🐱 Studio Ghibli + Cats 🐈

sad, sad day.

An active social life is the food of every day.

dear gods just imagine the stories of women in a dark academia setting. 

women with squared off shoulders that strut down the hallways as if they have the whole world at their hands. women playing the male roles in the plays. women adjusting their jacket before storming off. women gently putting on red lipstick with a bloodied hand. women with hunched shoulders and dark eyes frantically reading a book, because they cant get enough of it. women with a secret just poised on their lips if the perfect arch. women with messy hair and disheveled looks stumbling into class. women seducing everyone around them with their raspy voices. women having everyone’s attention with their soft voices. women knowing how to handle blood. women knowing how the plan things perfectly. women reciting poetry over a fresh grave. women with their arms linked running across campus, their laughs rising above the quiet of the night. women tasting like strawberry wine and the faintest hint of whisky. women helping women when things go wrong. just women in the dark academia genre where they aren’t used as the lust interest in the room. 

towards a gentle academic

be up front and honest about the things you do not know

acknowledge the intrinsic value of others’ knowledge bases, even if they do not seem important to you from your institutional context

do not feign mastery where you have none

respect the gaps in others’ knowledge bases

be generous, not only with others

but also with yourself

you overwork yourself at the risk of legitimizing a culture of overwork 

privilege voices and perspectives that have historically been left out of the academy

nothing is ever neutral or apolitical

support the progress of other scholars

collaboration over competition

“I have always felt that mathematics is a language like music. To learn it systematically, it is necessary to master small pieces and gradually add another piece and then another. In a sense, mathematics is like the classical Chinese language—very polished and very elegant. Sitting in a good mathematics lecture is like sitting in good opera. Everything comes together.”

— Sun-Yung Alice Chang

i have the complexion of a sickly victorian child, the disposable income of a 10th century serf, and the fashion sense and eccentric personality of a professor of the arts in the 1920s who does a lot of cocaine

Eau Claire Leader, Wisconsin, January 30, 1915

Franny Choi, Soft Science