That moment when you feel,,,Aha!

   "Aha! I'm not alone!", a feeling I'm sure you've had probably more than once in your life when you came across something you read or something you heard that proved you are in fact not the only weirdo on earth. Better yet, you are not a weirdo at all. Others do exist! And then you even might have gotten the idea that if you and your kind all bunch up together maybe you could rule the world and take over the reigns of power and....

   Sorry, I got carried away! But seriously, these Aha! moments come to us when we realize that some of our quirky traits, or some of the things that make us who we are and for which we have been constantly criticized all our lives are not mistakes or flaws that we need to remedy, but are just part of who we are and there are reasons for it and others share these traits and reasons for having them with us, we just hadn't realized it yet, not until that Aha! moment I'm talking about. And let me add, in case you are in your teens and you feel that everything you do or say gets you more and more rejected by the "cool crowd", do not worry, your Aha! moment has just not come to you yet, and believe me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE, no one is.

   So, what was my Aha moment? I have had quite a few lately, however I do want to talk to you about a couple of the most important and most recent ones. The first was when I came across the definition of Introversion and Extroversion and the realization that being an introvert was the cause of my condition,ah, sorry, was the reason behind many of my character traits. The second was an even bigger moment. That was when I came across the definition of The Scanner Type Personality and it's opposite, The Specialist Type Personality, and all the various and accurate examples that explained the remainder of my traits that were causing me to be depressed since I thought I was flawed and should try to change them, which of course I never could do.

   In future posts, I will get into the details of what each of these things, being and introvert and a scanner, mean to me and what they might mean to you. 

   Please share with us any of your similar moments and what that meant to you and to the way you viewed yourself. Stay tuned for more about introverts and scanners, maybe reading these posts would bring about an Aha moment for you!

Screw it! If I'm crazy, so are you.

     It's Saturday already. For some of us this is a good thing if the weekend is just starting, for others, such as myself the weekend is in its twilight hours and for some poor souls the new week has already started. So in the hope that these posts are reaching all of you I wish you will enjoy, are enjoying or have enjoyed a happy and energizing weekend.

     In my last post I promised to share my first piece of writing that stands as a testament to how angry my writing,and thoughts for that matter can sometimes get. Here is the piece. I hope you find it a fun and interesting read and I hope you would share with us some of your early writing whether angry or not!
     
     Let me know what you think. Here goes nothing!

            Screw it! If I'm crazy, so are you

     "Let's take a second here to be really honest with ourselves. How many times have you dreamed of walking into the office where you work in the morning and just walk up to your coworkers and tell them what you REALLY think of them? Might be good, might be bad, but it sure is the truth, maybe you even would like to drop by your boss's office too. 
  
   You probably also get the urge to knock on your loud and noisy next door neighbor, with whom you've tried to reason politely many times, asking him to stop making so much noise at night, but this time you just want to punch him in the face and just walk away.

   And my personal favorite, is wanting to take a baseball bat and smash the hell out of cars. Starting with the one that is usually parked next to mine in the garage because the driver rarely keeps to his assigned space and always constantly makes my life hell trying to get in or out of my car, not to mention wiping my clothes against his door every time I get in or out of my car.

   The list of fantasies goes on and on, and I bet we've all had them at one time in our lives. The idiot driver in the street, the annoying receptionist, the rude relative, all those people and all those times in our lives that create what society has come to call STRESS.

   The annoying part is that we have to look for ways to RELIEVE the stress, but why do we let it accumulate in the first place? Why do we have to play by the rules? We all like breaking the rules. True, that might create chaos, but if we all break the rules, then we can just create new rules, rules that say you can say or do what you want, when you want it. I'm not saying we should live like animals, don't get me wrong. Be polite, but once someone is not, kick them in the face. Try to correct someone when they make a mistake , but if they keep insisting that they are this age's Einstein or are as wise as Confucius, just tell them they are idiots and it is a miracle their kind has not yet become extinct. Why should you and I abide by the rules that make us civil if that other guy won't? Why should you nod and smile when someone is insisting that they are right when everyone in the room knows they are wrong just because that guy's status outranks everyone else. Why should we take a deep breath and go on our ways when we see someone in a parking lot taking up two spaces just because they learned to drive at Idiots School or because they just don't give a damn about anyone else, while in fact we both know that what we want to do is wait till that guy is back to his car, grab him and rhythmically bang his head against the wall like a basketball?!

   We all have to talk in a certain way and eat in a certain way. We have to look and appear a certain look. We all have to work hard to earn more money to secure better financial futures and keep up with crap every second of every day of our lives because if we don't, if we say what we want, if we eat what we want, if we don't want to be skinny, if we don't want to save for the future, if we just quit a crappy job, or punch an irritating bastard in the face, we will be called CRAZY.

   You know what, I have a long list of people I want to punch, a list of people I want to tell they are idiots and a whole lot others I just want to get my revenge on and I sure as hell wish to live my life just like my fantasies, and I believe we are crazy for living the way we do. I don't believe one is crazy for breaking the rules or changing them. I believe one is crazy for following the existing rules.

   So be that as it may, if everything I said makes me crazy, then SCREW IT, I am crazy. But look me in the eye and tell me you're not"

Angry Young Men

     In the 2012 movie THE WORDS, starring Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Irons, Bradley Cooper's character was a struggling writer living in New York and trying to write his breakthrough novel. At one point, broke and newly married, he took on a job in a big New York publishing house in order to support himself and his small family and at the same time make the proper connections to help him out as he works at night on his novel. So, at that publishing house he meets another guy working there for the same reason and in a brief encounter on screen they ask each other "what kind of writing do you do?" and they both answer "mostly angry young men, I guess".

