Can Passion and Love Improve your Work?

Love is so beautiful, we can find it here and there; it doesn’ t need hugs, and I think the essence of love is putting another people before your ownself .

Love at the office? No way! In these weeks of mandated sexual harassment training, we’re continually warned to hold our even mildly lascivious feelings and emails, let alone our arms, to ourselves. However, human being nature may trump the rule. I make it a practice to hug one and all who works for me and most of those that work around me, both males and females. In my opinion, if I hug everyone this cannot be construed as harassment. I even do this with people I meet for the first time.

Sure, some odd academic can get away with this, but let’s get real, doing this at General Motors won’t fly. Hold that thought. General Motors is exactly a company that needs love. It was recently on the verge of bankruptcy and only survived with a government bailout, downsizing, and layoffs. GM workers are not feeling loved.
Think about that for a minute. Do we need to love those we work with? Imagine the CEO of a distressed company who refuses his or her multimillion-dollar bonus so that one thousand employees would not be laid off. That would be love. How about an employee who agrees to work late so someone can go home early to care for a sick child? That would be love. Or, an employee who drops off a forgotten package to a customer’s home after leaving work? That would be love.

The funny thing is when we are loved, we return love. Yes, this is an oxytocin response. When we care about others, they care about us. Biologically, love is the foundation for trust – both trust and love arise when oxytocin is released in the brain. My research has shown that trust is the secret behind many profitable companies. The benefits to managing with love include higher employee morale and productivity, lower employee turnover, fewer sick days, and legions of return customers.

The New York consulting form Edelman has published the Edelman Trust Barometer for the last nine years. In 2009 they reported that trust in businesses was at the lowest point they had ever recorded. Sixty percent of employees surveyed reported that they needed to hear information three to five times before believing it. Shockingly, only 17% of employees trusted statements made by their CEO. Managers simply cannot do their jobs effectively when trust is low.

Managing with love is the way to build trust. It’s a no-brainer. So why do so few companies do this? The autocratic “manage with fear” model is what business began with hundreds of years ago when managers whipped employees literally and figuratively to compel them to work. In modern businesses with skilled and empowered employees, the top-down approach is slowly starting to fade away. The open-door policy is replacing the executive suite. For example, my university built me a new lab last year and the builder wanted to know where my office would be. I said I didn’t want one. I prefer to embed myself with my team because we work together on projects. Why would I want to separate myself from those I collaborate with?

There is a growing number of successful companies that manage with love. Southwest Airlines is an example: their corporate slogan is “How do we love you? Let us count the ways.” In fact, their stock ticker symbol is LUV so this is a big part of their corporate identity. If you have flown Southwest, you know that their employees love working for them. Southwest Airlines has never laid off an employee. Southwest’s CEO Gary Kelly was paid $903,000 in 2009, and half of that was a one-time bonus. Compare that to former GM CEO Rick Wagoner who was paid more than 14 million dollars the year before GM went belly-up.

My investigation shows that the molecule of love, oxytocin, makes us dependable and motivates us to assist to others. Most managers would sacrifice a limb if their workers embodied these virtues at work.

Sometimes, business can be a little tedious, but if you have business with love and passion, I strongly believe that your business can change to the other side, and this is why companies like South West.

Ken is Hypocrite ?

Last night on a Show, Joan Stwart called Ken Mehlan a hypocrite and no doubt a lot of people. In the course of the Bush reelection movement, Republicans, led by Mr. Mehlan, fanned the flames of fear, and intolerance to gays and lesbians. Denying lesbian and gay people their civil rights, including the right to lawfully wed, was a middle part of the campaign, seemingly planned to activate conservative voters. It’s maddening to consider that a gay man, albeit a closeted gay man, not only aided and abetted but in some ways led the charge. Nevertheless, before we rush to judge Mr. Mehlan, a closer look at the varied pressures gays and lesbians face are in order.

In spite of slowly growing advancements in the public’s attitudes toward homosexuality, intolerance continues to be alive and well. In a recent Gallup poll, close to half of these sampled believed that homosexuality really should not be”considered an appropriate alternative lifestyle” and about 39 percent thought homosexual relations between two consenting adults should be illegal. Thus, there still very much exists what stigma expert Gregory Herek and his colleagues call a homosexual stigma, which they define as “society’s shared belief system through which homosexuality is denigrated, discredited, and constructed as invalid relative to heterosexuality.”

Amazingly, kids, especially gay kids, learn about this quite early. At very young ages, gays and lesbians come to know that same-sex attractions are wrong-sometimes even before they are aware of these feelings within themselves. For the gay and lesbian youth interviewed for my book Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child, their stories of coping and adjustment began long before they understood what their feelings meant. Once they faced their attractions head-on, they knew they were in trouble. If their peers or their parents discovered their sexual feelings, they risked becoming objects of rejection and abuse-and their attractions threatened to pull them away from everything and everyone they knew, leaving them lost and alone.

Interpersonal interaction is one of the primary domains where stigma manifests, and many of the young people in this study first learned that their homosexuality was wrong at the hands of their peers. Their classmates saw their cross-gendered or otherwise atypical behavior as justification for cruelty. As I wrote in a previous post for this blog, many gays and lesbians recall being physically assaulted by peers who sensed they were gay long before they recognized their own same-sex attractions.

Stigma in the form of discrimination is also embedded in institutional policies and practices. Most of the youth I interviewed who were verbally and physically harassed by peers recalled how school employees who witnessed their abuse did nothing to stop it. The confusion and shame experienced by these kids was compounded by the indifference of adults who could have protected them but didn’t.

So, how do kids growing up gay or lesbian deal with stigma? One way many oppressed people protect themselves is to form groups with like others so they can learn effective coping methods such as externalization, which is when people place the blame for their stigma on its source where it belongs. However, for the most part, a resource such as a supportive group of gay peers is usually not available and it certainly wasn’t for the young men and women in my study. As stated by a sixteen year-old young man: “As far as I knew I was the only person who was gay.”

Alone and isolated, gay young people learn painfully and powerfully that their burgeoning homosexuality is shameful and punishable by social exclusion and violence, and therefore hide their attractions in an effort to protect themselves.

If one is good at it, hiding becomes second nature-and some never stop, even in adulthood. Others are so skilled they manage to hide their sexual orientations even from themselves, compartmentalizing their feelings into fantasies or fleeting sexual encounters which they keep hidden and walled off from their self-identities. Some of these individuals adopt the perspectives and sympathies of their oppressors, and in a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome, identify with their aggressors in order to survive.

So, by hiding his sexual orientation from others and as well himself, Mr. Mehlman was doing what his peers, friends, family, and society educated him to do. What makes him different from the lots of gays and lesbians who come to terms with themselves, come out, and fight against societal intolerance, instead of contribute to it, remains a mystery. Without knowing Mr. Mehlman personally, but being familiar with the case of Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who also came out as gay late in life, I can guess that burning ambition could have something to do with it.

Another lesson is that no matter what our political persuasion, we need to recognize that gay persons are everywhere-even places you don’t expect to find them and we are interacting with them all the time, even if we might not know it. Societal intolerance and stigma might force lesbians and gays underground but will never erase their existence. As being a gay man, I am certainly angry that Ken Mehlman supported and helped spread the idea that lesbians and gays are unworthy of civil rights-he no doubt contributed to a destructive force that wounds many and continues to damage our society. However, as a therapist and researcher I can understand and even sympathize with his coping techniques along with his desire to avoid obstacles to his ambitions that heterosexuals never have got to think about.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches nike air max ltd and fashion things on the Internet.

Teachers are important, students’ environment also matters

Preposterous and needless contrast between reducing the racial achievement gap and lowering one’s golf score. It really should not be about reducing the racial achievement gap, rather helping everyone reach their full potential. Now, suggestion on thinking more scientifically about life outside the classroom and the way it relates to what occurs inside the classroom, what exactly do you plan and how exactly will such an attempt do a world of good?

The Black-White achievement gap is living and well in the United States. Take New York City just as one instance. Based on a current article in the New York Times, in the town’s 4th-9th grades, about 39% of black college students met state standards in the 2010 arithmetic exams. This is in comparison with about 74% of white students. In English, about 32% of black students were talented, compared with 65% of white students. These numbers unluckily put to break earlier statements that New York City’s racial achievement gap was considerably shrinking.

The Black-White achievement gap the phenomenon whereby white students consistently perform at a higher level on tests than their minority counterparts is as old as our nation itself. Educators and policy makers have funneled a significant amount of time, money, and resources into trying to diminish it. However, with the exception of a period between the 1970s and 1980s, the gap has stayed fairly steady.

Recently, there seems to be a renewed interest in teachers’ role in shaping student test scores. For instance, federal funds now seem to be tied to whether schools link teachers’ performance to student scores. I suppose one can read this funding issue in a variety of ways, but one interpretation is that the government is saying its teachers who should be held accountable for the low test scores of their students. Although teachers certainly play a role in student success, I think it’s easy to forget that factors outside the classroom play a big role in minority students’ performance as well.

