LJILJANA w CLIFF #8.1
We started today's discussion talking about sleep. You came to the session tired but still ready to learn and practice, and you also talked about how you felt like it sometimes got you in the middle of the day. That lead us on a little bit of a side-trek where I told you that I had recently learned that according to recent sleep studies, scientist believe that we were designed to sleep through the night but also primed to take a nap sometime around 1 or 2 in the afternoon. This is why so many people feel drowsy after lunch. It's not the food that makes them drowsy, it's the natural biological cycle of our bodies. The thing is that the modern work day doesn't allow us time for that, but this is how the Spaniards came up with the idea of the afternoon siesta. Then we moved onto my favorite topic, which is writing, and you told me that you had spent a large amount of your day yesterday working on it and planned on doing so again today, that though certain sections of a scientific paper make references to so much other material so it's not wholly your words, the results section is all you and that is something that you are looking forward to writing because it gets to be completely your words and your expression and gives you an opportunity to flex your muscles a little bit. Then we moved on to talk about doing something that you've always dreamed of doing and that is for you swimming in a competition. Though it's nothing that you actually plan on doing because you haven't trained for it aren't training for it, but it's nice to think about. Along those same lines, it's also nice to think about returning to Australia, where you lived during your post doctoral program for seven months. You thought that they had a great work-life balance and that the general attitude there was very appealing. But you have a lot of family and friends where you are right now and you do like where you live right now, so they are an anchor to keep you where you are, but a very pleasant one. Still, you wouldn't mind returning to visit Australia from time to time on an ongoing basis I joked with you about how in Australia so many of the animals seem designed to kill humans and you told me that was actually quite real, that you were always on the watch out for snakes and spiders, that you had to shake out your shoes before putting them on, that you were not thrilled with the idea of walking through tall grass for fear of what might be in there and might bite you, that at one point you slept on an island outside of a home because you wanted to see the stars and you had fire to draw the to drive away the animals, but in the morning you still had to shake out your shoes for for fear of what might have crawled in them in the middle of the night. You told me about a time when you were given black bed sheets but then also told to be very careful about certain insects that might crawl into your bed and the black bedding didn't let you see what was in there so you had to ask for a different color sheets and they gave you red instead. Better, but still not great. You also told me about the shark infested waters and how they put up a wire fence inside the ocean so that people could swim safely because there were so many shark attacks whereas in Croatia the last great white shark attack was all the way back in 1979 when I was just 3 years old. Still despite all of the danger he was a beautiful place and you would like to see it again.
