OMG! I Met a Cute Guy, Let's Check My Horoscope!

                “Oh my god look at my horoscope!  It’s so right today!”  I giggled as my friend passed me the paper reveal the secrets of the universe to us all.  “You know I never want to believe these are real, but they are so dead on right all the time!”  I giggled reading the paper myself.  They did seem accurate, but wait, I wasn’t reading my own horoscope I was reading hers.  Maybe we are connected by the stars?  I had to go home and look it up!

http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/horoscope-sign-profile-cancer.html

                I looked through pages of how fortune predictions worked.  Throwing out tiny pieces of meaningless information to see how you react to it and then building from it.  Like in the Wizard of Oz when the fortuneteller looked at the picture in Dorothy’s basket, real fortunetellers also use the context clues we bring in with us to start to develop a story of our “fortune” for us.  To me, that is almost just as worthy as a real fortune, a person letting you know exactly the kinds of signals you send out to the world is extremely useful.  However, where does a newspaper get its clues about my own personal life.

                The fact is, horoscope predictions are actually written in such a way that most people will see them as applying to their life most of the time.  An excellent experiment performed by the professor Richard Dawkins gave out just one of the daily horoscopes telling everyone it was the prediction for their sign.  A majority of the people agreed that the fortune was accurate, except, ironically enough, a woman who happened to actually have the sign used as her actual sign. 

At any given point in our lives, we are nervous about expectations and changes in our lives, we are hoping to find love and happiness, and we are preparing for great adventures in our own minds.   As humans we are naturally prone to facing stresses at work or school, we change friends, meet new people, and help old friends through difficult times, and we look forward to new things on the horizon for ourselves and hope for success and even see it amongst failure.  Horoscopes take these aspects of our lives and give us general overriding advice on them.  The advice can apply to such a vast majority, the odds of it applying to you are strong.

But what about my personal solidified description that describes me wonderfully and that doesn’t change… Well, the thing about those are that they often include very positive wording which people tend to want to agree with in the first place.  I may not actually be the deepest thinker, but if a horoscope tells me I am, I’m not going to disagree with it.  If you read through all the horoscope descriptions, you would find in general most of them feel as though they apply to you as well!

Sources:
http://www.cracked.com/funny-6269-horoscopes/

Organics, Mathematics, and Other Problems We are Loosing the Ability to Solve

“And then there are some things, that you are just wasting your money on, like organics!  People have lived for thousands of years without organics, and now this whole organics craze has got me paying double when my wife goes to the grocery store.”  My mouth hung open, I couldn’t believe that my well-educated college professor was saying this.  Living without organics for thousands of years? No actually its only very recently you could get things non-organic.  Its only in the past 50 years that un-natural chemicals have been used in the production of our foods.  Since then, we (Americans) have found ourselves becoming increasingly unhealthy.  That professor is not alone in his thinking, so many of my friends agree whenever we talk on the issue of health “Its just soooo expensive, I want to do it, but I just can’t afford it!”  “Going to a drive through is just so much cheaper and easier.”  It doesn’t stop with organic foods either.  Constantly we hear parents complain about how much effort it takes to organize children into doing physical activity and it is “just easier to put them in front of the TV’

We constantly say that we don’t have the time or money to eat the way we should, but is that really it? Or is it simply the big companies who gave us drive through lanes, video games, and cable TV want us to believe that buying into their unhealthy products makes life easier and cheaper.  When you buy organically yes you’re paying more, on average it is about a 20%-40% markup, however, when you go through that easy drive through you are paying 3X as much for the low quality food that you are getting.  Not to mention the cost of the gas to drive to the drive through for every meal as opposed to the one trip to the grocery store a week.

If you order off the breakfast dollar menu, you will probably spend about $3 per person.  Seems cheap enough, until you consider the actual math of the situation;  at home my organic eggs cost $2.50 per dozen, that is about 20 cents per egg, I eat my eggs with toast which is the most expensive bread you can buy (100% Whole grain, Whole wheat) at $7 for 16 slices, that’s 44 cents per slice.  So, if I ate two slices of bread and two eggs, which is much more food than the dollar menu meal provided I will spend $1.28, less than half what I spent on breakfast for far more.  The time you spend making an egg into whatever way you want (except for hard boil but you can make those in advanced while doing other things) is about the same if not less time than you will spend in the drive through on their quickest days.  The same formulas can be used for any meal and for all of them you can come up with simple, more filling, cheaper, quicker, and healthier meals every single time.

