Our necklaces

   The necklaces came in different colors. Actually the only choice we had in the whole matter was to choose the color of our liking. Of course, we couldn’t make that choice the moment we were born. But once we grew to be five years old, they accepted our requests for colors. That way, kids would compare their necklaces in school and change them every few months during the puberty. When that was done, the change was done every two years, in order to download some content and replace it if it was needed.

 Nobody really remembered when the necklaces were put into place. Some say, the reason we don’t know the exact date is because they have wiped out our brains of memories. Not all of them, of course, but the ones that are important to the government. They say the necklaces are there to ensure our safety and, to be fair, even top officers use them. Of course, theirs are much more beautiful than the normal ones, some even made of different materials and adorned with jewels or other beautiful things. But in the end, same as ours.

 It has been like this for a long time and we just live alongside the whole thing. Our necklaces record our daily lives and all of that is passed on to the government in order to decide who is loyal and who is not. We are taught that’s a good thing because we cannot have rebellious people around. The yare the ones that could hurt us the most and they sometimes do. The explosions and attacks that happen sometimes are all of their doing and its because they don’t want us to keep living like this.

 To them, this system is wrong and we are also wrong because we let it exist. But the truth is that most of us don’t make our lives being like this at all. We just wake up in the morning and then go to work and then comeback to our families, like every single person has done for thousands of years. The necklaces don’t make any difference in our lives; it’s just an accessory that we have to carry from the moment we are born to the moment of our death. Not more than that and we accept it.

 Rebels, people say, are people that want everything to be as it once was. We are taught in school that the world was chaotic in the past, filled with war and poverty and hunger. We don’t have any of that to today and we fail to realize why some people would like all of that to come back. Back in the past, people fought for everything that we have now, so why would we even remotely agree with a rebel that just wants us to fight and fight and fight, with no end in sight? They are crazy people and they have to be detained by the government, the only ones that actually care about us.

 Once a year, there are public showings of a movie shot by drones that fly away to other areas of the world. Our country is large and prosperous but some others were actually destroyed in the wars of the past. They want us to see all of that for ourselves because the truth is more important than anything. The footage is always different but the message is always the same: we cannot keep rising because when people do that, other people, less fortunate people, suffer all of the consequences. And that’s what happened.

 None of us remember the wars. None of us remembers when the bombs were dropped from the skies and from the blackness above us. What we do know for sure is that some of the people, those that survived to create the government, they hid for years in deep caves, eating only canned goods. Nowadays, we have all the fruits and vegetables that we would ever need. We don’t buy them, because they are delivered to our houses and distributed equally among the populace. We don’t have to suffer anymore.

 Rebels, apparently, say that the government keeps most of the food for themselves. But they don’t understand that we don’t really care. Because we are able to eat what we want, we can ask for it and it will be delivered. Only a few things are commonly rejected and it’s due to the low amount of some resources. But we understand that. We have learned that oil and coal and so many more things became almost extinct after the wars. So we have learned not to ask for any of that. Actually, we have mostly replaced it all.

 Complaining and complaining. Not wanting to fit into a society. That’s what’s wrong with those people, with those rebels. They just don’t want every single one of us to be happy. They want to create chaos because they are the kind of people that love to kills others and see the world burn. They do what they do because the amount of order in this world makes them mad. They cannot bare to think that we have peace, that we finally have a world in which we can be ourselves, just by giving up a little bit.

 And yeah, we do. We give the government access to our lives; we keep our necklaces because we have agreed to live in peace with everyone and everything else. And they cannot understand it, they are furious every single day because a bomb hasn’t killed a whole family or a soldier has not been slaughtered with a knife. They find chaos amusing and they thrive in it, as if they were flowers fed with blood. Deadly flowers that have nothing pretty about them, they are only poisonous and looking to kill us all, slowly. Rebels are that type of scum and we don’t want them here.

 Sometimes, not too often, a billboard is raised to announce the number of rebels leaving the country to be sent to a specialized facility where the government can take care of their kind. Some people say its located on one of the caves that our ancestors used after the war. Some others say it’s an island just a few kilometers from the capital city. Well, of course most of us don’t know where it is or what it’s like because we are not rebels and we haven’t done anything to deserve that kind of punishment.

