worth sharing

Only a short post this week because this week has been exhausting (I finished work at 10pm on Thursday – a new record for me). Actually, barely even a post. I’m just going to share this list of TED Talks because it is actually worth sharing. It comes with summaries, so I won’t say more.

10 great TED Talks by Hispanic and Latinx speakers for Hispanic Heritage Month

Thank goodness it’s a long week-end now.

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a talk worth sharing

I came across this TED Talk by Johann Hari in the course of my YouTube browsing.

Having been trained to see depression and anxiety from a medical perspective, I thought the talk was quite edifying. A lot of valid points that, as Hari says, seem obvious, but just do not get acted on.

Thought I’d share it here for general interest, and in case there’s someone out there who needs to see this

poetry in every day

I’ve been feeling like I want to get back into writing again, and I’ve had this itch for a while now. And by “get back into writing” I mean proper creative writing. I know blogging technically counts as writing, and I suppose there’s some element of creativity, since you are creating something, but I think I really want to write stories again.

The problem is I don’t know what to write about. My last serious attempt at writing a decent-length story started getting rather depressing, so I ditched it. (I couldn’t really handle churning through so much emotion, and I wasn’t sure how to pull the whole thing from the depths of misery it was drowning in.)

one twelfth

I watched a TED Talk recently about bees and have since decided that bees are in my top 10 favourite animals. I mean, they could probably be in the top 5, but I don’t really know what my favourite animals actually are beyond the first two, so I can’t say for sure. Just never gave it much thought, I suppose.

But this post isn’t about me — it’s about bees and the wonderful work they do. The talk, if you’re interested, is by Marianne Gee, and is titled “Want to change the world? Think like a bee”. The title intrigued me because I was probably in the middle of an existential crisis, or just out of one. Highly recommended, though, even if you have never despaired at how impossible it seems to make any worthwhile impact or change.

knives and daggers

There’s a particular scene from The Grapes of Wrath that has stayed with me longer than I could have expected it to (although I’m also not surprised that it has). I can remember parts of the novel if I stop and think about it, but this one part pops into my mind of its own accord. [Warning: spoilers in the next paragraph.] 

learning how to learn languages

Every so often – maybe when I’m feeling like I need a bit of inspiration, or I’m just feeling bored and listless – I watch TED Talks. Usually these are TEDx Talks but they’re more or less the same thing. Usually I watch talks about psychology and human relationships, or about behaviour and the way the brain works; but a couple of weeks ago, YouTube was suggesting some talks about learning languages.

As you may or may not know, I’m currently in the process of learning Persian (AKA Farsi) and also kind of re-learning Mandarin, so when I saw videos like “How to learn any language easily” pop up, I figured “why not”. I used to be quite wary of these talks because I thought they would just tell me to spend three months in whatever country speaks the language I’m learning, and I’d miraculously master it (obviously I can’t just pack up and move to Iran or China for three months); but I had spare time that day, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to watch one talk, and see if it offered anything worthwhile.