Are you in Love with your Phone?

Are you even aware how many times you end up checking your phone in an average day? Do phubbing and technoference words sound alien to you? Are you up for a quiz of 15 questions which would throw up startling results for you related to your beloved phone.

The Quiz

Go on, read this article then!

Practice phone etiquette. If you must look at your phone, announce that you are doing so. “I am just checking the score/weather/playlist for two minutes,” shows courtesy and indicates to your partner that you are aware that your attention is shifting. It may also make you more aware of how often you pick up your phone when your partner is present.

If your partner’s job demands round-the-clock availability, discuss reasonable boundaries that would satisfy both the job and you.

The complete article

LESLEY ALDERMAN – The New York Times

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MELANIA’S BURDEN

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How a girl who wanted to make big in fashion world traveled from a sleepy town of Slovenia to the most coveted house on earth….How the most powerful man on earth needs her more than she needed him 20 years ago! Presenting Melania Trump…..

The union made perfect sense for Donald too. After demanding Ivana and needy Marla, Melania would be the perfect mate, one who would be an advertisement for his virility while giving him his “space.” Federico Pignatelli, a longtime Trump friend and business associate, who founded the fashion studio Pier 59, says, “Ivana was an intelligent, entrepreneurial woman. Also a very strong-minded person and very feisty. While instead, Melania . . . really no fights.” For her part, Melania would get a luxurious home where she could indulge her hobbies—Pilates and reading fashion magazines, according to People—in peace, and a promise that she would never have to return to drab Eastern-European prospects. Donald accompanied Melania to her homeland once. “I was there for about 13 minutes,” he later said to Larry King with Melania by his side. “We landed. I said, Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Bye.” Eventually Trump brought her family over to New York (where her parents now live for most of the year), allowing her to cut ties with the Old Country.

The complete article

Evgenia Peretz — Vanity Fair

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The Gift of Loneliness

Can loneliness be a gift? How do lonely people feel? What keeps them awake at nights?

Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself.

Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge. One of the good article I have read in awhile….

What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal. Being foreign didn’t help. I kept botching the ballgame of language: fumbling my catches, bungling my throws. Most days, I went for coffee in the same place, a glass-fronted café full of tiny tables, populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops. Each time, the same thing happened. I ordered the nearest thing to filter on the menu: a medium urn brew, which was written in large chalk letters on the board. Each time, without fail, the barista looked blankly up and asked me to repeat myself. I might have found it funny in England, or irritating, or I might not have noticed it all, but that spring it worked under my skin, depositing little grains of anxiety and shame.

Full Article Here

Aeon – Olivia Laing

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