Eating Healthy foods is only half the equation, exercise is also part of it.  We always hear parents complaining that it is easier to put their child in front of the television than to have to go through the time and money it takes to organize them into sports.  However, they are forgetting that, it cost quite a bit of money for all the electronic equipment, the monthly cable fee, and that lovely air conditioning you have blowing through your child’s climate controlled environment.  To send them outside to play, is well, free!  Yep, that’s right the most you as a parent have to do is stick your child on the front porch and lock the door, and guess what within 5 minutes, they have come up with their own game to entertain themselves with for free!  I’m not saying don’t keep an eye on them, but children can actually manage themselves when left to their own devices, and first and foremost, they will find a way to entertain themselves.  Often they find entertainment, not by sitting down and lethargically staring at rocks, but by running around, playing tag, chasing birds, and getting physical activity.

The same goes for us as well, we say we don’t have the time to exercise, and then take every available moment to sit down, after spending full days sitting.  The key to our problem is that we have taken unhealthy treats such as fast food, cable, and video games, and tried to turn them into our lifestyles.  As a result, we have seen extraordinary obesity and diabetes in our world.  Our bodies are revolting against our own treats and failed attempts to spoil it!   Our bodies need healthy foods and they crave exercise.  So why not be lazy, and give in to the healthy lifestyle, because at the end of the day it’s actually easier!

Sources:

http://eartheasy.com/article_high_cost_organic_food.htm

http://jennifer.hubpages.com/hub/Is-it-Cheaper-to-Eat-Fast-Food-or-Real-Food

http://www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/nutrition_policy.html

It was Love at First...?

            “Do you believe in love at first sight?”  It seems such a simple question on first sight, but as soon as my friend posted it, she saw a flood of emotional responses fighting for possibilities and defending the honor of loves past and current.  However, as we all debated we realized one profound truth that we all forgotten in the simple question.  That love, itself, is not simple, love is complex.  Love is not a black or white fact, but a flexible emotion that we feel.  We cannot know if someone loves the way we can see if someone blinks, instead we must sense it the way we sense if someone breaths, we must assume by the warmth in the air and the signs of their motions to know if someone is breathing.  There are also different types of love we can feel and different levels and stages of love with in those types.

            Before I begin, I must pause to note that I am not talking about lust.  Although lust and love are similar and can be often confused, as they both are based in a combination of passion and desire, lust is a completely different emotion based upon innate animal instincts with the intention of continuously populating the earth.  We also must recognize that love is not something we can judge about other people.  We do not know how someone else feels love, and it is not possible for us to truly know.  All we know is what we feel ourselves.

            Love is an emotion based upon caring about someone or something else.  Therefore, like any other emotion, it can felt in a second.  Like anger, joy, and sadness, your emotion can change in a moment.  Of course, like all emotions, the more bases and more time put into developing that emotion, the longer it is felt.  You may feel love for something in a moment and immediately stop moments later because you don’t put the time into developing that emotion, or you realize that your original emotion was unfound.  It happens all the time with the emotion of fear, one moment we are shocked into fear, only to realize moments later that we had nothing to be afraid of.  We react to love in just the same way.

            Obviously, there are certain types of love that cannot be gained in an instant.  Although all types of love can come over time, storge love is they type of love that comes from slowly develops from friendship.  By the very definition, storge cannot be found in an instant.  Euros, on the other hand, are based upon aesthetic enjoyment and can easily be felt the moment you notice something.  Ludus, which is love played like a game of chess, is entered into the moment the players start to play the game.

            The key to love as most wish to experience it is in the recognition that love is an emotion that must be nurtured.  You may have had that initial feeling of care towards that other person, but you must develop it more in order to make it last over the years in the form of friendship, romantic relationship, or any other form.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_styles

Diet or Just Plain Die...

http://kimslightfoods.com/

            I was trying to be healthy, but at times life amongst the brightly colored boxes of a grocery store can be a rough road.  “Stick to the outside. Stick to the outside. Stick to the outside, but wait I need juice, V8 V-Fusion juice is good for you.  Ok, really quick in and out.”  I dodged into the juice aisle and grabbed my healthy beverage, and managed my way out of the grocery store without falling to my own temptations.   I was already unpacking my grocery bag before I realized I had failed.  By accident, I had grabbed the wrong bottle of juice.  I had grabbed the Light V8.