A few months ago, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that when there is a murder in a black child’s neighborhood, his or her math and verbal standardized test scores go down. This is true even if the child doesn’t witness the violence directly and isn’t personally impacted by it. Just being in close proximity to a homicide is enough to hinder academic performance.

To measure how local homicides impact students’ test scores, Sharkey compared the test scores of black children directly after a homicide in their neighborhood with other children in the same neighborhood who took the test at a different time. Black students tested directly after a local homicide scored substantially lower than their peers who live in the same neighborhood, but were tested at different times. Of note, Sharkey was unable to find enough murders in predominately white neighborhoods to see if white children were affected, suggesting that this homicide effect is really most damaging for black kids. Indeed, the drop in black children’s scores after a homicide account for about half the difference in the typical racial achievement gap.

Keep in mind that it’s not just violence outside the classroom that has the potential to contribute to the racial achievement gap. Culturally-held stereotypes that constantly hang over black students’ heads in school and out may also play a role. For instance, psychologists have known for some time that when blacks are made aware of negative stereotypes about intelligence and race, they perform worse on standardized tests than when this information is not as salient. Indeed, something as simple as checking off your race before you take the SAT lowers black students’ scores while having no effect or even increasing white students’ performance.

Although scientists and educators are still working on finding the exact cause of these relations, it’s not hard to imagine how knowledge of violence in your neighborhood or the awareness of negative stereotypes impugning the intelligence of your race could prevent you from devoting you full attention and effort to what’s going on in the classroom. Humans are limited capacity systems, meaning that we only have a finite amount of attentional resources to devote to learning and performance. When these resources are co-opted, for example, by worries about your safety or confirming a stereotype about your ability, performance in the classroom can suffer.

There are actually little doubt lots of factors that develop the racial achievement gap. However, besides focusing on what professors are doing inside the classroom, it appears careful to think more methodically about life outside. You never know, such attempt might do a world of good in reducing the gap, which, like your golf score, is a number that is much better when it’s lower.

In nature, nobody will do their best in the classroom while they do not have satisfaction and their essential desires met outside the classroom, for instance, family troubles, economic stressors, poor nutrition, unsafe surroundings, regardless of race, age, or gender. So, please explain what specially you want to put into practice that might make things better for all.

What Would You do If You Have to Say “I’m Sorry”?

People are unlikely to forgive someone they don’t believe is building a truthful apology. Furthermore, people don’t desire to forgive people they think enemies. They want to hate them, so that they hate to forgive them. They want to have the transgression substantiate their earlier appraisal or viewpoint.

Apologies could be enormously useful when it’s time to resolving conflict, repairing hurt emotions, nurturing forgiveness, and improving relationships in both our individual and specialized lifestyles. They enhance relationship promise and satisfaction, employee faithfulness and pleasure, emotions of belief, and cooperation. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. Despite the fact that attorneys are inclined to caution their customers to avoid apologies such as plague, fearing that they are equal to an admission of guilt, reports show that while possible plaintiffs accept an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.

But as anyone can tell you, apologies don’t always work. At times they seem to fall on deaf ears. This can be because the person or persons we are seeking forgiveness from really aren’t interested in forgiving, or because the transgression itself is deemed simply unforgivable. But more often than not, our apologies fall flat because we apologize the wrong way.

So what is the right way? How should you apologize to your coworker, customer, friend, or spouse, in order to be sure that your already bad situation doesn’t end up even worse? Until recently, there has been very little psychological research focusing on what constitutes a “good” apology. A new set of studies, however, reveals that different kinds of apologies appeal to different kinds of people, and that the key to an effective apology lies in thinking carefully about your audience.

Offers of compensation are an attempt to restore balance through some redeeming action. Sometimes the compensation is tangible, like paying to repair or replace your neighbor’s fence when you inadvertently back your car into it, or running out to get your girlfriend a new phone when you accidentally drop hers into the toilet.

Expressions of empathy, on the other hand, involve recognizing and expressing concern over the suffering you caused. Through expressions of empathy, the victim feels understood and valued as a partner in the relationship, and trust is restored.

People who have an independent self-concept think of themselves primarily as individual, autonomous agents, completely separate from others. They tend to be focused mainly on their own rights, feelings, and goals, and as a result, experience transgressions as a personal injury or betrayal. No surprise then that they respond most favorably to apologies that offer compensation. The United States is a particularly independent, individualistic society, which may explain why American juries seem to love doling out lots of money as compensation for pain and suffering.

People with a more relational self-concept see themselves as primarily defined by their relationships with significant others. This type of self-concept is more common among women, for whom relationship ups and downs tend to loom large. When your self-concept is relational, you are focused on creating, maintaining and strengthening the relationships in your life. Transgressions are experienced as betrayals of mutual respect and belief, and consequently, apologies are most effective when they include expressions of empathy, rather than offers of compensation.

Finally, people with a collective self-concept see themselves first and foremost as members of the important groups, organizations, and cultures to which they belong. When you are a part of a group, whether it’s your family, your company, or your society, there are rules that govern how you are supposed to behave. For instance, baseball players aren’t allowed to take steroids. Accountants aren’t allowed to fool around with the books. Politicians can’t break the laws that they are elected to create and protect. Members of my family aren’t allowed to violate the rules of grammar. Transgressions are experienced as betrayals of the rules or values of the group, and thus, apologies that offer acknowledgment of violated rules and norms are your best bet for restoring your good standing with the other group members.

When crafting your apology, remember to ask yourself: Who am I talking to, and what are they looking for in my apology? What troubles them the most about what I did? Was my transgression perceived as a personal injury, betrayal of the relationship, or betrayal of the code of behavior of our group?

If you are not certain, consider how a wounded party most often discusses on themselves do they concentrate on their own personal qualities, their main relationships, or the significant communities to which they belong? Knowing something on how the person you aggrieved thinks of him or herself is your first evidence to what might be bothering them most, and may help you to apologize in the best way.

When I’m sad, everyone seems to be sad. I do not feel a part of the group. I usually guide the group, or am a key to it. I usually don’t mind about the current group, but the future one. Like, my family right now means crouch. When I insult them, it effects very little. But my future family means much more to me than the present. If you endanger my future family, or make fun of my idea of this future family, I’m hurt. And I feel for not just myself, but all people.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches replica coach purses and fashion things on the Internet.

How Did The Demise of the Rest Happen?

What do you think that couples have ascended to a spot of ascendancy in American society now more than at previous times? It looks like that there’s an unbelievable emphasis on being single as something that should be fixed. At the same time, conservative social research focuses on proving that couples are psychologically and developmentally superior to singles. In American society generally, lots of people appear to value a variety of lifestyles. But there is this enormous market devoted to fixing singles, including books and articles and television shows and workshops.

Before I began learning singles and their space in the world, everything I believed was what I saw and heard all around me. Obviously, partners reigned supreme. The coupled connection was the largest celebrated of them all. Everything of the other ties that have the possibility to create our life significant bonds with close associates, relatives, mentors, spiritual beings, ancestors, community, and even, to some degree, the association between a parent and kids were deemed smaller and fewer worthy.

The reign of the couple is both an inside and an outside phenomenon. The view from outside of the couple is the revering one I just described. Within the couple, many practice what I’ve called “intensive coupling” – the two people look to one another to be their everything, to fill all of their needs, to create all of their dreams come true.

Toward the end of the first chapter of Singled Out, when I summed up what I had learned about how couples have been regarded at other times and in other places.

“The way that coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person – sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.”

The question I did not answer, and still do not know how to answer, is why. How and why have couples ascended to a place of dominance in contemporary American society, leaving a lot of other important relationships and life pursuits devalued, dismissed, and neglected?

Usually, when I ask a question in the title of my posts, I intend to answer it. Not this time. I’m asking the question because I don’t know the answer and I’d like to. So if you know something, please share. If you know social historians who may be willing to weigh in, please spread the word.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I was on a radio show in which the host asked me a relevant question. Actually, I only thought he was asking me about the rise of the couple. After the show was over, I realized he was asking me about the history of marriage. I see that as a different (though related) question. Much has been written about the ways in which marriage has changed over time. In Marriage, a History, for example, Stephanie Coontz has reminded us that love has not always been the basis for marriage -in fact, in historical terms, that’s a relatively recent development. Elizabeth Abbott, in A History of Marriage (I discussed it here), enlightens us about the changing place of race, money, children, and sexual orientation in the history of marriage, and even includes a separate chapter on singles. All that is interesting and important, but leaves my key question mostly unanswered.

Sadly, there is a very thoughtful and accomplished author who came close to addressing my question, but got talked out of it. In the acknowledgments section of her book, A History of the Wife, Marilyn Yalom said, “I am grateful to Basic Books editor Joanne Miller,for suggesting that I focus on the wife, rather than on the couple, as originally intended.”

Shortly after that radio show aired, I heard from Laurie, a Living Single reader who was thinking examples of the same questions on why Americans are so obsessed with coupling. So thanks, Laurie, for encouraging me to keep thinking.

