There seem to be a few paths, but if I were you I would stick to the ones expounded by the true spiritual geniuses of our species- Jesus and the Buddha. Maybe Mohammed- I don't know enough to say one way or the other.
I don't know how. But one way I can think of is to not make any long-term plans.
All your plans and goals can be achieved in one day. You finish the day reaching your goals. You wake up next day, find yourself alive, you make new goals for that day only.
Yeah I agree with this. I seem to have reached a point in life where I don't really think about the past and future often, but I wouldn't say I've quite reached enlightenment yet.
"Live every day like it's your last. That's what they tell you, right? Yeah. What they don't tell you is what to do when it gets to tomorrow and you're not dead yet. You got bills to pay...." - Doug Stanhope.
Me too. I didn't notice the "translate" in the URL, and just thought it was written by a non-native English speaker. I did a double take at the end when I realized it was translated. Does Google do a particularly good job on French to English? (Bigger training corpus?) I more often used it on Chinese or Japanese, and it didn't seem as good.
The source material is written in a rather simple and direct way. Short sentences, very specific words. It may make things easier for Google to translate. Very well written anyway.
French to English generally works rather well because they have similar sentence structure (except for inverted adjectival order) and neither has a lot of long-distance dependency stuff. Even Systran kicks ass on French to English.
Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things very differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.
"then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it."
That's basically the M.O. of all completely automated systems though. Especially when concerning non-trivial things like language translation. Stuff like that requires intelligence in many cases to choose the right word based on the context and information the speaker is trying to communicate.
French grammar is very similar to the English's one.
A text translated "word for word" to English from French, using the later grammar, will almost look readable. Strange but not really wrong.
Most errors will be from an over-usage of perfect tenses ("I have visited" vs "I visited") and wrong superlatives ("most fast" vs "fastest"), as these are the biggest differences between the two languages.
Total idle speculation, but a while back I read about how google uses statistical algorithms to do their translations instead of using the more traditional machine translation methods. They do this by running the stats on sets of identical documents that are available in multiple languages. Given that French is the other established major international language, I suspect there is an exceptionally good corpus of text to use from international organizations like the UN. I would also suspect Canada has a huge number of documents in both English and French as well.
Definitely: the EU, in particular, seems to be pretty inventive in their use of English, coming up with new words, novel grammatical constructions, and novel meanings for old words, and since so many of the documents are written by non-native English speakers, this inventions end up being assumed correct by other bureaucrats and re-used in subsequent writing, such that the EU has developed its own weird English pseudo-dialect. See: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4620
Not all - the main three languages are English, German, and French (IIRC the Italian government just won a court case of some sort because they claimed this was discriminatory against its citizen, especially when it comes to posting job vacancies)
Possibly, but also consider that English and French are very close. English vocabulary is largely lifted from French (there's the well known statement ascribed to Alexandre Dumas - that English is just badly pronounced French), and while there are some differences in sentence structure, they are fairly basic when you are mostly writing in present tense like here.
His post is written in very clear, straightforward French with few or no fancy flourishes that might complicate the translation. My French is decidedly not the best, and I have no problem reading the original at a decent tempo - there's the odd word missing from my vocabulary that I had to figure out, but that's it.
Native French here, the original is beautifully written and the Google translation does not do justice to this (and sometimes even obscures the meaning). I would presume that people reading the original are more touched by what is said (be it true or fake) just because of the quality of the writing.
While what you're saying might be true, you are missing the point OP made. He isn't saying the translated text is well written, he is saying google translate has really improved to the point of producing readable text.
Of course you lose a lot of the original's quality, but at least you can understand what you read.
I think you are completely reasonable. Exceptional claims requires exceptional proof, and this blog only has a claim and no proof. I don't see any reason to believe it.
One would think that if you are taking the time to write something like this in your last 30 days of life, you would do what you can so it wasn't just dismissed as fake since it would have meant that you have wasted some of the last time on Earth.
I can't think of any better circumstance than knowing your living days are a numbered few, to absolutely not give a damn about what other people think. There are many therapeutic reasons to write a blog/journal during this time that are not diminished by worrying about skeptics.
