#and my blog looks like an actual rock no-sense garbage can with barely any information of myself it's fucking weird idk how you all decided

[lovely-menza]

qwq (tag)

tagged by the lovelies @majestickatelyn, @ritchieblackless, @thespiritofvexation and @missus-beastly to do this tag about my 10-15 favourite blogs of the website (I don't know how to even accept a compliment so I can say that this is heartwarming, I'm tagging YOU💞💕💓❤💗💞💕)

@ritchieblackless

@stonetheskooks

@thatonerockerfreak

@passingthetime

@platypus4life

@nebula-rat

@thespiritofvexation

@lennons

@lowkey-crimson

@david-watts

@jaebirdy

@missus-beastly

@thatsagroove

@verylongsongs

@twosidesofkeithmoon

@streaminginonsunlightwings

@deadmensdynasty

@majestickatelyn

@sirringostarkey

@candyandcurrantbun

@if-i-say-to-you-tomorrow

@rnurder-one

@silveraspens

@so-sad-her-eyes

@witchy-tombstone-smile

@n3wlife

@morningsynth

@eleventh-earl

I refuse to count how many people I tagged, and I think I never interacted/had a proper and decent conversation with the most of the people here and I'm very sorry, four years in this goddamn page and never figured out how to make friends lmao

[jeki2011-blog]

8 Ways to Read the Books You Wish You Had Time For

Neil Pasricha

When I tell people this, most say, “Oh, yes, for sure, yes.” But then two seconds later, they say “I just wish I had the time.”

Well, you know what? I’m calling shenanigans on that excuse. Because the truth is we do have the time.  A University of California report shows we’re consuming more information now than we ever have before — more than 100,000 words per day. Think about how many texts and alerts and notifications and work emails and personal emails and news headlines and fly-by tickers and blog feeds and Twitter spews and Instagram comments you’re reading each day.

With all that garbage reading, who has time for books anymore?

In an earlier HBR piece called “8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year,” I shared how for most of my adult life I read five books a year, tops. I had a few slow burners on my nightstand, and read a couple of books on vacation if I was lucky. But then three years ago, I read fifty. Fifty books! In one year. I couldn’t believe it. I could suddenly feel books becoming this lead domino towards being a better husband, a better father, and a better writer.

Since then, I’ve tried doubling down on reading. I’m now reading somewhere above 100 books a year. Sure, I sometimes hit slow patches, and bare patches, and slip into social media black holes. But here are eight more things I do to get back on track:

1. Live inside a world of books. Most people have a bookshelf “over there,” where the books live. But one day last year, my wife just dumped a pile of about ten picture books in the middle of our coffee table. What happened? Our kids started flipping through them all the time. So now we just rotate them and leave them there. It’s a path-of-least-resistance principle, much like how Google leaves healthy snacks on the counter for employees, while chocolates are hidden away in cookie jars. We’ve put the TV in the basement, installed a bookshelf near our front door, and slipped books into car seat pouches and various nooks around the house. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said: “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.” This is how we now choose to live. (Even if you’re trying to declutter, or don’t have a lot of space to store books, you can always visit your local library for books and return them when you’re done.)

2. Go “red” in bed. My wife generally falls asleep before I do, and that’s when I strap my red reading light on my forehead. Why red? Michael Breus, author of The Power of When says the theory is that red light aids melatonin production. And bright lights have the opposite effect, according to The Sleep Health Foundation of Australia. Too-bright lights, or a bright screen, can make you feel more alert. Bedtime reading should help you wind down, not wind you up.

3. Make your phone less addictive. Cell phones are a distraction machine. Our cell phones are designed to be smooth, sexy, and irresistible. Don’t believe me? The book Irresistible by Stern School of Business associate professor Adam Alter will quickly raise your awareness of the addictive designs going into smartphones. They’re like pocket slot machines. So how do you resist the urge to reach for it? Make it less appealing. Move all of the apps off the main screen so it’s blank when you open it. Leave your cracked screen cracked. Move your charger to the basement so it’s an extra step in your low-resilience nighttime and morning moments. If you must have your phone in the room while you sleep, enable “Do Not Disturb” mode to automatically block calls and texts after 7 p.m. Slowly, slowly, slowly, you can prevent your phone from becoming so seductive.