I believe that a rise in the push toward fixing singles for profit has contributed to the feeling of partners having ascended to a spot of ascendancy. And the very idea of ascendancy, why would one even have to dominate another? It looks like a product of conservative communal science, the determination to prove that one group of people is happier, healthier, and better than another. There are now all sorts of competition that did not exist years ago between social groups, couples and singles, parents and the childfree, working mothers and stay at home mothers. There doesn’t appear to be an end to the types of social competition that exist.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches pink coach purse and fashion things on the Internet.

Why Are the poor More Generous?

Wealthy people pay a far lower part of the riches in taxes than do most middle-class or lower-class people, There is possibly a few serious psychological distress involved in giving to the destitute. It calls for acknowledging the necessary injustice of life.

It isn’t reports any longer, however, it’s still a shock: the needy tend to be more generous than the wealthy. “For many years, surveys have shown that upper income People are particularly ordinary as givers when compared with the destitute, lower income Americans give proportionally more of the incomes to charity than do upper income Americans.”

A PhD candidate at Berkeley, Paul Piff, recently repeated that finding and more: “lower income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.”

It’s tempting to think that the rich are richer because they are more selfish or single-mindedly focused on their own advancement, but Piff’s research suggests otherwise. His experiment primed subjects by showing sympathy inducing videos and encouraging them to imagine themselves in different financial circumstances. That changed their reactions for both sets of subjects. In other words, the poor, imagining themselves rich, became less altruistic. The rich, imagining themselves poor, became more generous to the destitute and ill. Piff concluded: “Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients” in the generosity of the destitute.

If we think of this in group terms, it makes perfect sense. Members of each group will identify with other members of the group to which they belong. Their issues will resonate more deeply. The rich will find it easier to give to the cultural institutions they and their friends patronize as well as the colleges and universities they attended. The destitute will give to the neighbors suffering from the same problems they are struggling with or to the causes closer to home.
As the gap between the rich and destitute in our society grows as it has been growing this divide will only get greater. Crossing over will not only be more difficult to accomplish economically, it will be harder for us to project ourselves imaginatively across it. The rich will not get the point of extending unemployment insurance, and could even easily talk themselves into believing that such a helping hand might make workers lazy. The destitute will get bitter about the tax cuts the rich keep insisting will trickle down benefits for all.

In other words, the psychological effects of group process will intensify our communal harms and help it become more hard for us to function politically like a whole. It’s already on the fringe of impossible.

Rich people love to tell themselves that they deserve what they own, that they worked hard for it. Of course, this implies that the destitute don’t work hard and somehow deserve their destiny in life. Liberality needs us to face just how fortunate we are and to accept that it really is fortune, not our greater moral qualities that led to our success.

Meditation Trains Help us Adjust Emotions and Behaviors

An investigation research on how meditation can change our brain for the better in as little as 10.5 hours. You would not have the promise that 11 hours of meditation will then significantly improve individual performance if you are a practicing psychologist, either for short-term or long-term.

Meditation is not just for new age people any longer. And, at the present, latest investigation suggests that you don’t have to dedicate days or even weeks of your life to the exercise of thought to acquire main benefits on thoughts and body. Consideration can alter our mind for the better in as little as 10 hours.

In a research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, Yi-Yuan Tang, Michael Posner and colleagues randomly assigned University of Oregon undergraduates with no meditation experience to participate in either an integrative mind-body training meditation program or a relaxation program. In total, students completed 11 hours of training, split up into 30 minute sessions conducted over a one month period.

IBMT involves body relaxation, mental imagery, and mindfulness training – guided by a coach and assistive CD. This meditation method stresses a state of “restful alertness.” The idea is to obtain a high degree of awareness of your body and mind such that unwanted thoughts are less likely to co-opt your attention and distract you.

The relaxation training program, on the other hand, helped people relax different muscle groups over the face, head, shoulders, arms, legs, chest, back, and abdomen. This progressive training was designed to help people achieve relaxation and calmness. However, as you will see below, it doesn’t carry the same brain benefits as IBMT.

Importantly, both before and after training, the researchers scanned the students’ brains while they rested, using magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. Just so we are on the same page, in MRI, individuals lie with their heads and upper bodies inside a machine often referred to as a scanner. An MRI machine is really just a large magnet – often 50,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. Nonetheless, surprisingly, a scanner’s function is rather limited. What an MRI machine does is measure the magnetic properties of the object inside it. When psychologists use MRI for their research, the object being measured in the scanner is the brain of the individual lying inside.

Our brains consist of both gray and white matter. The gray matter is where the cell bodies of neurons reside and where signals are sent from one brain cell to another. The white matter connects these gray matter areas and thus is very important too. It is because of these white matter connections that different parts of our brain can communicate and work together so well. The researchers focused on these white matter tracts, using a form of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging or DTI.

What the researchers found was that, after only 10.5 hours of meditation training, there were changes (for the better) in a white matter tract that connects the anterior cingulate cortex to other structures in the brain. The ACC is part of a network of brain regions involved in regulating our emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Simply put, after meditation training, the integrity and efficiency of the connections with the ACC, a major player in our ability to regulate our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions – improved.

Phil Jackson, coach of the LA Lakers, became well-known when he was coaching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to several successive championships for advocating meditation practices as a means of enhancing his players’ performance. Successful individuals ranging from board members of Goldman Sachs to the Chairman of Ford Motor Company, William Ford, have also touted the benefits of meditation practices in their everyday and work lives. These powerful figures in sports and business are often using their intuition about the psychological benefits of their practice but, as I just described, now brain investigation suggests that these intuitions are spot on.

Whether you want to hit a 5-foot putt to win the contest, nail a stress-filled pitch to a customer, or ace an significant experiment, the thought that the brain’s structure can change as a result of meditation is intriguing because it means that meditation may help you adjust your mind, feelings and performances when you need to perform at your best, for instance, under tension. Indeed, some politicians who are continuously performing under stress, have attested to the power of meditation in helping to reprogram the thoughts. And, although it keeps to be seen whether the mere 11.5 hours of meditation that changes in the brain is enough to improve performance on the playing field, in the classroom, or in the boardroom, if it does, then it may be time to change our weekend activities. After all, 10.5 hours is less time than it would take to watch half a dozen movies or four football games, or to repaint the bedroom.

I suppose the investigation on choking was funded by public wealth, so I consider perhaps the viewers are trying to get their cash worth. Perhaps lots of your co-researchers can add their support? That might make for a more of a dispute. I think the meditation idea could be misused by the procrastinators I know to indirectly prepare when it should be directly preparing for their responsibilities. Overall, I think meditation is great, though. I also agree that for a scientist to publically and ethically talk about that this particular person or that particular person choked under stress there should be many statistical analyses behind it, rather than eye-balling the situation and making an assumption.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a air jordan vi with lots of fashion things.

Do we want our dreams to reality?

We would have to go so far as to think about the possibility saucers, if many of the observations are verified, act according to a set of physical laws unknown to us. The easy act of admitting these possibilities just as possibilities puts us beyond the pale, and we would lose more in prestige in the technical society than we could probably get by undertaking the investigation.”

A scientist’s “Inception” is more than an early film icon. It’s a sleep doctor’s wet dream, a thriller set in the landscape of the mind. So while reporters ask me if it’s probable to manipulate others people’s wishes I should not be amazed. The current likelihood of intellectual dream invasion around equals my ability to drive my ‘96 Corolla to Apollo 10’s lunar base camp.

Lately I’m often asked whether people prefer dreams to reality. I generally reply that only a few psychotics and political commentators appear to prefer dreams to the consensual bet we call actuality. But these days I’m not so sure.

In the late 80’s a local reporter questioned a girl about alien abductions. I offhandedly remarked that much of what “abductees” described sounded like sleep paralysis: states between REM sleep and waking where people have bizarre and frightening out-of-body experiences. Uncanny human events are actually very common; about half the population experiences sleep paralysis. Shortly thereafter I received a call from a producer on the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries,” asking if I’d be willing to explain “my theory” on camera.

Uh oh. I hesitated to appear next to a large mock-up of an alien applying 24th-century-style dental tools to violate a comely, hapless earthwoman. A week later the producer called back to say, “Sorry, we can’t do the show. We’ve been having trouble finding someone credible from ‘The Other Side.’”

Over the next several years the controversy exploded, as Harvard professor John Mack published his study of hundreds of people describing their own, often repeated, alien abductions. Carl Sagan expanded “my theory” to claim that many of these abductions probably were sleep paralysis, though lots of occurred in waking daylight.

Later I discussed the uncanny with my late friend, author Stuart Kaminsky. Prior to the filming of Spielberg’s ET, Stu was asked by the studio to write a review of historical UFO literature. He nodded as he told me about a newspaper report from a western town describing hundreds of people gathering around Main Street to watch a “cigar-shaped object” lazily dance through the afternoon sky. The date: 1893.

UFOs still capture the media. Recently the BBC reported that Winston Churchill personally suppressed reports of UFO sightings by RAF bomber crews, not wishing to harm wartime “public morale.” Long after the “The X-Files,” many people still wish to know the truth about extraterrestrials; and according to The Week, about one fifth of the world’s population believes ETs live amongst us. This means that for over a billion people, “Men In Black’s” portrayal of Manhattan as an asylum island for aliens is no joke.

