feelings into motivation to do better. Imagine the productivity.

Just this second, I asked myself what the hell my resolutions for this year are. Oops, lost sight of them. This is not gonna end as a successful year, I can already predict that. No year is probably gonna be as good as 2013. It's always difficult when you set the bar high so early...

I find it funny when someone tells me they like me because I'm so simple. I honestly don't know what to say in those moments. "What? Are you crazy? I'm the best-fitting antonym of 'simple' you can get". Or, "Oh yeah, if by 'simple', you mean an ambiverted, hard-to-predict, multi-faceted overthinker, then you're correct." Believe me, I really try to work on the overthinking. But I don't want to be superficial, and I find it incredibly hard to see the line between the two. The golden mean, blah blah, it's just a myth. Hmph.

Well, hasn't this post been informative. A list of incoherent thoughts put together in a chunk of text. I don't even know if I myself will understand everything I wrote above when I come back to read this in the future. But one thing is for sure: I love reading every post from the past. And this one will not be an exception. That's the very first reason why I keep a blog, or post pictures and short statuses on various platforms anyway. Can't nobody take that away from me.

But yeah, enough of the rambling already. At least for today.

Life Update

It's been a while since my last blogpost... I think an update is quite due, isn't it?

So, what's going on in my life? 

I'm still sitting in Gießen, waiting for my visa for Australia. If everything works out the way we hope for, I'll fly to the land Down Under in November and spend three months in the rheumatology clinic there. After a bit of traveling annexed to the three working months, I'll visit my family and friends in Vietnam for about 2-3 weeks. The adventure abroad then ends with an internship in a hospital in Tokio, Japan, with hopefully a couple of traveling days appended to it, too. 

No, I don't hate Gießen, I swear. :P I just like seeing more of the world. That's all. Actually I'm a bit sad, knowing that when I return to G-Town in April next year, I will only have about half a year more in the city I've been calling home for 5 years. Oh and have those 5 years been special! It has shaped my character significantly and brought me so many relationships to treasure for life. But a more detailed reflection of my Gießen time will probably come at a later stage, in another post. I just want to emphasize that I do, really do, love Gießen. 

Right now, I'm spending my time in the library mostly, trying to work on my doctoral thesis. After that little crisis last year, I'm approaching this matter in a much more positive way. Thankfully. I've visited quite a few conferences where I looked at research work done by other labs, and to be honest, I am quite proud and thankful to be able to work in my lab. The quality of the stuff we do really is not bad. And the things I've learned, even though I didn't do a lot of different lab methods, is very valuable. Especially the habit of critical thinking in research will be a valuable asset for my career in the future. (I dearly hope this positivity trip will last until I finish my thesis.)

Anyway, I'm starting with writing my thesis now, so a bit of writing exercise really isn't bad. I've noticed my English writing is becoming super rusty, while my German writing is actually getting much better. Not my favorite outcome, but well... 

So yep, not much going on in my life right now. But it's nothing less than the calm before the storm, of course. :P

Love

Damn it, there are too many drafts on this blog that I never managed to finish and post. It feels like this blog now harbors a dozen snippets of thought, all randomly typed in and saved when I have time, just to be forgotten until the next time I feel like writing. 

So the reason I'm writing this time is because I'm thinking hard on this one thing: love. 

Yep, you got it. 

Through several things happening during the last couple of weeks, the realization just came again to me that with love, one person can overcome a remarkable amount of hardships. And the powerful love I'm talking about is the love that one person feels for everyone and everything around them, not just for family and friends (and maybe pets), but even more so for strangers. 

When someone on the street says or does something mean to me for unjustifiable reasons, I used to wish I could be sarcastic enough to come up with snarky remarks to get back at them. What I usually end up doing is to just keep silence and ignore them. Just sometimes when it's too much, especially when there are other people I care about involved, I would raise my voice and fight back. But now I'm thinking, really, neither of the two options is the best way to solve problems of the kind. Silence is too passive, and fighting back will only result in a lot of negative energy on both sides. Why shouldn't I smile, take it with humor and, here it comes: love? 

