Fraudulent science

Finally the charade is over. It is not MMR vaccine that causes autism.

Where is Jenny McCarthy now?

http://www.stopjenny.com/

Do people with autism want to be "fixed"? Why is everyone searching for the cause or cure instead of embracing these human beings for who they are: beautiful people who are different than majority and from whom we have so much to learn.

Stop Jenny McCarthy and those similar to her who spread the propaganda that autism is terrible disease that has to be cured.

Support those who ask for giving persons with autism a chance to become members of society in any way, shape and form they can become.

Human rights for persons with autism now!!!!!

The Happiness Project

This is title of the book I am reading. The author is Gretchen Rubin. I came across this book in my local library on the shelf for "Best bets". It means I cannot renew the book and I will have to return it today. I am only on the page 84 of almost 300 pages. I procrastinated in reading it last week, and procrastination is actually one of my favorite topics lately. I even made Power Point presentation for my family about procrastination.

Now back to my topic about happiness. After I gave this presentation to my boys here, they seemed totally unfazed. I do not know if me telling them that what they do is called procrastination will make any difference right now. But, I believe that all experiences that we have in our life, including me giving this presentation to them, shape somehow who we are or who we become. Act now! Do something meaningful. Enjoy now, as Gretchen Rubin says on page 84 of her book.

p.s. You may think I am procrastinating now, but you are wrong: there is laundry in the drier. So the perfect time to guilt free blogging is while doing laundry :)

Cooking with love and love for cooking

For me it goes both ways. In my tiny kitchen I find solace that is hard to find anywhere else. When it comes to cooking I do not know about procrastination. It is always good time for me to cook. I love cooking and I rarely follow the recipe. If I do, it makes me really nervous, I usually screw up something and it does not turn out to be the way I want it. Well, I do follow recipes sometimes, it sometimes turn out to be OK, but I always modify something as I usually do not have all the ingredients the recipe is calling for. This is what I hate the most about recipes because in each and every one of them is an ingredient that I do not have. So, I cook "from my head". I do not think that I am able to make the same meal twice, because I always make it differently. Ingredients may be similar, but I add them in different order, I add different quantities, and I try it as I cook and decide what is the next step.

My family loves my cooking. I explained them that it tastes so good because "I cook with love". There is no tasty homemade meal if the love is not one of the ingredients. The love is magical. It combines that spices and ingredients in a perfect way. Adding love to your cooking with make your meals to be not only testy, but in a way your vehicle to spread the love.

For tonight I am planning on making the meal called "Turli tava". My son asked me several times to translate this word. We do not have translation of this word into Serbian, so when it is translated from Turkish - turli means "mixed" and tava means "pan". It is Turkish or Middle Eastern dish, but I adopted it through my Macedonian roots. It calls for all different kind of vegetables (mainly eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, potatoes, onion, pepper) including the main ingredient okra. You can make it to be vegetarian, or with meat. When I make it with meat, I like to buy nice, fresh veal stew. It is fairly easy to make. The most of preparation is cutting veggies, and stewing the meat with onions, before everything is combined and put in the oven to bake for few hours. I like this to be baked in the slow heat to combine flavors. My hubby likes to add few pieces of bacon on top. I am not particularly in favor of this, but I will do it today because he specifically asked for it. This is another thing about my cooking: it is my way or highway. I do not like any suggestions, and like to add things just the way I feel they should be added.

Here is the recipe for "Turli tava"


■1 kg. mixed meat

■potatoes, tomatoes, paprika

■onions, okra

■aubergine, string beans

■1 ground onion piece

■cooking oil, salt

■red mixed pepper

■pepper



Chop the meat and fry it in a pan with cooking oil. Chop the vegetables into small pieces, add the meat and some cooking oil and water. Put enough water so the mixture is boiled and still there is no much left after baking. Add spices and boil for a while. After that put it into a crockery baking dish and bake it on 2000 C for 1,5 hours. Stir the mixture 2-3 times during baking. The food is ready when it becomes brown.

