Pregnant in London and Bangalore - Week 1 to 9

So it's been a long while since I have updated. This really isn't a formal announcement since I'm not yet 3 months and I shouldnt be telling anyone (who knows what could happen). But I really waned to come back to a space where I can document and remember the dates. So if you're still reading this blog after a year of neglect, you're the first few to know that I'm very likely preggers.

It started approximately May 27th, 2016 when I thought I had been pregnant and went and bought a home pregnancy test. Alas, I got my period about 1 or 2 days after. Assuming it was the 29th of May, then right now, I'm around 9 weeks right now.

I left for London on the 15th of June so I'm assuming that I was pregnant between the 15th of June and the 30th of June. I came back to Paris on the 2nd of July to take off to India on the 8th of July.

Around the 10th of July was when I started to feel like I ate something bad and had mild indigestion symptoms, which lasted all week long. By the 15th of July, my boss went and found me a home pregnancy test in Bangalore and alas - it was almost immediately positive.

For the next two weeks I was in India, I wanted to puke all the time. Everything gave me stomach pains and i would be rolling around the bed all night long with lower stomach pains from diarrhea and upper stomach pains from indigestion. Not to mention the smells that made me want to puke constantly. Between the terrible detergent they were using at the hotel, the pungent food, and almost every other person having really terrible body odour (especially the women), I wanted to jump off a cliff. I was surrounded by odour every second of the day.

But I stuck through it all the way to the end and finally returned home on the 30th of July. I think I have serious PTSD from the experience because everything that reminds of India makes me gag these days. When I opened my suitcase to do my laundry, looking at the clothes i brought to india made me gag. The slightest smell of typical india spices like coriander, cumin, and curry, makes me nauseous. Ironically, French body odour no longer bothers me as much.

Comments, Forums, Entitlement, and Offense

It's be so long since I posted something on here.  I suppose it's a combination of being busy with work and mostly being actually old now - it's not really because I don't have thoughts I want to jot down, but mostly because I just don't have the time or the energy to sit down and put in a couple of hours to "think" about matters that are of no importance to life except a simple observation of the human condition.

Besides the fact that my workload has increased significantly and all I want to do when I get home is sit in bed and watch tv shows, I'm also spending a bit of time doing things like co-running a travel blog with a friend, shopping, and selling my handbags on ebay.

In fact, I spend way too much time on the Internet in general, reading news and analyses via fb and twitter, watch tv shows, curating my instagram and browsing aimlessly in general. The thing about Internet these days is that what drives content isn't just a writer on a keyboard publishing on a blog or a online news/magazines (although who can tell the difference at this point?), but also the comments and general opinion. Opinions are not just saved for forums anymore, but anyone can say anything when someone writes something.

For news sites like NPR with a very niched market whose makeup are those who are generally liberal and highly educated, the comments act as a dialogue where most of the time people are debating using very relevant data, stats, experience, and logic. I often find those dialogues enlightening and they sometimes change my opinion or widens my understanding of something after reading them through.

For news publications like NYT, you still have a pretty good base of educated, thoughtful, and caring people, but they have a much wider readership and often times you do have to sift through some garbage opinions.

For gossip columns like People magazine (which is now more similar to Apple Daily in HK & TW, posting a bunch of sensationalized crimes), a majority of the comments are pretty garbage, though entertaining, when not outright anger-inducing.

But in general, I think the intelligence of the comments don't always have anything to do with education and has everything to do with a culture of entitlement. For example, almost a year ago (I think) I read an opinion piece on the NYT that resonated with me pretty strongly. This woman was describing a day when a guy who refused to keep a door opened for her and her stroller  and she was not upset at the guy, but was upset at the culture of mothers who believe that their children, and what their children experiences should always come before other people.

I can no longer find this article, but what resonated with me was her point about mothers buying ginormous comfortable strollers in NYC where space is limited, and goes about ruining other people's day by hitting ppl with it and taking up too much space unabashedly.

I recall reading the article and nodding furiously because of my experiences with people who have children who they think they deserve to accommodated without having to even politely ask first (e.g., taking my seat on a flight and then tell me to sit elsewhere cuz they have a toddler, someone complaining no one in Toronto lets his child have a seat on the bus when he never asked anyone to get up)

The idea here is not that one does not want to be nicer to a person with a young child, but that the parents believe that they deserve it and expect it and get upset if they don't get their way.

