peachesandbee

[peachesandbee]

On this day (28 March) in 1941, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with rocks and walked into the River Ouse near her home. She left this suicide/love letter for her husband Leonard. Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

[peachesandbee]

Game night with Harbour

[peachesandbee]

Can’t wait to play face to face again

[peachesandbee]

394 days

It’s been 394 days since lockdown and I feel so tired. I haven’t exercised, gone out, or done anything physically taxing, but the current state of the world, specifically my country is making me go mad

[peachesandbee]

[peachesandbee]

03/31/2020

I am slowly

accepting the conclusion

that maybe, maybe

I don’t know myself after all this time

[peachesandbee]

— MARGARET ATWOOD, from “A Sad Child”

[peachesandbee]

How to Study Like a Harvard Student

Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother

Preliminary Steps 1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you. 2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24. General Principles 3. Study less, but study better. 4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs. 5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 6. Write it down. 7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done. Plan of Attack Phase I: Class 8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run. 9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something. Phase II: Study Time 10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair. 11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.” 12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done. 13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t. Phase III: Assignments 14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead. 15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady. 16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes. 17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on. 18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything. Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week) 20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe. 21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet. 22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom. 23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor. 24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad. 25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point. Phase V: Exam Day 26. Crush exam. Get A.

[peachesandbee]

Read more here:

[peachesandbee]

TED: What makes something "Kafkaesque"?

Notes from the video:

- describe unnecessary complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate bureaucracy

- many of his characters are office workers compelled to struggle through a web of obstacles, but it turns out that the ordeal is so illogical that success is moot.

[peachesandbee]

Sara Tasker

[peachesandbee]

http://www.ijreview.com/2016/01/524662-real-estate-agent-shares-family-secret-to-keeping-burglars-at-bay/?author=kbn&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=owned&utm_campaign=life&utm_term=ijamerica

[peachesandbee]

showing up late to a meeting with an iced drink is a power move. like with hot drinks the cup is opaque and people cant tell the temperature so they dont know how long ago you got it. maybe its hours old. maybe you just got caught in traffic. who can say. but iced drinks. its clear. they can see the ice. they can see if its still frozen. they look you in the eye and they know you were standing in line fifteen minutes ago and made the conscious, deliberate decision to get a mocha frap instead of being on time. and then you made ANOTHER conscious, deliberate decision to bring it into the meeting with you, informing everyone in attendance that on your list of priorities, each and every one of them ranks firmly below one (1) mocha frappuchino.

[peachesandbee]

god, do you know lucky i feel to have you in my life?

[peachesandbee]

the iliad + the odyssey = the idiocy 

[peachesandbee]

“Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks  barbed and drawing blood with their caress.”

The Hunger Moon; My mother’s body, Marge Piercy 

[peachesandbee]

family feud is a national treasure