Had the great pleasure of seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street band live in Frankfurt on Friday night. Bruce and the band played for three hours non-stop and put on a great show on a very hot night!
At nearly 60, Bruce proved that age is no problem when you really have talent!!
Bring back Spring and the cooler days!!!
I have watched the weather reports lately with a mixture of trepidation and horror. We are quickly heading towards my worst time of the year, one that everyone else seems to enjoy immensely.
Yes, I am talking about summer and the hot, humid weather that goes with it. I suffer really badly when it reaches 30 degrees with cloud cover and I cannot imagine anything worse than working, breathing or just moving in such weather!! Now you may say that it could be worse but as someone who comes from a place where there is always a cool wind, this is too much.
Great to know that it will only last a few months and by September it will be all over and then we will be back to normal again !!!!
New priorities are the name of the game
As I go around doing my job, I have come to realise that many freelancers and self-employed people have more time on their hands than they had a year ago. Some seem totally depressed by this, while others see it as an opportunity to look at life in a different way. I, personally am still busy but have also taken the time to reflect on things. I decided to continue studying, something that has been an enlightenment for me but I have also contacted old friends that I had maybe neglected a bit in the past, which is a great experience indeed.
In times of crisis, people often achieve and try things that they wouldn't have done in 'normal' times. I have read stories from America of people in the higher levels of business giving it all up to lead a simple life or to turn a hobby into a new business. Something that would not happen without the crisis.
If there is one positive thing to come from the global recession, it might be that people start to look at themselves and what they have, instead of chasing material fantasies.
It is always a tough decision to team up with other people and work together. I have generally had bad experience when relying on other people. I have worked on my own for a long time and maybe now is the time for a change! After a couple of failed attempts to offer translation services through freelancers, I have made the jump again! This time, I think I may have got it right.
I will be working together with Tina Gabriel, who is a sworn translator and interpreter for English, German and Spanish and offering translation and proofreading services. The experience so far has been great and Tina is very professional and dedicated to her job. More details can be found on her website ;
or contact her directly on
Dreams are thoughts, emotions and the images shaped by them, which are encountered when asleep. One has dreams during the rapid eye movement sleep. Various theories on dream interpretations exist but the real purpose of dreams is still unknown. Dreams are closely associated with human psychology. Research shows that during an average lifespan, a human being spends about six years in dreaming which is around two hours every night. Let us look at dream psychology.
Sigmund Freud had proposed that dreams are the means of one's expressions of his/her unconscious wishes. He said that bad dreams allow the brain to gain control over the feelings that are a result of distressful experiences. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist suggested that dreams compensate for one-sided feelings borne in consciousness. According to Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a dream bears something that cannot be expressed outright. Some theories say that dreams involve one's repressed emotions that are fantasized during sleep while other theories suggest dreams to be an outcome of the cleaning-up operations of the brain. Hartmann believes that dreams give a person an opportunity to organize his/her thoughts. Blechner's theory of Oneiric Darwinism, which attributes the generation of new ideas to dreams, is quite supportive of Hartmann's analysis. Griffin, through his recent research has proposed the expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming, according to which dreaming completes patterns of emotional expectations. According to the theory of emotional selection by Richard Coutts, dreaming is a way to modify one's mental schema. The theory of emotional selection is about a process of executing a set of dreams during the non-REM sleep. A second set of dreams is executed during the following REM sleep in the form of test scenarios. It defines an accommodation as the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. If the accommodations performed during the preceding non-REM dreams reduce one's negative emotions, they are selected for retention, else they are abandoned. Thus emotional selection says that the psychology of dreams is usually about the enhancement of mental schemas, it’s about increasing one's social abilities. Have you wondered about the significance of the content of your dreams? Dream psychology believes that the elements of the dreams are closely related to the environment and the experiences one is exposed to. Presence of colors in the dreams is the result of long years of exposure to colored media, which is evident by a study that shows people of the olden times to be having black and white dreams. Colors, which appear in the dreams, carry the emotions represented by those colors. Dreamer often ‘watches’ the incident in the dream as an ‘onlooker’. Mostly, the visual and auditory senses form a part of dreams. It is seldom touch or taste that are experienced in the dreams. Although dream dictionaries give meanings to dreams and various ways of dream interpretations exist, dream psychology believes that the association between objects dreamt and their meanings is subjective. What is indicated by a particular dream depends on what the dreamer associates the elements of his dream with. It is suggested to write down your dream and decipher what each of the constituent of the dream conveys. It is important to understand what you associate with a particular thing you dreamed of. The thought or emotion that you get in relation to a certain color, object or a person in your dream, can serve as a clue to interpret your dreams. After having a dream, you can make its write-up, identify your psychological associations with the dream images and link all of them. More than what the elements of your dream symbolize, it is about what the elements mean to you
Recognizing burnout
Burnout is a state of emotional and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It can occur when you feel overwhelmed and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest or motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place. Burnout reduces your productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly hopeless, powerless, cynical, and resentful. The unhappiness burnout causes can eventually threaten your job, your relationships, and your health.
Because burnout doesn’t happen overnight — and it’s difficult to fight once you’re in the middle of it — it’s important to recognize the early signs of burnout and head it off. Burnout usually has its roots in stress, so the earlier you recognize the symptoms of stress and address them, the better chance you have of avoiding burnout.
Signs and symptoms of burnout
The signs of burnout tend to be more mental than physical. They can include feelings of:
Powerlessness
Emotional exhaustion
Detachment
Isolation
Irritability
Frustration
Being trapped
Failure
Despair
Cynicism
Apathy
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