 The idea is that rebels are stripped of their ideas there and then the yare sent back to the country, in order to be valuable members of our society. Most of us think that’s a great idea but we know it doesn’t happen very often. The few times the military makes raids, they kill all of the country’s enemies and we celebrate it by applauding for a whole minute at home. We do it to make our boys and girls in uniform for their fantastic job. Without them, it is quite possible that the world would be lost.

 It’s not common to see one of those rebels that have become a member of the community once more. They are rarely seen in the cities and, people say, they are mostly used in the large farms that feed all of us daily. It must be a nice change of pace, from carrying weapons and killing people, to milk cows and planting rice in the fields. Maybe they don’t deserve it, or maybe they don’t, but the government gives them a chance and that’s a lot more than they deserve, that’s for damn sure.

 We also partake in an event called the Games, every four years. In the Games, we face each other in different sports. The idea is that every single member of society should have an ability to exploit. The Games are most important for teenagers; because that’s the way they find out what their jobs will be in the future. Adults participate too, but it’s more like training and a gathering of different people to share experiences and get to know one another. It’s not something we do a lot and its fun sometimes.

 Something curious is the moment we loose our necklaces, when they are being replaced for one reason or the other. It is then when we all change a bit. It is a very short moment, a glimpse in time. But we all react differently when we are disconnected from our government. It is a very peculiar thing.

 Some of us scream, as if we were staring at a monster. Some other start crying profusely and others even laugh their heads off for a few seconds. We all do something. Or at least most of us. They are some, not many, that do not react to loosing their necklace. They don’t move or make a noise. They just wait.

She lived as herself

   Amanda had never been known for being kind to anyone, rather the opposite. She was normally vicious to every single one of the people that worked for her and she would never accept a negative answer from everyone. Amanda Carvey was the daughter of the owner of the company, a man that had died only a few years ago in a ski accident in the Alps. Amanda had to step up and take control, something that most members of the board were against. That was, until they were able to see who she really was.

 They didn’t care for a woman commanding the ship. But that was before they saw the kind of woman she was. Amanda ruled with an iron fist from her first day and wouldn’t let anyone tell her something different than what she wanted. She didn’t accept advice and, when addressing her, she would often remind others that she was now the head of the company and not her father. Maybe they had gotten use to him but that was the past. Her father was no longer there to captain the ship in such a careless way.

 In her mind, her father had been an idiot with all the family’s assets. He had not done his job of really taking care of the wealth of the family. It wasn’t like he had lost too much money or anything like that. Rather, he had been exceedingly cautious and the company had run stale, no generating interest of any kind, whether it was with its clients or with its partners. People saw it as a dinosaur that refused to die and Amanda had seen that ever since she was a teenager and she had taken an interest in the family’s business.

 She laid off a lot of people during her first week and forced all the remaining workers to double their efforts, making lunch hours very restricted and putting up a “points” scale in which workers of any type would get points for their mistakes in the eye of the new owner. Too many points would mean that the person could get kicked out at any moment, so everyone tried their best not to upset Amanda. And they stayed there because the salaries were still very good and very difficult to earn in the modern world.

 In her first year running the company, she earned almost double that what her father had earned in his last full year as chairman. She was so glad about it that she even authorized for the most loyal and hard working people in the company to receive a substantial bonus to their usual earnings. People thought, for a second, that it was because she was getting a bit softer and kinder but that wasn’t it at all. It was because she was happy to have made a much better job than her father, she had shut off all the criticism around her and now people trusted her to be the one to lead them.

 However, her abrasive personality took a really heavy toll on her personal life. Her mother distanced herself from everything that had to do with the company and would no let her daughter talk about it when she came in for visits at her countryside home. Beside the company, there was no real connection between mother and daughter. The first had sent the second to boarding school from a very young age, so they had no idea what the other liked or thought about. There was no relation ship or empathy.

 Their weekly dinners would largely consist of silences, only interrupted by the mother scolding the daughter when she pulled out her phone in order to check stocks or talk to someone at work. So those dinners were only about honouring the late father’s legacy and nothing more. They both wanted to show respect to someone that was never there, someone who had drifted through life without ever really making a proper impact.