            I know what you are thinking, this is better for you right?  Light is better for a healthy life.  At least that’s what we are raised to believe, but throw that out now, because it is probably those light foods that are keeping you off the road to healthy living. For years, food companies have used these “Diet”, “Light”, and “Fat Free” labels to get us to buy things that should never enter our body in the first place.  At first glance, the “Light” label on my V8 juice seems accurate, after all it contains only 50 calories as opposed to the 170 of the regular V8.  However,  if you continue to read down, you will see that you are giving up all of the protein in V8 when you drink the light version.  That little cheat chart of nutrition facts is only the tip of the ice-burg.   Located not too far, hiding in plain view on the ingredients list is the true perpetrator.

            Sucralose, more commonly known as splenda, is written on the list of ingredients.  We also think of splenda as a health food, because it replaces sugar.  However, the truth is that eliminating sugar won’t help you lose weight.  In fact sucralose has been shown in studies to not only make you gain weight, but also negatively affect your body’s ability to utilize those few nutrients V8 light didn’t eliminate.

            It doesn’t end with just V8, almost all light and diet labeled foods have something in them to make them worse than if you ate the actual product.  The conception of aspartame, used in Diet Coke, can lead to not only to seizures, but also death.  Saccharin, sweet’n lo, greatly raises the risk of some forms of cancers and tumors.  Besides these health risks, these replacement chemicals are highly addictive making you want to eat more of them and, in the end           

            So what can you do to eat healthier now that “diet” foods are off the table.  Stick to the natural.  If you buy it the way you can find it in the wild than it is generally good to eat.  Of course, a variety is best.  Your body needs protein and iron in meets, the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, and yes even the fat found in milk and other dairy products.  The goal, is to aim for as little processing as possible.  The amount of sugar found in one processed item is often more than what is enough fruit for you to care to eat.

            Keep healthy, keep it natural, and do your research.

Sources:

http://www.campbellfoodservice.com/details.aspx?Code=1022

http://www.anh-usa.org/how-sweet-it-isnt-cutting-through-the-hype-and-deception/

http://www.foodrenegade.com/when-sugar-is-still-sugar/

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403942n&tag=contentBody%3BstoryMediaBox%3Ftag%3Dfacebook

It Wasn't Me, It Was That Crazy Jealousy

            “I shouldn’t care! I don’t care! Ugh I don’t know why I care! Why do I care? Nothing is going to happen anyway.”  I couldn’t say anything. I just had to let her talk.  We have all felt it before.  That bubbling feeling that fills us when we get those pangs of jealousy.  We can get it over almost anything from boys to grades to jobs to boys, pretty much if it affects us we can feel jealous about it.  Our first reaction is to reject it, to blow it off as something evolution just forgot to get rid of like appendixes, but maybe we shouldn’t.

            We may be creatures of emotion, but often that we forget that the basis of emotion is innate logic.  No, that doesn’t mean that you were right that the girl talking to your boy of the moment is truly a whore, but it does point to something deeper.  When we feel jealousy, we are given a window into exactly what we actually want.  Although other forces are pushing you toward that perfect romance, being truly jealous (not just the fake kind that you say to her) of your friend who has just gotten a cushy raise can tell you something about what you really want.  If you really break down why you are jealous, you can discover exactly what is important to you.            We are born into a world that tells us to want so much.  From individual things to lifelong pursuits in order to be happy, everyone is telling us to want something.   Advertisers are telling us to buy now, universities are telling us to be deep thinkers, our employers tell us to work hard, our parents tell us to find happiness, churches are telling us to make God happy our friends our telling us to have fun.  In all of this noise can it really be possible for us to know exactly what it is that we want.  Jealousy is like an alarm going off inside of us, telling us to stop and look that there is something you really want. 

            So why then is jealousy such a problem? Simple, it is how we react to it.  Because it is such a private emotion, for the most part no one has ever taught us how to properly deal with it.  In our own frustration of what to do with this strange emotion, we become angry and often attack.  Who do we attack? Often the very person we are jealous of, to rip them apart and take away what they have in order to feel better about the fact that we ourselves have not achieved it.

            This poses a bigger problem, because we have taken a person we have seen achieve our goal often coming from the same place we have, and we have turned them into an enemy.  What we should be doing instead is turning them into a mentor and to learn from their tricks to get what we want.  There are tricks to every trade, and odds are in addition to hard work, your friend has used them.  Studying how they did something can help you achieve it also.

