How to write a letter of application

https://lingua-airlines.ru/articles/resume-studenta/

Hitchcock's Definition of Happiness

Emotional Intelligence film interview: What is emotional intelligence?

An astronaut is probably the most difficult job to land on the planet. Of tens of thousands of applications, NASA selects roughly half a dozen each decade. The application process is rigorous and highly demanding. You have to be a total badass to qualify. You have to have deep expertise in science and engineering. You need at least 1,000 hours of piloting experience. You have to be physically fit and strong. And, most of all, you have to be smart.

Lisa Nowak was all of these things. She had a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and had studied postgraduate astrophysics at the U.S. Naval Academy. She flew air missions for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific for over five years. And in 1996, she was one of the fortunate few to be selected to become an astronaut.

Clearly, she was smart as hell. But in 2007, after discovering that her lover was seeing another woman, Lisa drove 15 hours straight, in a diaper, from Houston to Orlando, in order to confront her boyfriend’s new squeeze in an airport parking lot. Lisa packed zip ties, pepper spray, and large garbage bags and had some vague-but-not-really-thought-through plan to kidnap the woman. But before she could even get the woman out of her car, Lisa had an emotional breakdown, resulting in her quickly being arrested.

Emotional intelligence is a concept researchers came up with in the 1980s and 90s to explain why intelligent people like Lisa often do really, really stupid things. The argument went that the same way your general intelligence (IQ) is a measurement of your ability to process information and come to sound decisions, your emotional intelligence (EQ) is your ability to process emotions—both others’ and your own—and come to sound decisions.

Some people have an incredibly high IQ but low EQ—think your nutty professor who can’t match his socks or doesn’t see the purpose in showering. Other people have incredibly high EQ but low IQ—think the street hustler who can’t even spell his own name but somehow talks you into giving him the shirt off your back.

Psychologists who study emotional intelligence sometimes claim that it is actually more important than general intelligence.1 This statement is controversial at best, and a big bag o’ “what the fuck?” at worst. For one, measuring emotional intelligence is difficult, if not impossible. Most of this stuff is subjective.

But also because emotional intelligence isn’t as stable as general intelligence is. IQ is harder to change. But EQ is something you can work on and develop like a muscle or a skill and watch grow, like a dainty flower in your stupid ass garden.

So, basically, no matter how smart you are, you have no excuse. Get your shit together. Developing emotional intelligence comes down to not being a fucknut like Lisa was. Here are five ways to start doing it.

1. PRACTICE SELF-AWARENESS

Like with most things emotional, you can’t get better at them until you know what the fuck they are. When you lack self-awareness, trying to manage your emotions is like sitting in a tiny boat without a sail on top of the sea of your own emotions, completely at the whim of the currents of whatever is happening moment by moment. You have no idea where you’re going or how to get there. And all you can do is scream and yell for help.

Self-awareness involves understanding yourself and your behavior on three levels: 1) what you’re doing, 2) how you feel about it, and 3) the hardest part, figuring out what you don’t know about yourself.

Knowing what you’re doing.You would think this would be pretty simple and straightforward, but the truth is that in the 21st century, most of us don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing half the time. We’re on auto-pilot—check email, text BFF, check Instagram, watch YouTube, check email, text BFF, etc., etc.

Removing distractions from your life—like, you know, turning off your damn phone every now and then and engaging with the world around you is a nice first step to self-awareness. Finding spaces of silence and solitude, while potentially scary, are necessary for our mental health. Other forms of distraction include work, TV, drugs/alcohol, video games, cross stitching, arguing with people on the internet, etc.

Schedule time in your day to get away from them. Do your morning commute with no music or podcast. Just think about your life. Think about how you’re feeling. Set aside 10 minutes in the morning to meditate. Delete social media off your phone for a week. You’ll often be surprised by what happens to you.

We use these distractions to avoid a lot of uncomfortable emotions, and so removing distractions and focusing on how you feel without them can reveal some kind of scary shit sometimes. But removing distractions is critical because it gets us to the next level.

Know what you’re feeling. At first, once you actually pay attention to how you feel, it might freak you out. You might come to realize you’re often actually pretty sad or that you’re kind of an angry asshole to a lot of people in your life. You might realize that there’s a lot of anxiety going on, and that whole “phone addiction” thing is really just a way to constantly numb and distract yourself from that anxiety.
It’s important at this point to not judge the emotions that arise. You’ll be tempted to say something like, “Ick! Anxiety! What the fuck is wrong with me!” But that just makes it worse. Whatever emotion is there has a good reason to be there, even if you don’t remember what that reason is. So don’t be too hard on yourself.