If everyone can do that, then there would be no shooting in Dallas as a response to police violence in the US. If everyone can do that, there would be no regular escalation in the Gaza Strip between Israeli and Palestinians. Heck, there probably would be no war anymore. 

But it's not just strangers we shall show more love. The closest people to us are just equally important. I have always been the kind of person who loves people quite easily, although when I was younger, I used to be a bit more withdrawn. But I grew up in a loving family, which taught me to love it with all my heart, and that habit transferred to my relationships with friends, too. Now that I've grown up more, I'm not just waiting for people to be my friend to love them, I'm trying a different approach. I love them, so that they can become good friends of mine. And it's working out great. :D

The biggest thing I have realized for myself today actually rose from an argument with my parents. I don't want to dive into details as there is no need for that. The conclusion I'm able to draw from my reflections is what matters: the best way to solve a conflict is with love. I have mentioned it for strangers above, but it is even more meaningful in the context with people I love, at least to me, at the moment. 

I have seen what damage anger can do, as an observer, as a victim, but also as the jerk who could not control herself. Even though I have mastered self-control much better than before, the righteous part of me who hates seeing injustice, especially when laid upon myself, still can't hold back sometimes. But today, I have seen again how a seemingly unsolvable argument was solved so peacefully when love is put before any other negative emotion. 

I'm not saying that we should embrace and love the wrongdoings of others (don't think I can really do that), but what I'm definitely saying is that hate and anger are the wrong responses. More love, less hate - that's the only way leading to a good solution, even though the answer to the problems is not always clear with just love in the beginning. Thinking about it, this really shouldn't be an epiphany on my part. Buddha has said it, Jesus Christ has mentioned it, Ghandi has stated, "An eye for an eye, and the world goes blind", and even Dale Carnegie has taught it to everyone in his book How to Win Friends And Influence People.

I know it's always easier said than done, this philosophical deep shit. But I have to try, and I want to try it. To let love show more of itself, especially in conflict situations. :)

(A three hour train ride from Leipzig to Gießen where I had nothing else to do is responsible for this chunk of text.)

Why I Care About Your First-Snow Photo

Ever since snow and the "This is Bill" trend started to exist in the same universe at the same time, this particular meme has been circulating in my Facebook feed. When I saw it, my first thought was, "Well, that's sad for Bill. He doesn't seem to have any friends outside of his city or village." It prompted me to finally put down my thoughts about social networking, especially when a lot of people nowadays seem to be so passive-aggressive particularly about Facebook.

The Green Smoothie

Let me explain to you where the initial hate comes from. In order to do that, let's imagine Bill to be the opposite of that meme-Bill in the image up there. Bill likes to post pictures, mostly of food. One morning, Bill finds a new smoothie recipe, checks it out and posts about it on Facebook. Your comment? "No one cares about that green smoothie you made for breakfast! What's next? Your lunch? Your tea-time snack? Your dinner? Stop it!" 

This is what the Facebook-haters probably hate the most about Facebook. Their annoying friend who posts 40 statuses or photos, per hour, about what they eat, what they wear, what they do, basically just all the banal, boring things in their life. People like that are just attention seekers, don't they know that they drive their friends crazy?!

It sounds awful, doesn't it? But's let's be honest here. Do you really have a friend who posts 40 statuses an hour? I don't. I don't even have any friend who posts 40 times per week. The most I ever saw anyone on my Facebook feed was probably twice a day. And you know what? Even if you have that 40-posts-per-hour-friend, you can block them! Or hide their posts from your feed. Or, if it really bothers you that much, just don't look at your Facebook feed at all. It really is that simple.