Dreams are in many ways the fragmented byproducts of the brain’s sleep-empowered reworking of memory. All our previous day’s thoughts-an enormous, mainly unconscious cache of information-must be processed, remembered, or forgotten. Fortunately much of this material appears to be summarized and then dumped, or our ability to learn new information might be fatally compromised.

Yet while I mention to people that thoughts are rebuilt and remade each time they are retrieved, reactions range from indifference to confusion. While I further explain that thoughts, like dreams, are not fixed like CDs or DVDs but are continuously changing, mouths drop as though I’ve described a public sex act. Most of us want our reality to be hard and defined, what “I” remember, and deeply resist acknowledging how quickly the body reconfigures itself-and our consciousness.

If our most powerful thoughts may be unconsciously fabricated, as neurologist Oliver Sacks demonstrates in his memoir “Uncle Tungsten,” it’s only a matter of time before people “remember” their “true origins” and extraterrestrials publicly declare themselves. A celebrity-obsessed culture requires new types of celebrities, and ETs should fit the bill.

The bigger problem is: Who will do the interview? The one keeps in long decline, and the other one is off the air. Thomson is throwing in the towel. Though Stelin’s wondrously mean tour of the National Air and Space Museum makes him a strong applicant, I would plump for aliens coming out through Jim. Rusi owns the media chops, daily describing how completely unreal TV and media realism really is.

In order to undertake such a project one has to approach it objectively. That is, one has to admit the chance that such things as UFOs exist. It is not respectable to provide serious thought to such a chance. Believers, in other words, remain outcasts.

Haiti's Election Announcement Has been Postponed

Haiti was filled with so much corruption and devastation prior to te earthquake, this small country has never had any kind of stability, what’s necessary now is an experienced leader with a long background in politics, developed knowledge in economy repair and the power to rebuild nation. Of course its probably not likely to happen anytime soon, but the last thing the people of Haiti need is a man who can’t handle his own personal funds or that of his Haitian fundraiser for the earthquake.

A choice about who is qualified to be the leader in Haiti has been delayed from Monday, leaving famous people Wyclef Jean and the other hopeful people in limbo, said Berto Dorce, Jean’s attorney.

Haiti’s election commission was scheduled to have a choice Tuesday night.
Jean’s eligibility was under question after claims that he has not lived in Haiti for five consecutive years before the election, a mandate in the nation’s Constitution.

Jean’s lawyer said his client meets that criteria.

"His candidacy has been contested and we went to court and proved that he is legally entitled to run for president," Dorce said. "Jean’s position is pretty strong. He should be on the list."

Dorce said Jean has been paying taxes in Haiti, which makes him eligible.

"Wyclef has been a shareholder of the local TV corporation called Telemax, and was paying taxes at least for five years; this was sufficient for the Justice of the Peace to issue a certificate of residence for Mr. Wyclef and confirm his residency," Dorce said.

Jean announced August 5 on "Larry King Live" amid fanfare that he had filled out the paperwork to run for president.

But since then, Jean’s announcement has met with some criticism.

Pras, who once performed alongside Jean and Lauryn Hill in the ’90s group The Fugees, said he supported Jean’s opponent.

Actor Sean Penn, who has lived in Port-au-Prince for months helping displaced Haitians, also questioned whether the Haitian-born musician could make moves to lead the devastated nation.

And now, Jean said he has received multiple death threats.
"We have been getting threats since last night telling me if I know what’s good for me, I would get out of the country," Jean wrote in an e-mail to CNN late Tuesday.

Jean’s lawyer also talked about the alleged threats.

"Wyclef has been repeatedly getting nameless terrors from someone who are saying that he ought to think twice before running for the leader. We cannot tell who are sending these terrors, but the nearer the statement, the more terrors Jean is getting," Dorce said.

I believe Wyclef hasd good intentions for Haiti, but that does not make him qualified to be president of this country that is facing so much turmoil. I suggest that he slowly break into the politics of Haiti, maybe in a lower position, supporting the president, and if he still has this passion and learns what is really involved, he can run in future elections down the road.

Some Things an Affair May Not Mean

Do you believe prostitution is dangerous to people’s health and marriages. That surely isn’t the belief among prostitute people on the internet escort review boards! Many actually think they’re saving their marriages by not bothering their wives with their sexual requests.

With both worldwide variations and human evolution in answer to unfaithfulness in heart, let’s think some matters an affair may not mean.

1. Your marriage has problems.

Maybe it does; perhaps it doesn’t. But let’s be honest: all marriages suck sometimes. If you don’t know that, you haven’t been married very long or you haven’t been paying attention. Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” Sometimes, that other person is your spouse. But that’s not the only reason people have affairs. The main reason people have affairs is that they can. Or at least they think they can. If you accept the premise of Sex at Dawn, it’s utterly normal for all of us to yearn for a little “strange” every once in a while. It’s quite possible that the affair is not a reaction to you or rejection of your marriage at all.

2. Your marriage is almost end.

Look, if she slept with your best man on your wedding night, yeah, you might want to consider asking for a refund on the tux, changing your name, and moving to Tasmania. But forget about the sex for a moment. How bad was the behavior-apart from the sex? Did she or he humiliate you publicly? Was there a lot of complicated lying going on? Did the affair or indiscretion threaten your career? Would you have been open to a heart-to-heart conversation about the natural appetite for sexual novelty if she or he had had the courage to initiate it? Do your kids really need to suffer over this? Can you see any way to turn this into an opportunity to get closer to each other, to break through the accumulated dailyness of life and talk about the eternal passions that brought you together in the first place?

3. He or she doesn’t love you.

Most of the men who admit to having affairs report being happier in their marriages than men who claim they’ve never had an affair. Sure, they could be lying (again), but maybe they’re not. Maybe, like a dog with room to run, they’re happy to come home in a way a dog chained to a tree can’t imagine (or, more likely, can’t stop imagining). Many of the women who report having affairs talk about feeling wanted and desired in a way they just don’t feel at home anymore. It’s not that the other guy is better than you, he just yearns for her more than you do-or so she feels at the moment. But desire isn’t love and ravenous hunger doesn’t last long once you start eating. Let’s all keep that in mind.

4. It’s your fault.

No, it’s not your fault that your partner feels the call of the wild occasionally. It’s not an indictment of you, your partner, or your marriage. It’s just a predictable consequence of the fact that you’re both Homo sapiens. Nothing shameful in that.

5. Your partner is ill.

Not inevitably. Your companion is a human being, a person with millions of days of casual, promiscuous libido flowing through her veins. In many cases, an affair may be abusive or insanely stupid, but in others, it may be nothing more than a momentary lapse in judgment. If the latter, perhaps we ought to think cutting each other many slack as a method to grasp our most important relationships together rather than insisting on a zero-tolerance policy that often results in larger suffering for everyone concerned.

It would be funny if there were some methods to poll spouses of broken marriages to find out what the true reasons were for eventually splitting up, unlucky our courts only seem to know infidelity as the cause for terminating a marriage. I’d wager one would find that emotional, mental or physical mistreatment in a marriage with the infidelity being the final straw, and the lack of remorse or repentance after an affair would be the biggest reasons for divorce.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches replica coach purses and juicy couture on the Internet.

Are you still listening to vinyl

My father is 55 and he’ve gone through most music storage formats including LPs, reel to reel, 8 track, cassette, up to today’s digital media. LPs and reel to reel were the best analog formats of the past and from his experience hold up to today’s digital and are better sounding in most cases.

Not long after being introduced to the British sensation, Thieroff purchased two Beatles albums. Before long, he was hooked on vinyl. Since he began collecting more than 39 years ago, Thieroff has traveled the state looking for the ideal LP. He currently owns around 3,999 albums, but at one time his collection exceeded more than 25,001 records.

Vinyl records are still a big part of Thieroff’s life today, as he currently sells and trades albums. He lately started writing a blog about his collecting adventures named “In Search of the Sound”.

“MP3s are to listening to music as McDonald’s is to supper,” Azevedo said. “It’ll keep you from starving but is in no way meant to and only approximately touches on the authentic experience of what can possibly be.”For many, the need for vinyl in today’s world of digital music seems obsolete, but those, like Thieroff, who still listen to vinyl, say that nothing can replace the authentic sound they hear every time they place the needle on the wax.

“I just love records,” Thieroff said. “I like how they feel in my hand. I like the liner notes on the back cover. I love the musty smell of a stack of LPs in somebody’s game room or garage as I search for a new treasure. I like putting a record on the turntable and placing the tone arm on the vinyl as I await anxiously to hear some new song that I have never heard before or perhaps an old song that I haven’t heard in years.”

Vinyl might never be what is once was due to the popularity and convenience of digital music, but it’s not dying anytime soon. Vinyl sales increased 33 percent from 1.8 million in 2008 to 2.5 million in 2009, according to Nielsen SoundScan. And though that accounts for less than 1 percent of all music sales, it is a record high for vinyl since Nielsen started tracking sales in 1991.Some iReporters predict that if anything will be dying out soon, it would most likely be the CD. Vinyl aficionados say records hold more sentimental value than CDs do.

