The QuaranTEENS

Lockdown is a great time (subjectively) for personal improvement. There are a few aspects about yourself, whoever you are, that you could develop. It could either result in new points of view, in effectiveness, in your usual mood, your self-confidence, or even how interested you are about certain subjects.

Creativity is one of those aspects you could develop, it’s also one of the numerous things you can always improve. What are the outcomes, the aftermath? You would be able to express yourself through arts or in your imagination, with specific and accurate representations of how you feel and what you’d want to show or communicate. Sometimes, we need to express how we feel in order to get rid of that feeling if it’s a poisonous one, or to enhance it if you want more!

As you can see, you couldn’t lose anything doing that, not even your time, even if you wanted to.

Explaining what good you get out of it is cute, but how could you actually do it?
First of all, creativity is a matter of imagination. Einstein once said “Logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere” (it could be taken as an explanation of quantum physics, space-time continuum or the infinite number of possible outcomes and dimensions). The brilliant scientist (but definitely not my favourite) also said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”. What this means is that knowledge is a cool way to show off how much you know and help your logic mind to find solutions. But imagination, if you spend enough time using it, you’ll develop it, you’ll be able to create things no one has ever thought of to this day. You might even get an eidetic memory. To this day, I have never heard of a such cool memory. An eidetic memory gives you the ability to picture what you are currently thinking about, in 3D (just like holograms!). You could picture anything, momentarily modify the surrounding space, objects, EVEN RECREATE AN ENTIRE CINEMA AND WATCH A FULL MOVIE! You could also add yourself to it (eidetic memory reproduces every single detail possible). It’s pretty cool, although I haven’t even talked about how to develop that thing.

I think that after having started to master your imagination and maybe found out how to get closer to an eidetic memory, you could do layouts of things you imagine (for better results you might want to get the right dimensions and proportions, try taking mesures with the model you have in your mind when you control it well). As an example, you could make layouts of buildings, or a layout of a hypercube would be cool too (haha just kidding it’s impossible, click here to see what it is). You could also compose music if you know how to, and if you don’t, try learning it. You could draw, you could paint, you could listen to music while creating a new world in your mind (I recommend listening to Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto, it’s really awesome). You could write, like in a diary or a notebook, or you could dance, sing, even try new recipes to cook! You could also learn new languages (I have been learning Italian for a few days now). Finally, even if it’s not the best thing for your eyes, I think that Virtual Reality is a good way to develop creativity.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get to develop your creativity, I think it’s worth it! You should try it sometime!

Brahms

Sixth week of confinement, I have the impression to go 2 months back: I see more and more people outside. I think people are driving crazy, I saw in my street, around a week ago at 11 P.M. a woman singing and going around the neighborhood during 1 hour. I hope we’ll get out of here soon. For my part, the recovery after the holidays was a bit hard.

I’m really starting to feel the lack of my friends and my girlfriend, I’m really looking forward to going out and coming back to “life before”, even I miss school: the situation is really worrying. I hope everyone who reads this post is going well and see you next week! Bye !

Source : https://www.stephguerin.com/archives/covid-19-loccasion-de-revoir-le-teletravail/

For more than a month the world has been idling and the world’s great power is paying the consequences.

The price of a barrel of negative oil in the United States for the first time in history. The barrel of the West Texas Intermediate collapsed on Monday, to trade for -$37.63 on the futures markets in the evening. Prices hit hard by demand collapse and storage capacity saturation.

For my part, I discover a new hidden talent like cooking for my family. I prepare delicious meals and desserts as pancakes .

The holidays just ended a few days ago, & I wanted to take stock of what happened in the world.

From an international point of view, many things happened in different countries, like United States, China… First, we know that currently the USA are the country with the most cases of coronavirus. Despite the numbers, many American people decided to protest against containment… And Trump decided to support them. Trump wants to make believe that China and the WHO (OMS in French) are responsible for the tragedy that is afflicting his country, therefore he decided to suspend his contribution to WHO, despite the numerous deterrents.

On the other side of the Pacific, more precisely in China, a second wave of epidemic has already started, but we don’t know much.

In North Korea there are rumors that Kim Jong-Un has coronavirus … Info or Intox, we don’t know. A CNN channel quoted US government sources as saying that Washington “was looking for information” and said that Kim Jong Il “could be in grave danger after an operation”. He wasn’t present at important ceremonies … we don’t know more.

It has been three days since the “lessons” have resumed. The holidays went rather well but I had to celebrate my 18th birthday with my parents instead of celebrate it with my friends. On the work side, I feel like I have lost my rhythm and I find it hard getting back to it since I didn’t work during holidays… I’ve continued to cook : apple pie, strawberry tart, cookies, strawberry cake roll, etc… And I even started painting, I’m not very good at it but it makes pass the time!

First good new : the end of the containment begins on May 11, normally we will go back to school on May 18. I’m so happy and I think it will pass quickly but I hope that the situation will not pose too many problems for my summer projects. I cant’t wait to meet you guys!