Most of the comments in the article were so illogical that I can't even remember any of them, except for one, which really stuck with me because of its level of ridiculousness. This woman commented saying that she spent years trying to get pregnant and after she has finally succeeded, she will now buy whatever it is that she wants and as big and comfortable as she wants for her celebration, and she is offended that the author tried to take away from that experience.

WTF?

So because it took you five years to get pregnant, you "deserve" to buy a ginormous stroller and not be considerate of those people around you? Talk about false attributions! What does having a big stroller have anything to do with taking long to get knocked up? How does not having a big stroller take away your experience of raising a child???

Where do these entitlements come from?

When I am buying or selling items on ebay, I go to the the purse forum to read about people's experiences, and there's obviously multiple threads on the ebay sub-forums complaining about buyers on ebay. Some of them are legitimate complaints but some of them are pretty entitled.

When you sell something and you list a price for the item and enable "Best Offer," why would you complain about someone making an offer below your expectations? Why is it considered "rude" if someone offers you a price 50% off of your listed price? It's not personal, it's business!

If you don't want to sell it at the price, then reject it. "Oh what if i get a lot of bad offers and it's just a waste of my time to have to reject it" one might say. Well first of all, if you are getting a lot of low offers, maybe your price is much higher than demand. Second of all, eBay even allows you to set an auto-reject number, what exactly do you have to complain about???

What are you entitled to here, exactly? That the buyer can read your mind about your lowest price you are willing to sell your bag for? That you should be able to sell your USED item at a price you believe the item is worth without anyone suggesting otherwise?

At what point is someone being offended legitimately and at what point is someone just offended from a wrong sense of entitlement?

Am I being entitled because I'm complaining about all these people complaining? Wouldn't it just be easier not to read comments? Probably.

Btw, an unrelated thought from reading those terrible comments: I would never call my own child a miracle, unless the child becomes a quantum astrophysicist with a nobel peace price, because it would be a miracle for me to raise a child that brilliant and loving.

Also, quantum astrophysicist is probably not even a real thing, but I have no idea.

In Search for Best ActiveSync Exchange Client for Android

Note: Last update Jan 27, 2015 - all apps are still being tested - not complete - also the apps keep updating!
Ever since I moved away from Blackberry, I've been feeling a void in my heart whenever I reply to work emails off office hours on my phone. I'm not gonna lie, Android just doesn't cut it when it comes to work emails. It's fantastic for everything else, but it pales in comparison against BES - and we're not just talking keyboard availability - things like being able to online search the exchange server for emails not sync'ed to your phone, send/accept/decline/propose new dates on meeting invites, and best of all, turn on and off Out of Office. Of course, BB mail isn't without its downsides - I like the idea of enabling HTML in emails, but it just wasn't designed to do this, but it was something I liked.

The native email client on the Samsung S5 is not very good at all so I've been searching for better ones. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any blogs that spell out the pros and cons of Exchange Email Clients using Activesync. Thus I have to test them out myself and see what's the best.

Here are are the things I look for in an Exchange Email Client

• Syncs Email up to a month
• Syncs Contacts and searches contacts online and finds exchange when composing email
• Syncs Calendar [I use an application call Business Calendar instead of S Planner]
• Ability to Accept/Decline a meeting invitation
• Signature (rich formatting preferable)
• Rich formatting when composing Email
• Grouping by conversation 
• Custom notification
• Online Search Server for unsynced emails
• Out of Office feature
• Widget Interface
• Overall usability 

My review on the Android Exchange ActiveSync clients below.