Tuesday Report

Every journey starts with the first step. The same holds the truth when it comes to my understanding of meditation. For a longest time, and I can say, all of my life I resisted even thinking about meditation. It is boring, I thought. How is it possible not to think anything ( this is how I imagined what meditation is)? I cannot be so quiet in my mind, it is too busy to meditate. However, recently I discovered that meditation is not at all what I thought it was. In short, it is not "not thinking about anything", it is just focusing on your own being, your own present state of mind, body and soul. It is acknowledging there are things going on around you, and inside you, but the point is not to let these things destruct you from being aware of your lightness, your highness, your ability to connect to the higher power, to the shining light that we all belong to.

But, there is a problem with that. Now that I know what meditation is, I still do not do it. I am too anxious to let it go, to let go everything around me, to focus on only myself, only my own presence, my own existence. As if I am going to meet with the stranger, someone who bothers me, as if I just cannot stand my own company, as if my own company is burden to me, as if I, me and myself are just a group of those boring people who have nothing new to say to the world. Is this too harsh to say? Maybe, but at least it is honest!

Moreover, although I still cannot make myself relaxed enough to enjoy my own company in meditative state, I am aware of how dangerous is when people try to escape from their own being, their own feeling, their own fears. I may say: I will try to connect with myself, which I think I never did in the past. Will this bring me to a better place?

Yugoslavian Airlines ( Jugoslovenski Avio Transport ) - JAT

It was a sunny day in March of 1990 when I took off from Belgrade "Surcin" airport to Toronto. Cannot remember JAT flight number (although I am sure that I still have somewhere that old airline paper ticket!), but it was DC-10 aircraft. Those were good days for JAT, also dubbed as “Joke About Time”, but known for the finest and best trained pilots and crews in the world. It was not obvious then, that it was actually counting its last days of fame. Soon, the UN economic sanctions against, what was left of the Yugoslavia, came into effect, and as the rest of economy JAT was struggling to stay alive, started renting its fleet and crew to foreign countries. Airport "Surcin" was shut down to international flights, sad but true, for at one time world class city with the world class airline, travelers were boarding buses to be driven to Budapest, Hungary (some 300 km away - or around 5 hours on the bus) or Sofia, Bulgaria (around the same distance) to fly to their destinations. The point of departure was in front of downtown hotel “Slavija”. At any time day or night, one could see groups of tired people with large suitcases, waiting to board the bus, or minibus that will take them to the place from where they will be able to fly. I was among them just one time, in September of 1993, leaving Belgrade to fly out from Budapest via Berlin, on Lufthansa flight to Toronto (with the transfer in Munich); a very long journey for the modern day aviation, especially when flying from the European capital.

It has been now 15 years since sanctions were lifted, but not much progress has been made for the national airline. Yes, it changed its logo, twice. Once to show the name “Yugoslav Airlines”, second time to hide the word “Yugoslav”, where “Y” is actually “J”, because of differences in spelling, in the word Jat.

Yes, it started flying around Europe and other international destinations, but it never flew over Atlantic again. For us who live on this side of the world it means changing the planes in one of the European hubs: London, Paris, Prague, Munich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam. The choice depends which airline has "seat sale". Some complain that passengers flying to the certain places are treated as "cattle", sent to the most uncomfortable terminals to board the aircraft that will take them to their final destination. This may be open for discussion. I personally had both experiences, and not enough flying to determine whether this is true or not. It is maybe matter of perception, but our perception is our reality.

With the loss of my country, I lost the airline, too. The airline which brought me here, now renamed “Jat Airways”, easily mistaken for “Jet Airways”, major Indian airline company. The acronym Jat still has original word in it - "Yugoslav", although the country does not exist anymore. There was some discussion about renaming it differently, but it seems that by keeping the old name, I guess the airline is clinging to the old fame. But those days are long gone by. With the old fleet, depleted assets, next to bankrupt finances, the future of the airline is unknown. We all know that Jat Airways is not the only airline in the world that is struggling, and it is in a good company of Alitalia (another national carrier that needs to be bailed out), and other, around the world airlines, which went bankrupt, or were swallowed by larger and stronger ones.

