Picture Source: Google

Last night my manageress asked me to make an important analyses.

This morning I stumbled on one of my colleagues sending my analyses to our department´s director with a few extra words and a little less signature – my signature.

I could stomp my foot, make a scene and demand justice… but since it´s Friday and our director is a big fat moron, I decided to smile instead.

Gotta have Faith

Picture Source: Jessice Galbreth

I believe:
In the improbable; In taking risks; in myself.
I don´t always get what I want
Things don´t always turn out the way i´d hoped
And yet I still believe.

If reality is what I perceive it to be then why shouldn´t I aim high?
In my opinion, i´d rather fail at something I tried doing and believed in than fail at something I expected to fail at – double disappointment!
Sure it´s hard losing grip of something you set your heart on but that´s just part of life – you can´t win them all.
And even so… I believe that all losses have their gains.
That things happen for a reason and that if you believe then all happens for the best.

Blind Optimism?
Not really…
I consider myself to be a blunt realist with a good dose of faith.

I believe that you´re a master of your own destiny but a victim of fate.
This means that you can´t always avoid what life has in store for you but that you get to choose with which attitude you choose to face it.
I believe that you get what you give.
And that if you´re a good person, good things will happen for you even if they don´t happen straight away.
If the universe is no more than energy, than the more you believe, the more it will work for you and become your perception: your reality.

Through years i´ve heard this be called a number of different things:
-self confidence
-the power of the mind
-Reiki
I call it faith. Faith in yourself and in the people around you.

“Take care when dealing with your heart. Take even greater care when dealing with other people´s hearts”

Disappointment VS Disillussionment
It´s the difference between:
“I believe that I have the capacity and deserve that Job” VS
“I will get that Job”

Faith is belief without expectation.

At times it scares me to motivate people,
Not due to dificulty in believing in them:
I believe in people´s potential.
But because not everyone easily accepts and understands the blessing of not getting what they want.
Shortly put:
I don´t want to be the catalyst of anyone´s disappointment.

Yet… I believe.
That people should believe in themselves and what they´re capable of regardless of the outcome…
That people should believe in their ability to make a difference…
And that people shouldn´t fear being disappointed.
As I told a good friend of mine recently: To fear taking risks is to fear being happy. Someday you get is right…
That is… if you believe.

My boss: The Dickhead

Picture Source: Unknown

Today is my day off.
It's one of those rare days when everything is done.
I don't have any clothes to wash or iron.
The house is clean and Kalash and I already went for our walk around the block together.
So when all is done I find myself with that much wanted time to do “my stuff”, most importantly to write in my blog…
But once I'm finally in front of an empty Microsoft Word page… I find that I have little to say… or so too much to say… or what I want to say isn't sayable…
Lately my thoughts make little sense to anyone but myself.

After catching up on my blog reading and going through some e-mails, I finally came back to the empty page and decided that I didn't necessarily have to write something spectacular… I just needed to write, to put some of my thoughts in text that I can read back to myself. So I picked one and this is what I came up with:

I hate my boss.
He’s an arrogant pompous ass that doesn't know the meaning of respect if a dictionary hit him over the head.
He takes reckless and uncalculated decisions without consulting the people that actually know… and he's destroying everything that I care about and helped build.
There, I said it:
I've never hated anyone in my life more than that moron!
And it breaks my heart to have been divided from amazing professionals that I loved working with, from being taken away from what I loved most about my job:
The people.
God, I hate him!
I watch him make stupid decisions day after day, treating people like dirt and destroying all the good things that were worked and built through the years.
Never have the quality standards been so low, never have the results been this lousy.
People are low on moral and stacked high with work.
And not the normal inflow of work, the kind of work generated when someone makes an ape decision and forces his team to work around it.
Doing something wrong is equivalent to having to do it twice.
It isn't the workflow that increased: it's the fuck ups introduced into the system!

I watch what is left of my team fall into a desperate resignation. Weak and frustrated we breathlessly attempt to hold together whatever pieces we can.
Exhausted… of trying to salvage and fix what that idiot keeps pulling apart.
There are days that I want to scream, others that I just want to cry.
I hate him.
He is the epiphany of chaos, anarchy and complete disorganisation.
The typical overconfident jackass that sucks the life of whatever good he has been given to work with.
He soils the very meaning of professionalism!

