“Know Thyself”

Read this blog!

This is the blog of someone very close to me. I have had the chance to get to know her for the past couple of months more than any of my friends. Like she states, she is someone who seems to know what she wants and where she wants to go in life, but everything is not what it seems. An advice that her dad gave her inspired her to write blog and inspired me to write mine. “Know thyself”, her dad quoted an ancient Greek inscription, when she felt lost in her thoughts and aspirations. Most of us claim know ourselves better than anyone else but I realized that sometimes we focus on other factors and forget to ask ourselves for our opinions and feelings. This is why is hard to understand what makes us happy, and so easy to get lost in a life made out of everything and everyone but you. I have met many people that demonstrate this simple argument. There are many engineering students who think their salary will buy happiness , anorexic teenagers who think that weighing less than ninety pounds will make them feel happy, and aspiring doctors who feel like the excitement and admiration of their parents will be contagious enough to make it their own. Some adults even think that drinking or smoking will solve their problems instead of making them worst and that marrying someone with a wealth will carry their lives toward a perfect life. Since we don’t know ourselves, many of us have no idea what will make us happy which in effect causes us to settle for things that bring temporary bliss.

Trust Calculator

Since my previous blog was not very comforting I decided to research a little and find out how we, human being, decide who to trust.

Defining the word is important so lets start there.: What is Trus?

In this website they define trust in a scientific way that seems like a way to calculate how much one person trusts another.

This is what I got out of that definition:

Assessed gain/loss probability +calculated expected utility based on hard performance data+ personal faith in humanity = concluded that the person in question will behave in a predictable manner= trust.

Based on this information the way we asses who to trust is by thinking about how much we can lose or gain by trusting this person and by judging their “performance data” or actions. Depending on how much each individual trusts others and how close this is to reality; this assessment will give us an idea of how that person will behave in various circumstances which in turn will make us trust them.

I like scientific thinking because a lot of the times it makes us think. Not only the actions of others and how each of us trust others matters, but how much we can lose. This is why is harder to trust your boyfriend more than you class mate. If you classmate goes to lunch instead of going to study like he told you he would it would not mean nearly as much as if you boyfriend did the same thing. You would definitely suspect of things and question what your boyfriend did and not even wonder why your classmate lied. Based on the definition this is because we are risking getting our heart broken or loosing someone who we have shared more with.

All of this makes sense and honestly it makes me feel better about the people I trust. My logic and analytical skills will decide who and when I should trust someone. If they fail, let’s hope at least I learn my lesson.

Trusting the One

As we are growing up, we get into a stage where we start choosing our friends and becoming more familiar with family members. We start to decide who to play with, who to share stories, and experience our daily adventures with. As we grow up we start choosing our life partner, some later in life than others, but it’s a natural step in life that most consider an important one. The difference with choosing who to play in the playground during recess and who to spend the rest of your life is that you are investing something much more important than your time: your emotions. So, how do you choose the one person you want to share so much of yourself with? In the previews blog I wrote about how actions give away the personality and thoughts of a person in a way that’s impossible to do with words. Anyone can tell you what you want to hear over a phone or internet conversation or have great personal advertisements with pictures and descriptions of who they are online, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. While spending time with someone and getting to know what they do and how they treat others feels like the only way to start trusting someone but it seems like there should be more to it than that. I don’t consider myself someone who has trusting issues but I’m not stupid either. Most of us know when someone is hiding or lying to you, mostly because we do it too. If everyone does it and we know this, how in the world are we going to have a relationship with someone where you are supposed to share almost everything with? It seems like most of the time the best way and the only way to do it is give people a chance until they break that trust. Until then I plan to enjoy others’ company as if I have known them my whole life because I don’t plan to miss out on people and everything I can learn from them.

Choices, Choices

Not long ago I read a blog from a student in my English class and I decided to share the story about an incident with a not-so-nice clerk at a computer store. Even though everyone has gone through bad costumer service she tells the story very amusingly and encourages us to think about our personal reaction. Click and Read!

Thoughts about the blog:
I’ve always told people who like to talk about themselves that the only way they can proof others who they are with actions. Everyone talks: about things they think, they are, they want, they feel. Most of them are opinions that are not always viewed the same way by everyone. So, how do I believe people show their real selves? Well, we all go through different occurrence in life that presents us with a variety of choices. The choices we make describe who were are a lot better than everything we think and talk about ourselves. The author of the blog goes through a series of options of how to react to an undeserved insult and finally decides not to act at all, which many would say is an action itself. She explains that she chose not to act because of the possibility that the clerk could get into more trouble than she deserved. This is a simple example of an incident that could have had various different endings. Her specific action does not describe everything she is and she could possibly react differently next time she gets confronted with an insult but it definitely shows a side of compassion and thoughtfulness in her. I am not done writing about this, but I will continue in another blog because I want to tell you in detail how this relates to my relationship with my past and current boyfriends.

What a Week...