            Instead of taking a moment to attack, we should be taking a moment to change our own course, to recognize what we want, and to become our own greatest accomplishment.  We are all capable of achieving what we want out of life; we just have to recognize that we want it enough to go after it.  After all, if you don’t want it enough to go after it, did you really even want it at all?

           

Sources:

http://www.futurescopes.com/advice/127/jealousy-sometimes-good-thing

http://www.askmen.com/dating/heidi_200/225_dating_girl.html

http://dating-advice.tv/ways-turn-jealousy-asset/

Free Birth Control for All Us Whores

            Wanting free contraception makes you a whore.  At least, if you are asking the opinion of Rush Limbaugh or his supporters you are.  Now, let’s face the facts, not a single one of us wants to give up on our birth control and if there is one person who wants us to loose our birth control less than we do it’s our boyfriends/husbands, and to be honest, although they don’t like to admit it, our fathers.  We as women are made to have babies, and society has primed us to raise them.  If the girls on 16 and pregnant can it, we can too!  On the other hand, there is no 16 and my girlfriend is pregnant to prep boys for fatherhood.  In fact most of the fathers on the show end up being exactly the kind of guy your boyfriend is trying NOT to be.  Our fathers also know this, and panic worse than we do when we say we are pregnant.

            Babies aside (we all know that is cost about a million dollars to raise a baby and that will fall on us if a woman is not financially prepared to have a baby), however, we all know that birth control does AMAZING things for our bodies.  The hormones lessen the blow of the much feared PMS mood swings (as well as all the other icks that come along with it).  So why would any guy (or anyone for that matter) near us want us off this miracle drug?  So, when that silly little boy makes a comment about our birth control, it is far too easy to get emotional, call him an idiot, and walk away.  However, there is far more to this controversy, and we all need to calm down pat him on the shoulder and calmly explain to him the true facts of the issue.  This, of course, means that we need to know the full issue, because if you get down to it this issue isn’t about birth control at all.

            The issue of Obama-care has been brought before the supreme court is not because of birth control at all, but because it requires all individuals to purchase a minimum standard of healthcare.  Whether you think this is right or wrong is your own prerogative.  However, you should be able to fight your opinion on THIS matter, without attacking or even bringing up women specifically.

            So why is birth control even an issue?  Well, under this new minimum standard, all preventative health care is available without co-pay.  Birth control, rightfully, is considered preventative healthcare.  Why? Well in addition to preventing babies, birth control also prevents uterine and ovarian cancer, symptomatic endometriosis, and the need for surgery for fibroids, it helps with PCOS,  PMDD, irregular bleeding, and regulates PMS.  If anyone calls into question the preventative nature of birth control, simply direct them to google or a doctor, because factually birth control is preventative care.

            The issue, was actually raised into question by Catholic bishops, before conservative politicians used it as a shiny distractor in their own campaigns.  Funny thing is, while these bishops were busy defending their pocket books, the Pope had actually been speaking out in defense of birth control.  Historically, while the church was against birth control, we must keep in mind that this came into practice during the same time when birth control was still unsafe to use.  However, now that it is becoming safer, the church has lessened its grip on it, in a similar fashion to the way that they now allow you eat bacon and ignore all the other rules listed in Leviticus.  Of course, the church still wants to remain in full support of procreation, the church has officially come out saying that although they are against the use of sex for a purpose other than procreation, if you are in a situation in which you don’t intend on procreating, go ahead and use contraception as it is not making what you’re doing bad, it’s the original action.  Nuns with in the church, have also come out in support of this new mandate because of its access to birth control, because nuns are actually out working with the population and seeing the need.  Also, nuns are women.  What it comes down to for the church, is money.  I hate to say it, but after thirteen years in a catholic schooling, I know fully well that the church is actually a business.  Sure, they are in a “noble” business of helping to develop our souls; much like a university develops our minds or a gym develops our bodies.  However, when you get down to it, it’s a business.  If it weren’t about money, wouldn’t these bishops have tried it and shown that the women under their employment weren’t taking the drug and therefore, they shouldn’t have to pay for it?  If they had used this method I may have agreed with them and said “sure don’t worry about paying for it,” but they didn’t because we all know the women working for them are on it (98% of sexually active) catholic women have taken birth control.