Knowing your own emotional bullshit. Once you see all the icky, uncomfortable stuff you’re feeling, you’ll begin to get a sense of where your own little crazy resides. For instance, I get really touchy about being interrupted. I get irrationally angry when I’m trying to speak and the person I’m speaking to is distracted. I take it personally. And while sometimes it is just them being rude, sometimes shit happens and I end up looking like a total dickface because I can’t stand going two seconds without every word I speak being respected. That’s some of my emotional bullshit. And it’s only by being aware of it that I can ever react against it.
Now, just being self-aware is not sufficient in and of itself. One must be able to manage their emotions too.
2. CHANNELING YOUR EMOTIONS WELL

People who believe that emotions are the be-all-end-all of life often seek ways to “control” their emotions. You can’t. You can only react to them.

Emotions are merely the signals that tell us to pay attention to something. We can then decide whether or not that “something” is important and choose the best course of action in addressing it—or not.

There’s no such thing as a “good” or “bad” emotion—there are only “good” and “bad” reactions to your emotions.

Anger can be a destructive emotion if you misdirect it and hurt others or yourself in the process. But it can be a good emotion if you use it to correct injustices and/or protect yourself or others.

Joy can be a wonderful emotion when shared with people you love when something good happens. But it can be a horrifying emotion if it’s derived from hurting others.

Such is the act of managing your emotions: recognizing what you’re feeling, deciding whether or not that’s an appropriate emotion for the situation, and acting accordingly.

The whole point of this is to be able to channel your emotions into what psychologists call “goal-directed behavior”—or what I prefer to call “getting your shit together.”

3. LEARN TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF

Have you ever lost yourself completely in an activity? Like, you start doing something and get immersed in it and when you snap out of the quasi-hypnotic state you’ve somehow induced in yourself, you realize three hours have passed but it felt like fifteen minutes?

This happens to me when I write sometimes. I lose my sense of time and I get this cascade of subtly-layered feelings when I’m fleshing out ideas in my head and putting them into words. It’s like a feeling of fascination mixed with slightly frustrated intrigue mixed with little bursts of dopamine when I feel like I just came up with a great line or funny poop joke or somehow got my point across without cursing.

I love this feeling, and when I achieve it, it motivates me to keep writing.

Notice something important here, though: I don’t wait for that feeling to arise before I start writing.

I start writing and then that feeling starts to build, which motivates me to keep writing, and the feeling builds a little more, and on and on.

This is what I call the “Do Something Principle” and it’s probably one of the simplest yet most magical “hacks” I’ve ever come across. The Do Something Principle states that taking action is not just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.

Most people try to look for inspiration first so they can take some momentous action and change everything about themselves and their situation. They try to pump themselves up with whatever flavor of mental masturbation is in style that week so they can finally take action. But by next week, they’ve run out of steam and they’re back at it again, jerking off to another “method” of motivation.

But I like to turn this on its head completely. When I need to be motivated, I just do something that’s even remotely related to what I want to accomplish and then, action begets motivation begets action, etc.

When I don’t feel like writing, I tell myself I’ll just work on the outline for now. Once I do that, it often makes me think of something interesting I hadn’t thought of yet that I want to include and so I write that down and maybe flesh it out a little.

Before I know it, I’m halfway through a draft and I haven’t even put on pants yet. (NOTE: This is just because I never wear pants.)

The point is that in order to use your emotions effectively to get your shit together, you have to do something.

If you don’t feel like anything motivates you, do something. Draw a doodle, find a free online coding class, talk to a stranger, learn a musical instrument, learn something about a really hard subject, volunteer in your community, go salsa dancing, build a bookshelf, write a poem. Pay attention to how you feel before, during, and after whatever it is you’re doing and use those emotions to guide your future behavior.

And know that it’s not always “good” feelings that will motivate you, too. Sometimes I’m frustrated and really fucking annoyed that I can’t quite say exactly what I want to say. Sometimes I’m anxious that what I’m writing won’t resonate with people. But for whatever reason, these feelings often only make me want to write more. I love the challenge of wrestling with something that’s just a little bit out of my reach.

