Bear with us while I try and bring the front page design into a new phase… a few errors need ironing out, but I’ll get there soon! I’ll be reorganising the explore spain links on the left as well so that they go to sub pages highlighting the best content from the past, useful subcategories etc… should all be sorted in a day or two!
…does it matter?
And other questions for the future-now:
Is a blog only a blog if someone reads it? Is a musician only a musician if he has a Myspace (substitute any other social network) page? And here’s the real question: Is a word only a word if it’s indexed by Google?
From: The possibility of unperceived off-line existence.
Points for the most philosophical answer – and I’ve got a philosophy degree you know, so I’ll know if you’re faking it 😉
…for podcasts, photos, and things!
Back in a couple of days, and in the meantime, we highly recommend you dive into the wonderful Notes from Spain forums!
Photo – fish shop in Lavapies
In April 2007, 30 intrepid Notes from Spain forum members came over to Madrid for a wonderful weekend of great food, drink, and general Spain-loving fun. It was such a success that we decided that we just had to organise another ‘Great Madrid Escape’ in 2008. Are you up for it?
..myself from starting any more blogs. Punto pelota.
Wandering off topic again (“topic” meaning living, working, culture, traveling in Spain etc), but I had a totally revolutionary past few days, rebooting completely and, who knows, someone might find this list useful one day. So…
Last week I was mentally, physically and inspirationally 100% burnt out. I couldn’t imagine ever managing to come up with another interesting blog post or podcast idea, and the mountain of life/paperwork/un-fun crap that needed sorting out seemed insurmountable. I was wound up as tight as I’d ever been in my life, moody, snappy, obsessive about all sorts of ridiculous things, complaining all day, and generally pissed off.
How did this happen? Well, if you really want to know, I would say it was a combination of: trying to keep on top of far too many projects and streams of information at once, never taking a proper break, and quite a bit of latent emotional stress and mental exhaustion related to the death of my mother earlier this year. (Sorry for the heavy stuff at the end there.)
Then I heard someone mention the word ‘burn out’ on a podcast, and I thought, ‘that’s what I’ve got!’ I googled the phrase just to make sure of course, and yup, all the symptoms fitted. If you’ve got this far and you’re thinking, hmmm, burn out, that sounds about right, then maybe this list might come in useful. This is what I did to reboot, and how around a week later I feel about 100 times better:
Ben’s top 10 12 ways to reboot after total burn out / stress collapse (in no particular order):
1. Take a 90 minute to 2 hour walk every day in the park or countryside with enlightening radio/podcasts in your mp3 player/iPod. I was recently led to/discovered the following podcasts, and they were great, enlightening, inspirational, interesting: Front Row Highlights from the BBC (good solid BBC cultural interviews), NPR’s All Songs Considered (lovely music podcast), WNYC’s Radio Lab (philosophical sciencey stuff). Important: walk very slowly, don’t rush, and for at least 10 minutes of the walk, turn off the iPod and just enjoy looking at those magnificent trees/hills/people/fields…
2. Have at least one long hot bath a day. Have two if you want 🙂
3. Stop living and working according to your conception of other people’s expectations of you. E.g. “I must write 5 blog posts a week, people expect it”… Who cares what people might expect of you, you’re burnt out! Take your own limitations into account for once! There are no rules about what you have to do. Do what you can for a while!
4. Take some exercise. (I didn’t get beyond the slow walks, but even that helped no end). Oh, and stop drinking for a while. You can’t reboot with a hangover, even a tiny one. You need to wake up in the morning feeling GOOD! (Eat lots of really nice, healthy food too!)
5. Remove as much information ‘noise’ as you can from your life. I realised that certain activities lead to that nervous knee-tapping thing that nervy people get on first dates. You know, where your knee starts involuntarily bouncing up and down? I realised that trying to read through the 40 or so RSS feeds I was subscribed to on Google Reader caused this as soon as I opened the page, so I wiped the lot and removed Google Reader from my browser bookmarks. I stopped checking Facebook 5 times a day (by removing that from my browser’s bookmarks too), and only checked email once or twice a day. If you notice a tell-tale sign that something makes you agitated, remove its ass!