     This made me realize that "Angry Young Men" is the same kind of writing I started out with too. And so I reflected on some of the first pieces I wrote when I got that advice I told you about, Stay Calm and Write Something. I tried starting journals, but for some reason the only thing I got out of it was a drawer filled with partially-filled notebooks of various designs and sizes according to the mood I was in when I purchased them. Then I moved on to writing NOTES on Facebook, which was not bad actually and helped a lot when people started commenting on these Notes which made me feel good to know that other people go through similar things or at least understand and empathize with what I was writing about.

     I might still be writing "angry young men". I'll leave that for you to decide. I would like to believe that my writing has evolved even if just a tiny bit since then and although I am still using writing as a therapeutic tool and to stay calm, I believe the subjects themselves are becoming more mature and interesting. Or at least that's what I hope in order for this blog to not crash and burn! However, the very first piece I wrote as a Note on Facebook will always remain as the clearest example of my writing about "Angry Young Men".

     For my next post I will share with you that piece, but I would like to hear about your examples of early writing. Was it also angry young men/women? or was it something else. Please share your experiences and let's be ANGRY and YOUNG together! Or we could just STAY CALM AND WRITE SOME MORE.

     I will be looking forward to reading and sharing your comments. See you next time.

The Words

The Words

The written word carries upon its breeze a magic that has never failed to capture those who have exposed themselves to its secrets. It's a magic that is imbued with the experiences and feelings of the men and women who poured parts of their lives into those words, and you can be so lucky to be able to soak up these experiences, share these feelings and make them your own. That is how and why the art of reading is an art that could take you on journeys through vast valleys and over high mountains, to cities you have never visited and to explore your own city through different eyes, to board rooms with the world's greatest CEOs, and to the corners of the human psyche, all in a matter of minutes or hours and brings you back to the comfort of your chair, only to realize that you have emerged from those pages a changed person, a more experienced person, a better person.

Many of us have been swept away by the rapid tides of modern day life to an extent that sitting down, and taking such journeys through the pages of a book, has become a great challenge no one can deny. Yet modern day life has brought us tools to help overcome that challenge even if only just a little bit. E-reading devices, tablet computers, smart phones and even audio-books, are all different media available today for us to use to compensate for the difficulty of not being able to find the time to sit down with "man's best friend".

All these tools are perfectly portable so that you can squeeze in the time for that magical breeze of the written word every now and then. Yet it will always remain one of life's greatest joys when you reach out your hand to grab and turn over the last page of a great book.

Choose to read fiction or non-fiction, fantasy or thrillers, read about business, about people who did your job before you and learn what they learned and get ahead of the game. Read a good book or a bad book, just rest assured that someone, somewhere, sometime, had learned a lesson and were willing to share that lesson with you, and all it takes is for you to be willing to listen to their words carried to you on a magical breeze, through space and time.

Keep a good book beside your bed, even if all you get is to read a couple of pages before you fall asleep, you will always know that you have a good friend to talk to every night, a good friend who, with every page, will always teach you something different, and will always help you become a better person.

We all have different jobs and each has its own art that one needs to learn in order to be better at it, but the art of reading is one art we all need to learn if we want to become a better version of ourselves.

We all have a vision of a better us, better at work, better at home, and if you think this is as good as it gets, if you think you have done all there is to be done, surrender to the magical breeze of the written word, listen to its whispers and you shall be amazed at how far you can still reach and how high you can still go.

Blogger for the first time!

     Stay calm and write something. That's the best advice I came by in a long time. Stay calm and READ something, now that's a motto I have been living by for some time now, but I only discovered the beauty of writing very recently, and it was the literal meaning of this motto "stay calm and write something" that lead me to this magnificent discovery.

     You know how you daydream of beating the living crap out of someone whose making your life miserable because society will "frown upon it" if you actually do? Call me crazy but I know you've had these thoughts too, even if they just come to you in the form of NIGHT dreaming instead of DAY dreaming. In any case, I checked, I am not crazy and neither are you, it's just called venting. And one of the best ways to do that is to literally STAY CALM and WRITE SOMETHING. So I did. And it helped. A LOT!

     So one thing led to another one piece of writing led to the next and one journal entry after another, an attempt which I failed to maintain for unknown reasons, I, like many others who take up writing, started to get vain and see the absolute beauty and hear the mesmerizing music in my prose and decided that I am the next big hit in the literary world. See how I used "mesmerizing" back there??

     However, after getting some tough-love feedback from very capable and honest writers and non-writers alike, I was told that using writing as a venting tool to stay calm is extremely valuable advice. And the other valuable advice that I need is to come down from my cloud and realize that I just took a shot at writing a couple of month ago. And that one of the best ways to write, as a tool for therapy and also as practice to get better and get instant feedback, is to start a blog.

     Eventually, I sat myself down and created this blog as a place to write down my thoughts on everything and anything that moves me in a good way, or bad. As long as I stay calm when I write something I will continue to write and I hope it will be good for you to read it. 

     For my next post I will be sharing something about the beauty of words and reading. In the meantime, I hope you too would Stay Calm and Write Something, or at least read something. My suggestion, you can start by reading this Blog!