That's really bleak. I wonder what kind of disease can kill you in 30 days but otherwise leave you well enough to write and travel? It doesn't sound like he has a history of anything. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing and could hazard a guess?
He writes that his wife is worried for his liver (Day 3, I think). Maybe he has Hepatitis C?
Edit: Well, this shows that I'm not a doctor. I have no idea if Hepatitis C can kill as quickly as this. Maybe he was diagnosed very late and his malady already is at its final stage?
It reads to me as a dark joke by repeating a common caution that is now completely irrelevant. Note the "Je ris" ("I laughed" for the non-French speakers) immediately afterwards. I'm presuming that's what kome think you missed.
Yeah, I totally missed the sarcastic tone. I just thought she was making the joke on his actual illness, not the possibility of having another illness due to wine abuse.
Cancer can kill quickly but doctors rarely give specific timelines, at least in the US. "30 days" seems suspicious, if only because most doctors hate giving specific amounts of time. (If the person lives half as long, then the family gets angry because they thought there was more time. If the person lives much longer-- sometimes an order of magnitude more, given the complexities of misdiagnosis, new treatments, etc.-- then there's a different kind of blowback.)
I would guess that it's metastatic cancer. Mentioning the liver is an indication. Once the liver's involved, cancer gets very hard to treat. Typical chemotherapy is killing the cancer by flooding the body with poison, and doing that when the liver's compromised is often fruitless (and painful).
Most likely, the doctors have stopped treatment, in which case 30 days is a reasonable median, but he'll be essentially functional until the last 2 weeks. However, there are cases (although they're quite rare) of people living for months or even years after that happens. Spontaneous remission is uncommon (less than 1%) but it does occur. That's yet another reason why doctors don't like giving specific timelines.
One of my family members has just discovered he has pancreatic cancer. It usually has an extremely poor prognosis because it is often caught too late and the disease has already spread to other organs. 1 year survival rate is 25%.
If true my educated guess for the disease would be a form of leukemia, although in its acute form is unlikely that the affected are left well enough to travel.
That is an interesting parting phrase. I suppose on that level where he's coming to grips with only have 30 days, he must be rationalizing that today is the first of those, and that he'll at least get the 30... Heavy.
I can't even imagine the understanding of my own mortality where I could say "See you tomorrow... Maybe." and actually mean it.
You read the post and feel pretty bad. You load the comments. You see what the top comments are about and it dawns on you - this is why engineers are stereotyped as being emotionless robots.
Or people sick of some PR firm's bullshit stunts, jerking people around for a few more follower or clicks. When things don't add up, we take notice rather than just wishing it to the way it ought to be.
It may very well be that the story is true. But when you see obvious giveaways, not only is it valid to doubt what is written but in my opinion a damn public service. I felt sad after reading the post, reflecting on my own mortality, and fleeting times. Then I felt sadder that some A-Hole may be deliberately trying to manipulate negative emotions. Perhaps nothing is off limits.
Ah! Taken in context your comment makes more sense. I must admit that while reading the post, my first feeling was of sorrow, but as someone fascinated with technology, I was also thinking a little about someone who speaks a different language being able to communicate their innermost thoughts with people half way around the world.
While posting a comment, stating the story is sad, might be redundant. But, posting a comment about some silver lining might be a common response. My siblings and I laughed at some of the funny events about my dad did while transporting his body to the cemetery. The feeling of grief was overwhelming and that was a coping mechanism.
That being said, given the level of info that was passed on, one might be more enamored by the blog and twitter and translate, as they try to cope with the terror or death. Smells a lot to me like PR company BS. While I suspected it when reading the post, looking thru the HN comments showed that my suspicions weren't unfounded.
I feel like this is perhaps fake. The first post read well to me, seemed reasonable, at least the first time through. The second post, about the job, is what gave me suspicion.
The way he quits, the feeling of "liberation", it borders on sociopathic in some ways. Pretending you're going on holiday when in reality you're going to die, who has time for such games when they've got a 30 day timer running.
It reads like a movie, not like my experience with reality.
Agree, the second post is a giveaway - plus some words French professionals don't use such as "plan pension". Same for the thord. The first post is really good though.
