academia boy

dark academia // original content // plant dad

[teaandplantdad]

dark academia things that are actually realistic to do

Decorate your room with candles. No need for expensive or fancy ones.

Buy most of your books second hand. there are some great online stores for used books.

Watch how you talk and carry yourself. keep your head high and speak with care, whatever that means to you.

Read while you're waiting instead of being on your phone. Take a book to doctors appointments, public transport and anywhere else where you might spend time waiting. You don't have to read classics, anything is good.

Go for walks, especially when it rains. They don't need to be long. It's good for your health as well.

Start your day with a cup of tea, no fancy mug needed.

You can dress however you want, just make sure you look like you care about your outfit. If you can buy your clothes second hand, amazing.

Enjoy the process of learning new things and studying. You don't need to go to university and get a degree in history. If you can and want to, go for it, but anything works just as well. Maybe learn how to care for house plants? Teach yourself how to knit? Study for the next exam because you actually want to? Learn a poem by heart? Try to cook new recipes? The possibilities are endless.

Care for your body and mind. Sleep well, eat well, exercise. Have a skin care routine (even if you're male). Wear sunscreen everyday, no matter the season and weather. Meditate if you want to. Limit your alcohol consumption and don't smoke. There's nothing aesthetic about hurting your body. You will not only look better but also feel better.

Get curious about art, music and history. See if you can find anything that interests you. If not, don't worry.

[teaandplantdad]

modern tech academia

planning your day using a laptop or smartphone

using an ebook reader to read books on a long train ride

staring out the window late in the evening, watching lonely cars drive by

writing letters to your best friend once in a while becuase it feels more personal than texting

reading in candle light during a power cut

having a small dance party on your own, the music coming from your bluetooth headphones

riding your e-bike to the nearest museum or library

taking online classes and lectures

zoom meetings with your study group

taking a social media detox to focus more on your studying

a spotify playlist with your favourite classical music

searching online the location of the nearest thrift store

switching off your phone early to get a good nights rest becuause there is an exam the next morning

getting emotionally attached to old objects like typewriters and sometimes still using them just for the aesthetic

[teaandplantdad]

Seriosly, we’ve all been there.

[teaandplantdad]

Well, well, if that’s not what a perfect day should look like.

[teaandplantdad]

I’m totally in the “really likes that dark academia aesthetic but is too depressed to feel aesthetic because how can you feel aesthetic when you’re not feeling anything positive at all and go moldy lying in your bed 24/7”- club.

[teaandplantdad]

Oh to sit in an armchair, reading classic literature and sipping on some black coffee with Chópin playing in the background.

[teaandplantdad]

dark academia plant guide

I personally believe that plants really fit the dark academia aesthetic but are also hightly underrated so here´s my guide for y´all:

The right plant: Get anything hard to kill. Pileas, palms, corkscrew rush, rubber tree, succulents or whatever you like. Avoid ferns as they always seem to die for no reason. If you manage to kill cacti then something is wrong with you.

When you already have some experience or you think you´re good with plants you can get some harder to care for plants. Orchids come in beautiful colours but there are so many other nice options.

The right technique: Always research what your plant specifically needs. Most like bright, indirect light and moist but not soaking wet soil, but not all of them so inform youself. Some plants will endure mistakes, others will die instatntly. Whatever you do, just remember this one thing:

Dont. Overwater. Your. Succulents.

The right pot: Once you have a plant and the knowledge how to keep it alive you need a pot. Chose something  that fits the aesthetic. Anything old and simple looks good. Some dark clay pots maybe, preferable hand made. Experiment with glass bottles.

The right name: As the aesthetic is kinda weird sometimes you won´t get aroud naming your plants. Choose Latin names, names of greek or roman gods, your friends names, book charakters or very old but common names. One day you´ll have too many plants to remember every name, but that´s ok. We all get addicted.

Now go buy plants, propagate them, get yourself a little family you can read Shakespeare to, tell them stories, play Chópin to them, be a parent.

[teaandplantdad]

weird academia

You ever just get the uncontrollable urge to study and read and draw for hours and hours and hours but then you can´t do anything for the next three weeks at all because you spent all the motivation you had for those weeks in just a few days or is it just me.

[teaandplantdad]

Admit it, that´s what you want your room to look like.

[teaandplantdad]

dark academia tea guide

to relax after a long study session or before bed time: fruit tea, chamomile tea. Get yourself some honey if you like.

when you want to feel healthy: Any kind of herbal tea, matcha, nettle tea, green tea.

to get a boost of energy: green tea, black tea, white tea or any other variation that contains caffeine. Make sure you  make them right or they´ll get bitter.

on a cold winter day: Chai, ginger tea, rooibos tea. Use spices, especially cinnamon.

during summer: barley tea, iced fruit tea, hibiscus tea. Don´t worry about hot tea in summer, it´s actually even better for your body than drinking ice cold drinks.

Get yourself the most visually pleasing cup you can find and go for it. If you like you can sweeten your tea with sugar or honey or add some milk. For green tea never use boiling water (60-80 degree celsius should be fine) and take the teabag out after two or three minutes maximum or it´ll end up being bitter. Figure out what you like best and what works best for your kind of green tea. The quality affects if it gets bitter easily or not.

[teaandplantdad]

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That´s all.

Oscar Wilde

[teaandplantdad]

“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence“

by John Knowles

Source: Flickr

[teaandplantdad]

New York public library

Source: Flickr

[teaandplantdad]

Library in former church, Austria.

[teaandplantdad]

dark academia guide to study latin

As somone who studyed latin at school for five years, here are my tips for all of you who want to teach themselfes how to speak latin:

Forget everything you know about learning a new language. Latin and Greek are different in structure from any laguage you might know. It doesn´t work like English or French or German. The translating is much more mathematical.

Grab a vocabulary book.

Study every vocab in there (it should be about 2.5k).

Realize that there is no word for yes or no but about ten related to killing and dying

Take a look at the grammar. All of it.

Study it until it´s stuck in your brain. You´ll have to remember every little piece of it. Except for maybe the NcI. I never needed that.

At this point you will probably notice that it is almost impossible to learn how to actually speak Latin. Give up that dream. Not even my Latin teacher was able to do that.

Grab any Text from Ovid or Ceasar.

Never just translate from the start to the end of a sentence. Always look for the predicate first and build your sentence up on that. Expect very, very long sentences.

Now you will realize that even translating is a ton lot more difficult than yout thought and you will probbably fail, even if you know all the vocabs and grammar. Again, learning Latin doesn´t work like lerning French. You have to analyse every letter because one small “e” instead of an “a” could change the whole translation.

Hopefully you have now noticed that teaching Latin to yourself within a few months won´t work and believing so was naive.

You could probably learn it with a proper teacher and lots of time, but then it won´t be fun anymore and you will suffer just like all of us students did learning it at school.

Forget about the idea.

Cry.

[teaandplantdad]

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society.

[teaandplantdad]

on thrifting books

Thriftig books on the internet is my all time favourite thing to do. Like, you never know what you´re going to get. Will you get a book that was read so often it literally falls apart? Will it look just like new? It´s like unwrapping a christmas present when you were a child.

And then there are the little personal things you find from whoever owned it before you: Little notes that don´t make any sense to you, hightlited passages, sketches, a small, barely readable text you find stamped on the cover as a result of the former owner writing on paper lying on the book.

Now it´s your turn to figure out what those notes mean, why that passage meant so much to the owner, what connection there is between the drawing and the story and what that little text on the cover sais. It´s that human curiosity, the wish to find a little secret about the books past, that makes it so fascinating.

Go buy a book. Be curios. Find its secrets.