It is the first time I have spent two weeks holidays in Paris. I never thought I would have to do that. We should never say never!

Normally during these holidays I ride my bike and meet my family. Those holidays were not like the previous ones. First of all I have learned that the pop music festival in Normandy I used to go every year with my family (my cousins, my sister, my mother…) was cancelled. It did not make me happy because normally it takes place at the beginning of July just after the end of school and it makes me starting my summer holidays with a lot of fun and great moments. It is a great family and musical moment. Moreover, the setting of the festival is beautiful because it is located at in the grounds of a castle.

After this announcement, I continued to do my homework slowly but surely. Then came Easter! Every year I go on an egg hunt in my grand-parents country house .This time my “country house” was in Paris and it was my home. So I went to look for the eggs in my family flat, which kept me busy anyway. I received eggs from my grandmother, which made me happy because I was not expecting that at all. After searching for these eggs a second week of “vacations” began.

This week was the fastest week of my lockdown. Everything went by very quickly and yet I felt like I did nothing. Instead, I changed my habits, watched videos and read articles especially on sports to find out how to get back on track without getting injured. So I was able to see how the triathletes had changed their habits and how they were planning to start again. And I am already looking forward to it! I am thinking about my next holidays even if it seems to be quite difficult to know more about the healthy crisis but I would definitely doing a lot of sports such as my favorite ones : windsurfing, running, cycling, hiking and swimming.

During the vacations, the government broke the news telling us that we will probably resume classes at school. I’m quite happy because I wanna go back to school for a while. Actually the containment begins to be a bit long without seeing anybody except my parents and my brother.

For instance we just resume classes at home. The recovery wasn’t that easy because at didn’t work too much during the holidays. But now, it keeps me busy at least most of the day.

Out of work, I try to do things unusual for me, as manual things for example. Last time I made a fire in the parc of the hotel where I’m confined. I’ve never done this before but I finally found it pretty cool.

However, even if I try to not staying the whole day behind a screen, I have to admit that sometimes it’s complicated. My guilty pleasure is watching series. The last two series that I watched are “La casa de Papel” that everybody know and “Validé” which tells the story of a young French rapper who start to know success, fame and worries about this job.

What is the influence of fake news in times like these?  

Coronavirus is, as you know, a pandemic who left a lot of people in quarantine and since one month, we received many information, sometimes false.  

A fake new is a misleading information to manipulate or deceive someone.  

In fact, in this historic period, we see past fake news about Coronavirus or about other things related to this virus.  

5 fake news:  

• Packages from China can carry the Coronavirus.  
• the US has a role to play in the spread of the coronavirus in China. 
• 5G has spread the virus.  
• Holding your breath lets you know if you are infected.  
• Air pollution has gone down.  

With the social media, sharing information is easier and quick. We need to be attentive and check the real information which come from official websites or newspapers.  

See you next week!

This confinement is getting longer and longer. So to keep myself busy, I have taken up several activities that make my time busier. First of all, I read more and more game rules, which then allows me to play with the people I am confined to.

I had received a lot of games for Christmas and this confinement allows me to read the notices and thus not to waste my time. So I have played at the mastermind, at Carcassonne, and so on. I have also played a childhood game called Kapla! I have built beautiful constructions!

One of my other activities was to sort through my photos, which took me a considerable amount of time. It is something I rarely do and I should do it much more often given the number of pictures I had. However, I had really enjoyed this activity because it allowed me to see what I had been doing for the last six months. So it got me out of lockdown somehow. I then decided to look at my photos when I was a little boy in my parents’ arms. It was really cool because I am still amazed at how I and my parents have changed. To conclude this, I decided to do more photography and more activities with my family because time goes faster and faster and we forget that we only have one life, so we have to make the most of it.

We have been confined for over four weeks now. I smiled the first time I heard the news because for me, I was going to be able to sleep more, to have a rest, to do sports, to play games, to have time to do school work and extra-work and I had deduced that I would therefore be more active during the day. Also, I would take care of my family, to be closer to her and this would allow me to hear news from all my relatives.

But now that it has been four weeks, I have changed my mind. I wish I could go back to class, work normally, go to the pool and go rock climbing. So I would like to see my friends, my family in real life again. I terribly miss all this but we are all in the same situation and I think the best thing is to stay at home, continue to talk with relatives and friends. I also think it is a good time to reconnect with people I have not talked to in a long time. For my part, it allowed me to know what was happening to my friends. First of all I have got in touch with a friend I have not seen since primary school, he now lives right next door to me! He told me about these plans for the next few years and they are exciting. I am really looking forward to seeing him again. I also learned that someone close to me had caught the coronavirus and was really not feeling well. He had to go to the hospital and luckily now he is better. At the same time, I learned that a friend of mine might be spending the summer holidays in the same place as me! This special time allows us to take news from close people and that improves everyone’s morals, which is important during this period of lockdown.

For everyone’s sake I hope that we will soon see the end of this period which is beginning to be long.