mel’s academic sb— I HOLD MYSELF ACCOUNTABLE

20 | sg | tracking!! | business management | year 1

[corvid-language-library]

Remember that if you want to do more of something, you have to do less of something else. It's that time of year where people set goals for the new year and they have plans and hopes and it's always focusing on what they want to do more of. More studying, more exercise, more crafting, more socialising, more making things from scratch. Okay, great. What are you going to do less of in order to have the time and energy to do more of those things you really want to do?

[achillesinhighheels]

[melcademia]

exported some photos today.

[curseworm]

the inherent shame of beginning… dont look at me while i learn

[garden-graveyard]

“the inherent shame of beginning”

i admit, “don’t look at me while i learn” hits hard… but why is that so? when i was 7 years old i sang along to songs i had yet to fully learn by bumbling through sounds that half-resembled what i thought i heard, at full volume.

at 6, i would practice ballet moves–in which i had no instruction–outside the theater after a professional performance, in full view of the public.

at 5, i asked my teacher so many questions that she affectionately called me Bug–because i was always bugging her with my endless inquiry. i loved the nickname.

at 14, i was afraid to practice a song in my own room with no one home because, “what if my voice cracks? what if i can’t hit that note?”

at 15 i was afraid to dance in the garage with no one around because–i mean how embarrassing would it be to get the move wrong?

at 16, i forgo asking questions in class because god forbid i not understand.

what is this? “the shame of beginning”, we say. but not inherent, never was it inherent. the child loves to begin! they love making the silly mistake. the world tells us the mistake is fatal, or worse, shameful. what a tragedy. the world strangles our joy of beginning and when we’re old enough we add our own hands to the neck.

but the truth is we begin everyday and we are wrong and we’re dumb and we make silly mistakes and at the end of it all we are still the brilliant learners we’ve always been. there is no shame. it’s alright. i don’t know how to properly express that i wish upon everyone who’s reblogged this post to realize the shame is in our hands wrapped around the neck. we can let go. allow the self-kindess of your heart to soothe the bruises.

learning is no secret burden. we do it together :)

[theambitiouswoman]

[iamwhatismissing]

made me think of this

[id: x/twitter qrt from user styloshka that says "I read a forum post about art once, that it's a product of the dialectic between the effort of the artist and the friction of the medium. You push on the thing and the thing pushes back on you, it has its own voice. The weight of a piano key, the tension of a guitar string." original post from user colleen_daves says "Don't you want to skip over the mindless drudgery that is making art?" I do six stand embroidery and break like 10 needles a day, would I prefer that activity didn't hurt my hands and make me angry? Sure. But that's what makes having the finished piece after so worth it to me."]

link

[thatbitchery]

The thing with self improvement that's simultaneously so obvious yet somehow so undervalued and overlooked is this, self improvement is about your SELF.

Heres the thing my love- no one is coming. No one is coming to save you. No one is coming to learn French for you. No one is coming to write that business plan for you. No one is coming to save up that capital for you. No one is coming to learn cooking for you. No one is coming to set routines for you. No one is coming to unlearn your shame for you. No one is learning personal finance for you no one will stand up for you no one can go to therapy for you no one will chase your dreams for you no one. No one is coming. No one.

& your relationships are failing because you keep expecting your partners to. You keep expecting your friends to do communication and conflict resolution for you. You keep expecting your partner to sit back and understand all your bs because YoU aRe tRaUmAtiZeD you keep expecting the people around you to deal with the things you refuse to. Your relationships are failing because you won't take responsibility, you're waiting to be saved.

Theres no salvation. No one is coming. You are responsible for yourself. It's SELF improvement. The best thing you can do is to learn to take responsibility for yourself and the things you want, love, because no one will. You're on your own, kid. If you don't, no one will.

Proactivity is the name of the game.

Youre on your own, kid. No one is coming, you're on your own. If you don't, no one will.

START HERE

[melcademia]

[melcademia]

haven’t been posting much about myself recently, but i’m in uni now?? in my second semester?? about to take 3 exams that’s coming up in a day??

[thatbitchery]

Ive been undergoing speech therapy for a month, give or take to empower me with the tools to speak better given I struggle with public speaking or just speaking in general bc a) English isn't my first language, & I'm really bad at the verbal / spoken part of it b) my accent which is notably better now but could get better and c)articulation, intonation, pronunciation & pitch, I'm a really fast speaker & somehow soft spoken & past that age where I can get away with it ksksks.

That said here's some mouth exercises I've been using to compliment my learning from this public YT video, in case you're looking to be a better speaker yourself.

The thing with self improvement, is that it's up to you, YOURSELF. Proactivity is the name of the game.

Ps: it's going good loves & my coach says I'm getting better Yay so maybe I'll do that podcast thing in May as part of practising & improvement, stay tuneddd.

Start here

[ashstfu]

kurt vonnegut, being good at things is not the point of doing them.

[maraschino-fairy-deactivated202]

palestine masterpost-masterpost

i've been trying my best to collect a bunch of links to other, more structured resources about the genocide in gaza, and what you, reading this, can do about it, that i'm going to compile here.

DON'T SCROLL PAST. LOOK THROUGH THE LINKS. REBLOG.

less and less people are talking about gaza every day, but it is still a very real crisis.

education, donations, speaking out, global links (masterpost)

links to contextual articles

for americans - state/congressional contacts

how you can help palestine - donations, petitions, campaigns, upcoming protests (masterpost)

non-politically motivated charity links

canary mission

petitions and congressional contact (masterpost)

education, current news, taking action, direct action and donations, current protests (masterpost)

small monetary actions

2700 ebooks on israel and palestine, available for free

thorough article by storiesfromgaza, dated 10/30/23

targeted boycott + bds

how to find state/congressional contacts, bds, email template, donation links

sudan and congo

egypt, us/uk/canada/europe congressional contacts

direct links to help palestine

educate yourself (twitter links)

translating gaza (instagram link)

bds/targeted boycott information

compilation of palestine info and how to support it (masterpost), dated 10/28/23

latest info as of 11/3/23 and large amounts of immediate action to take (masterpost)

history of palestine and israel - articles, books, films, social media (masterpost)

socials to follow

journalists in north gaza

btselem

[wrenhavenriver]

why must reductress hurt me in this way

[thiefree]

ok a) lmao me too girl, and

b) once burnout hits you CANNOT work that hard, by your standards, so odds are it actually hit a while ago and you just “powered through” because that’s what you’re used to doing. So now, every day, you’re hitting your limit and thinking “wtf man i used to be able to do this, i used to be competent, clever, diligent” and like yeah. you were. and that burns glucose. welcome to the dumb bitch zone.

and c), lmao, me too girl

[junkolt]

fuck b) came for me harder than the first post did god damn

[juliaxyn]

Work as hard as you can and then be happy in the knowledge you couldn’t have done any more.

[sweetoothgirl]

From Scratch Fresh Strawberry Shortcake

[macgyvermedical]

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

[s-n-arly]

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[whump-it-like-its-hot]

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

[kazoosandfannypacks]

Saying "I'm not going to draw this thing because I don't know how to draw this thing" is really shooting yourself in the foot, because you've now cut yourself off from an opportunity to grow.

I had a friend in college who was an absolutely amazing artist. I loved seeing his work! One time I said something to the effect of "I could never do that."

He told me something that, as an artist, I resonate with. He said art isn't about natural talent; it's a learned skill. When you tell an artist their level of skill is impossible for you to reach, you're assuming their level of skill is a natural gifting they have, and it discredits the hundreds to thousands of hours of hard work they've put into getting where they are today, and you're cutting yourself off from trying to reach that point yourself.