Blog Buster!

  How often do you leave your comfort zone? Discomfort is Comfortable     Leaving my comfort zone is still a challenge for me. Everyday I try to do something that will make myself better and improve by at least 1%. Once, I was having a hard time playing too much videogames, my attention span dropped, my streaks of going to the gym, studying and focusing on my life projects were negatively affected, but I wasn't able to notice it. After a certain time, my grades were still high, I was still losing weight, but it still felt like I was living in a "passive way". I was still having good results even maintaining a consistent and quite disciplined routine of playing videogames, and, since I was younger, I didn't notice the damage that it was doing to my overall personal improvement.     Staying in the comfort zone does not feel bad at all, but it's that type of illusion that kept me and probably a lot of people in the same place for a lot of time. ...

How good are you at waiting what you really want? Waiting is Worth It      My parents always told me that patience is the key to success. Since the beginning, they made me visualize that what separates me from what I want is not just effort, but time. As a medicine student, being able to refuse to attend parties and, overall, fall for distractions became routine. I know that to become a professional that helps and saves lives is a kind of burden for a lot of people, and I totally understand that, but for me it's just what I was meant to be, that means that studying everyday, practicing anatomical nomenclatures, helping people became just a small price to achieve my lifetime goal. However, I'm not here to say that is easy, because it's not. Even maintaining a strict routine it's not a guarantee that I'm entering the university. But the final achievement is priceless, and that makes me a really patient person.     When I was in my home country, I noticed...

  Do you wish you could return to a moment from your past? Coming back to the past is often treated as a super power in numerous comic fictions and famous narratives. Getting back to the past is understandably a power that I wish I could have. Imagine being able to time travel and “correct all of your past mistakes in only one trip? To be honest, I’m sure everybody had the same regret feeling that generates that wish to change things which had already happened, and I guess I’m passing through the same thoughts. Sometimes, what only remains from the ruminant thoughts is the notion that “what happens in the past, stays in the past”, but I’ve always felt confused about this, like what do you mean I should be okay with making a mistake that could be easily corrected?  “if I changed that one thing”, “if I had made in that way”, “I wish I haven’t done that”, does if statements are often associated with the idea I’m trying to develop, sometimes a catch myself thinking about thing...

  What can older people learn from your generation? The principle of age has never been totally defined in my mind. Would an older person be able to understand the modernity brought by the newer generations that don’t stop coming? Surely there is a midpoint where they both connect and understand each other, because like it or not they were once young and that is the singularity that generates this bond. My opinion is that elderly people, despite having a good dose of knowledge and experience, learn every day with the youth and that’s what makes them inserted into a society that changes very often. A few years ago, I used to hang out with my grandparents when they were alive and I quite didn’t understand why they had some difficulties accessing their bank accounts, telephone number, apps and even modern cars. I understand that, being close to my grandparents, at that moment, was a shock between generations and I was too young to notice. I learned from them on how to cook, how to...

  Libra , by Don DeLillo Truth and Paranoia  by: Pedro Oliveira de Miranda       An interesting factor, possible to be noticed in Libra is that the book does not really focus on trying to discover who in fact killed John F Kennedy, but instead, the narrative tries to give us a glimpse of whether the truth can be really known by someone. Just like in Rag Time, DeLillo creates a fragmented plot that mirrors the chaotic character which surrounds historical events. As a reader (and a non  native English speaker), this style made me a little uncomfortable while reading and understanding what the book is really about, but that made me realize that in Libra , lack of coherence is not an issue to be solved; it is the main point of the narrative.     Certainly, the element that most stood out in the book was the constant presence of Paranoia. Characters, like Lee Oswald, often believe that every action is connected with a larger/bigger plan. It mi...

 Kindred  The Time Travel  by: Pedro Oliveira de Miranda        Kindred, a novel published in 1979 by the African American writer Octavia E. Butler, important figure in the science fiction landscape, tells the story of Dana, a Black women from the 20th century who is mysteriously transported to a different period of time from the one she was present on. Dana appears inside of a plantation during the slavery era in  the United States, forcing her to face the violence and oppression of the relations related to this period. However, Butler didn't use time travel merely as a narrative device, but instead a complex metaphor that exposes the connection between past and future.     One of the main functions of time travel in Kindred is its ability to eliminate the distance between the past and the present, used by the author to force both Dana and the reader to face and confront the history not as something distant and immutable, but as an ong...