 The father had always preferred to take the private plane to some far away place where he could use his latest yacht and enjoy the best foods. He would always invite some people to come with him, people that enjoyed his millions and his stupid comments about life that didn’t make any sense, because he had no sense of the real life. He didn’t know real people, not even his immediate family. And his company was the laughing stock of the rich society he inhabited in, he just didn’t know it.

 But Amanda did know. She had always known that her father was just a stupid clown to all other people and that, by extension; her family had been laugh at for a long time. That ended the day she took control of their assets and made her family even more powerful and rich, more respectable and a force to be reckoned with. Her mother was just one reminder of the past, who didn’t even care about anything. She only cared about her check being on time and that was it. She was practically out of reality.

 And yeah, Amanda had no boyfriend or girlfriend, and her friendships were non-existent, unless you count business associated. She knew some men tried to court her because of her success, but she disarmed them pretty fast, with only words. Sometimes, she did “good” things because she felt she could lure more people towards her goals, but there was nothing good or positive about her attitude. She only lived to torture the memory of her father and to prove to everyone else that they had underestimated her and her family for far too long. It was her time to rule and she was not going to leave space for anyone else, no matter what she had to do to achieve her goals.

Thoughts on family

   You don’t have to cry in order to be sad and you don’t have to smile every time you fell happy. Each person deals with moments, with feelings, in their own way and there is nothing bad about that. We are just different and that is what makes us interesting to each other. If we were all the same, there would be no point in meeting each other and building up relationships. Being different makes us unique and better, in every single sense of the word.

 However, it is always better to be able to demonstrate what you feel in order for other people to notice what’s going on, especially if some of those people are of any interest to you. For example, you have to be able to talk or at least show your parents how you feel and why you’re feeling the way you are. You don’t have to be able to do that with every single person in the world but it is very important to be able to communicate with family.

 Family is the group of people we have never chosen to be with and the group of people we should know better than anyone else. And I say should because it is clear that many people do not live like this, meaning that some of us don’t even know that much about our siblings or our parents. It is very typical that, as children, we don’t really see our parents as equals. We see them as people that are just wiser and move in other circles that we just don’t understand. When we’re little, they seem so mysterious and difficult to understand.

 However, as we grow older, we realize parents are just like us: they are a couple of humans who’ve had a life before we entered their lives and will continue to live independently from us once we get out of the house or even as we are still living in there. That’s why divorces are so tough on a family: it breaks up a whole bunch of connections and many things you have learned about your parents don’t really mean anything anymore. In that case, everything seems to become something else so you feel lost and confused but the truth is that, with a little effort, everything comes back to what it once was or at least something like it.

 Then there are siblings, who depending on the age gap, can seem like friends or like some other strangers, like parents. If they age gap is not so big between siblings, the possibility of having a true friendship develop between them is very high. That’s simply because you treat the people your same age as friends and equals and you tend to get closer to them because interests are similar and you are able to understand each other. When the age gap is too big however, the level of friendship can be high or very low, reaching the level of friendship you have with your parents when you’re young.

 What’s great about brothers and sisters is that you get and instant set of friends that way, or at least the possibility of having them in the house, different from school friends that come and go because hey have their own separate lives that may run close but never really parallel to your life. Of course, sibling don’t have similar lives but at least the first fifteen years of life is frequently similar as you probably all go to the same school, you share all those meals during the week, the holidays, the moments with the parents and a very large array of things that come with the fact that you live in family.

 Of course, there are many types of families, some of them not even having siblings or both parents or even parents at all. Besides that, there are families that do not really believe there should be a tight relationship between parents and children as in the old days people believed children only had to respect their elders and that’s what was required in a family. Love was something that people supposedly felt but it wasn’t the same kind of feeling we think of today. People tended to be colder before because it was more practical, especially as families were a lot larger: there could be up to ten children in one household or more so there was no real sense of “having to” love them all deeply and without reservations. There was responsibility and respect and that was it.

  Of course, the fact that there should be love in a family doesn’t mean that it’s going to be perfect every single day. Family relationships can be as difficult as relationships with other people and that frequently has a lot to do with how complicated things are in the household, the moments of life you and your family are going through and the personalities of each person. There can be days when everything is laughter and beautiful and everyone gets along in the most respectful but also thoughtful manner. On the other hand, you can have days when everything is a constant fight, everything is a problem and all the words that you speak might be cause for some sort of quarrel.

