what my parents told me: you can do anything if you set your mind to it
what I wish my parents had told me: sometimes you will fail, and it will be scary and it will suck, but you will probably not die
I would also have appreciated: the fact that you can do something if you try very, very hard, does not actually obligate you to spend your life putting forth maximum effort to achieve it. It is okay to not be 1000% driven by life-consuming ambition and instead be satisfied with something less difficult.
Also: having spent a lot of time on something isn’t good enough reason to keep working on it if there’s no success in sight and it has lost all joy for you or whatever motivated you in the first place.
If you seem to be unable to hack something, but you believe you can’t quit because what about [all the time you spent on it/all the money it cost/what people are expecting of you], google “sunk cost fallacy”. Quitting doesn’t mean your effort was for naught, it means you know when to call it quits and stop wasting your energy/time/money.
yeah, yeah, i know, academia is an evil bourgeois lair of useless elitist white cishet men writing self-congratulatory articles about nothing and groping their brilliant female students’ arses and so on and so forth, but occasionally, it is prudent to let some of those useless academics - plenty of whom are women and/or poc and/or lgbt nowadays, how shocking, and who’ve spent their lives learning EVERYTHING about a certain subject - explain a text or a concept to you, so that you don’t run around after with a wildly inaccurate understanding of smth like what ‘social construct’ means, or what Nietzsche was all about, or what Freud actually wrote or did or said, or inventing already invented strains of feminism, etc etc etc
oh, and while i’m at it - this whole “academia is useless” is a belief that the far-right ideology has been extremely fond of all throughout the last century or so. just saying.
In Austria, we call kittens at that age “Autodromkatzerl”, which translates to “bumper car kittens”, because of the way their tail sticks up. It’s not a really common word, but a very cute one, I think
this is a genuinely delightful bit of knowledge, thank you for sharing this!! omg
ive been thinking and honest to god: i think i would actually join a girl gang if the offer came. like a legitimate, hierarchical, “let’s carry knives under our skirts and beat up men” gang. fuck college
bringing back the sukeban girl gangs from the 70’s that wore long skirts against teen sexualization and fucked things up for the patriarchy
and this was no “5 girls in a small town” who made the news—this was yakuza level shit. 20,000 girls getting into gang fights and shoplifting and getting pissed off that only men were allowed to be rough and violent and angry
and y’all wanna know the funniest part? immediately after this trend blew up, the Men decided to sexualize the hell out of these girls. this included movie adaptations and pornos where the skirts were made shorter and the tits were bigger cause apparently they had found their new fetish
but here’s how they actually looked, and it’s actually pretty badass:
