Tribes

We all want to be accepted.

It is just that, we all want to be accepted by different people, for different reasons.

When we grow up, we want to make our family proud of us. This is something that we share with most mammals. The kids in the litter defer to the adults.

What makes humans different is our ability to grow up and develop a want to make us proud of ourselves.

Some of us get it rather early. Some of us reach that stage in our early to late adulthood, even during our twilight years. Some of us completely miss the urge.

We all live our lives out differently as a result. We develop our own tribes and customs to identify and commune with those who think our way is right. In that process, may of us have no problem in turning away from the tribe that we are born into and finding groups where we belong.

And therein lies the essence of all advertising and marketing. It is about making me want to belong to a tribe that I want an admission ticket to. It is also about making stronger bonds within the tribes that I love.

So sell to me - sell to me my identity; sell to me my aspiration - if you will not, I will not buy your product.

Waiting

It funny that often we spend our lives waiting, among other things.

We wait for shows to air. We wait for work to start and end. We wait for weekends to be here and we wait for decisions to be made.

In summer we wait for autumn, and when autumn invariably moves to winter, we look forward to the spring.

Sometimes it is possible to speed things up, but mostly, the best things in life cannot be hurried, and hence we wait.

And we wait for the day when all waiting will be over.

Miss K and random thoughts

Today was a great day. I met with my friends - Miss K and her mom.

Miss K is all of four years old. She speaks Finnish and Albanian. Her knowledge of English consists of 'Let's go', used creatively. So we talk to each other in English (me) and Albanian or Finnish (her). That however never stops us from having a good time dancing, modelling and singing ( all by her ) with enthusiastic cheering and shopping ( me and her mom).

That was not the first time, when communication happened without knowing the language. I had gone to E's home to spend Christmas one year, and her mom in all her Polish goodness made me put on 3 Kgs in my bones with some of the most amazing carnivoral spread I have ever had. She chatted away with me in Polish, I reciprocated by piling food high in my plate.

There are so many times when you are happy that you have the right words and know exactly what to tell them. But even for the times that we do not know what to say or when to say it, we get by quite well.