 But that’s exactly what a family is supposed to look like, The old days when everything had to be said in the most proper of words even if you were addressing your brother or your mother are done. And doesn’t mean that everyone speaks in the most awful manner to their family but that the relationship has evolved and its now possible to get closer through the language and through the best words that you can use to communicate with people you have loved and seen for so long. Family is something very strange and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are so many forms of it all around the planet. Even in the building we are living in there could be dozens of varieties.

That probably why beginning a new family is so strange at first. No one really knows how to properly do it but you always have the example that you received at home. Even if it isn’t the best example in the world, it should be enough to get you started in the basics of creating a new family. And nowadays, the process can be done much slowly that before because in the modern world not many people are able to establish themselves outside the familiar home and then not many are willing to stop their careers and so on in order to create a home, which often includes bringing a new member of the family to the world.

 Some people think it is better to save some money before “looking for” their first kid. Some others think it’s better to have a child early in life, in order to enjoy the upbringing and being able to cope with what childhood entails. It’s not the same to be a parent in your twenties than in your sixties. There are both advantages and disadvantages to each way of doing it. And then, there are also the “unexpected” arrivals, which normally happen when people are young but can also happen later. In those case, you’re just pushed into adulthood and family.

 Pieces tend to come together when a family is being formed. Money may not be coming in huge amounts and it may be difficult to find a proper place but people always seem to be able to make it no matter what. Like in the past, families today can thrive despite of difficulties. The difficult thing, probably, is to keep yourself in that perfect balance as you try to make it all better for you and your new family. They are probably many things missing but it’s just like a game of domino’s or a puzzle: every piece will find its spot in time, if things are done correctly, with the best intentions.

 Families have always been here, in whatever shape or forms it was, and they will continue to be here in other forms we might have not consider at this point. It is silly to think the family structure is just one and that only that one should be achieved and respected by every single human being, when most humans have thrived among what people now call “non traditional families”, as if tradition wasn’t something that keeps evolving every single days without stopping.

 Anyway, our family is that group of people life got us to be with. It put us with them for a reason and it is up to every single one of us to find out, if we want. But we don’t have to. The best thing is to appreciate all of those people that surround us as we grow up and help us be better and achieve everything we want from life.

Your so-called "freedom"

   I don’t get it. I simply don’t get why people transform into humans with traces of swine characteristics once they move out of their homes, far away from the eyes and supervision of their family. It’s beyond me why people, many times, simply choose not to learn anything and decide to do things as they please, as if that had ever worked. Maybe I am obsessed with order and with everything being spotless and clean but I’d rather be obsessed that way than not caring about anything, not even your own hygiene. If these people don’t even know how to clean their own room, how are they taking care of their own bodies every day, if they are that is? It disgusts me a bit to even think about it because to me being clean is not a trace of character but a basic human instinct that you should know to survive.

 Apparently, it is not as I thought. I have lived with my parents for a long time and that has formed a certain image in my head of how people usually live. I have gone to other houses, of course, but always of people I’m related to or friends who also live with their parents, so it’s not really a clear picture. I have even dated people that live alone but I have to be honest and say I never pay attention to details in those moments so, maybe they were clean and maybe they were not. That certainly something to think about because if I decided to date someone permanently, I would certainly decide such a thing based on the amount of order and cleanliness he has with himself and everything he owns.

Is that an exaggeration? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not the worst thing to prefer dating someone that is clean and knows how to behave like a human being. I have to confess I hate people that eat and live all their plates in the sink. And they pile up and the smell keeps getting worse and its like they’re waiting for someone else do clean them for them and it’s simply pathetic. I just don’t like that because I think it shows what kind of person you are and that’s certainly not the kind of person I would like to be involved with. Is it insane that I’m the opposite kind of person? The kind of person that cleans his mess just seconds after creating it and the kind of person that gets sick if they happen to find lots of hairs from strangers when cleaning the floors? Is that so bad?

 I don’t think so, of course, but people will always exist that happen to love living in a certain degree of anarchy because it makes them feels free. I have no idea why freedom is always related to a mess, to chaos, because freedom is not chaos but respect. Or that’s what I think. When you are free, you can do what you want, that’s true. But the only way to properly use freedom is if you combine it with respect and use it wisely instead of taking advantage of it as if you were a child, as if everything that has the capacity to worry you doesn’t exist any more. Freedom is not dirt. I refuse to even think about it like that.