Seems that they use "pension" more than we french, but still the expression seems "plan de pension"
http://www.fonds127.be/index.php?id=25&L=1
Makes more sens than french canadian though.
plan pension doesn't mean anything in french, at all. Plan "de" pension would (maybe) means something like retirement pension plan, but i've never heard anyone say that here. Since it's used twice in the text, it's not a typo. So maybe the author is canadian (they tend to mix english with french differently than in France)..
It does looks very fake. The engineer says he is also a hobbyist writer, so maybe he has a taste for romanticism, but i think it is way too much stylized to be a real testimony. It definitely reads like what contemporary french author writes.
I also thought it could be canadian, but there's no other sign of French-canadian expression in the text.
The french term would be "retraite", or "retraite complémentaire" and there's few companies that give pension packages except for top executives. Seems at lost with the experience of a true white collar.
I've live in France and in Quebec for a good portion of my life. Couldn't the "plan pension" be a contraction like "plan cul"? I agree that "plan retraite" would sound more French and "plan pension" would sound more North American French but it doesn't sound like an anglicism to me and the rest of the tone is clearly not North American French to me.
Isn't it presumptuous to say that this isn't a 'normal' reaction? I have no idea what a normal reaction to being told you have 30 days to live is.
Even if you have seen real (non-movie) instances of this, I would assume different people would have different reactions.
These come up every day on reddit, and almost all of them turn out to be fake. There was a guy about two weeks ago that claimed to have Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer at age 24. He got thousands of upvotes, got a celebrity from the band Blink 182 to tweet to him, etc. Exposed as fake because he used someone's actual identity he found on Google who did not have cancer.
This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:
>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.
Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.
These two lines are interesting though:
>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.
>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.
Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.
EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.
Well, how do you know that the person in question is average?
At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...
Research on aging is making significant progress. We will know things in 20 years that we can't imagine now. Therefore, a 58 should expect to live past 100 if he or she is in good health now.
Well, if we take historical trends as any kind of indication, not quite. E.g. according to Google's life expectancy charts, if we take the period 1992 - 2012 (20 years), and take 3 good, developed countries (USA, UK, Canada), life expectancy has gone from mid 70s to low 80s in that period. On average, about 1.9 years added every decade, and that would lead us to something like 84 years by 2032. The very high numbers we're used to hearing are fairly wild extrapolations of this trend for the next 90 or so years, for newborns today.
Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.
* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.
Life expectancy changes with age -- a 60yr old man should live to 81, a 70yr old man should live to 86.
This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.
This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.
There's one thing missing from your analysis: the life expectancies calculated this way include all deaths; someone who is 58 has managed to avoid some pretty dangerous parts of life, for example:
1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US.
2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.
Most of the advances in life expectancy were achieved by reducing infant mortality. In Miedeval Britain average life expectancy was 30. Very misleading though. If you made it to adulthood your life expectancy was 64.
I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?
Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.
You're right about life expectancy statistics, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about research into aging.
"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"
I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.
According to that, a 58 ear old male in 2009 can expect to live to 80. That link represents the best information we have available today. Could there be some miracle cure for aging in the next 20 years? Probably not but maybe. Will it help the person who is 78 when it is discovered? Almost definitely not - the aging damage has been done!
I read the original and his style is impressionistic where he'll readily exaggerate something for effect. I'm French from France and these exaggerations put me in trouble here in Quebec where people are way more literal.
I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."
I live in Quebec and I'm not that literal. In fact your first example is funny because I just realized that I always say "steal" when I want to borrow something.
I heard that idiom in English just a few days ago. One friend asked another, "Can I steal that book for a minute?" The other replied, "Yes, let me just hide it first." It stuck in my mind because I don't think I've heard that usage of "steal" very often, or that degree of quick-wittedness among my friends!
I think there's an easy answer. He's heard of people living to 100. He's human, thus overly optimistic, and assumes he'll live until 100. I don't think that can be called a lie. Just a flaw in human logic.