“Vinyl is much more tangible and personable than clicking skip or scrolling through lists of songs,” said iReporter Tim McGuire from Marietta, Georgia.”I’ve only had my MacBook Pro for a year and it’s already crashed once, so, technically, my records have already outlived all my MP3s once,” he said.iReporters shared that they preferred vinyl over other music formats because of the distinct sound it produces, the participation role involved with listening to vinyl and the alluring visuals that adorn album covers.

Most agreed that digital music is convenient, but it’s not they way the song was made to be heard. Most music was and still is recorded with analog technology and does not transfer perfectly to a digital format. And since vinyl is not instantaneous, it takes extra time and effort to play a song, it makes you appreciate the music more than listening on an iPod does.

Caroline Grand, a 14-year-old who recently discovered vinyl after finding a collection of records in her grandmother’s attic says, “I like the experience of listening to music in the exact format in which it was originally produced, intended for to be played on vinyl records, not flat MP3s. Vinyl takes more work. You have to flip it over and set the right speed. I like that user participation part.”

Record collectors and listeners also enjoy the extra perks such as the artwork on the album cover or the extra poster or knickknacks that sometimes come with an album.But perhaps the best part about vinyl is that it’s tangible, iReporters say. It is something you can hold, unlike an MP3. Because it is tangible, it holds more meaning than a file on your computer.

Mayeske, a mother of two, said she’s making sure that her two young girls know the miracles of vinyl. She arrogantly shares that her girl is one of the few 6-year-olds with a turntable and a collection of 44s. For Mayeske, vinyl will live on for many more years, “at least in two young girls from south Atlanta!”

As someone who grew up with the vinyl album, I’m going to have to go against the flow here from my friends and admit I prefer CDs and MP3s as a format. I do love having a full size album cover to look at, the reality is CDs have far greater dynamic range. I remember listening to my first CD and hearing an electric cord short out during the final cut, something you could never hear on the vinyl version.

If You Don’t Like Yourself

Do you think that people do not welcome you because of your physical beauty, in terms of your grade, weight, sense of fashion, etc and because you may be less outgoing. We know people are not shallow, in the sense that, they don’t stop and tell, “you’re not pretty”, as a result, we will not be friends with him or her, but rather they are just not compelled by you or may not want to be your friend.

A few of people have the misfortune to have been born to abusive parents who belittled them and prevented them from developing a healthy self-esteem. Other people are born predisposed to view themselves in a bad light because of their physical appearance, a disability, or for no reason anyone, including themselves, knows. Investigate has consistently supported the idea that it’s hard to be glad without liking oneself. But how can one learn to like oneself while one doesn’t?

People filled with self-loathing typically imagine they dislike every part of themselves, but this is rarely, if ever, true. More commonly, if asked what specific parts of themselves they dislike, they’re able to provide specific answers: their physical appearance, their inability to excel academically or at a job, or maybe their inability to achieve their dreams. Yet when presented, for instance, a scenario in which they come upon a child trapped under a car at the scene of an accident, that they recoil in horror and would want urgently to do something to help rarely causes them to credit themselves for the humanity such a reaction indicates.

Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The reply in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.

Before such a change will happen, however, the essential cause of one’s self-loathing needs to be apprehended. By this I don’t mean the historical cause. The situation that initially lead people to dislike themselves do so by triggering a thought process of self-loathing that continues long after the circumstances that set it in motion have resolved, a thought process that continues to gain momentum the longer it remains unchallenged, much like a boulder picks up speed rolling down a mountain as long as nothing gets in its way. It’s this last idea, not the memory of your parents ignoring you, which gathers the power within your life to make you loathe yourself if not checked by adult reasoning early on. Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one’s mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially while one can find evidence that it represents a true account.

But a narrative is just that: a story we tell ourselves. It may very well contain elements of facts that we are unattractive, that we do fail a lot of the time, or that our parents didn’t find us all that lovable, but to proceed from facts such as these to the conclusion that we’re deserving only of our own derision constitutes a significant thought error.

But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.

I’m not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our good qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on optimistic qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of other people for us to value them. We must awaken to the necessary goodness to what in Nichiren Buddhism is termed our “larger self” that lies within us all. If we want to fall in love with our lives and by this I don’t mean the “we”of our small-minded egos we must work diligently to manifest our larger selves in our daily lives. We must generate the wisdom and compassion to care for others until we’ve turned ourselves, piece by piece, into the people we most want to be.

In other words, if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn’t require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character-something anyone can do.

An easy thought test supports this notion: think right at the moment of your favorite people and ask yourself, what is it about them that attracts you the most? Chances are it isn’t their physical appearance or their accomplishments but rather their generous spirit; the way they treat other people. This is the main quality that makes people friendly, even to themselves.

Treating other people well, it turns out, is the fastest trail to a healthy self-esteem. If you hate yourself, stop focusing on your bad qualities. We all have bad qualities. There’s nothing special about your negativity, I promise you. Focus instead on caring for other people. Because the more you care about other people, I pledge the more in turn you’ll be able to care about yourself.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with cheap coach purses and fashion things.

Dr. Laura’s Rhetoric is More Offensive Than the Words

Before Dr. Laura is permitted to go any further, somebody over her requests to require that she seek out continuing teaching on diversity and the new cultural movement among academics and aspiring mental health professionals today. Her work should be postponed until she meets the criteria of cultural competence. When she may not be a psychological health professional, she is in the forefront as if she is and this needs the suitable training.

Rather than concentrate on the caller’s query, Dr. Laura takes protective and starts spewing her frustration. She states that it’s “hilarious” that “we’ve got a Black man as president and we have more complaining about racism than ever.” It is mostly in answer to her deeming the caller hypersensitive. So rather than calmly explain to the caller, Jade, that in her view, her husband’s friends were not being racist, Dr. Laura minimizes and invalidates the woman’s experience.

It’s unfortunate that we have to continue to remind people that the act of one man unluckily does not erase the racial disparities that persist. Black little ones did not miraculously stop dying at higher rates compared to White babies the day Obama was inaugurated. Trends such as infant mortality rates are one example of the myriad of troubles that Obama being in office did not remedy. Individual acts of racial triumph do not result in the amelioration of institutional racism.

As the call continues, Dr. Laura appears to imply that if someone asks “Do Black people really think?” or “Why do Black people do?” the caller should be willing to engage in the discussion. Despite an empty caveat that one does not exist, she continues to assert that there is a “Black think.” She instructs Jade to simply refer to a poll of Black people while answering such questions. Seriously? I’m not sure where to start with this one, except for that counseling 101 would remind Dr. Laura to listen to her caller. We don’t get enough information from Jade to know the true nature of these questions. Dr. Laura appears to assume they coming from a place of pure curiosity. Yet Jade is clearly experiencing them as antagonistic.

Dr. Laura treats Jade as if she is certain Jade is misinterpreting the interactions. She extrapolates this misinterpretation and maps it onto what she sees as Black people being hypersensitive. And she continues her messy tirade by accusing Jade of taking her out of context: “Don’t naacp me.” At this point, it is clear that Dr. Laura is not only talking to Jade, but she is bringing into the “room” all of her own “stuff” about race.

These excerpts sums up why the difficulty with Dr. Laura is beyond the words she is using. After the call ends, Dr. Laura is ranting and declares “we have to be able to talk about these things. Discuss the issue.” Well, she surely did not serve as an exemplar nor did she facilitate a conversation about the issue. She shut the conversation down by being defensive, condescending and off-topic.

Cultural competence is not only a main aspect of psychology, but it is becoming a requirement for navigating our increasingly diverse society. Knowing our blind spots is key while it arrives to sensitive subjects such as race. And Dr. Laura seems to have some baggage to process before she is quick to invalidate another person’s experience of racial discrimination.

I’m uncertain where the bit about favored groups or obsessing about the past comes from. It might have just as easily been about someone being dismissive of a associate of a number of “groups.” It’s more generally about respecting the various identity communities that make up who we are rather than one specific group.

What significance can suicide have?

Due to mental illness and substance abuse, my mother took her own life in 1990 while I was about 11 years old, and I kept her suicide a secret out receiving any mental health help for 15 years.


The medical field has always offered great profession chances and appears to provide not only job security but favorable incomes in many facets of the medical environment. The demand is a constant and unless people quit getting sick, it appears there wont be any troubles in the future finding a need for the medical professional.


At about this time last festival, I clicked "Publish" and put out into the world an incredibly individual piece of writing. I struggled for months to make a decision whether or not I should publicly claim an identity as someone bereaved by suicide. I determined that taking the danger was better than sitting with what had become a kind of secret.


What happened was remarkably different. I was immediately supported by partners and friends both virtually through comments and in person. I came to appreciate, by hearing this feedback from others, that I'm someone who can hold in balance a personal and emotional connection to the issue that I've made my occupation. Most importantly in my mind, I confronted the disgrace that I'd held on to for over about 19 years.