4. Use the Dewey Decimal System. How do you organize your books? By color? By when you bought them? By big random piles everywhere? There’s a reason every library uses the Dewey Decimal System. It makes sense. Books fall neatly into ever-more-thinly-sliced categories around psychology and religion and science and art and…everything. What’s the benefit? You make connections. You see where your big gaps are. I spent one Saturday organizing my books according to the Dewey Decimal System and, in addition to scratching an incredibly deep organizational itch, I now find books faster, feel like my reading is more purposeful, and am more engaged in what I read, because I can sort of feel how it snaps into my brain. What tools do you need to do this? Just two: I bookmarked classify.oclc.org to look up Dewey Decimal Numbers for any books which don’t have a DDC code on the inside jacket, and I use the Decimator app to look up what that number means. Oh, and I use a pencil to write the Dewey Decimal code and the category on the inside jacket of each book before putting it on the shelf.

5. Use podcasts and BookTube to solve the “next book” dilemma. As you start ramping up your reading rate, the biggest problem soon becomes “Well, what should I read next?” Going beyond piles in airport bookstores and what’s trending on bestseller lists means plunging into backlists and bookstore side-shelves to get intentional about finding the books that really change your life. In an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets. Podcasts and BookTubers (a subset of YouTubers focused on books) are now a reader’s curation dream machine. Where to start? In podcasts, “What Should I Read Next?” by Modern Mrs. Darcy tackles the problem head on and “Get Booked” by Amanda Nelson at BookRiot offers custom book recommendations. I also have my own show “3 Books,” during which we ask guests like Chris Anderson of TED, Judy Blume, or Chip Wilson to share three books that most shaped their lives. And: BookTube? Yes, BookTube. There’s a great overview of it here, and some starter channels to get you hooked are Ariel Bissett and polandbananasBOOKS.

6. Unfollow all news. Sure, sure, I preached before about how I cancelled my five magazine and two newspaper subscriptions to focus solely on books. But you know where the news followed me? Online. That’s where you need to go hardcore: Unfollow every news site on social media, and remove all bookmarks to news sites (remove all passwords, too). Remember what political scientist Herbert Simon said: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Want to go deeper here? I recommend reading “Why You Should Stop Reading News” on Farnam Street and “Five Things You Notice When You Quit The News” on Raptitude.)

7. Read on something that doesn’t do anything else. As author Seth Godin told me in an interview, “People rarely read a book in iBooks because you’re one click away from checking your email.” If we can be interrupted, alerted, or notified, we will. That’s not good for diving deep into new worlds. So what do I suggest? Real books. Real pages. On real paper. Yes, I’m OK with killing trees if it means gaining the ability to disappear into your own mind. Only real books let you be the full director of the show, after all. No voice replaces your mental voice, no formatting or display screen affects the artistic intentions of the writer. Sure, I get it if you need bigger fonts, or if you drive all day and prefer audiobooks, but I’m just saying that if you want to be a real book snob for the rest of your life just like me, actual books are where it’s at. And, if you must use a device, just make sure that e-reader can’t receive texts.

8. Talk to your local booksellers. My favorite bookseller of all-time is Sarah Ramsey of Another Story Books in Toronto. I walk in, I start blabbering, I start confessing, I share what I’m struggling with, and she hmms and hahs and sizes me up as we wander around the store talking for half an hour. She finds: a good book after my divorce, a good book before my trip to Australia, a good book as I struggle with my kids. And then I walk out with an armload of books that completely fit my emotional state, where I want or need to grow, and those that resonate with me on a deeper level. If you believe humans are the best algorithm (as I do), then walking into your local independent bookstore, sizing up the Staff Picks wall to see who’s interests align with yours, and then asking them for personal picks is a great way to find books you’ll love faster. (Here’s a list of indie bookstores in the U.S. if you want a place to start.)