Nine

I'm currently having issues with Push notification (not being pushed)!  Nine Support is telling me that Push is not being enabled but it is working for my other email clients -.-;;

Pros

• Syncs Email up to a month (up to all your un-archived Email)
• Syncs Contacts and finds exchange when composing email
• Syncs Calendar 
• Ability to Accept/Decline a meeting invitation
• Signature with rich formatting 
• only bold, underline, italic 
• Rich formatting when composing Email
• only bold, underline, italic
• Grouping by conversation: 
• great interface
• in speech bubble for emails that are synced
• Widget Interface
• can select specific account and folder to view during set up of widget
• can click on top and app opens up
• can compose email
• Overall usability:
• when composing email, you can:
• set priority
• include signature
• edit edit
• tracking (delivery/read receipt)
• include quoted text
• undo/redo button
• reply inline (edit quoted text)
• Swift and responsive customer support

Cons

• Out of office is only for Exchange Server 2003
• Online search for unsynced email only on Exchange Server 2007+
• Rich Formatting:
• No bullets or colours
• Grouping by conversation
• only emails that are synced
• Widget Interface
• can choose account and folder only when setting up, can't edit later 
• would need to delete and reset up to change folder viewing
• cannot edit size of viewable font
• No custom notification
• Cost $10-$20 (it's on sale for half price atm)

Other Notes

• Does not sync gmail, yahoo, but that doesn't bother me

MailWise 

Pro:

• Syncs E-mail up to a month (up to all your un-archived emails)
• Syncs Contacts and finds exchange when composing email
• Syncs Calendar
• Ability to Accept/Decline a meeting invitation (pretty good)
• Signature but no rich text
• Grouping by conversation
• will show in list and you can click to go to original individual email (finnicky)
• will show older emails that's not synced in conversation list but cannot reply to the emails
• Custom notification
• can choose ringtone and vibration
• can set night time silence
• Widget Interface
• can choose account and folder to view during set up of widget
• can compose email
• click on top and app opens up
• number to show unread emails
• Overall usability 
• Easy to reply, reply all and forward
• additional search filters: all, to, from, subject, body

Pro:

• No out of office
• No Online Search Server for unsynced emails
• No rich text for body or signature
• Cannot edit inline (cannot edit quoted text)
• Widget Interface
• can choose account and folder only when setting up, can't edit later 
• would need to delete and reset up to change folder viewing
• cannot edit size of viewable font
• Grouping by conversation is finnicky
• sometimes you can't reply to an older email in a conversation
• workaround: search for the email
• Delete button on the top deletes entire conversations, not just single email
• you can delete single emails by going to the original email but if all the older emails are in conversation you can only delete original conversation. 
• I would avoid deleting altogether in these cases where you're not sure the whole conversation is going to get deleted
• Ads

Cloudmagic

No Calendar sync so not an option.

The Justification of Travelling

I'm really tired of reading posts and shares on my Facebook page exalting travelling, talking about  why it's important to travel and how great it is.

Maybe it's because I've already had my fill of travelling and I have the opportunity to travel that I think this way, but maybe it's because I find none of these posts understand how lucky people are to be able to travel.

Travelling is a Luxury.

Travelling is a Consumption.

Travelling is ALMOST ALWAYS Selfish
(unless you are a humanitarian doing work to help others)

I am not arguing that learning about different culture and adding to your life experience is a problem. But you can learn about cultures and add to your experience without travelling, just as you can travel and not learn about culture nor add value to your life experience beyond, "been there done that." 

What I really find problematic are the ways people travel, the reasoning behind people's travels and, most importantly, what I hate the most, is what people are adding to the propaganda of travelling.

No one can define for an individual how they should travel or how much they should travel. So before you start quitting your job or spend all your money so you can backpack across the world to learn about yourself, please consider the following:

1. How are you going to travel? via an airplane or a boat or a car? Because everything I just named means carbon footprints.
2. What are you giving back to society and what are you taking away from the society when you travel?
3. Who is benefitting from the travels? What is being lost?
4. What are your goals when you travel? Do you NEED to travel in order to achieve your goals? Did you actually achieve your goal after you travelled?

North Americans have this ridiculous notion of travelling: the more you travel the better you are as a person.
The reality? You can learn anywhere. You can widen your perspective through doing anything. If you are willing.

Again, I'm not saying don't travel. I'm not trying to be a hypocrite. I travel a lot and I'm extremely grateful for my ability to do this. I love travelling (most people do) but I understand that it's a consumption slightly better than buying expensive purses.  You don't HAVE TO travel.

Travel, if you want.

But don't go around telling people that it's more than what it really is: a vain and luxurious entertainment. There's no justification for consumption beyond personal gain.

