Maid of honor

It was an amazing experience. When one of my best friends got married I was so proud and happy to be the maid of honor! It's like being a special part of one unforgettable moment. 
We grew up together, so I couldn't imagine being away on that big day. I remember her ex boyfriends, our girlish nights chatting if we would ever get married and what would the Man be like. And on that day this chapter got closed.

Mistakes on the way to happiness (for women)

A few days ago I found a very good article - What makes women happy? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jun/11/familyandrelationships6

It's a long one, but here are my favorite parts:

We should be the happiest generation of women in history. We can choose whether to have children, and when. We don't need to marry to survive, and if marriage makes us miserable, we can divorce. Interesting and rewarding careers are on offer. We can reasonably expect men to take on a proportion of domestic responsibility. For women of other generations, we would seem to be sitting in front of a smorgasbord of opportunities. Yet we're not satisfied. It's not so much that we have to make a million choices; more that, having chosen, we are haunted by the possibility that our choices might be wrong.

If you actually ask women what makes them happy, they're quite likely to say 'sex', or 'eating' or a 'cold bottle of sauvignon blanc' because sensual pleasures are still as available as they ever were. But the woman who told me that happiness was 'sitting on the sofa with my husband' seemed to be imagining a different quality of experience altogether.

'the status and role model of a mother is lower than that of a street sweeper, because any unpaid work is despised and downgraded'.

In making our decisions, we compare ourselves to other people all the time, which is why a famous experiment found that far more people would prefer to earn $50,000 in a world in which average earnings were $25,000, than $100,000 in a world in which average earnings were $250,000. We're caught in a bind: we get quite a lot of exhilaration and sense of freedom from our choices - to be fashionable or stylish, live in the city or the country, be married or stay single. Such decisions are crucial to establishing our identity. But we can't escape the fact that all these choices are made in a context, and the idea that we can identify pure preferences that express our innermost souls is absurd.

When I go out to lunch three times in a row with a friend who only pushes a lettuce leaf around her plate, I feel unhappy (and at some level, I actually hate her) because I think a) she's more interested in cultivating her thinness than having a good time with me and b) she's implying she has more self-control than I do. And also because she's probably right about that.

We are in competition with women, and we're in competition with men, and it's exhausting - and, if we pause to think about it for a minute, often ugly and demeaning. It's also a no-win situation, because there will always be someone more competent or beautiful.

One of the first things to understand is that scientists are increasingly reaching that the neural pathways in the brain for desire are separate from those for happiness. In other words, we might desire things that don't make us happy.

Love and friendship score highly on all tests of what makes people happy, although love is obviously also capable of making people very unhappy. When it goes well, love satisfies both the desire for self-fulfilment (love is a search for the self, to the very bottom) and the sometimes contradictory desire for recognition, approval and endorsement of identity. There's general agreement that it isn't necessary to be in a relationship to be happy; but in that case, you do need plenty of friends.

This helps to explain why religious people consistently report greater levels of happiness than others. Religion offers a glimpse of some thing beyond the self.

My Job

Monday, time to get myself together and start working. I have to make a brief presentation of my job role… well, look at the pictures below. I’m the person who’s trying to align things and make all of the pictures as much alike as possible.

My beauty

I was afraid it would be too difficult to take care of such a beauty, but so far it looks like we're getting along pretty well.

It's a gift from a friend, since it arrived it blooms and I enjoy it very much! I'm even thinking of getting one more.

Brief Review of 2012 in Pictures

January - June, 2012

 

 

July - Decmber 2012

Pleaces visited:

-          Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koprivshtitsa
-          Belogradchik, Bulgaria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belogradchik
-          Sunny Beach, Bulgaria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Beach
-          Alexandroupoli, Greece - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandroupoli
-          Neos Marmaras, Greece - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neos_Marmaras
-          Thessaloniki, Greece - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thessaloniki
-          Valencia, Spain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencia
-          Nesebar, Bulgaria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesebar
-      Edessa, Greece - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edessa,_Greece
-          Milan, Italy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan
-          London, United Kingdom - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London
-          Bansko, Bulgaria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bansko

Hello 2013

The world didn't come to an end in 2012, but the year did itself.

I celebrated the New Year's with my sister and friends. We started at home with my family and then we went to a nice party. Here I am in the last hours of 2012 and the first ones of 2013.

 

Christmas tree at my parents':

The place when we arrived:

 

Relaxing in the last hour of 2012

They had a Christmas tree there:

Cheers! A glass of champagne at midnight.

Dancing in the new year.

With the colleagues

After almost 1,5 years at my current job, we got closer with my colleagues. Especially around the holiday season, we spent some time together out of work.
We had a Christmas party in a club:

And then we spent a weekend in a spa hotel in the mountains. It was a lot of fun, especially playing in the snow like little kids.

Christmas 2012

A few pictures of my Christmas 2012:

Christmas tree at my parents':

 

In a club:

Gifts, greetings and decorations, @ home:

 

 

 

In a hotel:

 

 

Some nice gifts from Santa:

 

 

 

November in London - part 4

St. Paul's Cathedral and around:

 

Red and Londonish:

A break in a pub, hot wine, fish & chips and jacket potato:

 

 

Madame Tussauds was the last stop. The best part of it was the trip in the old London, unfortunately pictures weren't allowed.

 

For me London will always be a very special memory, for the people I met, for the things that happened, especially on 25th of November :).