I'd underestimated everyone's ability to hold about three seemingly contradictory things that I had trouble holding that someone can be a person and a statistic. It meant something for me to identify as a survivor, because it made my mother's death count in a new way. It made me count among the hundreds of thousands of people bereaved by suicide. It allowed my mother's death to be counted as what it was - the end to years of unbearable emotional pain and a courageous struggle with a mental illness, bipolar disorder.


I'd also failed to imagine how greatly I might honor my father by writing about her death. Now, I get to talk about him more than I did before, because people ask and want to know. I've been asked so many good questions about her that gave me the chance to remember him, but also to extend her memory to others.

Through answering some of these questions, I was given the opportunity to realize, and articulate, that my father worked very hard to live. She fell in love, married, and had three children. He had lifelong friends and made a valuable contribution to the world through her career. He lived with mental illness in a way that I think many people, including myself, often do not picture.


Critical to his story, though, is that she died because of her illness. I think some people believe that people who die by suicide are weak, failures at life. Suicide deaths are so often seen as selfish, and because the act of suicide is self-inflicted, the person who dies is blamed for her death. Thinking that way leaves out that mental illness is influenced by multiple factors, biological and environmental, just like physical illness. I wouldn't blame someone who died after years of having cancer, especially if they were able to get treatment and the treatment couldn't fight the disease.


Someone asked me last year if there was anything we in the suicide prevention field could have done differently to prevent my father's death. As public health professionals, we don't take a lot of time thinking about how to prevent individual deaths, so it meant a lot to me to be asked that question.


Throughout my mother's adult life, when he was struggling with and being treated for bipolar disorder, the treatments available were also extremely limited. My mother engaged with treatment the best she could, but I know that he also didn't always take medications she was prescribed, and it's pretty clear to me now that he was released from hospitalizations without adequate safety plans.


I'm proud that I'm able to be a part of the field at this time, that I can honor my mother's memory through my job, and that I've integrated this missing into the way I think about my life, and I'm thankful to the society for providing support and inspiration.


I wish it can encourage openness about difficult life experiences, and helps people know they're not alone. At the same time, I am always sad to hear about others who've lost loved ones to suicide.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with air jordan vi on sale.

Easy Fix, Tough Implementation

Religion is a part of life. Religion serves as a moral compass to many people, it solves our fears of the unknown by telling us what happens after death. Unlucky, it also attributes a lot of other things to the deity that mankind has since figured out.

Organized religion as a whole is a great way to influence the actions of great numbers of people in similar ways. People have been trying to convince other people of their opinions for a very long time, and I would shake the hand of the person that first thought up the farce of making dissenting views morally wrong. The major problem with religion today is that it takes that idea to extremes by designating anyone with a different religion as a “sinner”.

The key is tolerance. Until we stop all the petty disputes about whose god is better than whose, the world simply cannot exist peacefully. I love the “Coexist” bumper stickers because they state simply in no uncertain terms that people have different ideas and that’s OK. If you need a special book and a religious leader to tell you right from wrong, that’s OK. I don’t even care which one you pick.

As soon as you start telling me what I should and should not believe in, you have overstepped your bounds. I respect your right to try and convince me that your faith is the best one, but don’t tell me I’m going to hell or am in any other way damned because I don’t go to whatever organized religious meeting you’re selling. As a matter of fact, getting over our petty differences in opinion would go along way toward making friends. Oh, and don’t forget that I reserve the right to try and convince you that you’re religion is silly. I also hold you responsible for telling me when I’ve taken my argument too far.

Maybe there should be laws against religious exclusivity. Religious exclusivity of course referring to teach people that any one religion is better than any other. Actually, at the rudimentary level, the reason religions teach exclusivity is to make sure that everybody is on the same page, following the same morals and so on. I think that by now all religions have enough in common in the way of morals that we can do away with the differences in doctrine and work together for the sake of mankind.

Alright, so we’ve got a solution, but how do we put it into action? Teaching tolerance is an uphill battle, I’m sure. If we want the human race to have it’s ducks in a row ten years from now, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Television ads are probably in order. Billboard campaigns. Any sort of publicity. The best way to deal with our demons is to drag them out in the open and have a good look at them. If we expose the ugly side of religious exclusivity for what it really is, maybe people will start to get the message that we should stop fighting amongst ourselves and strive for our goals together.

I think people should strive to be good to themselves and their neighbors. Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. The world is full of people doing harm or exploiting others, but those same people get upset when it’s done to them. Some people actually need a book to show them what’s right or wrong. The only way we can make the world a better place is to be good examples for our children.

Our society would be strengthened with healthy relationships

Imagine if today’s men used this revolutionary concept of candor in dating. Our society would be strengthened with healthy relationships. Instead of desperately searching for somebody to accept his romantic overtures, the healthy man would defer his need for instant gratification and use the dating process to select likely partners among those women of compatible temperament and like interests.
The people who have the third stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome choose between their aged life based on fake intimacy. For lots of guys this is a simple option as their aged life was a mess.

Such was the miserable example of actress Brittany Murphy and Simon Monjack. Simon Monjack left behind quite a checkered past. He never told Brittany about the two children he had fathered from two prior liasons. According to US Magazine,  he also left behind two warrants  for his arrest in Virginia for alleged credit card fraud and theft, an unpaid about $6088 legal bill, about $20,001 in unpaid debt to his former fiancee, a half million dollar judgement against him by a British investment firm and a stint in jail for overstaying his visa.

If poor Brittany had known of his past, she would have understood his sudden desire to get married to avoid deportation. If she had known how he told his prior fiancee he had bought her a diamond ring but it was actually cubic zirconium, she would have known to stay about 9 miles away from this deceptive man.

Unfortunately, in the third stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome small details like a criminal record and deceit are ignored as the relationship builds momentum leading to the peak known as the Honeymoon stage. Cautions from friends are ignored as the couple becomes increasingly isolated. This works out perfectly for the sociopaths and con men.

In an earlier America, courtship was used to link honest men and women of compatible temperaments and shared interests and weed out mismatches. There was no need for guile, for withholding the reality of each other until some far-off day after irreversible commitment was made. It looks hard to believe, but once upon a time Americans did not fear the truth.

In the 1800s, the prospective bride and groom were integrated into each other’s life. If one could not abide the friends and relations, it was considered proof of incompatibility and the relationship would be terminated. That was the point of courtship. Instead of dating like an ostrich with one’s head in the sand, the fact that two people might not be compatible for a lifetime commitment was faced with eyes wide open. Early Americans knew that a person’s friends were a mirror of their true self.

We had an example of Brittany Murphy. Within months of starting another relationship with a factual outlander she was staying together with him and ignored the words of her partners and friends. Only a few weeks after starting to see each other they shocked partners and friends by marrying in a secret house. Only then did the real Simon Monjack start to emerge. Ladies, love at first sight is a fantasy. Get to know your guy before you have to bail him out of jail and pay off his debts.

If we can only look at the person we’re dating pasts or history to determine if they’re good candidates. We should look at them as if we were employers trying to hire them for a job. Where we can go and call their exes as a reference. We’re not going to hire someone that got fired for stealing, always getting to work late and or being lazy. Choosing a partner is thee or one of thee most important decisions we make in our lives. Why not take the time to make a wise decision. There are so many people out there; it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all choices. Some people are clearly not an option.

Dealing with Adolescence Problems

Parents as they grew older, even as they had more challenges of aging, they had fewer problems as they accepted much more in life that they used to complain about, and grew in their appreciation and gratitude for the little gifts that they no longer took for granted.

There are problems stemming from teenage separation. The parents complain how the teenager never talks to them any longer, never has anything to tell, and they feel nothing about what has happened. The teenager complains how parental checking and inquiries are invasive of the requirement for secrecy that comes with becoming more independent.

There are problems stemming from teenage differentiation. The parents complain about the teenager’s new taste in dress and entertainment and friends. The teenager complains that all parents do is criticize, refuse to accept that he or she is growing older, and are intolerant of his or her new interests.

There are problems stemming from teenage opposition. The parents complain that the teenager actively and passively resists their authority and refuses to cooperate at every turn. The teenager complains that parental rules and restraints are over protective and unduly restrictive of his or her personal freedom.

No wonder adolescence is a more abrasive and contentious time with so many more problems to deal with. Thus some understanding about the nature and management of problems is in order.

It is the dissatisfaction created by an identified problem that can drive efforts to close the discrepancy and restore personal content. In this sense, problems come with their own motivation to resolve them. This dissatisfaction can range from mild upset  to major pain. In the first case the person is energized to go looking for what is temporarily lost, in the second they are energized to confront the wrong doer and stop the mistreatment.

Because a problem is a judgment call, it is always a matter of choice – whether or not to take issue with some conduct, circumstance, or condition. And here conflicts can arise between parent and teenager, and between parent and parent, over whether something should be treated as a problem or not.

Then there’s the parent at the other extreme that is controlling to a fault with the teenage, too critical for that young person’s good. "You can’t trust her, she never does anything right, I have to ride her every step of the way, she’s nothing but a problem." And so the teenager’s confidence plummets as her resentment builds.

The more judgmental, rigid, and demanding a parent is, the more problems that adult will choose to have with the teenage. The more accepting, flexible, and adaptive a parent is, the fewer problems that adult will choose to have with the teenage. The first parent goes for control; the second goes with the flow. Each approach has its own strengths and limitations.

