ed naplója

 

Some psychologists say that practising a religion helps the individual to stay balanced and healthy. If you are not religious, reality can freak the hell out of you and jeopardize your mental wellness. Not being spiritual means that you have to accept that it’s only you who is responsible for your happiness and failures; that accidents and tragedies do happen without any hidden sense (though it must be a challenge for all to believe that any kind of transcendental entity could come up with a justifiable reason for torture or massacre); that your existence doesn’t mean more for the universe than the rise and fall of a modest apple pie; that bad people eat lobster while good people eat cheeseburger and there is no compensation at the end; and death is like an infinite power break with no candles, no cigarettes and no company… Some say this is too much for us to stand.

 

So if you don’t have the money to go to psychoanalysis or to buy hard drugs in order to ease your existential anxieties, and you are not religious yet, I recommend you to find a religion and make your life easier to live. The following list will help you with choosing the religion which fits your personality the most.

A tricky way to maintain your unhappiness is blaming others for your misery instead of acting and changing your self-destructive attitudes. These complaints are in most cases right, but at the age of 35 it is kind of pointless to say that you haven’t ever had a good relationship because at the age of nine that arrogant Jimmy refused your kiss and drew genitals on your history homework. Let’s face that no one cares of your childhood offences anymore. But if you are hopelessly fixed on the idea that your elementary school P.E. teacher is responsible for your defeats because he called you Miss Piggy in front of the whole class, then do something instead of feeling sorry of yourself. You can’t go back in time but there is one thing you can do: TAKE A REVENGE. Many movies offer us this simple solution, but normally we don’t live with it. Well, maybe it’s time for you to give it a whirl. As my grandfather said once ‘A well done revenge can always cheer you up when you feel down.’ (He died by the hands of the mafia some years later.)

 

Are you ready to act? Good.

1. Now call the wife of your old teacher and tell her that you work with her husband and he has been cheating on her with you for twenty years. When she asks who you are, tell her that you are the blackboard of his classroom. (To make it believable, try to speak on a blackboard voice.) 2. Find out where Jimmy lives, get into his bedroom and hide in the locker, and while he’s sleeping tattoo a photo-realistic nude picture of Jean-Marie Le Pen on his forehead. If he wakes up, tickle him until he swallows his head and dies. (It’s better to wear a fake moustache for this occasion.)  

 

In case you are irrationally emotional and don’t want to harm anyone, the other choice you have is to take all the responsibilities for your happiness from now on. It’s simple. Change your lousy job, get extremely rich, set up the ‘Wealthy but Warm-hearted Foundation’ and save some thousands of orphans and baby elephants, buy a big house with seven swimming pools and secret slaves in the kitchen, produce many happy babies and forgive your enemies.

Have you ever noticed how much time you spend with meaningless smiling? You smile when you say hello and you smile when you say goodbye, you smile when you ask for a coffee and you smile when you apologize for stepping on the head of your lover in the morning rush. Your day is a never-ending smile.

 

Smiling is the oil of this old machine called human interactions. Without smiling it would be all broken. I suggest you to try a very simple experiment: do just one day without smiling. The result will be chaos and disaster, tears and confusion. You will cause irreparable discomfort in your counterparts. They will need to eat a huge amount of chocolate to feel like valued human beings again.

 

So, the formula is simple: the more you smile, the more people will like you. However, the challenge of smiling is not in daily life situations. There is nothing more adorable than someone who can smile under the biggest stress or crisis. Do you want to be a successful and popular person? Well, there is nothing easier to achieve than this: you just have to learn to smile in any circumstances.

 

Let’s practise this now. I’m going to say you bad things and you have to keep on smiling. Ready?

 

- Your mum never loved you.

 

- Your mum never loved you because you are a dwarf.

 

- A dwarf!

 

- You are so dwarfish that you are almost two dwarfs.

 

 - No one told you that you are a dwarf but everyone was laughing on you behind your tiny back.

 

- Your dad didn’t love your mum.

 

- Your dad didn’t love your mum because your mum supposedly cheated on him with an enormous dwarf.

 

- Your guinea pig doesn’t love you. He feels ashamed to be owned by a dwarf. He hasn’t left you yet just because he is dumb and depressed and locked in a glass prison. But he has already sent a replacement claim to the local authorities.

 

Are you still smiling? Congratulations, you learn very fast! (This is indeed a remarkable achievement from a dwarf.) So what you have to do now is to keep on smiling in every single situation until the end of times. 

 

Ready?

