30-Day Challenge (20/30) Someone once told me that superstition is the religion of the ignorants. I don’t see myself as a superstitious person but as a child, I was taught some weird things that took me some good years until I could think for myself and finally get rid of such beliefs. One of them was that if one leaves a shoe or a sandal turned upside down on the floor it might cause the death of someone from that household. I can still remember the feeling of panic I used to feel every time I saw an unattended shoe in such a position in my house. Eventually, I became a sort of a guardian of shoes of the house. I used to walk around checking if everyone's shoes were in the correct position and if I found any that wasn't I would complain to its owner and for a few days I kept my eyes on the unlucky soul whom I believed was about to die. Put like this it probably sounds silly or even absurd, but for a five-year-old child, it was quite scary. There were other beliefs that I was taught like the one about placing a broom behind the entrance door if you want someone who’s visiting you to leave. According to this belief that would make your inconvenient visitor cut the visit short. Walking backwards meant that your you were wishing your mother to die. It took me a long time until I realised that there wasn’t any truth to it, but up until then, I suffered a lot with all these nonsense that I was irresponsibly taught by my elderly. What I waste of time.

30 Day Challenge (19-30) Music has been my passion since I was a boy. I remember spending many hours locked up in my room, pretty much like kids these days do with their video games and smartphones, listening to my dad’s old records. I didn’t discriminate any genre of music. Jazz, rock and roll, country music, whatever. If it was good music it was for me. Back then I use to hear old people say that most of the new music that youngsters liked at that time wasn’t good and that proper music was the ones from their time so I started to believe that when people got old, they lost their ability to enjoy new music. Obviously I didn’t appreciate those comments and saw it this behaviour as a sign of age. I mean, old age so I promised myself that when I got older I’d try to be as open-minded as possible in terms of music so that I could somehow keep myself young for as long as I could. At 47 I’m still trying to keep my promise, but the challenge is becoming harder by the hour. It seems that we got to a point where singers don’t need to have a good voice and musicians as a whole don’t even need to play well their instruments. In fact, some of them don’t even have to play an instrument at all to be considered musicians. Basically, if one is skilled enough to play a couple of songs and mixed them up in a sequence that the listeners feel like dancing this person is considered a musician and is risking to become quite rich and famous. Even though I’m still open to new experiences, it’s getting harder and harder to get impressed with music nowadays. I guess time has finally caught up with me, and I just become what I feared the most, which was to be an old man.

30 Day Challenge (18-30) Today is my eighteenth day on this 30-day challenge that I decided to take. The last couple of weeks have been quite challenging for me. One of the reasons for that I guess is the fact that it’s made me more aware of my lack of imagination in terms of creativity to write random stories. So, for the last eighteen days, I’ve been struggling like mad to come up with some good ideas so that I can put them on paper in English. I've been told that the text itself doesn’t necessarily need to be like a great story since the idea is to improve our writing skills in particular and our to expand our vocabulary in English as a whole, but I’d much rather write about something interesting than bore any unlucky reader who might end up stumbling upon one my notes but unfortunately, it is what it is, and I can’t help the fact that today is one day before Monday, and as a consequence of that, I am feeling less creative than usual I’ve got to keep writing, though. Regardless of my mood, the challenge remains and so does my persevering spirit. I hope I sounded convincing to enough and hopefully I’m be feeling more inspired tomorrow.

30 Day Challenge (17-30) How far should we as a society go in the name of our right to freedom of expression? We’ve witnessed a massive revolution in terms of means in which people can express their opinion lately not only with the popularization of the internet but also with the creation of social media. Not so long ago if someone from a remote part of the world had something important to share regarding something or someone and knew that such information could somehow impact the lives of a great number of people the only option this person would have was to resort to mainstream media. The problem with mainstream media is that not rarely it has its own agenda and opinion on most subjects which by default makes it bias. Also, it’s not so simple to reach it and it’s usually expensive, therefore, having your ideas and opinions expressed through these media is only possible if one is willing to pay a huge amount of money for it. Even in this, the whole thing should not go against the views of the media in which the news or opinion are being transmitted. Therefore it’s fair to say that social media has come about as a means to close the gap between someone who has something to share and his intended public. No more middlemen. Free of speech one might say. It is indeed a great tool and ultimately can be quite effective in terms of reach and speed the information can be spread at a cost near to zero. Having said that, one thing we need to admit is the amount of misinformation that has been spread around and taken as true by most of its recipients through social media. The fact that it’s free of charge and accessible to virtually anyone, people have been spreading false rumours and destroying careers. Virtual bullying by what’s known as Trolls on social media has been the cause of a number of suicides. All this has taken place in the name of freedom of speed and this, in my opinion, for what it’s worth, is the dark side of the social media. Basically, the fact that people are allowed to post whatever they feel like on social media anonymously allows these types of things to happen. I am, by no means not against social media in particular and freedom of speech as a whole,but I just think that like alcohol, it should be used responsibly and the best way to do it is by banning anonymity on posts so that whoever decides to spread some information around may become liable for it. Be it true or false.

