Theo James Travelled With UNHCR To Meet Refugees In Greece

The fighting doesn’t just end after they come home.

Veteran Vision Project

Women Self Defense in 1947

Brazilian cherries aren’t related to common cherries at all! They look like this and taste rather sour:

Also, if you’re not used to them, Brazilian grapetrees look really alien:

The fruit is formed in the trunk, not the branches!

i’m done!!!

today, a year and a half after reading hamlet and first falling in love with shakespeare, i completed my goal of finishing the complete works before my high school graduation. it’s been an amazing journey and talking to all of you and feeling at home in such a wonderful community has made it ten times better. if you follow this blog it probably goes without saying that shakespeare has changed my life, but damn, i’m really feeling it today. i’m just so incredibly grateful to have read each and every one of these plays (yes, even henry viii….kinda). here’s to starting my english degree in the fall and reading them all again. 💕💕💕

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.

Sometimes we look at bizarre catwalk fashions like…

“What was that designer ON?? Nobody would ever wear that!!!”

…But sometimes I stop and think about what fashion designers have to work with.

I mean, as animals, we did not develop a very design-able shape.

(^THIS is a designable shape.)

We developed these weird, organic shapes and then decided we wanted to put things ON our shape. And that was hard.

(^This is NOT a designable shape, especially since the arms don’t just stay up like that and the whole thing’s always moving…)

I mean, think how hard it was to come up a way to put on clothing that would stay on your body while you’re hunting and gathering and keep you warm, made mostly out of the skins of OTHER animals, which ALSO do not grow in nice, flat, straight-edged pieces:

(^Working out THIS would have been very difficult. We’ve got ideas now to work with, stuff like “neck hole” and “arm holes” and “sleeves” and “loincloth”… but they had to figure that shit out from SCRATCH.)

And then different groups of people in different areas decided that certain things in clothing were “normal”. People in Polynesia were like, “Hey, clothing can be grass!”

And people in Europe were like, “Hey! Clothing can be pointy shoes!”

And people in east Africa were like, “Hey! Clothing can be big flat collars!”

And now people in western culture are like, “Hey! clothing can be double-breasted suit and tie!”

And avant-garde designer are like, “Hey! clothing can be… whatever the fuck this thing is!”

And honestly, when it comes down to it, that’s not any weirder than the stereotyped shape of the double-breasted suit and tie, or the pointy shoes you trip over, or the skirt made of grass. Human bodies are weird, and the things we wear on our bodies are also weird. It all just comes down to what you’re used to seeing.

Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?

me: haha oh god this is so bad im making so many unsupported claims and pulling all this analysis out of my ass

my prof in the margins: excellent analysis!

me: 

Hey guys! If you are travelling to Latin America, it’s an amazing opportunity to learn Spanish. On my travels there I was able to learn the language without paying a penny or entering a classroom even once :) And I encourage anyone else heading there to do the same. Read how on my blog here.  Best of luck & happy travels! (Ustedes de latinoamerica, estoy buscando alguien para charlar y mejorar mi espanol - por skype. Si tienes interes, por favor enviame un mensaje. Puedo ayudar con ingles!)

How to feel again

Walk barefoot in the grass, remember the way this feels. Now put your shoes back on, you do not want the thing to touch your toes.

Go outside in the dark, scream at the moon. She is listening, it is okay.

Allow her to comfort you, she means well.

If you hear other people screaming, do not fret, they are just as apathetic as you, let them feel.

If an elderly woman comes and stands near you, thank her. Listen to what she has to say, she knows best.

If you see an animal that does not belong, leave. Go home, and sit in a room in the dark. If you don’t, go home and have a good night’s sleep

Do not fall asleep.

If you hear whispers, it is okay.

Remember rule number 7 and 10. Leave at sunrise. Lock the door behind you. Feel.

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