Don’t let yourself be used and walked on. If you’re feeling upset over something, tell the person. It’s important to communicate your feelings! Your feelings are not a burden! Your feelings matter! They are valid and talking about them openly is perfectly healthy.
“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how you love. There is courage in that.”
— Bianca Sparacino How To Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing That You Are)
getting overly defensive of your favourite historical / literary / classical figure
suddenly remembering how much knowledge there is to acquire and getting stressed about the overwhelming amount of stuff you don’t know
roman numerals: you either love them or you hate them
when your teacher is obsessed with one bit of the course and teaches you that for weeks then breezes over the rest
anachronisms
you’ve listened to so many in our times that melvyn bragg is basically your internal monologue
waking up in the morning with a desire to know everything about one specific thing that’s totally unrelated to everything you’re studying
‘ooo i know this word!’ she did not know that word
muddling up the actual history, the fictionalised versions of the actual history, and the fanfictionalised versions of the fictionalised versions of the actual history
‘what can this cartoon / movie / song / art tell us about x’
history students are over prepared for politics and classics students are over prepared for english lit
reading aloud in terrible accents in english lit
j s t o r
Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. When I say “romantic,” I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn’t know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, that can mean vast things. That mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song. -
Jeff Buckley
Detail: La Lutte de Jacob (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). By Léon Bonnat, 1876
why do there have to be beauty standards
every so often the spirit of a sapphic classics professor at oxford consumes me… and today is that day: no bra, a half-buttoned, loose shirt tucked into a pair of tweed trousers, spectacles and dark maenad curls… sprawled on the lawn with the iliad, writing fragmented poetry, dreaming of sapphic love and murder mysteries …