 However, people still think that living alone, the “big liberation”, is al about doing whatever you want to do without any excuses. So waking up late, showering becomes optional, eating whatever you want whenever you want it, having no responsibilities or respect for anything beyond your own body and not even thinking about any consequence because that is just not cool. All of that is implanted in our minds when education at home has been all but good or even remotely decent. People whose parents have explained things to them have a tendency to be better socially simply because they know why doing certain things is socially unacceptable or should simply be avoided.

 But let’s say all of that is ok, all of that is perfect if you leave by yourself. You can be a pig if you want, when you leave alone. But the truth is that when most people leave their homes, they leave it to live with others. No one has the money to live really alone until they have a proper job and so on. And seeing many students depend on their parents to live away from home, the obvious answer is to live with roommates. And that’s when everything we have been talking about comes back and acquires importance. Because when you share a space with others, it’s not all about you. You share a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and maybe other common areas. True, your room is your own but that’s it.

 So most people have filthy rooms and live like pigs when being students but they try to behave like decent human beings outside of it. Right? Well, wrong. Because many people, all of those we have been talking about, they simply think that the world and the people in it that are their same age are just as filthy as them. So the plates and pans start to pile up, and so does the laundry and everything begins to become as filthy as if they were living alone. Why? Because freedom means chaos for them and not respect. They have no respect for themselves or for others, so they do thinks as they think everyone in their situation does.

 Of course, in order to have a nice life living with roommates, people simply do not say a word. Maybe they like living like that or maybe they simply do not want to quarrel with anyone about anything. I personally do not know which one of those solutions is the worst. Not saying anything and submitting yourself to the lives of others is beyond me, it’s something I simply cannot understand. Especially when you have a stake your own health because, at the end of the day, that’s what we are talking about. It’s about our life and having a nice space to share with other people and not simply about living and going forward like a mule. If we do that, we might reach a point when there are no more roads to keep walking on.

 All of this, some might think, is an exaggeration. And maybe it is, maybe we won’t die if we clean our bodies in a filthy shower or if we use the greasy pans that who knows how many others have used in the past. Maybe those are not lethal things and we can survive a small mess. But what that would entail would be a world where everything is a mess because people have stopped caring about the fact that we always live in community, we rarely live truly alone and there is no correct way to ignore that. What if bus drivers stopped doing their routes as they are supposed to? Would that be tolerable? What if airlines only had flights whenever they wanted or felt like it? I bet many people wouldn’t be exactly happy about it or the world would be a lazy ball of filthy and disgusting people.

 To my knowledge, we haven’t reached that stage and I personally hope we never do. Because this world is ours, for every single one of us and we cannot live thinking it’s all about us because it isn’t. Each person in this world is not important and that a truth we are never told or reminded enough. Each one of us, in our own, is simply not important enough. But as a group, as communities and as a species, we are important because of the simplicity of numbers and the importance those numbers have when affecting other numbers like the amount of trees, of drinkable water, of animals in the world and so on. When we live together, we share and respect others as we consider them equals; we gain more than we lose. And that’s the best for our growth as human beings.

 It is because we learn that by helping others we are actually helping ourselves. Those dishes that are left in the kitchen for hours or days, if we clean them just after we’re finished, we are letting someone else use them and that person would likely do the same so at dinner there will be clean plates to eat properly. If you clean the bathroom after you use it, people will eventually notice and, no matter if it is because of guilt or because they have learned, they will begin to clean everything too and the chances to have an infection or something nasty get into you will be as low as they can be. Of course, that’s the optimal way of living.

 So why not living like we care about others and ourselves? Why not living alone as if we were still living with our families? The world doesn’t just get different because our personal situation changes. The world does not care about a single organism but about the group, the communities. So let’s live, let’s enjoy ourselves and let’s do that by respecting others and letting them know how much we care about them and about the world as such. You will forgive my rant, my incessant way of pushing these truths down everyone’s throat but I do believe in the importance of respect, because it brings and order to our lives than lives for far longer that any of us would ever live. Because respect is freedom.