Let’s start with a brief summary about my week. My weeks start Sunday night. I go to help out teaching salsa and then salsa practice. This Sunday I was at that room for four hours practicing for a performance, which is about two hours more than I had planned. After that I was dizzy, sore, and very tired and definitely incapable of thinking about studying of doing homework. Monday and Tuesday I caught up with some assignments, cleaned the apartment and even did some grocery shopping that needed to be done. Wednesday morning I went looking for black baggie pants at every store in town because the team needed for our hip hop number. This obviously took half of my day and replaced important studying time but it was accomplished before my 12:30 class. I rushed all morning to make sure to make it to my 12:30 class. I knew I had to park my car at 12:00 in order to ride the bus to campus in order to make it to class in time. The problem was that I don’t have a 12: 30 class. When I arrived to my class all of my classmates were leaving and then is when it hit me: my class starts at 11:30, not 12:30 like I’ve been telling myself the whole morning. As soon as I saw Tito, one of the performers of the team in my class, I asked him if I could copy his notes and told him what happened. I assured myself that this error wouldn’t hurt me much because I could easily study the notes that I had missed, but that was not the only thing I had missed. The professor had given out one of those pop quizzes he likes to give out at random once a week. I kept telling myself that this would only make me more focused on making good grades in the class, but it didn’t keep me from feeling very stupid. Wednesday night was our last time to practice for the big performance. All of the team was dancing for what seemed for the first time so it made it harder to teach and organize the choreography. It was a two hour practice where a lot of reviewing and sweating was done but we felt like all the work would pay off competing against the other teams. Thursday was a hectic day. The performance was that night so I needed to make sure costumes, make up, shoes were all packed. I drove my car for the first time the whole semester because I had a heavy bag to carry and because of the disguising rainy weather. When I got to a building I looked for my iPhone which I had seen minutes earlier in my car. I didn’t see it in my bag or any pockets so I thought I left in my car. As a nice touch to my week I still can’t find my iPhone. Those who have an iPhone or anything similar will understand my frustration. It is unbelievable how much we learn to depend on them. We find ways to use them for every single activity in our day. I thought about using it to look at the time before class, to calculate the answer to a statics problem, to text your friend you were supposed to meet to work on the statics homework to mention a few that day. Finally the one thing that makes me forget about the one million things that I’m supposed to be doing was going to happen: it was dancing time! Right before the performance one of our dancers realized she left her shoes at home which made us change formations right before performing. The two performances went well, but there was no doubt that there was not an obvious winner. I’m not blaming our lost on my bad luck that week but both groups knew well that it wasn’t definite who was going to win. I ended up spending the whole week worrying about a dance competition which we didn’t even win. Oh, and I lost my iPhone and got a zero on a calculus quiz on the way. The week is over and I plan to have a wonderful Valentine’s Day weekend while I catch up on all the homework I have for next week. Since this blog is about learning about situations and people I will bring up a thougt that it’s good to think about every now and then: other people have it worst than I do. I know it sounds a little selfish but sometimes the thought of other people’s troubles makes appreciate life a little more, even when everything is not going your way.

Plomo... What?

On our first night out in Houston some of my girlfriends decided to RA sushi. It was almost Dany’s twenty-first birthday and we were deciding little details. Before I continue the story you have to have an idea of who she is. Dany is the second oldest of the group and she is a planning freak. Let me explain: she needs to have every event planned in detail months before an event: what we are doing, what we are wearing, the time, the place, everything. Let’s just say that she already knows exactly what her braid maids are wearing and her boyfriend has not even proposed. It might sound like she is a little bit crazy, but everyone knows that her birthday parties, get-together’s and trips are definitely the most fun to go to. So, that night at RA sushi we were talking about her birthday party and she wanted us to brainstorm of what we could all wear to the party. Like a color theme. Obviously some mentioned the common black-and-white party, or “Wear red” themed. While we were debating between colors and themes Maki, the oldest of us, stopped our conversation and we knew she had the perfect theme. Let’s all wear lead (plomo). I really wish I could say that in Spanish “plomo” is a color we use often, but it is used just as the word lead is used in English. We all looked at each other and couldn’t stop laughing. Lead? We asked. Maki tried to explain what she was thinking when she thought of all of us wearing a beautiful lead color dress, but it was too funny to make sense out of it. Obviously other crazy ideas came up making fun of what Maki had just said. “Let’s all wear baby-chicken yellow.” We never forgot of how funny it was when we all pictured ourselves in lead outfits. The name “Las Plomo” which translates to “The Lead Girls” stuck with us. We all remember it as a night that not only our “name” came up but a night when we realized that we could enjoy each other’s company and have the time of our lives laughing at something so simple as a color.

Las Plomo

My closest friends in College Station are the group of friends that I always wished to have in college. Sometimes they don’t make my life easier, that’s for sure, but they surely make your life happier when I need it the most. My girlfriends are close to me but not because we know everything that goes on in each others life, but because we share a bond we share that not even we can explain. I can start to describe who we are by saying that we are all Colombian, but this is not enough explanation because we are all VERY different. A handful of essential values and our heritage are about all that we have in common. You will realize this when I write more in detail about every individual one that we all have different personalities, looks, believe, and even economical status. These different traits teach me different things everyday and shows me how important is to have friends like them in my life. Sometimes friendships like these amaze me because it’s not easy to trust and give so much of our time and effort to people who you just happen to meet. I will never understand why we give each other so much, specially knowing that they it is possible that our relationship could change any second, but that’s what makes it is so special.