As for attention seeking, I'm sorry to break it to you, but everybody, including you and me, is an attention seeker. The noun people use the most everyday? It's "I". Maybe you should stop thinking, "I can't stand Bill's 40 posts," or, "It pisses me off that Bill shares the story of his green smoothie." Maybe start with, "Oh, Bill made a green smoothie," and at some point think, "Wow, it's great that Bill tried to make a green smoothie." You'll realize you won't be pissed at all. It's like magic. Because the truth is: if you start to genuinely care about your friends, Facebook will make you much less angry.

And the most important question: Why in the world must you be so butthurt about Bill's green smoothie to begin with? Or Bill's first-snow picture, for that matter? Does it hurt you, or maybe even kill you with boredom to have to see what Bill posts? I get it, you've had green smoothies before and you're not a fan, and you have a window to look at the snow just like Bill. But you see, maybe Bill has a friend who has never heard of green smoothies before. Or maybe, he's friends with some folks (from Vietnam, for example) who have never seen snow. He knows that they would love to see a picture of his green smoothie or the first snow, or even better, videos of it all. Things that are mundane and belong to Bill's everyday life might not interest you, but they might be more spectacular and less boring to Bill's friends who share less things in common with his everyday life (and -cough- only see him face-to-face every two years -cough-). So, please be a decent person and not complain or judge Bill, and go do something else if you are bored. 

That Drunk Picture

We all know that Facebook has a bad reputation regarding their user's privacy. Very deserving, for that matter. It's completely legitimate that you don't want Facebook to use your personal information to enable market research for some random companies without your authorization. But it's the bitter truth that we can't change yet, so everyone should be able to decide for themselves how they want to handle that. The less legitimate reasons about your privacy, however, are the following:  you don't want your employer to see that drunk photo of you from your friend's birthday party last night, and you don't want the government to come after you because you posted a photo of your dinner with a caption that says, "it was the bomb".

If your employer is not a professional hacker (which I bet does not apply to only the rarest of cases), you can decide whether or not they can see that drunk picture of yours. It's simple: you can edit your privacy in Facebook! You can decide who you want to allow seeing your party pictures, and who not. If your employer ends up seeing your drunk pictures, it's not Facebook's fault, it's yours. 

If you live in a country that is modern and up-to-date with the latest technologies, it is indeed hard to not have the government sniff around in your private life. And you can't hide from the NSA anywhere, that's true too (damn it, America!). It's okay if you never want to post anything on Facebook because of that. But you see, the thing is, Facebook is not really the problem. Even if you don't post anything, the NSA can still track you down if they read something suspicious in your emails, and all you have to do is log into Facebook. If you really want to be safe, you have to quit Facebook, stop writing emails and give up on Skype calls. In fact, you have to quit the internet altogether. Or you should pick up an IT major to learn how to protect yourself from being spied on digitally. Or better yet, you should consult a shrink who can help you with your bordering-paranoia worries.

Bad For Your Mental Health

There are said to be studies out there that found out that people using Facebook tend to be more depressed than those who don't. The pathomechanism is this: Most people only post their happy moments on Facebook. Someone who is going through a bad time (or sometimes, is just simply bored) sees others' happiness and thinks life is being nice to everybody else but them, and they get super depressed about their own life.

Now I'm a bit too lazy to go search for those publications, but I heard from a trusted friend that there are studies out there that dug a bit deeper, and realized that people who just lurk and stalk tend to be less happy than people who actually share something on Facebook. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Ever heard of this saying that goes, "Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled."?

When someone feels bad about something and makes it heard on Facebook, no one should accuse them of simply "seeking attention", which sounds like it's a terrible thing. Every act of caring, every word of encouragement, no matter how small, could help them in that situation a whole lot. Maybe you should just try it. You'll notice that you will feel much less depressed about life, when you see that your friends care about your well-being.

For Bill, who might have friends that are geographically separated from him, Facebook is a great way to show them that he always cares, and to let his friends care back for him. It makes the hard task of defying distance a bit easier.