I think most of your clues are inconclusive, but I don't care one way or another. I'm just going to sit back, relax and hope that the emotions I feel from this blog are less real than the actual blog. Because that is what a story is, and one way or another this man is telling a story.
One of his first tweets says how it's funny that Twitter only recommend journalists to follow. He clearly is a new user, as he had his son set it up for him.
Just saying that it is strange. When I set up twitter for my mother (about the same age as this guy) the first thing that I did was show her how to follow somebody, and that person was me. Why doesn't he follow his son, or anybody else other than journalists? It just seems off imo.
Probably, because he said that he doesn't want to go into his family details. He wants to keep his identity secret. Also the fact that he didn't tell his company about his illness would be a justification.
I'm a French native and I read the original 3 posts. If this is fake, which is a possibility, it still reads beautifully. Clearly the person who is writing this put a lot of thought into the idea he's expressing and for the record he does sound like a reasonably smart mid-to-upper management type he states he is.
i'll assume it's fake. We dont know who the guy is, no name no address , nothing. i could come up with the same stuff ( i'm french).
IF you cant verify an information , assume it is fake.
This is going to be revealed as a "public art piece" in about 45 days, with commentary on the morbidity of the media outlets that picked up on the story.
If you are told you have 30 days to live, you're much more likely to die tomorrow than someone expected to live another 60 years. The 30 days isn't an exact number, it's a guess, and whatever's expected to kill you in around 30 days might take a turn for the worse at any time. My grandmother died the day after the doctors said she had a few months to live.
Why would the author waste time posting about the things he is doing? I hardly speak for everyone, but I would be using that time to for a bucket list, visiting friends, and other personal things that needed to be done.
<Well, I think my son must have created and configured the blog.
I wonder about all this talk and arguing back and forth over whether "it's a fake".
What this man is expressing is real. I can confirm it is real, because as a human I can feel many of the same things, as I read it. Whether he will die in 30 days or not, we don't know. And you can, of course, argue about that all day long. You might even be quite put out if he does not. But whether he is having these thoughts and feelings because he is about to die, or whether he is simply exploring these thoughts and feelings because he is a human (and facing death like us all), they are no less real. You may call one fiction because the man does not die on cue, but after reading it, I say it is not fake.
Well said. Joseph Gordon Levitt isn't actually facing death in the movie 50/50, but I can assure you the anxieties expressed in that movie touch me profoundly.
I can't tell whether this is a fake or not. But ever since calling the one about the one night stand woman in Denmark that wanted to contact the father of her baby I've had a healthy dose of unbelief for anything that goes viral and that involves some personal tragedy.
Another couple of those and real people with real problems or calls for help will find it impossible to be heard.
If this is real I hope he makes the most of whatever time he's got left.
119 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadhttp://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...
All your plans and goals can be achieved in one day. You finish the day reaching your goals. You wake up next day, find yourself alive, you make new goals for that day only.
Rinse. Repeat.
For example, see http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan... and http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan...
Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things very differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.
That's basically the M.O. of all completely automated systems though. Especially when concerning non-trivial things like language translation. Stuff like that requires intelligence in many cases to choose the right word based on the context and information the speaker is trying to communicate.
A text translated "word for word" to English from French, using the later grammar, will almost look readable. Strange but not really wrong.
Most errors will be from an over-usage of perfect tenses ("I have visited" vs "I visited") and wrong superlatives ("most fast" vs "fastest"), as these are the biggest differences between the two languages.
His post is written in very clear, straightforward French with few or no fancy flourishes that might complicate the translation. My French is decidedly not the best, and I have no problem reading the original at a decent tempo - there's the odd word missing from my vocabulary that I had to figure out, but that's it.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...)
Of course you lose a lot of the original's quality, but at least you can understand what you read.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...
Many wonder if fake. Not much evidence pointing one way or the other.
But I guess almost twenty year of Internet can make you a bit over-suspicious :)
It's an interesting writing and life experience in any case !
Edit: Well, this shows that I'm not a doctor. I have no idea if Hepatitis C can kill as quickly as this. Maybe he was diagnosed very late and his malady already is at its final stage?
lol no! you lost something in translation...
Such sentence is very common in my (Belgian) entourage.