30-Day Challenge There’s something special about Friday that it always brings my mood up. I used to think that the reason for that was the fact that Saturday and Sandays are were my days off work. This idea made sense to me until I got my current job. Nowadays I usually work on Satudays and sometimes even on Sundays. One would expect that my feelings towards Fridays would change, but for some unknown reason this wasn’t the case. Friday nights still are my favorite part of the week, even though I cannot enjoy it to the fullest as the next day I usually have to wake up at 5 a.m. Other than that the good vibe is still there regardless of the weather. I don’t know how to explain it, but there something about Friday that makes me feel alive and happy. Mondays on the other hand… Let’s not talk about Mondays, today’s Friday and that’s what really matters.

30 Day Challenge (15-30) Time is relative and quality is more important than quantity are sentences I hear since I was a boy, but to a certain extent, wasn’t really sure there was a true to them. At least, not until a few months ago. Having worked for over two years without vacation I was longing for some time off work even if I couldn’t go anywhere. I’d be happy just to stay at home. Basically, I just wanted to have a lot of time to myself. I wanted to relax, not to have to go anywhere, no meetings, no phone calls, no commuting to work and back. Just chill. At the time I thought that if I had it, most of my problems would magically be solved. Guess what? My dream came true. Well, not exactly. I mean, due to the pandemic that took place on our planet this year, like most people I was offered a lot of time at home. Actually I was forced to quarantine and even though I had all the time for myself it still didn’t feel as cool as I imagined it would. I didn’t feel relaxed and how could I with all the bad news we were bombarded every day? The “extra time” I was given was spent worrying about all the bad things that were happening in the world. This week I started to work again and, I’m still feeling as tired and stressed as before and still need some time off. It goes to show that time alone doesn’t solve problems. We need to have quality time.

30 Day Challenge (14-30) There was a time when people who wished to become famous had to have a plan in place in order to achieve their goal. The plan usually consisted of deciding what type of industry they wanted to succeed at and put a lot of work hard on it for many years until they got to a point where they became better than the average man. Obviously having some natural talent always helped, but that alone wouldn't take anyone to fame and money was the natural consequence of the effort that had been put to the career and not the main goal. One had to love of one did to be able to go through all the hardship found on the way to success. Hard work had to be part of the plan and usually, there was no other way around it. Things have changed after the internet and social media became part of our lives. It seems to me that nowadays the only reason people want to be famous is to achieve financial stability. I don’t mean that the desire of getting money regardless of having talent or not in itself is a bad thing because ultimately everyone has the right to want to get it the easy way, but when we as a society start to pay more attention to someone who was part of a reality show than to someone who has spent his whole life working hard to acquire his talent I think we’re not being fair.

30 Day Challenge (13-30) After thirteen days of writing random texts in English, it seems as if I were running out of imagination. I understand that the idea behind this challenge is to make people improve their writing skills as a means to improve the language they're learning. One thing that I notice over these last fourteen days is that I keep using the same words and expressions over and over again regardless of the subject I am writing about. A week or so ago I wrote a text in which I mention the fact that people usually have their active and passive vocabulary and how much I wished that the gap between the two weren’t so big. I'm not sure I wrote that last bit, but anyway I do wish that nonetheless. Watching movies, listening to the radio, reading magazines and newspapers are all things I usually do without any major problem. Actually it gets to a point where sometimes I don't even know if I’ve read an article in English or in my native language a week earlier. Looking up for a word I don't know the meaning is something that I rarely need to do since I'm usually able to at least get the gist of the story I’m reading or listening to. But when it comes to express myself it’s another story. Basic words and expressions that I am so used to hear and read simply won’t come to me easily and that causes me a huge frustration. In theory, one should try to add up new words to his active vocabulary gradually and that’s exactly what I’m doing, but I have to confess that I’m not sure I’m achieving anything big if I’m honest. I’ll keep trying, though because at this point I guess it’s too late to give up.

30-Day Challenge (12/30) Today was my first day at work after over four months of social isolation. The feeling I had when I was using public transport was that I had just woken up right in the middle of a dystopian movie. People wearing masks and looking scared when commuting like I witnessed today wasn’t the type of future I imagine when watched The Jetsons and Back to the Future as a kid. Flying cars and hoverboards was what I expected to see at this time in my life. If I’m honest dystopian and sci-fi movies have never been my cup of tea, but I did dream of one day being able to drive my own flying car over the sea. Actually, I expected the car to drive itself while I sipped some bubbly and gazed through the window the beautiful landscape below. I knew that like everything great this lifestyle would eventually end up in chaos and that by then I would no longer be around to experience the post-apocalyptic age where people would feel scared if you coughed next to them and face masks would become mandatory in public. Today I had the impression that the future had skipped a chapter or two in its sequence and that we missed out the fun part of it for some unknown reason and that all we had left was the aftermath of our future mistakes. That’s just not fair.