People have two responsibilities for their problems: creating them and intensifying them. Thus having created the perception of a problem, they also decide how important that problem is by the degree of worry and urgency they attach to it. For example, the adolescent decides she has a problem because she can’t find an outfit she likes to wear to the party. Now she intensifies the problem by saying: "I have nothing to wear! I’ll look awful! Everyone will notice! My life will be ruined!" By turning a minor dilemma into a major crisis, a problem becomes a major source of distress.

The great problem with problems, between parents or between parent and teenager, is the negative effect they have on relationships. Now attention is focused on what’s wrong, on what is not working, on discontent, grievance, and unhappiness.
Under the influence of the negative mindset created by the preoccupation with problems, complaints and hard feelings can rule, appreciation of each other and the relationship can be lost, and neither side feels inclined to make the positive initiatives and investments that the relationship sorely needs.

At this juncture the contribution of laughter, enjoyment, play, fun, expressions of interest and love are essential to help renew and restore a relationship that is faring badly at the moment.

There are three rules for coping with problems between parents or between parent and teenage to think. First, take responsibility for your troubles for making a judgment and making a discrepancy that states how things are, is not how you want them to be. Second, don’t let the harmful focus on the problem overwhelm the positive perspective on the relationship, thus permitting displeasure to drag you down.

Third, when beset by problems, take optimistic initiative and make optimistic contributions to remain the relationship nourished with fine emotions to maintain you through what can be a hard and unrewarding time.

This is what every parent should really learn about. But I also think adolescence a period all parents had passed through once in their life time and for this reason alone we all should try to show some understanding of the teens’ situation. Parents should all remember how it was in their own time and there will be no conflict in the end.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches england soccer jersey and fashion things on the Internet.

Drinking is always secondary to mental illness

Drinking is the least of the worries of a Bipolar, considering mental illness alters the personality and the relationships of the sufferer. Drinking is always secondary to mental illness.

I respect Stanton Peele very much, if for no other reason than just for the reason that he is informed well, he also telling us all about the approach he sees things. Nevertheless, even the mighty sometime misstep, and this appears to be one of those cases.

Maybe Stanton missed this sentence since it was a few lines above the one he was focusing on, but what it’s telling us is that the vast majority of people who meet alcohol dependence criteria do so for a very limited amount of time when another 29% or so have the chronic-relapsing version of alcoholism we’ve all come to know. So yes, most people quit without help, but the rest have a hell of a time quitting and most of them need help and even then don’t necessarily respond to cure. I don’t know that this is very different from the percentage of people that eat too much and gain weight, some stop and return to a normal BMI, the rest become obese. The same story holds for the prediabetics who never quite cross that line but once they do, will need insulin and a strictly managed diet. In both cases I don’t think we need to discount the latter because the former exists.

I agree that this sort of nuanced observation is missing from the public discourse, and I think that it’s important to bring it in since it does something important – it lessens the stigma of alcoholism and addiction by showing us what is really happening without distortion. However, showing only the other side does little to improve the situation.

Most of persons who meet the meaning of alcohol-dependence should possibly not be named alcoholics. On the other hand, there is a big enough group out there of people who really suffer with a state that doesn’t go away while their first 4 years episode of hard alcohol use ends. They require cure and they’re the focus of most study on addiction and alcoholism, as they probable should be while it arrives to cure. That other group, they just require to be careful not to get in a car accident or get pregnant too early.

Years of episodes and psychosis put Bipolar’s in a defining depressive state. The ability to refrain, coincides with years of brain altering episodes quite common really. All people who engage in such self deception, should be seen as unwell, and encouraged to be more better, with medicine.

Redefine midlife is the starting of adult challenges

People in their twenties can play at life and make a few mistakes and recoup, but it is at ones peril to walk away from a long term marriage only to find boredom, unhappiness is just part of the human condition along with joy, kindness, and self sacrifice. But if you are old, and you just change partners it will be all better. So what if your partner doesn’t want what you want, and what does that mean anyway?

A lady in her early 40s was telling me on her work life problems. She has a busy job, four kids, and a husband who travels a lot for his own work. She suddenly stopped, recalling a latest, horrible dream: She’s on one of those moving paths, and can’t move. Passing by on either side are scenes of herself, but living different lives with unknown person. All of a sudden, she recognizes the Grim Reaper standing at the end of the path, arms outspread, awaiting her.

I think sadness does rise among some people while the new conflicts and needs converge with a second psychological shift: Old emotional defenses, rationalizations and self-deceptions from your childhood and adolescence, as well as from your adult decisions, begin to erode and crumble under their own weight. They no longer work so well as you age.

One reason that occurs is as we always know the truth inside, and truth always keeps trying to rise to the surface. We may have remained unconscious about old conflicts – and puzzle over repetitive patterns or underlying unhappiness – but the pull towards resolving them is a strong developmental need. It tends to blossom more fully as you become older. In fact, the current economic meltdown has intensified that pull, out of necessity. In that sense it may prove to be a blessing in disguise for many people; an aid to redirecting their life choices in more fulfilling ways.

Sadly, though, some do descend into that "death spiral" of despair and resignation. That can segue into sadness, from mild to severe. Suicide attempts may occur, as the investigate found. An example of downward drift is a man who realized that he never really liked his career, felt underutilized and unfulfilled; and then was let go by his company. At the same time, he was going through a divorce. He asked me a tearful question in our first meeting that sounded like a Zen koan: "How do you start over when you can’t start over?"
Many people are better able to move through this period with greater clarity and hopefulness. This may account for some of the other data, about an upswing of happiness during one’s 50s. In reality, investigate shows that older people show greater brainpower, increased judgment, perspective and wisdom when solving problems. In addition, those with a sense of humor tend to live longer. These qualities can enable one to feel gratitude  and appreciation for what one has in life. That can enhance overall well-being and positive energy, as distinguished from day-to-day fluctuations in "happiness."

But I believe there’s also a darker reason for the reported rise of happiness among some: masked resignation and accommodation. Some people more or less give up trying to grow or change. They decide, consciously or unconsciously, to lope along in the life they’ve been living and then define that as "happiness."

I’ve worked with many such "happy" people: A lady who feared what changes she might have to make in her life to feel more alive, more vital – until one day she discovered her husband had been conducting an affair for several years, and her world crumbled. Or the man who had become more withdrawn at home, burying himself in job, alcohol and Internet chat rooms with the silent agreement of his wife. Meanwhile, he gained weight and developed high blood pressure. When he consulted me, he said that whenever he had tried to "break free," he reverted back to his "old ways," so he had decided to just stop trying.

But more positively, I’m seeing a growing number of people who grapple with their "midlife" challenges right from the start. They do some self-examination and work towards creating clearer purpose and more integration within their lives. That can open up a sense of renewal and positive resiliency.

Maybe a time will come while people choose a marriage partner on the basis of raising healthy children in a stable environment, and then later seek a different partner with whom one feels a greater romantic, soul mate connection. But for now, you can face whether the two of you can rebuild the kind of relationship that you both want. Get the help of a good couples therapist if necessary. But if you decide it’s better to end it, do it now, with mutual respect.

The result, at this point, is that the majority of people are competent of self-directing their lives during the adult time. What you experience isn’t some relentless course that just happens to you. It’s the effect of how you manage the changes within your spirit; how you deal with the new possibilities that lie ahead.

But there is a question that how in the world can we help clients end a marriage with mutual respect if one person wants out and the other person doesn’t? I see that situation with over 40 and especially over 50 couples far more often than cases where each spouse feels roughly the same about the condition of the marriage.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with juicy couture bikini and fashion things.

Marriage Promotion Programs

There was one I ran across some time ago who was of a distinctly libertarian bent. He made what I thought was an excellent point that the entire gay marriage debate misses the much larger and more general issue that the government has transitioned from protecting inherent individual rights to granting them, or not as the case may be.

Singalism may be a problem, but people aren’t banished from their families for being single, at least not at the rate gay youth are. Get a grip, singalism is a choice while homosexuality is not. We should own our choice.

While I heard that the full text of the judge’s ruling on Proposition 8 was accessible, I put everything else aside and dug into the 136-page file. Prop 8 had banned gay marriage in California. Adjudicator Vaughn Walker said that unconstitutional.

First, those statements about the transformative power of getting married that I’ve been trying to bat down for so long – they get taken seriously in the ruling. That was disappointing. The Judge did not need to claim that marriage makes people healthier or happier or any of the rest of it in order to rule that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

Another gloomy side of the story: In order to argue for the potential importance of marriage to same-sex couples, the ruling, I believe, added to the discourse of singlism and matrimania.

Now here’s the more interesting and less depressing part. The judge maintained that the opposition to same-sex marriage was based largely on untrue stereotypes and private moral views, and that neither could provide the basis for legislation. “California’s obligation is to treat its citizens equally,” he said. So shouldn’t singles be treated equally, too? That’s what I argued.

