Sleep Hygiene

not my typical academic study content, but I have my grade 5 cello exam next Tuesday, so in five days time, and I am planning to do 50 minutes of music practice everyday between now and then. will update as we go!

physically go to your local library at least once. seriously.

look around. find a random book with a cover that catches your attention. read the description. read the first page. if you like the sounds of it, borrow it and take it home to read. borrow a handful of books even.

if a book loses your interest, drop it. if a book grips onto you, ride that wave.

i've struggled to read recreationally for years despite having read so much as a kid. a lot of us are frozen by the seemingly infinite choices. even when we buy books to take home, we don't read them because which book is worth reading first? we don't have to decide, we have it right here in our bookshelves, we have an eternity of never deciding.

in this past month, i have read five books, most of them i've never heard of when i spotted their cover at the library. most of them, i've ended up loving. the due date of library books maintains the ability to read a book so i can return them to the library and leave the library with more books. an even better incentive than borrowing ebooks, because i actually have to leave the house and not be a hermit.

so if you used to enjoy reading but struggle with it now, ignore the book recs you hear. go to the library, come across a book that piques your interest, and read one page after another until you either lose interest or finish the book.

then it's onto the next one.

the killing of the weeds

we've all been told that they pick the flowers they think are the prettiest

and they do, they pluck the beautiful ones when they are young and they display them for all to see

but hidden away behind this is their treatment of the less beautiful ones

the ivy and and the dandelions - the 'weeds'

a weed is not a specific breed or family of plant, a weed is defined as 'a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants'

a weed is any plant that does not conform

a plant that is wild and unruly and a law unto itself

a plant that challenges the status quo, the norm

a plant that grows in competition, a plant thats non-conformance makes it brighter and bolder and braver

i can tell you what they do with those plants

they rip them out

they try and remove the roots as best as they can, to try and remove any chance of the resilient weed bouncing back up

they pour weed-killers, harsh chemicals designed to destruct

and they do so repeatedly

the forceful and ferocious beating down of those that dare to be different

the killing of the weeds

no one cares about that

they kill the weeds

They need to invent a locking in that is permanent

why I don't use AI for school work, and I don't think you should either

I have been staunchly against using AI for as long as ChatGPT has been a regularly used tool, not necessarily for moral reasons but for arrogant ones. I firmly beleive that I can write a better essay then a malfunctioning robot. My teacher used it to generate photos of scrabble tiles for a wall display, and despite the prompt spelling the words exactly correctly, ChatGPT spelt them wrong. Why would you want to trust a clearly flawed machine with your grades? However recently the sheer amount of people I see at school using AI and supporting the use of AI is so horrifying to me I felt it was something I needed to talk about

Using ChatGPT prevents you from learning properly. Doing things quickly does not equate to doing them well. I understand how difficult it can be to schedule and make time for everything, but using ChatGPT is just like getting someone else to do your work for you. You will not learn! (Most) teachers are not setting difficult homework for the sole purpose of making things hard for you, they set the work to help you learn and to grow resilience.

People are using it for completely stupid tasks, that they could perform far easier without it. For our English Portfolio Essays the SQA requires us to have a certain amount of sources and so many people asked ChatGPT to find them articles. It was ridiculous and slightly horrifying. Have we lost the ability to simply look things up for ourselves? Or to, god forbid, read a real book? Do not use ChatGPT for tasks that could be performed to a higher level if you simply did them yourself! My mother has a friend who marks Advanced Higher Biology Assignments for the SQA, she recently marked one that had 30 references, none of which were right! ChatGPT is not a good tool!

Yes it can save time, but what would you do with the extra time? and surely there are other ways of saving that time. Don't use it to help format emails, there are human made email templates available online, don't use it to help find quotes, you can just search them up yourself on a normal search engine, whatever ChatGPT does for you, there will be an honest hardworking person willing and able to do for you, please go to them instead. If ChatGPT saves you fifteen minutes a day is that really worth it? and if it saves more time then what do you do with that extra time? scroll tiktok? watch netflix? you are not saving time you are wasting your life!

Wikipedia / Image from pinterest / Machiavelli / George Santayana / Thucydides / Image from pinterest / Abba - Waterloo / J. M. Barrie - Peter Pan / Fibonacci spiral / Catherynne M. Valente

last seen 20:47

sometimes i open my phone and i check when he was last online.

i don't ever message, we have nothing to say to each other anymore, we have already said far too much

i just want to know - its a small act of comfort. i picture him checking his phone at clapham junction, or putting his phone away because a lecture is about to start, breifly replying to a text between sets at the gym.

i picture him doing these inane, everyday activities because i don't know anything about his life anymore. i focus on the facts i know irrefutably because the fact that our routines no longer intertwine like smoke kills me.

he always seems to have come offline just minutes before

maybe this means something, something about how we always just miss each other, the timing was never right, tangled miscommunication

'i can't sleep, can i come back in' 'sorry i missed this message, i fell asleep' 'not here, not here, not here'

i sit and i look at his profile picture, and my heart reaction to the last message he sent, and the words 'last seen 20:47' and i imagine i can smell his distinctive scent, like i have entered a room he was in only moments before.

i think i will spend the rest of my life chasing this boy.

babe your suffering is not noble. your self destructive habits do not make you cool. your self loathing does not make you fun to be around. go for a walk. drink some water. wash your hair. i promise you can be happy and loved.

YOUR FATHER’S A BURNING HOUSE

Sue Zhao / Family Tree, Ethel Cain / Unknown / Father, The Front Bottoms / Silver Spoon, Erin Lecount / Unknown / Sarah Kay

i just wanted to reblog this to clear some stuff up, because a few radfems have reblogged this with their own thoughts.

i was 100% including trans people in this, i meant to write a paragraph on them but it slipped my mind.

but yeah i have heard stories of trans men in academia who got treated better after transitioning, and trans women who got treated worse.

i don't rlly know how to phrase this i just wanted to make the point that this blog is not a safe space for trans-exclusive feminism, i beleive trans women and women and trans men are men.

btw if you say 'i'm just a girl' you are contributing to the negative misogynistic stereotype that women are silly and ditzy and lesser than men. if you say 'girl math' you are contributing to the negative misogynistic stereotypes that girls are not good at maths. if you say 'pink jobs' or 'pink chores' to describe washing the dishes, doing the laundry, and cooking, you are contributing to the negative misogynistic stereotype that women belong at home or in the kitchen.

i personally am a humanities/social sciences student. frankly sciences and maths baffle me. but i love my female friends in architecture, engineering, medicine, maths, physics, and coding. i think they are so smart and cool!

please do not start contributing to the rise of 'humanities are for girls, sciences are for boys' this is bullshit!

also it should not, and quite frankly cannot, be separated from the rise of the arts being seen as 'useless' or 'mickey mouse' degrees. they are defunding the arts! be angry! they are saying that this what women should be studying and then they are making it harder to chose to study it! they are trying to remove women from academia!

also shout out to men in humanities, y'all are important to!

TLDR: women in stem rock, they are defunding the arts in an attempt to remove women from academia, your harmless jokes spawned from tiktok trends actively contribute to negative misogynistic stereotypes