 

 

But the problem is not only with the famous people and with your friends. There is also a crucial problem with your dog: most of the time it’s much happier than you are. Even if you have lost your iPod or your girlfriend, you go home and your dog behaves as it has won the lottery, jumping and woofing of true pleasure. You are a very patient person, but there are things you should not tolerate anymore. So my advice is the following: invite your dog for a sunny walk, bring it to a pet shop and exchange it to a guinea pig. You won’t have these problems anymore: guinea pigs are wonderfully dumb and depressed. Much dumber and much more depressed than you could ever be. (They also have better reasons for being depressed than you do: you don’t look like a hairy meat ball, you do have separate bathroom and you don’t have to eat rotten apples.)

 

So if you follow my advice and do this fruitful exchange, it will be truly a pleasure to arrive home from now on and see your pet standing motionless in the corner of its glass prison as the living statue of desperation. Though guinea pigs die very early, there is no big difference between them being dead or alive apart from blinking, so there is no urgent need for buying a new one in case the old one has committed suicide by hanging himself on his own tail. (However they are unfortunately a bit less depressed when they are dead).

 

In case you are hopelessly emotional and don’t want to exchange your dog to feel better, what can also help is if you don’t give him food for a week. It will surely break his enthusiasm and increase his solidarity to your sufferings.

If you want to know more about guinea pigs before investing into one, you can read below the complete PHD thesis of a guinea pig philosophy student:

 

‘Why do we live? Who is God? Dunno, I’m just a pig. Damn it.’

 

And here comes a guinea pig haiku from the 19 century Japan:

 

'The night comes
and brings to pigs a chance to shit
while looking at the moon.'

The problem is not only with famous people but also with your friends, as you often compare yourself to them too. This is only problematic in case your friends are more successful than you are. Imagine that you had a great day: after 6 sexless months the girl you like in the office offered you her apple at lunch which certainly means that she wants to sleep with you. Furthermore, your boss told you that he is satisfied with your work, so he will raise your salary with 1 euro 80 cents and you can move out from your windowless basement office as you will get a new office in the elevator! So you call a friend to share these great news with him, but before you could say anything he says that he can’t speak too much now as his airplane is ready to take off from Thailand where he was with his stunning girlfriend celebrating his promotion to be the youngest chief executive officer ever (he is only six years old but extremely mature for his age). You hang up the phone, and hit your head with a chair until it gets soft and warm like a freshly baked apple pie.

But if you select your friends carefully, this can never happen. Therefore I recommend you to seriously revise your social network. Forget your friends with a successful love life or career. Keep only the truly miserable ones or find new friends in the nearest hostel for homeless people.

 

Just imagine the same phone conversation with a new friend who you have met on the ‘Happy Sober Excursion’ organized by the local club of the Anonym Alcoholics.

 

Anonym You: And how are you, Anonym Joe?

Anonym Friend: I’m fine, thanks! Tried to kill myself yesterday as usual but it didn’t work ‘cause the knife I was using turned out to be a spoon, but I was too drunk to see the difference. Look, Anonym John, these are really great news about your new office in the elevator, I’m really proud of you!

 

You see? In the right community you can be the King of Life!

 

If case you are very emotional and don’t want to change your friends just to feel less hopeless, the Internet always provides you a temporary solution to boost your mood. Put keywords in Google such as ‘civil war’ or ‘starvation’. There is always suffering on other parts of the world for you to feel better.

 

'Serious is more fun, but more fun is serious... you have to be seriously into fun to have more.'

 

It's my Greek friend, who said this, and I absolutely identify with this sentence. It expresses the true essence of life in my opinion.

Thank you, Greek friend!

There are various brilliant ways how you make yourself unhappy. One of these gorgeous habits is that when you feel a bit down you are likely to compare yourself with famous people. For example, it takes the whole Sunday for you to write two e-mails, you are not even able to bring yourself to wash the laundry, so you wouldn’t dare to even think of those big intellectual or artistic achievements you were supposed to reach by the age of 30. You switch on the television to forget the misery of the daily life management, and what do you have to see there? A butterfly person such as Paolo Nutini, presenting with a hypocrite smile on his charming face how successful one can be at the age of 15, with 30 Grammy awards and 9763864 trillion-grillion of fans. And then you look at yourself in the mirror: you didn't feel the motivation to wash your hair today, so you look like Robespierre two days after his execution; the last award you received was 'The Cutest Little Monkey of the Kindergarten' prize at the age of 4 and sometimes not even your mother remembers your name. So, after this comparison obviously you feel like crawling under your bed and not coming out until the next earthquake.

 

So what can you do when you feel this huge inner pressure to compare yourself with someone world-wide famous?

 

Compare yourself with Adolf Hitler.

Yes, he was famous. Very famous.

So what?

Was it worth while? Wouldn’t have it been much better for him to shut his mouth, paint some frumpy pictures, sleep from time to time with a low-cost prostitute and die in piece?

 

Don’t forget: the one who gets very high can fall down.

