TED Talks

So today I slept until noon and watched TED talks online and movies on tv. I watched movies late last night, too, which is why I slept in so late. But that's not important, except to say that I need to nip that habit in the bud. It is so easy to waste time. That's why I'm trying to take another sabbatical from Facebook. I'm okay without it but I continue to find other ways to waste time.

TED talks are really thought provoking and inspiring, most of the time. Not all of the speakers are brilliant but it's a much better use of my time that Facebook. I love that Facebook allows me to keep up with friends who I may never see again, but it is so easy to waste entire days sitting in front of the computer.

The first TED talk that caught my eye was Charles Limb: Your Brain on Improv. I have seen several presentations of studies on the brain in love, playing music, and other things, using MRIs. It was very interesting to see what areas of the brain are involved during the creative processes of improvisation and freestyle rap.

The second one that really blew my mind was Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity. (also, Changing Education Paradigms) I have been thinking a lot about if the education system is failing because it's just an outdated conception of what education should be and how it should work. Robinson explains the history of the education system and how it is set up with a hierarchy with the arts on the bottom. The system is set up to pump out professors, and rates success in one, narrow, academic way. As a result many brilliant students feel they are unsuccessful and their potential is squelched.

The third talk was by Amy Smith. It was about producing safer burning charcoal bricks out of common materials in Haiti and India. What struck me was her statistics near the end. Women and children around the world spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water. I don't know how big the audience was. 300 in the room would be farmers. 100 would have AIDs. More than half in the room would earn only $1 a day.

I also really liked coach John Wooden's definition of success: Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction and knowing you made the effort to do the best of what you're capable.

It's so incredible to hear people's incredible stories, efforts, and revelations. It gave me a lot to meditate on. Hopefully I can think of something worth remembering.

Christmas and New Years

My mom got me a splendid digital picture frame for Christmas. It's wonderful (and I predict it will be distracting) and I have already imported some 116 pictures so I can see Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Heiligenblut, and all of your (IES) beautiful faces, without having to wait for my screen saver to turn on. I cry a little bit every time I look at it.

Being home is hard to explain. Just about everyone is home now, excepting those who are staying the full year, so you understand how I'm feeling right now. I feel like if my life were a tv show, an announcer would say, "and now back to your currently scheduled life, already in progress." It's like I was living in an alternate universe for the past 4 months. Coming back to what you consider normal isn't so hard, like I didn't have reverse culture shock, but everything is a little strange. We went to Europe and experienced a new way of living. And through our time there that culture became the norm. So while it's easy for me to slip back into the routine here, behind every action I think to myself, "this isn't the only way of doing things." For example, filling up my car with gas costs me $40-50. I know that for 50 Euros ($67) I could buy a month U Bahn pass and be good for the entire month. As much as I enjoy driving, I miss walking everywhere.

While I had missed the more attentive service in restaurants, the atmosphere is totally different. In Europe you can take your time and just enjoy the entire experience of eating good food at your leisure. There is definitely nothing like the cafe / coffee house culture here. You could sit in a Starbucks for a few hours and read but it's no substitute for Cafe Central, Cafe Hawelka, Cafe Diglas, the Palmenhaus, or any of the other hundreds of Wiener cafes. And don't get me started about Christkindlmärkte. On the flip side, I have eaten Mexican food twice already and was delighted to see that a Chipotle has opened 5 minutes away from my house.

Christmas was lovely this year. I wish I had found nice things to bring back for my family but everything I wanted was either too large, too heavy, or too fragile to pack in my suitcases. The few things I brought back are too dear to me to give away. I bought them for me, anyway. If I buy a gift for one person, I don't like giving it to anyone else because I was thinking of the first person when I bought it. I was far too tired when I came home to go Christmas shopping at the malls, so I decided not to give gifts to anyone. Dinner at my dad's was really nice on Christmas Eve, and lunch at home was low stress on Christmas, with my sister's family coming over. I love my sister's family, and my niece, Grace, in particular brings me joy. Grace is 3 and Haz, my nephew, is now 8 months old and twice as big as when I left for Austria.

New Years was merry and a joyous reunion with several old friends who I haven't seen in years. I went shopping before the party and arrived early to make Glühwein. I probably drank half of it, but everyone seemed to like it as well. We played Kings and Cranium and just talked a lot. A few people left and then one by one the rest of us fell asleep.