This is The End

The end of the line.

“And so it is”, says a Damien Rice song. “This is the end”, says The Doors’ famous song. “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” says the famous mantra from one of The Beatles’ most unknown songs. And this is the end.

This is my last post in this blog (or I hope so), finishing one semester of learning English in two sessions every week, and I think there were the most useful way to improve my English level since I studied at Norteamericano Institute, two years ago. At this time, you won’t study for example past simple, past participle and all that kind of stuff, but you'll obviously learn much more about the two most important things that I think you should learn in order to, for example, know how you can’t get lost when you go to a foreign country, or if you have a better level, to keep a conversation with a English native speaker. These two things are to learn new words to improve your vocabulary, and to pronounce them rightly (The highest satisfaction for an English teacher is that he can make that their students stop speaking English like Tarzan).

I really appreciated the Blogging experience, since I could learn much more than other kind of teaching methods about how English is being used currently, and obviously, to explain own ideas about the large amount of topics that I had to write about.

But in my case, I probably won’t make the teacher’s satisfaction real, because I still speak like Tarzan, less since I started the lessons obviously (I can’t deny that I haven’t been the best student, I forgot a very large amount of homework and I'm still asking for mercy and clemency), but I think that I still have some hope to talk more fluently in English. My passion is music, and I love English music, from Bob Dylan to Pink Floyd, and I don’t have many problems to play and sing songs in English trying to imitate the original accent from the artists, so by that way I think I would divorce definitively from Tarzan, to sing more appropriately, and the main objective, to be a better English speaker.

That’s all. Thank you very much, Merci Beaucoup. It has been a pleasure. See you next time :D

My Future Job

Today I’m going to write about my current major at the University. First of all, I’m a freshman at Universidad de Chile Law School, and I have been here for about 8 months (trying to be a survivor).

Only In Law School.

Since I was at school, I always liked to study Law. Although I had doubts about studying Music or Literature, I finally decided to follow this career after having some conversations with elder people that joined their artistic and professional career together, so I could probably do that too (I hope so).

Although I haven’t got any experience in the most important law aspects; right now my three most important subjects are Roman, Private and Constitutional Law, I think I would like to work at the Public Service, and being a professor in my university. I think I won’t be happy being my whole life sitting in a desk in front of a computer all day long, and therefore I would like to have a future job that I can be the most time outside of the office. I won’t have a problem if I have to walk long distances or go from the same place to the same place every week, but if I can go outside long hours, It would be very fascinating.

If I had a job interview and they asked me about my strengths and/or weaknesses, I would say that I’m a hard-working person (I think), and I would contribute by thinking of new ideas about increasing the “work-level”, but I would also say that I’m not the best speaker and my speeches would be a little bit confusing. However, I would be much more useful writing documents rather than speaking. But I still don’t want to spend all day sitting in front of a computer, so If I’m not my own boss, the real one would fire me or ordering me to make different tasks, but I think I’ll be fired.

Green stuff.

'Cause I'm green.

“’Cause I'm green” says the chorus from Kermit the Frog (the Muppet) in his cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”.

Honestly, I think that is one of the few things that I know about “Green Stuff”.  But what’s the problem with the real “Green Stuff”? Everybody has heard about increasing pollution, accumulated trash, and all kind of “stuff”, and the idea about teaching environmental topics in schools is only a recent activity. Nowadays, people learn about the troubles of excessive pollution by social networks, films and TV series, but apart from feeling sorry about the world and the poor children of the future that will suffer our mistakes, we do nothing more meaningful.

Personally, I'm one of those people that don’t do anything to try to make a cleaner environment, but some weeks ago I had a strange experience in the supermarket, where while I was carrying the bags to the car, the guy that was packing the bags next to the cash register brought probably 200 plastic bags and kept packing. Although it was something normal in every supermarket worker’s day, for me it was a little bit shocking. How many trees had to be turned down for packing a single bottle in a single bag?

These thoughts would sound as false modesty, but I think that after thinking all day about the plastic bags, I (think I) changed my mind about Green Stuff, and started to change my daily routines in order to improve a little bit my environmental consciousness, starting obviously to use less plastic bags, stop using my dad’s car excessively on weekends, trying to walk more and to recycle paper in the supermarket next to my house.

Although the minimal carbon footprint that every person in Santiago might have by making a more “environmental life” would be probably less than the 0.1% that an international industry would contaminate in one single day, environmental knowledge must be increased not arguing that if we don’t change our minds, our planet will be destroyed, but thinking that our life quality doesn't depend only on economical stuff. It depends also on our relationship with nature and how dangerous this relationship could be  for us and for the planet.