When I was a child I was laughing on my friends who believed that sharks can live in a river.

- There are sharks in the Danube! – The little jerks said.

- Haha! – I replied. – Hahaha!

Then the child inquisition came and tortured me because I didn’t want to believe in their beliefs: they have excluded me from the group of friends and sent fake love letters in my name to the Geography teacher. But I was strong and I resisted the public pressure and persisted in my principles.

 

And now, after so many years of scepticism, I have to accept the existence of the Shark. You know me, I don’t believe in things just because I was told they exist. I have proofs. I have seen the Shark with my own eyes. And not only once. Not only twice. I see the Shark every single day when I look out through my window to the river Tejo. And the strange thing is that I see the Shark every day staying exactly at the same place. Shark doesn’t move. And I’m getting a bit worried about him.

 

Why is he always at the same place? I have the following possible explanations for his paralysis:

 

- He is a very bored shark. He is bored with his life and he is facing middle-life crisis. He wants to restart everything with a young, wild American shark woman in New York but he has been waiting for the VISA already for seven years. It’s not easy to get the VISA to the States if you are a shark.

 

- He is a very depressed shark. He is not motivated to move. He takes antidepressants and when friends invite him out for a Bloody Mary on the MSN he pretends that he is not in front of his computer.

 

- He is counting the fishes passing by. This is his job. He is an official fish counter, and the place where I always see him is his office. He likes his job, because he likes fishes and he was always good in Maths.

 

- He is desperately in love with me and this is why he is always at the same place because from that location he has a good view to my room. He is a very introvert shark, so he doesn’t dare to talk to me, he is just watching and dreaming. Considering that this might be the case, I wrote a message on a sheet and hung it below my window, saying: ‘All different, all equal. Don't let differences in age, religion or ethnic origin be an obstacle if front of your love life. P.S.: Let the sunshine in.' As nothing happened, today I changed the banner for the following: 'Don’t be shy, Shark! You do have a chance.’

 

- He has a serious personality disorder. He doesn’t know that he is a shark. He thinks he is a storm-buoy.

 

We have a very good relationship with Shark. I wave to him every morning. He doesn’t wave back because he doesn’t have a hand to wave with, and even if he had a hand he wouldn’t wave because he believes that waving is very childish.

 

 

Please don’t think that I have developed imaginary friends in Lisbon because I’m lonely here. It’s not true. And even if I was lonely sometimes I do not need an imaginary shark for having a company: if I feel alone I can always talk to my hands.

 

 

 

Lesson 1. Level: beginner (very)

Dear students. As you will see by reading the example below, understanding what people are talking about is crucial for managing conversations. To achieve this goal you can listen to the Portuguese radio and watch the Portuguese television. You can also try to be adopted by a Portuguese family.

 

How to manage daily life situations in Portuguese?

Translation by Dottir

 

Cute Brazilian Guy: So how are you?

Dottir: I good. And you!

BG: I'm fine, thanks. When did you arrive to Lisbon?

D: Two weeks. Yes. I! And I here work.

BG: Great! And do you like the city?

D: I’m twenty six. And you?

BG: It’s great to know how old you are, but do you like the city?

D: And you?

BG: DO YOU LIKE LISBON?

D: I like!

BG: And for how long are you going to stay in Portugal?

D: From Hungary.

BG: How long are you going to stay here?

D: From Budapest. Capital from a Hungary country.

BG: HOW LONG?

D: I’m long, thank you. Today I’m very long!

BG: Do you want to have a coffee?

D: No, I’m a sociologist!

BG: Well. Whatever. It was nice to meet you.

D: Where?

BG: Bye!

D: No! No! Bye.

So it's the 6th of December, and in Hungary this is the day when Santa Claus comes and brings sweets and little presents to children who behaved well. So I have cleaned my boot and put it to the window yesterday evening because I believed that I was a good girl this year.

 

And I woke up this morning and went to the window and I saw that there was nothing in my boot apart from a little mouse. So I asked the little mouse: 'What are you doing in my boot, little mouse?' And the little mouse said: 'I'm your present from Santa Claus.' 'And what can I do with you, little mouse?' 'You can raise me so I will be a big mouse.' And I got nervous and asked: 'What do you mean by raising you?' And the little mouse said: 'It means taking care of me and staying at home with me and not spending three days in a row alone with writing and not even spending 3 hours alone but playing mouse games with me and cleaning my fur and stroking my mouse head when I'm down and telling me mouse tales and paying my mouse education'. And so I grabbed the little mouse by his little tail and opened the window and threw the little mouse out to rio Tejo.

 

And then I woke up and I was sweating and I realized that I'm seriously stuck in my transition period. And I went to the window and my boot was full of sweets and little presents.