The Bottom Line

Sometimes I have a feeling that people forget what Facebook really is. A social network. A platform to connect people. It's that simple. How each person chooses to use that platform to connect is their business, and we need to not judge each other by that. Just like how we should not judge each other by our origin, our skin color, our sexual orientation, our outer appearance or what we wear, what we eat, what music we like, what our hobbies are, etc. (I can write a whole new blog entry about this topic, too...)

Now we all know that Bill in this text and I are quite similar. If there were not for social networking platforms, I wouldn't be able to maintain a stable relationship with half of my current friends. And that would be a great, great shame. 

I think it's fun to see a picture of my friends in Ho Chi Minh city, who experience the coldest winter yet and actually had to buy thick scarfs for the first time in their lives. I am happy to know that a long-time buddy who is studying abroad in the U.S. just graduated, and I am still happy even if my "Congratulations!" is buried under a hundred other comments. I'm thrilled to see a picture of a friend and her newborn daughter who live only a couple of hundred kilometers away in another German city, but I still can't visit them anytime soon. I'm excited to be inspired by the travelling pictures of a friend who broke free into the world for the first time in her life, and to be able to visually accompany her through her journey. And yes, I am also glad to see what that friend in Korea usually eats, or to see that one Australian friend of mine to have recovered from his heartbreak and is smitten with his new girlfriend.

One could argue that those relationships are too shallow. I agree that picking up the phone to call someone is better than just liking a post on Facebook. But a person only has so much time and energy in a day, can anybody call every single one of their friends regularly? There are only a few you can catch up on with frequently. You should do that, I am doing it. But I'd rather be involved in my other friends' lives in form of Facebook likes and comments than not being in their lives at all. The same applies to their involvement in my life.

That's what Facebook should be used for. To make connections between people easier. If you're the type who values connections and think that distance should pose no obstacle to sustaining them, you would know to appreciate social networks like Facebook. And if you're the type who likes sharing and genuinely care about your friends, I can't imagine why you would hate that first-snow picture that Bill posts. I know I don't. :)

The First 2016 Post

Another year has passed, another year has started. Time really flies. :)

The lasting impression 2015 has on me as of the moment is that I have strayed from the usual academic path that I used to stick to. The first half of the year, I only remember feeling super caged, which resulted in a latter half a year of "breaking free". From August on, 2015 was terrific. Asia and all the people I've met will always have a special place in my heart (cheesy as I always am, haha). Also, Prague is wonderful and I couldn't be happier to have made the experience.

Anyway, it didn't escape my notice that while I obtained quite the personal gaining of relationships and satisfied my craving for adventure, my professional development is not advancing as efficiently as I would like it to. It feels like I have left the ambitious part of me somewhere behind. And that kinda bothers me a bit.

I really get pissed at myself everytime I fail to recall the know-how I have spent lots of time studying on, while realizing that knew know-how isn't really getting into my head. The passion is still there, the curiosity, the interest, all there, but because a day only has 24 hours and I have been spending my days lately doing too many other stuff, there has not been enough time for studying.

That's one of the things I wanna fix in 2016. It's about time. :)

So here come my resolutions for 2016:

• Get back on track with studying, which means bringing good grades back on paper. I am also currently trying to apply for some more exchange opportunities which pose more serious study experiences than an Erasmus semester. (Chilling out is nice for a month or two, but I can't stand more time just partying and being unproductive.)
• Finally, really, seriously starting to work on that stupid dissertation thesis of mine. I am crazy good at procrastinating, but that gotta stop this year! T_T
• As I have done quite a good job at catching up on reading during the past year, I think I should try to focus on another hobby this year. Video making sounds quite nice in my head, so let's see if I can manage putting together one or two short movies at the end of 2016.
• Especially towards the end of the year, I have again realized how important my family is to me. That's why I really want to go on a vacation with my whole family this year. The last time we all went together anywhere for holidays was in 2014 if I don't remember incorrectly. :(

I think that is all. If I set up too many goals, I won't be able to make it, haha. Anyway, in order to stick to that very first resolution up there, I have to end this here and attend to Neurology. ;)