You are the collector in the gallery of your life. You collect. You might not mean to but you do. One out of three people collects tangible things such as cats, photos and noisy toys.

    These are among some 40 collections that are being shown at “The Museum Of”—the first of several new museums which, over the next two years, will exhibit the objects accumulated（积累）by unknown collectors. In doing so, they will promote（推动）a popular culture of museums, not what museums normally represent(代表).

    Some of the collections are fairly common—records, model houses. Others are strangely beautiful—branches that have fallen from tree, for example. But they all reveal （显露）a lot of things: ask someone what they collect and their answers will tell you who they are.

    Others on the way include “The museum of Collectors” and “The Museum of Me.” These new ones, it is hoped, will build on the success of “The Museum Of.” The thinkers behind the project want to explore why people collect, and what it means to do so. They hope that visitors who may not have considered themselves collectors will begin to see they, too, collect.

    Some collectors say they started or stopped making collections at important points: the beginning or end of adolescence ( 青春期 )—“it's a growing-up thing; you stop when you grow up,” says one. Other painful times are mentioned, such as the end of a relationship.

    My school stood in a big square playground in southeastern South Dakota. One teacher taught all grades, first through eighth. Most grades had only two or three students.

    Our school day started with the flag pledge(宣誓). Then the teacher called one grade at a time to the recitation bench beside her desk. She'd check our work, explain the new lesson, and dismiss us to go back to our own desks and do our new work, all in less than ten minutes per grade.

    At noon we ate lunches we had brought. Our lunches consisted of homemade sandwiches and if we were lucky, dessert. My favorite dessert was a fresh pear, and a piece of Mom's delicious sour cream chocolate cake.

    The annual Christmas program was the most exciting part of the year. We hurried through our lessons during December to allow time to practise poems, songs, and plays.

    A few days before the performance, the school board members borrowed equipment from the town and set up a stage across one side of the classroom. We hung bed sheets for curtains.

    On the evening of the performance, petrol lanterns hanging along the walls cast a warm, though not very bright, light over the gathering crowd. We could hardly contain our excitement as we looked from behind the curtains to wave at our parents.

    On a spring Sunday in a new term, just before the last day of the school term, everyone in the neighborhood gathered for a picnic. Our moms set fried chicken, bowls of salads, and desserts on the teacher's desk and the library table. After the dinner, we played games. One of the school board members brought big buckets of ice cream in the afternoon to top off the picnic. How we looked forward to that treat!

    I was just nineteen years old when I started my first teaching position in a country school with thirteen students. I felt excited, nervous and happy as I prepared my lunch bucket the first morning of the term. I can't remember what kind of sandwiches I packed, but I do remember I put in a fresh pear and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert!

    French writer Frantz Fanon once said: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

     More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the online Oxford Dictionary, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today's changing world.

    After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is “clicktivism”, a compound of “click” and “activism”. It refers to “armchair activists” — people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smartphone. And “otherize” is a verb for “other” that means to alienate (使疏远) people who are different from ourselves — whether that be different skin color, religious belief or sexuality.

    Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, “fitspiration” — a compound of fit and inspiration — refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy.

    The phrase “climate refugee” — someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change — reflects people's concern for the environment.

    According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions. “People feel much freer to coin their own words these days,” he said.

    But still, not all newly-invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream (主流的) dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries head of content development, suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive (有表现力的) and meaningful, but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

    Freelancer.com is the world's largest freelancing and crowd sourcing marketplace by a number of users and projects. We connect over 29,613,376 employers and freelancers (自由职业者) globally from over 247 countries. Through our marketplace, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software development, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering, the sciences, sales and marketing, accounting and legal services.

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    Last April, on a Sunday, we took one of our “nowhere” drives. My husband was quietly driving along a back road. I was occupied in the front passenger seat watching the scenery.

    I noticed out of the corner of my eye that my husband was struggling to look out of my window. This frightened me, since his eyes should be on the road in front of him. I asked him what he was looking at out of the windows, and he quietly replied, “Nothing.”

    After a few minutes, I looked over at my husband and noticed a tear running down his cheek. I asked him what was wrong. This time he told me, “I was just thinking about Pop and a story he had once told.” It had something to do with Pop, his friend from childhood, and I wanted to know the story, so I asked him to share it with me.

    He said, “When I was about 8 years old, Pop and I were out fishing and he told me that the pine trees know when it is Easter.”

    I had no idea what he meant by that, so I pressed him for more information.

    He continued on… “The pine trees start their new growth in the weeks before Easter because spring is drawing near. If you look at the tops of the pine trees, you will see the yellow shoots(嫩芽). As the days get closer to Easter Sunday, the tallest shoot will branch off and form a cross. By the time Easter Sunday comes around, you will see that most of the pine trees will have small yellow crosses on all of the tallest shoots.”

    I turned to look out of the window and I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a week before Easter, and you could see all of the trees with the tall yellow shoots stretching to the sky.

    The tallest ones shone in the sunlight like rows of tiny golden crosses. May you find your Easter season filled with beautiful golden crosses!

    Memory, they say, is a matter of practice and exercise. If you have the wish and really make a conscious(自觉的) effort, then you can quite easily improve your ability to remember things. But even if you are successful, there are times when your memory seems to play tricks on you.

    Sometimes you remember things that really did not happen. One morning last week, for example, I got up and found that I had left the front door unlocked all night, yet I clearly remember locking it carefully the night before.

    Memory "tricks" work the other way as well. Once in a while you remember not doing something, and then find out that you did. One day last month, for example, I was sitting in a barber shop waiting for my turn to get a haircut, and suddenly I realized that I had got a haircut two days before at the barber shop across the street from my office.

    We always seem to find something funny and amusing in incidents caused by people's forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. Stories about absent-minded professors have been told for years, and we never get tired of hearing new ones. Unfortunately, however, absent-mindedness is not always funny. There are times when "tricks" of our memory can cause us great trouble.