4. RECOGNIZE EMOTIONS IN OTHERS TO CREATE HEALTHIER RELATIONSHIPS

Everything we’ve covered so far deals with handling and directing emotions within yourself. But the whole point of developing emotional intelligence should ultimately be to foster healthier relationships in your life.

And healthy relationships—romantic relationships, familial relationships, friendships, whatever—begin with recognition and respect of one another’s emotional needs.

You do this by connecting and empathizing with others. By both listening to others and sharing yourself honestly with others—that is, through vulnerability.

To empathize with someone doesn’t necessarily mean to completely understand them, but rather to accept them as they are, even when you don’t understand them. You learn to value their existence and treat them as their own end rather than a means for something else. You acknowledge their pain as your pain—as our collective pain.

Relationships are where emotional rubber hits the proverbial pavement. They get us out of our heads and into the world around us. They make us realize we’re a part of something much larger and much more complex than just ourselves.

And relationships are, ultimately, the way we define our values.

5. INFUSE YOUR EMOTIONS WITH VALUES

When Daniel Goleman’s book came out in the 90s, “emotional intelligence” became the big buzzword in psychology. CEOs and managers read workbooks and went to retreats on emotional intelligence to motivate their workforces. Therapists tried to instill more emotional awareness in their clients to help them get a handle on their lives. Parents were admonished to cultivate emotional intelligence in their children with the aim of preparing them for a changing, emotionally-oriented world.2

A lot of this sort of thinking misses the point, however. And that is that emotional intelligence is meaningless without orienting your values.

You might have the most emotionally intelligent CEO on the planet, but if she’s using her skills to motivate her employees to sell products made by exploiting poor people or destroying the planet, how is being emotionally intelligent a virtue here?

A father might teach his son the tenets of emotional intelligence, but without also teaching him the values of honesty and respect, he could turn into a ruthless, lying little prick—but an emotionally intelligent one!

Conmen are highly emotionally intelligent. They understand emotions quite well, both in themselves and especially in others. But they end up using that information to manipulate people for their own personal gain. They value themselves above all else and at the expense of all others. And things get ugly when you value little outside of yourself.3

Lisa Nowak, for all of her brilliance and expertise, couldn’t handle her own emotions and valued the wrong things. Therefore, she let her emotions drive her off the proverbial cliff, going from outer space to incarcerated space.

Ultimately, we’re always choosing what we value, whether we know it or not. And our emotions will carry out those values through motivating our behavior in some way.

So in order to live the life you truly want to live, you have to first be clear about what you truly value because that’s where your emotional energy will be directed.

And knowing what you truly value—not just what you say you value—is probably the most emotionally intelligent skill you can develop.

https://markmanson.net/emotional-intelligence

A Short Digest of a Long Novel by Budd Shullberg

      A Short Digest of a Long Novel by Budd Shullberg

       Her legs were shapely and firm and when she crossed them and smiled with the self-assurance that always delighted him, he thought she was the only person he knew in the world who was unblemished. Not lifelike but an improvement on life, as a work of art, her delicate features were chiseled from a solid block. The wood-sculpture image came easy to him because her particular shade of blonde always suggested maple polished to a golden grain. As it had been from the moment he stood in awe and amazement in front of the glass window where she was first exhibited, the sight of her made him philosophical. Some of us appear in beautiful colors, too, or with beautiful grains, but we develop imperfections. Inspect us very closely and you find we're damaged by the elements. Sometimes we're only nicked with cynicism. Sometimes we're cracked with disillusionment. Or we're split with fear.

When she began to speak, he leaned forward, eager for the words that were like good music, profundity expressed in terms that pleased the ear while challenging the mind.

"Everybody likes me," she said. "Absolutely everybody."

It was not that she was conceited. It was simply that she was only three. No one had ever taken her with sweet and whispered promises that turned into morning-after lies, ugly and cold as unwashed dishes from last nights dinner lying in the sink. She had never heard a dictator rock her country to sleep with peaceful lullabies one day and rock it with bombs the next. She was undeceived. Her father ran his hands reverently through her soft yellow hair. She is virgin, he thought, for this is the true virginity, that brief moment in the time of your life before your mind or your body has been defiled by acts of treachery.

It was just before Christmas and she was sitting on her little chair, her lips pressed together in concentration, writing a last-minute letter to Santa Claus. The words were written in some language of her own invention but she obligingly translated as she went along.

Dear Santa, I am a very good girl and everybody likes me. So please don't forget to bring me a set of dishes, a doll that goes to sleep and wakes up again, and a "washing machine. I need the washing machine because Raggedy Ann's dress is so dirty.