6. Destroy your “to do” list! Looking at my to-do list (in a text file on my computer) led to instant melt down, so I wiped the lot. About 100 items deleted in one fell swoop. I’ll remember all the important stuff, the rest is gone, the world goes on, hurray!
7. Get up later whenever you can. Just for a while. You can get up super early again next week, when you feel better.
8. Go to the cinema. I saw the wonderful Death at a Funeral. Laughed so hard I cried!
9. Enjoy music and sofas, at the same time. Or your cat. Or garden. All immensely therapeutic stuff.
10. Work out what burnt you out and what you are going to do about it. Do that thing less or more efficiently. How are you going to make it fun again? Can’t? Make changes, no matter how impossible that might seem, or how big they might have to be. Can’t advise much on this one, only you’ll know what to do.
11. Get others to help out with things that need doing while you reboot. A million thanks to everyone who sent in posts on the worst of Spain last week to keep this blog going.
12. Take up the guitar! OK, that’s what I’m doing, but I bet there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, learn, start. Make time for it. It feels so good to be learning something different and new again, and something off-line! I’ve always wanted to do something musical and at last I am. What about you?
Well, that lot worked for me, I feel pretty energised again. (But cautious to keep applying the above for, well, forever would probably be a good idea…)
Any thoughts?
There have always been two reasons why I like the band Radiohead. Firstly, I love the music (and started loving it before I was 28 which, apparently, is when our music tastes freeze for all time). Secondly, I went to the same school as they did, Abingdon school, and knew Jonny, the guitarist. He was in my French A-level class. I bought one of their fist demo tapes (eventually sold for 600 pounds on ebay to pay for my Charity India motorbike trip), and my friends and I went to all their early Oxford gigs, some before they were even signed and were still known as On a Friday….
Now I have a third reason to like them. They have just completed their latest album, to be released on October 10th. So what? So, they are releasing it on their own, with no record label involved, via their website. And guess what? You decide what to pay for the album. If you go for the digital download option and click on ‘view basket’ you see empty boxes where a price should be. Clicking a question mark next to the empty price boxes elicits a new page saying ‘You decide’, and again, another question mark links to a page saying, ‘No, really. You decide’… and so it is, the fans decide how much they want to give the band for their new record. I paid 5 pounds to pre-order mine (which I reason is more than the band would normally get from their cut of a CD sale), and will get an email on or before the 10th with my download link.
So, not every band has the clout to make this work, but this is obviously a revolutionary move, and just how the music business ought to work: ditch the greedy labels, and make the fans happy to pay you for your work. No matter what happens/what people pay (and I’m sure Radiohead will come out very happy from this new way of selling their music), they will still make a fortune on the concerts that will follow and the admiration this will inspire. So it’s win win for them, and win win for us!
What do you think?
South of Watford has a great map and explanation of three incredible treks through the Picos de Europa
Our latest open forum question asks: What’s your Spanish learning program?
Show Me… Spain on Spanish dress sense: “Suit & tie – conservative, suit sans tie – socialist, no suit – communist.”
BBC: Spain police seize Basque leaders
Our Notes in Spanish – Phrase of the Day Facebook app has over 11,000 users! Have you added it yet?
The New York Times has a good run down on Bilbao
Andalucid is Chumbo hunting!
Abadia Retuerta (from our winery podcast) wants you to win their salt!
Mojacar-based Lenox writes at the Spanish Shilling: “There are, broadly speaking, three different types of Britons coming to Spain – if you consider this part of the Iberian peninsular as being ‘Spain’ since most towns around here now have more foreigners than they do locals.”
And finally… our latest advanced Spanish podcast on the Spanish education system mentions a subject I have always found quite amazing – that it seems quite common for kids to cheat in exams in Spanish schools. This usually involves the typical scribbled notes on the hem of a skirt, the palm of a hand, even etched onto the side of a biro with a pin! And what are these secret cheat-notes called? Una chuleta, yup, the same word as ‘meat chop’!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 