How can one man screw up so much? Destroy so much so quickly…
I guess it's just easier bringing things down than building them up…
But bullshit won't keep him up there for all eternity.
I anxiously wait for the day where he falls, gets fired or transferred or just disappears… someone wise up and kick him off this throne!

In the faces of the few good members of the team that got left behind, I see the same sadness I see in my mirror every morning.
The frustration of not being able to turn things around…
Most of all… the emptiness left behind from those that are longer there.
I miss my colleagues, the professionals that I've had an enormous pleasure working with in the last two years.
And I hate him… him and that other spineless jerk that made him king of the non-quality-sad-excuse-for-a-client-department.
Those two would be a hell of a lot more productive cleaning the rubbish from the sidewalk!

You'd think I'd feel better after venting… but in truth I my spirits are too dampened to cheer up. I long for change, for universal justice and for revival.
I hate my boss; he represents every possible selfish trait that I despise in a human being.
It's not that I don't know how to deal with assholes; I just don't want to have to!

Someday soon things will turn around, I'm waiting…

Getting Dirty!

Photosource: René Magritte

There are things in life that you don't quite picture yourself doing… and then on one Sunday afternoon you find your hands literally in the dirt and you stop to think to yourself:
“What happened?! What in the hell am I doing?”

I had one of these such moments this weekend when my man and I decided a major attempt at:
Gardening.

It started off with the fact that one of the plants on the stairs was bulging out her vase and needed a bigger one to grow. Then there was the issue of the bonsai that looked like a bush that had never seen a scissor in its life. Not forgetting of course the huge pot plant in the doorway that drank 5litres of water a day and was still thirsty….

Ecomarché – One stop shop for all your gardening needs. 20 minutes and 50 Euros later we were loaded with 10kg of dirt and tools to mess around in it with.

No instruction manual.

Not that we needed one, gardening is supposed to come as natural as having kids (or so they say – needless to say neither of us have the experience!).
So after unloading the car, we stared at our purchases wondering where the hell to start and came to the fast conclusion that:
“If it all fails, we’ll ask Grandma for replacements…”

I decided to take care of the indoor greens whilst my significant other took care of the outdoors… there’s just something about spiders that crawl onto the wall after the lawn has been mowed that gives me that weak knee feeling and for this reason, the grass doesn't fall under my job description…
You’d think that for the amount of the little suckers that hide under the green mat, mosquitos would be non existent in our area! But No! They squatter up rent-free in our grass as vegetarians!... Even the flies aren’t scared of them!
Hairless Tarantulas, that’s what they are!

Armed with repellent and the desire to work together, after three or so hours we came up with some pretty good results:

- We planted mint and parsley (none of which have shown signs of life – but hey it's only been a week!).
- We put more soil into all the vases, mixing it with the old and enforcing it with fertilizer (the commercial type, not the smelly one you were thinking of!)
- We transplanted one of the plants into a bigger vase and put one of her children into a new one (yes plants have kids; it’s the extension of the bigger plant). She's flowering for the first time I've ever seen but according to those that know her from small, it's her very first time flowering.
- We put the bonsai into a new pot (Yes moranguinho, I know I should’ve done it Spring but I'm just not the kind of woman that can wait nine months…) and we gave it a whole new make over! (No matter what you say – I didn't cut too much and she doesn't look bald!)
- We cut off old leaves and stems (Once again – I DID NOT cut off too much)
- And lastly, we removed the outside drunk from her vase and put her in the soil right next to the sprinkler…

So far… nothing's died.

Through the whole experience, I recall doing things the way I remembered my dad doing them. I cut the leaves the way my grandmother cut them and trimmed the Bonsai the way Código Verde had taught me not too long ago…
It wasn’t the planting, trimming and nursing of the plants that gave me the kicks, it was doing in teamwork and after a week, watching them grow…
As dad would say… with time, you’ll experience things a whole different way and you’ll understand them differently.

This doesn't explain however, my recent development of plant talking. Not only did I out of nowhere begin talking to them during the whole surgery:
“There now, once you're in the new vase you’ll feel a whole lot better…”
But a week after I continue with the habit of chatting to them as I climb the stairs:
“You're looking good! Just look at those two new leaves you've grown…”

If I start talking to any other objects, throw me in the loony bin!