You know what’s incredibly weird?
You don’t see blackness on the edges of your field of vision, but at the same time you can’t see what’s there. It’s nothingness without actually being nothingness. Your line of sight doesn’t have edges, it just gets blurrier and blurrier and at some point it stops, but it’s hard to tell for sure where exactly you just stop seeing. There’s no border, and there is nothing beyond the border, but the image within the border isn’t infinite. It’s the most absolute kind of nothingness.
I can never wrap my head around that.
It’s weird when you think about how all of the beautiful nebula pictures you see floating around Tumblr are actual places. They aren’t just visual things that you can see up in the sky, they are literally locations that are just as tangible as your own bedroom.
It’s so strange.
did you know that when you drink soda through a straw, you’re not actually sucking the liquid up through the straw? you’re just breathing in the air at the top of the straw and increasing its velocity from 0 to however fast you’re breathing it in, which lowers the pressure at the top of the straw (since pressure decreases when velocity increases) which means that the atmospheric pressure pushing on the soda in your glass will push the liquid up the straw and into your mouth
so you’re not actually sucking up the liquid, the atmosphere is pushing it up to you
science
I absolutely love having those wonderful moments where you just feel complete and utter calm and bliss, not from any specific happy event, but just from seeing a really pretty sight in nature and having it completely calm all of your anxieties.
For example, after jamming out hardcore to t. swift on the way home from school, when I parked my car and looked out the window there was just a huge billowing wave of hundreds of leaves all falling at the same time, and it was perfectly bright and clear outside, and the temperature was crisp but not cold enough to bite at your nose, and none of my neighbors were around, and all of the trees were at their prime golden color and weren’t rotting into brown just yet. And I just rolled down my window and rested my head on the window sill and watched the leaves fall for 20 minutes or so while listening to music and it was so incredibly peaceful.
Ah
I think that quote about how “the nights you stay in and get enough sleep aren’t the nights you’re going to remember” is kind of silly. I think too many people think that you have to go out and do something big and extravagant to have a good time.
If I think back on all of my favorite days in the last few years, not a single one of them was super extravagant. One day that I always think of was two autumns ago when my best friends and I just stayed in her living room for the whole morning watching scary movies. It wasn’t some big day we planned out, we just woke up at her house in the morning, put on a marathon, and ate candy all day. But it was wonderful because the whole day was a combination of a ton of little things that are really enjoyable: getting to sleep in on a long weekend, wearing cozy sweatpants for the first time after the summer, eating your favorite seasonal candy, watching a poorly made movie and laughing about it. None of the components of the day would be particularly amazing by themselves, but when you add all the little things together, it’s just the best kind of happy. It’s not some insane bliss or excitement kind of happy, it’s contentment. Like a quiet comfort where you can’t stop smiling to yourself because you’re so happy to be doing something so simple and yet enjoying it so much.
I just think it’s silly when people think that to have a perfect day you have to be doing something huge and extravagant. You don’t need a big event like a vacation or Prom or graduation to be euphoric, and half of the time those events don’t live up to their hype anyways. The days I’ve experienced where beforehand my parents told me “you’ll remember today for the rest of your life!” I found myself disappointed. But the days when I didn’t do anything particularly memorable, I just did all of the little things that my heart happened to desire at the time, I was really truly happy.
It’s really easy to put a smile on your face if you let yourself get excited about all of the little things that make your days wonderful.
Stumbling upon your old favorite book when cleaning is the best thing ever. As cliche as it is, old books really do smell lovely. It’s the best when they’re old paperbacks and the spine has tons of creases in it so you can easily flip to your old favorite parts. And when you see all of the pages you dog-eared it makes it easy to remember the first time you read it. What a cheap form of time travel.
It’s weird to think that everything in history actually happened. It’s not just a very long, incredibly detailed story that we are forced to memorize. Every historical figure you’ve ever read about was a real living person, just like you. Their lives were just as vivid to them as your own life is to you. Imagine being Socrates. Imagine what he must have been thinking when he was told that he was going to be killed for his teachings. I would imagine that he immediately thought about the people he loved and how he never got a chance to learn even more about the universe. Except textbooks never mention that kind of thing, because it’s not factual. They don’t address the fact that everyone in history was a real, physical person, with emotions and personal motives and secrets and fears and loves. Textbooks dehumanize.
Imagining prominent people in history as real people is very sobering. Imagine actually being Neil Armstrong and how surreal it must have been to step onto the moon, something that he grew up seeing as a distant, intangible object in the sky. It probably was not a place to him, just like to most people it is not viewed as a place one can actually be. It was not a destination, it was an object. It probably wasn’t even necessarily an object. The moon is more of an idea, or a simple image in the sky that we attach endless facts to. But actually stepping on it and realizing that everything that you see is actually a tangible object, no matter how far away, is very strange. The nebulas that you see images of contain countless stars, and each of those stars has the potential to have many planets orbiting it. And each and every one of those planets actually exists. They aren’t just ideas, they are actual places.
The easiest people to put yourselves into the shoes of are obviously writers. No matter how old a piece of literature is, when you read it and consciously shut out the rest of the world, you are essentially going back in time. Literature is so important because it is the only thing in history that actually acknowledges the fact that every person you’ve ever heard of had a mind and a personality. Books and poetry let you tap back into their mind, which is something that an endless string of facts you may read in a documentary will never match up to.
You should trust your gut feelings because it’s your soul trying to tell you that you already made that mistake in one of your past lives.
I just want to curl up in bed for a week or so and read philosophy books and eat fruit salad and watch my favorite movies while I cuddle with my favorite stuffed animal
That would be nice
when people say “god why do i have to take an english class i obviously already speak english” i’m always just speechless
WE CAN ALL SPEAK ENGLISH. YOU ARE NOT HERE TO LEARN ENGLISH. YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN HOW TO INTERPRET LITERATURE
THERE IS A DIFFERENCE
…When you are so overwhelmed by endless things to do that you just sit on the floor with no pants on and ponder how you don’t want to do anything ever again except eat and sleep.
can i leave high school now please
i’ve aced all of your stupid tests and i know how to cheat your system to get good grades and i can function effectively with other human beings
why else am i here
i can learn things on my own thanks i know how to read