            So, why are we even debating it?  Because it’s a distraction.  Our politicians all know that there are so many issues in our world today that they cannot find the perfect answer too.  In fact, they probably could not even fight against the previous battle in a way that would win them supporters.  In all honesty how can you easily fight that one child deserves better preventative health care than another because of their parent’s income.  Especially, when they are both American children just like you or I.  Is requiring mandated health care the best solution?  It’s a big issue, with complicated solutions, which are hard to debate.  So, for a politician it is easy to throw up something like birth control and say it is wrong because it is immoral and gain backing from people who were raised under these old beliefs of the church.  It is easy to call girls who want something that enables them to have sex whores, but guess what buddy it takes two to tango.  When their opposition questions them on keeping birth control away from women, they can always say well I’m not against it when they are paying for it (that’s funny cause you didn’t say that before).  The fact of the  matter is when you give women birth control, poverty levels go down, and education levels go up and that is something any nation will benefit from.

            We as women, have survived for plenty of years without free birth control, and if Obama-care is thrown out for mandating citizens to purchase something, we shall continue to pay for it.  Were it is wrong is for these men to call women out as being “whores” and “sluts” or defending what our country has deemed our right as it has been in this health care reform.

Sources:

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20120215/LETTER/120219905

http://ezinearticles.com/?Birth-Control-Pills-Advantages-And-Disadvantages&id=372251

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/truth-be-told/2012/feb/15/does-free-contraception-all-really-improve-society/

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/italy/101227/vatican-pope-benedict-condoms

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/kristof-beyond-pelvic-politics.html

If I Go Alone, The Cannibals will Eat Me Part II

*If you haven't read http://girlworldvsreality.blogspot.com/2012/03/if-i-go-alone-cannibals-will-eat-me.html read first*

          So cool, last time we all realized that when traveling, that no matter where we are or where we go, we live in a world made up of human beings with feelings and emotions.  Sure there are a few bad eggs here and there, but in general people will pick up on your signals and help you out, you just have to be willing to make those first moves towards saying no.  Of course, no one is going to make a movie about the girl who got away, only the girl who fell for the trap.

But wait what about Hostel?  People had asked you about that one two, and well, those guys were taken right out of their beds.  They weren’t even travelling alone. They were in a group of GUYS!!! I’m a girl all alone! If a guy falls for that, how am I supposed to be on my A game enough to not have that happen to me without using a private investigator?   Well first of all let’s remind ourselves that it just a movie.  While some hostels can be sketchy, most of them aren’t secretly operating as a way to collect people to be tortured and if they are they are probably being shut down by local authorities. 

In our modern age, booking websites provide endless supplies of feedback on hostels so you can actually feel them out before you book.  I mean if hotels and hostels are operating under a false front in order to collect people to enslave, and you happen to book there even after researching it and getting a pretty good vibe, I’m sorry but that is called really bad luck.  Of course, so is having a pedophile move in across the street when you were six years old and you hadn’t even left the house at that point.  Sadly, I can’t sit here and say that bad things don’t happen in the world, because they happen everywhere.  However, I can say that they happen everywhere and you are pretty much as safe abroad as you are at home. 

Sure, stories of fatal adventures pop up in our newspapers and create a panic against travel.  However, over 32 million single American women traveled in 2010, and made up 65% of people going on cultural adventure tours.  In fact in the past 6 years the single woman travel business has grown by 230%.  If all of them were being raped, murdered, and kidnapped abroad, not only would this number no longer be existent, but those news stories wouldn’t be news stories at all it would just be what happened when you are stupid enough to leave your front porch.  Think about it how many car crashes make the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  In all my time of reading that particular paper I have seen none.  However, I have seen enough plane crashes to make me never want to look at a plane again.  Funny thing is, you are 12 times more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash.

People are funny that way, when I first decided to Virginia Tech, just after the April 16^th shootings, people constantly said “Don’t get shot.”  I lived less than five miles from Baltimore City (and actually went to school in the city) and moving was to a place where in the past 100 years there were two incidents of people getting shot, one in the early 1900’s and the other on April 16^th 2007.  Blacksburg is still one of the safest places in America and Baltimore is one of the most dangerous, but because every petty crime is a shock in Blacksburg, it becomes a big story which is scary and shocking to those on the outside.

            So, just remember to travel safe girls and live smart.

Sources:

http://gutsytraveler.com/2010/12/31/women-travel-statistics-the-latest/ http://www.hostelworld.com/blog/solo-female-travel-nine-myths-and-one-truth/155970http://www.airtravelsurvival.com/pages/plane-crash-statistics.htm