I’ll save them for later. So it was just moments ago that I caught up with the lively discussion of the post on dealing with put-downs. I loved discovering that readers were mulling over the same concept I was blogging about at the Huffington Post marital privilege. The title of my post over there was, “Does the Prop 8 ruling make the case for ending marital privilege?”

I think if people can find a church who will marry them, then there should be no government interference, or encouragement. Instead of trying to get the state to grant equal rights, we should be trying to get the state out of meddling in the marriage business and people’s private affairs all together.

Though I paraphrase to a large degree based on memory, I pretty much agree with this take. That’s the real argument against federal marriage promotion programs, not that they’re founded on bogus research and false claims, which is taking the idea behind such programs seriously and as a given that the government would be justified in promoting marriage if the claims were sufficiently demonstrated to be true, or if enough people believed they were true.

How do you think of Narcissist

We all know learning is so important, we don’t see how it can be a bad thing. And it helps you so much in your interactions with others. If you know about yourself, your motivations and your worldview, you can understand and control your interactions with others, instead of having these things control you can potentially sabotage relationships.

Narcissism is all the rage these days, it appears to turn up in every third conversational have, accusations of narcissism are thrown at introverts and extroverts in almost equal measure. So who is the narcissist?

Research does find a correlation between extroversion and narcissism, although not all narcissism is pathological. The unpleasant kind, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is a very particular disorder, described thus in the DSM-IV:

1 Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
2 Requires excessive admiration
3 Is interpersonally exploitative, takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
4 Has a grandiose sense of self-importance
5 Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
6 Has a sense of entitlement, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
7 Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8 Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
9 Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people.

People with true NPD are rare and frightening creatures to be avoided if at all possible. But like all personality traits, narcissism exists on a continuum, and there is such thing as “normal” narcissism. I would wager a guess that the narcissism described in this article about narcissists and perceived creativity falls in the normal range of narcissism. In the article, narcissists are described as conveying “more enthusiasm, confidence, and charisma while they are selling their ideas to others.” Which sounds as much extroverted as narcissistic, and it doesn’t sound like a bad thing at all.

But how about accusations that introverts’ focus some say excessive focus on the inside of their own heads is narcissistic? Freud thought it was, Jung begged to differ.

More recently, we have Dr. Jonathan Cheek of Wellesley. He studies shyness, so his research is only somewhat applicable, but it’s a good place to start.

“I would distinguish anxious self-preoccupation from selfishness,” he says. “They’re both excessive self-focus, but I think the distinction is very important.” In fact, the Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale finds a strong negative correlations between shyness and overt narcissism.

However, shyness does correlate positively with hypersensitivity or what some call “covert narcissism” which is vulnerable and anxious rather than exhibitionist and grandiose. That’s the kind of narcissism that imagines everyone is looking at you when you enter a room.

All introverts don’t feel that way, but some do. And doesn’t it seem possible that some other introverts actually are sitting quietly in the corner of the room feeling superior to the hoi polloi around them? And is it possible that the extrovert-hating introvert is a low on empathy, unable to see and respect other aspects of extroverts’ humanity?

It seems to me both introverts and extroverts can have narcissistic qualities. So, who is the biggest narcissist? The narcissist is the biggest narcissist. Introvert or extrovert.

We are great, complex machines filled with light and shadow and nuance. Bashfulness and sociability are just two characters among the many–narcissism included–that make us individuals. As a result, pointing fingers is a waste of time. We’re all correct, and we’re all incorrect. Better to just try and get along.

As an introvert, it always seemed to me that extroverts would be more likely to become narcissists than introverts. It makes more sense for them to need to be the center of attention and to boast and convince others of their importance in order to gain that attention. I never really considered the possibility of a quiet narcissist who isolates him or herself from others because he or she considers the rest of humanity inferior. That leads me to think that introverts will often mistake extroverts for narcissists, viewing their constant need for interaction and attention as inflated self-importance, and extroverts will often mistake introverts for narcissists, viewing their withdrawal as arrogance.

Why do people have to make commitments in front of god

Common law marriage is often evidence of a stronger relationship, because it survives without the artificial buttressing provided by the law. And from what I've seen, dissolutions of common law marriages may be even more painful than legal divorce, perhaps because the relationship was valued more, and the commitment was active rather than passive, a wonderful way to put it.

Why isn't love enough? This is a very good question, and I struggled with for years myself, so let's have a deeper thought. We'll talk about two points of promise, positive and negative, and then two sources of it, outside and inside. I think that the bad rap that commitment and marriage all often get is owing to the the combination of the negative aspect of commitment and the outside source of it.

Commitment, in this sense, has two points, one negative and one positive. The one which commenters like the one quoted above criticize is the negative one, which focuses on constraints and rules. That is the "business" or contractual aspect of marriage, the "thou shalt nots" that get us into so much trouble when we decide "yes, we shall."

OK, a dog with people. But there is an important but neglected positive aspect that explains why people voluntarily enter into commitments like marriage: it is way of expressing your love and devotion to another person. Not the only way, of course, but a well-established and particularly declarative way.

And these two aspects of commitment are, to a large extent, inseparable: the public declaration of devotion would not mean as much without the promised made therein. The fact that, in a traditional wedding ceremony, a couple stands up in front of the people who mean the most to them in the world and promise to love each other, support each other, and be true to each other, is what gives that public statement its force. It's also what makes it so heartbreaking, especially to those in attendance at the wedding, when those vows are broken. And it can be safely assumed that no one would make such promises if not to express to the other person his or her devotion; we rarely make commitments for no reason. Rather, the commitments are the expression of love and devotion.

Now what I imagine happens with many if not most couples is that they start out emphasizing the positive aspect of the marriage commitment, and then over time the focus shifts to the negative. They take their mutual love and devotion for granted as the passion and lust fade, and the rules and constraints take center stage and these rules and constraints end up seeming all the more binding and unfair in comparison.

This is where the sources of commitment come in. When a couple first declares their love and devotion to each other, and makes that commitment, it comes from their hearts, they want to make those promises voluntarily in expression of their love. In other words, the source of that commitment is internal. Even during the wedding ceremony, I doubt it seems like the priest, rabbi, justice of the peace, or Elvis is shackling the couple with the wedding vows, they want to make them. When the commitment is voluntarily, the positive aspect gets all the emphasis, and the negative hardly seems important. After all, why would I ever want to desert, ignore, or be disloyal to this fantastic person who I'm completely in love with? Perish the thought.

Now the promises do not seem so voluntary, the ring seems heavier, and marriage seems more like the list of "thou shalt nots." At this point, commitment seems externally coerced, a institutional legacy of the foolishness of youth that only now made be paid for. This is even more true for marriages that did not start so rosy, that were somewhat contrived of forced by circumstances from the beginning. But even the mostly glorious, romantic marriages can decline over time, and one or both partners may start to resent the promises they once made so freely.

So when partners forget why they said their vows and made their promises in the first place, their meaning is lost, and only the ball and chain remains. One way to avoid this, obviously, is to not forget, to keep the love alive, to celebrate what brought you together in the first place. Then the rules won't seem as important, and the voluntariness of them will almost make them irrelevant, in a sense, the marriage begins anew.

I think part of blame for the excessive emphasis on the negative aspect of commitment must also be laid on the contractual nature of marriage.  Commercial entities commit themselves to certain actions contractually to elicit certain benefits; the constraints are a means to an end, and something they would avoid if it were at all possible. But as I explained above, the marital promises are part and parcel of the expression of love and devotion; the partners want to make these promises because they reinforce to each other their love. Thinking of marriage as just a contract makes this point harder to see, and invites cynicism and skepticism.

No one is perfect. Few people imagine on their wedding day that they will ever be tempted to cheat on their beloved, but we know all too well that many do cheat and presumably more are tempted. This is exactly where the outside view of the marital promise has its value: when human weakness is at play. Even the most devoted partner may be tempted, and he or she may not be strong enough to resist without the commitment. As the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart explains in his classic book, The Concept of Law, it is in this way that laws bind even the best of us; when tempted to skirt the law, our respect for the law, if we hold to it internally, may keep us to the straight and narrow.

But isn't commitment counterproductive? If your partner is forced to be faithful, how can you know he or she is being faithful out of love rather than out of obedience or fear of reprisal? This is another product of the outside or contractual view of commitment that emphasizes the constraints over what they express. If indeed your partner must be induced to be faithful, then no, he or she is not truly faithful, and if your partner were truly faithful, the rules and constraints would not matter. So, in a sense, external commitment does reduce its expressive value, that's true.

In essence, if commitments are freely selected and adhered to, they won't appear like commitments at all, but they will still have all the meaning that commitments ideally own. However, while we start thinking of our commitments only as commitments, and lose notice of the reason we made them, then the problem begins.

I think that the messiness of divorce is enough motivation to work things out in a marriage. But although commitment is a condition of marriage, the reverse is not true. I've struggled a lot with the question of to marry or not to marry, and came to the conclusion that I'm happy being in a common law partnership. My partner and I have built a life together and work at our relationship. We don't take our togetherness for granted because we're not legally tethered. It's something we nurture. Think of it as active commitment rather than the passive legal commitment of marriage.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with juicy couture bikini and fashion things.