After she finished her letter, folded it, and asked him to address it, he tossed her up in the air, caught her and tossed her again, to hear her giggle. "Higher, Daddy, higher," she instructed. His mind embraced her sentimentally: She is a virgin island in a lewd world. She is a winged seed of innocence blown through the wasteland. If only she could root somewhere. If only she could grow like this.

"Let me down, Daddy," she said when she had decided that she had indulged him long enough, "I have to mail my letter to Santa."

"But didn't you see him this afternoon?" he asked. "Didn't you ask for everything you wanted? Mommy said she took you up to meet him and you sat on his lap."

"I just wanted to remind him," she said. "There were so many other children."

He fought down the impulse to laugh, because she was not something to laugh at. And he was obsessed with the idea that to hurt her feelings with laughter was to nick her, to blemish the perfection.

"Daddy can't catch me-ee," she sang out, and the old chase was on, following the pattern that had become so familiar to them, the same wild shrieks and the same scream of pretended anguish at the inevitable result. Two laps around the dining-room table was the established course before he caught her in the kitchen. He swung her up from the floor and set her down on the kitchen table. She stood on the edge, poised confidently for another of their games. But this was no panting, giggling game like tag or hide-and-seek. This game was ceremonial. The table was several feet higher than she was. "Jump, jump, and Daddy will catch you," he would challenge. They would count together, one, two, and on three she would leap out into the air. He would not even hold out his arms to her until the last possible moment but he would always catch her. They had played the game for more than a year and the experience never failed to exhilarate them. You see, I am always here to catch you when you are falling, it said to them, and each time she jumped, her confidence increased and their bond deepened.

They were going through the ceremony when the woman next door came in with her five-year-old son, Billy. "Hello, Mr. Steevers," she said. "Would you mind if I left Bill with you for an hour while I do my marketing?"

"No, of course not, glad to have him," he said and he mussed Billy's hair playfully. "How's the boy, Billy?"

But his heart wasn't in it. This was the only afternoon of the week with her and he resented the intrusion. And then too, he was convinced that Billy was going to grow up into the type of man for whom he had a particular resentment. A sturdy, good-looking boy, big for his age, aggressively unchildlike, a malicious, arrogant, insensitive extrovert. I can just see him drunk and red-faced and pulling up girls' dresses at Legion Conventions, Mr. Steevers would think. And the worst of it was, his daughter seemed blind to Billy's faults. The moment she saw him she forgot about their game.

"Hello, Billy-Boy," she called and ran over to hug him.

"I want a cookie," said Billy.

"Oh, yes, a cookie; some animal crackers, Daddy."

She had her hostess face on and as he went into the pantry, he could hear the treble of her musical laughter against the premature baritone of Billy's guffaws.

He swung open the pantry door with the animal crackers in his hand just in time to see it. She was poised on the edge of the table. Billy was standing below her, as he had seen her father do. "Jump and I'll catch you," he was saying.

Smiling, confident and unblemished, she jumped. But no hands reached out to break her flight. With a cynical grin on his face, Billy stepped back and watched her fall.

Watching from the doorway, her father felt the horror that possessed him the time he saw a parachutist smashed like a bug on a windshield when his chute failed to open. She was lying there, crying, not so much in pain as in disillusionment. He ran forward to pick her up and he would never forget the expression on her face, the new expression, unchildlike, unvirginal, embittered.

"I hate you, I hate you," she was screaming at Billy through hysterical sobs.

Well, now she knows, thought her father, the facts of life. Now she's one of us. Now she knows treachery and fear. Now she must learn to replace innocence with courage.

She was still bawling. He knew these tears were as natural and as necessary as those she shed at birth, but that could not overcome entirely the heavy sadness that enveloped him. Finally, when he spoke, he said, a little more harshly than he had intended, "Now, now, stop crying. Stand up and act like a big girl. A little fall like that can't hurt you."

Task 1. Read the text. 

Task 2. Write out and translate the words in bold.

Task 3. Write 5 questions to discuss the plot. 

Task 4. Find information about the author. 

Task 5. Write a summary.

Prezi for A SHORT DIGEST OF A LONG NOVEl

Go through this link to watch the presentation of the story A short digest of a long story by Budd Schullberg 

https://prezi.com/rnxqho3g4brr/a-short-digest-of-a-long-novel-written/