But what is the sad part of this story is not the reality that airlines are facing these days: the rise in fuel costs, more expensive airport security, more taxes and less passengers who are willing to pay astronomical airfares, the rise of low budget, low cost airlines, and growing army of very unhappy, grumpy passengers. I am sad for different reason. I not only lost the country where I was born, but I lost the airline that brought me here. I had chance to fly only one more transatlantic flight with JAT. It was in October of 1991. The time of Vukovar siege, the height of nationalistic euphoria, only few months before UN economic sanctions shut down Belgrade airport and expelled JAT from the world flying scene. JAT, as we knew it, no more. The airline we grew to love and trust gradually started disappearing from the world radar, just as the country that was her home.

Jat Airways, who knows, maybe they will fly again over mighty Atlantic, but before that they will have to replace their fleet with the newer aircraft that will be safe to fly with. Until then, next time flight to Belgrade will be a long one, exhausting one, with change of planes, going through security couple more times, boarding another plane that will bring me to the place I once called home, the place that I left flying with one of the finest airlines in the world - JAT!

What would happen if you disconnect from the world of technology?

Seriously? Would anyone care? Would the Earth stop moving, because you did not update your Facebook status, or reply the the e mail, or check the latest news? What would happen if you disappear from the Internet for a little while? Are you afraid that no one will notice, and that your presence is insignificant to the lives of others? Maybe?

If we know that it is not so good for us,why we do not think more about how to get rid of this time consuming and time wasting, for our survival totally unnecessary activity? Is it because we are lonely? Some will argue that the more narcissistic you are, the more you will want others to know about you and admire you, so you will be posting things on the Facebook, that will show your persona as cool, trendy, upbeat, creative, and the more "likes" you get, the more food for your ego. But is it that simple? I am flirting with the idea of getting disconnected from the technology, or better to say, part of the technology that I am using for the entertainment, for some time now. I have few reasons for that. Number one, I would like to be a role model for my son, who is spending way too much time on the computer. Two, I would like to have more time for "soul surfing" and finding out what is that exactly what is holding me back, and making me feel depressed at times. Three, I would like to clear my mind for my own ideas and creativity. Four, and so on... I am sure you have your own list of the reasons to quit.

However, this may be harder than you and I have ever thought. Why? For starters, I have at any time at least one computer in my home on. It is hard to quit smoking if the cigarettes are all over the place. Second, even if I turn it off, I will think of the reason why should I put it on ( like I need a recipe, or I have to check the e mail to see if someone important e mailed, or I need to check directions on Google Earth ). Yes, I am very sneaky! So once I am online, the first thing will be to suppress the urge to go on the Facebook, and the longer I hold that urge, the stronger it gets... Bang:

So what are you going to do to save your soul from this menace? Any suggestions? Maybe something similar to AA's 12 step program? Or maybe disconnecting can be easy as 1-2-3 only if you are motivated? I am sending this question to the Universe: How do you become the whole again once you exposed all of you, or all of you want to be you, on the Facebook?

Disconnect now!

It is October, already!

Yesterday was the very last day of September. It is truly unbelievable how this month flew for me. Today I woke up realizing that autumn is here, big time. Although I say I love autumn, because of the most beautiful colors that it paints in Ontario, I love summer more, and I already miss it. I love going to Georgian Bay. My faves: Balm Beach before the fence was built, Awenda Provincial Park, beach number 3, before 5 pm, beach number 4 to enjoy the sunset.

Also, this summer I went to Belgrade and, among other things, had a couple of beautiful beach outings, with my son, to Ada Ciganlija. What I like about going to the beach in Belgrade is that in Belgrade you can have a beer on the beach, unlike here. It really is a bonus, sitting in the shade, on the beach chair, with your feet in the water, drinking cold beer and reading, for example, some trashy Belgrade newspaper, such as "Kurir".




Anyway, now memories of Belgrade look like much better when filtered though the time that passed since I came back. Actually, I was almost sick for a month after I came back. Not really sick, but sick from too much emotions that I cannot digest anymore. As if I was sucked in the black hole, and came back.

Belgrade looks perfect to me now, from the safe distance. What I noticed this time is the fact that I just do not belong there. That's it. But, this being said, I have to mention that my love for Belgrade is really strange one. I love you my beautiful Belgrade, but I do not miss you, not anymore - how about that!