I Have a Dream

I have a dream today, well actually tonight! 

I have a dream that one day all grown up people around me will be communicable. That all of them, at least the ones that I have the most interactions with, will already be in the "adult ego state". 

I have a dream that one day the very presumption of every human interaction will be "I'm OK, You're Ok". 

I have a dream that one day we all will be trying our bests in "staying Ok" and we will be helping each other in getting more than OK!  

I have a dream today!



P.S. This is insane! I realized Google's Doodle just now, like half an hour after writing this post, and boy! It's Martin Luther King Jr. day tomorrow (probably will already be today once I update the post with the postscript). I was kinda imitating his format of "I Have a Dream" just cuz I thought it was cool. Such a coincidence! 

The Trimates

Today's* google doodle celebrated the 82nd birthday of Dian Fossey, one of the three ladies famously known as Leakey's angels or the trimates, the name coined by Leakey himself. These three ladies were encouraged and supported by Louis Leakey to study primates in their habitats. Jane Goodall is the first one of the trimates who studied chimpanzees for over 45 years. The second one, Dian Fossey studied the mountain gorillas for about 18 years and she is not alive anymore. The third trimate, Birute Galdikas studied orangutans. Previously I just had read about Jane Goodall's work. I've learned about her probably in one of Robert Sapolsky's lectures. I used to follow his course "Human Behavioral Biology" online. I guess I had already given links to some of his lectures and interviews in one of the previous posts. 

From left to right: Birute Galdikas, Jane Gooodall and Dian Fossey

*/ Yesterday's since till I'll publish this post it'll be already past midnight. Dian Fossey's birthday is on Jan 16th.

I really can't resist sharing some of these fantastic photos here:

Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees

Dian Fossey and her gorillas

Birute Galdikas and her orangutans 

and once again "The Trimates"

From left to right: Jane Gooodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas

Long Distance Parent-ship?!

Today I was taking a break between reading two scientific papers to read this article. Later my officemate told me one of the postdocs in our group has his family, his wife and two kids, back in Hong Kong. His daughter is three years old now and the son is just two months old. He has been away from his family for the last three years. Then he told me this story which was extremely shocking and sad. Apparently he had gone home when the daughter was just born or a few months old and then he didn't go home for a long long time until she was like about two years old. Almost all the interactions the kid had with her daddy till the age of two, at least the ones she could recall, had been through the Skype and the laptop monitor. He gets home and realizes that the kid doesn't recognize him. The kid thinks daddy has to be in the laptop. It takes the parents a few weeks to make her understand that this human being next to her is the same daddy so that she stops calling the laptop daddy!!! 

Recalled this video. I'm not going to argue how insane I think what this parents did is. Just to get an interesting video (!) which would be watched and shared a lot?! Why would you do that to your kid?! Anyways the kid in this video doesn't recognize her father after he gets rid of his huge beard and she really feels unsafe and insecure when he hold her. Imagine how hard and complicated was what our postdoc's daughter went through. She has seen daddy as a face on the laptop for at least one year and now this guy wants to hold her and asks her to call him daddy. 

The Heavy Burden of Secrets; Would you carry it for me?!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please don't expect other people to carry the heavy burden of keeping your secrets absolutely to themselves, if you already failed to carry it yourselves. 

Thank you very much in advance! 

Yours sincerely,

Wisher Writer

To her and the intense sweetness and sourness that her friendship brings all along! *

Intense friendships are like sandpapers I was thinking. Dealing with intense people is not easy at all; So much conflict, so much friction most of the time. In most cases though I feel interacting with intense people results in one getting kind of polished, you know. It's like a sandpaper which softens your roughnesses, refines you, makes you glossier in your social interactions. The less abrasive you are, the less conflicts you are going to get into with other people, the smoother your friendships and relationships go on. In retrospect I see how much I've changed in my life through interacting and befriending intense people despite the initial inertia I have always had towards getting close to these type of characters. I guess this inertia comes from the fact that after all I really try to avoid drama and dramatic people as much as I can. Although it is inevitable and almost impossible to avoid drama completely but I've realized the less drama I am involved in or aware of, the happier I am. On the other hand the other day I was telling C, I feel like intense people live more. By "more" I mean they experience higher levels of joy as well as higher levels of pain. The amplitude, the peaks and valleys of the feelings and sensations they experience is usually bigger than what non-intense people do. What is life after all!? How would you squeeze more out of life?! I really don't know but sometimes I think maybe, and just maybe, a gauge or meter can be one which measures the number as well as the intensity of the emotions and sensations someone goes through during her/his living.

Is it just me or is it a typical Iranian thing to think immediately of pomegranate and only pomegranate when thinking of sweetness and sourness together?! :D

*/ This is what I thought of and wrote under a photo of mine, taken by N, which I shared on Facebook. I kinda like this sentence and my view especially since it happened to me so spontaneously. So proud of myself, ha?!?! :P