In Pursuit of Un-Unhappiness

In a world where a person is not oppressed and abused by another power, where food, water, shelter are abundant, and quality of life is superb, why are there still unhappy people? Where does unhappiness stem from?

I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. Ironically it is not because I am unhappy; it is actually because I have currently found peace in my life. Beyond the mundane first world problems that I like to incessantly broadcast to my boyfriend and my best friends, I am beyond grateful for what I have and where I am in life, both physically and abstractly. But this is not a show-off post wherein I describe my insignificant personal achievements to make myself feel better about myself, because people who are happy and at peace don't need to be validated by others. What is this post about? I'm not sure yet, but I feel like I have something to say.

I have learned that happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive. Either can be an emotion or a state of being. You can be in a state of unhappiness but feel momentarily happy about something (I am deeply unhappy with the way my life is, but I just bought a new car). Or you can be in a state of happiness but feel unhappy temporarily about something (I love everything about my life but oops I just crashed my new car).  

So yes, you can be happy and unhappy at the same time, but only if one is a state (I am, deep inside, always) and the other is an emotion (I feel, right now, and maybe for a little while longer).

But it is much easier to detect and understand your emotions, and harder to pinpoint your state.
Therefore it is easy to change your emotions, but it is difficult to change a state of being.

In the spectrum of the most unhappy state to the most happy state, most of us probably sit somewhere in between. And a lot of us have no idea where exactly we sit, especially when many people mistaken their emotion to be a state (I just bought a new car and a new house, I must be happy). On top of which, what makes up happiness for each individual is different and no one can actually tell you what will make you happy. So how does one know if you are happy or not happy, and if you don't know, do you need to bother to pursuit happiness?

Whoa - now things sound way more complex than it needs to be. Defining happiness is near impossible for most of us. We can list a million things that makes us happy, and if we did achieve those things, would we truly be happy? This self-awareness thing is way too complicated.

The way I see it, is that we gotta take baby steps.  The pursuit of happiness is too hard - who really knows what can make you happy?  But the pursuit of ensuring you are not unhappy or the pursuit of un-unhappiness: much easier. I am not talking sitting around refusing things that I think makes me feel unhappy (eating a celery stick, having conversations with French people), but I'm talking about taking action to change things. I did say it was a pursuit, did I not?

I don't know what makes me happy. But I will do things to change my unhappiness. And you know what, the more I think about it, the easier it seems to pinpoint the root of unhappiness stems from:

• Cowardice: fear and excess self-concern override doing or saying what is right, good
• Greed: desire to possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention to keep it for one's self, far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort. It is applied to a markedly high desire for and pursuit of wealth, status, and power.
• Denial: when faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence
• Laziness: disinclination to activity or exertion (making changes) despite having the ability to do so
• Intolerance: unwillingness or refusal to consider, tolerate or respect contrary or different opinions or beliefs
• Lack of Introspection: the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings and trying to understand them

The above are all standard dictionary definitions and you can EASILY see why these characteristics could make a person be in a perpetual state of unhappiness. Next time if you are unhappy with your life, try asking yourself:

• What am I scared of? Should I be scared? Maybe I need to be brave and do what I believe is right. Be brave.
• Do I want too much? Do I have enough? Why don't I have enough? Be satisfied.
• Am I in denial? Be honest - with yourself and with others.
• What action can I take to change things? Am I making a change when I can because I am in denial or because I'm scared or just lazy? Be proactive.
• Does what I can't stand affect me negatively? Should allow it to affect me? Is it even in my control to change what is happening? Be accepting and try to change your own perspective.
• Why do I feel this way? Why do I think this way? Be critical of your thoughts

I'm not an expert in therapy and I don't expect anyone to do something just because I tell them to. I am not better than anyone else. And I am constantly working away these roots of unhappiness. My biggest problem is acceptance and tolerating thing when they don't agree with me. And it does make me unhappy.

But for the most part, because I am making an effort every day all the time, I have peace. And I deeply believe introspection, critical thinking, and most of all,  honesty has been the most rewarding for me - because they usually lead to action. Sometimes unnecessary honesty can bring unhappiness, but lying will always bring unhappiness. And if you are don't make an effort to be honest with yourself and with others, you will always be unhappy.