This is also why he adds he is smiling.
I would guess that it's metastatic cancer. Mentioning the liver is an indication. Once the liver's involved, cancer gets very hard to treat. Typical chemotherapy is killing the cancer by flooding the body with poison, and doing that when the liver's compromised is often fruitless (and painful).
Most likely, the doctors have stopped treatment, in which case 30 days is a reasonable median, but he'll be essentially functional until the last 2 weeks. However, there are cases (although they're quite rare) of people living for months or even years after that happens. Spontaneous remission is uncommon (less than 1%) but it does occur. That's yet another reason why doctors don't like giving specific timelines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_cancer
I can't even imagine the understanding of my own mortality where I could say "See you tomorrow... Maybe." and actually mean it.
A form of self mockery.
It may very well be that the story is true. But when you see obvious giveaways, not only is it valid to doubt what is written but in my opinion a damn public service. I felt sad after reading the post, reflecting on my own mortality, and fleeting times. Then I felt sadder that some A-Hole may be deliberately trying to manipulate negative emotions. Perhaps nothing is off limits.
While posting a comment, stating the story is sad, might be redundant. But, posting a comment about some silver lining might be a common response. My siblings and I laughed at some of the funny events about my dad did while transporting his body to the cemetery. The feeling of grief was overwhelming and that was a coping mechanism.
That being said, given the level of info that was passed on, one might be more enamored by the blog and twitter and translate, as they try to cope with the terror or death. Smells a lot to me like PR company BS. While I suspected it when reading the post, looking thru the HN comments showed that my suspicions weren't unfounded.
The way he quits, the feeling of "liberation", it borders on sociopathic in some ways. Pretending you're going on holiday when in reality you're going to die, who has time for such games when they've got a 30 day timer running.
It reads like a movie, not like my experience with reality.
(plan pension is a literal translation from dutch: pensioen plan)
It does looks very fake. The engineer says he is also a hobbyist writer, so maybe he has a taste for romanticism, but i think it is way too much stylized to be a real testimony. It definitely reads like what contemporary french author writes.
This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:
>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.
Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.
These two lines are interesting though:
>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.
>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.
Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.
EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...
Source: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...
Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.
* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.
This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.
This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.
1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US. 2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.
That being said, this histogram (logarithmic scale) suggests that one's odds of living to 100 are still somewhat low: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/number.jpg
I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?
Source for historic life expectancy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.
"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"
I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
According to that, a 58 ear old male in 2009 can expect to live to 80. That link represents the best information we have available today. Could there be some miracle cure for aging in the next 20 years? Probably not but maybe. Will it help the person who is 78 when it is discovered? Almost definitely not - the aging damage has been done!
I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."
I think most of your clues are inconclusive, but I don't care one way or another. I'm just going to sit back, relax and hope that the emotions I feel from this blog are less real than the actual blog. Because that is what a story is, and one way or another this man is telling a story.
Hey, you forget how health care is so great in France :p
You had much experience of being told you have 30 days to live?
[Edit] Link to twitter https://twitter.com/uncondamne/following
>Mon fils me montre comrent tweeter depuis mon téléphone. Tweeter me suggère de suivre plein de journalistes. Amusant!
>My son shows me how to use tweeter from my phone. Tweeter suggests me to follow a lot of journalists. Funny !
I think I'd like to travel. Not sure.
<Well, I think my son must have created and configured the blog.
He is an engineer and he isn't sure?
What this man is expressing is real. I can confirm it is real, because as a human I can feel many of the same things, as I read it. Whether he will die in 30 days or not, we don't know. And you can, of course, argue about that all day long. You might even be quite put out if he does not. But whether he is having these thoughts and feelings because he is about to die, or whether he is simply exploring these thoughts and feelings because he is a human (and facing death like us all), they are no less real. You may call one fiction because the man does not die on cue, but after reading it, I say it is not fake.
Another couple of those and real people with real problems or calls for help will find it impossible to be heard.
If this is real I hope he makes the most of whatever time he's got left.
If it's not fake, I hope he keeps up like this until the inevitable.
Ah, and before I forget, he's certainly right with a lot of things, fake or not.