So are you ready to read? Raring to go? Or are you one of those people who first needs to hear some rock-solid science to help change your behavior? If you need another couple of reasons: In 2011, The Annual Review of Psychology said that reading triggers our mirror neurons and opens up the parts of our brains responsible for developing empathy, compassion, and understanding. Reading makes you a better leader, teacher, parent, and sibling. Another study published in Science Magazine found that reading literary fiction helps us improve our empathy and social functioning. And, finally, an incredible 2013 study at Emory University found that MRIs taken the morning after test subjects were asked to read sections of a novel showed an increase in connectivity in the left temporal cortex — the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. Just imagine the long-term benefits of cracking open a book every day.

https://hbr.org/2019/04/8-ways-to-read-the-books-you-wish-you-had-time-for?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[kalesandfails]

speaker of your house

Friend, do you call yourself ugly? Or is it just me?

I had an eating disorder for two decades, from before I got my braces put on — from when I barely had all my grown up teeth, honestly — to, well, roughly the time I got pregnant with my first son.

For the entirely of that time, I went around telling people I was fat. I did this like I would have told them I was in nursing school, or had grown up Seventh Day Adventist, or that I had a brother.

Actual fat people, and also all the not fat people who weighed more than me (often, but not always, this was most people): I am sorry. I was kind of a a-hole.

Disconcertingly, though, as I’ve just made myself stop saying that — mostly — I’ve gotten a little closer to the truth of how I feel about myself. So now I go around telling myself, and those around me, as a matter of course, that I am ugly.

I do this by way of explanation or humor: this thing happened to me, and I understand that it happened because I am ugly. Or, the nice thing about being ugly is that I don’t have to deal with [x]. 

And, of course, I do it so I don’t ever forget. Because possibly the most basic lessons I learned growing up is to not believe people who tell you good things about yourself, that those people are secretly laughing at you or feeling sorry for you. That if you believe you are beautiful and worthy, if you believe anyone wants you around, you are doing something wrong and you’re going to be punished. These punishments can range from the Trauma-Rama column in YM to the more deep humiliations of, say, childhood sexual abuse, but they will come, because you deserve them, and your sense of security hinges on a view in which the world is a giant Excel spreadsheet and things are fair and easily manipulated - although strangely, very rarely or never by you.

It’s a somewhat unconventional, but unassailable, power move: I will define myself on my own terms, even if those terms are kind of a bummer. It is, honestly, a fairly comprehensible response to a set of circumstances in which the strength of others — say, Christ — is supposedly “made perfect in [your] weakness”, but also weaknesses, are routinely attributed to you, whether you agree or not, and then identified as both personal failings and as justification for other people’s hurtful behavior.

And after a couple of decades, feeling like you’re not good enough stops being so painful, right? A more solid essential truth of life is that life is happiest for people when we can escape the trap of self, and what better way to avoid that trap by making yourself an extremely  unpleasant thing to think about or look at directly?

But here’s the thing — and gentle reader, if you think I am talking to you here, I probably am. (And if you don’t, then guys, Jonathon Van Ness is reading my blog!)

Stop calling yourself ugly. Not because you’re truly gorg - you absolutely could be, but I’m not here to die on that hill today. But because what kind of Flowers in the Attic mom or sibling or friend goes around evaluating the physical appearance of the people they love?

It’s a weird thing to say, guys! Are my kids literally more attractive than the children of other people? Likely no. But when I say my kids are the most mindblowingly perfect creatures on the planet, I’m actually  just saying that I love them, because whose mom is in any kind of a position to make an aesthetic argument about someone she has lost entire nights of sleep over, whose shit she has tenderly washed out of her own hair?

When you call someone you love beautiful, it’s like a code, but instead of being meanspirited and making people around you uncomfortable, you’re saying a totally normal thing (possibly you are also re-inscribing the stipulated connection between worthiness as a human and value as an aesthetic object, but let’s all walk before we run here, ok?)

Look, I don’t know whether you’re beautiful or not, or what that even means, but I do know that you don’t owe it to anyone to hurt yourself with mean code words.

If you have a better filter than I do, and manage not to work your negative feelings about your appearance into conversation, but you hang out with them in your downtime: stop that, too. Because even if you don’t go around saying mean things about yourself out loud, your belief that they are true is keeping you afraid.

Look, there are ways of being invulnerable that don’t involve desensitizing yourself to painful “truths”. To the degree that you think you have to do this — to the degree that other people’s possibly negative opinions of you pose a threat — you’re still doing all this extra work to accomodate the expectation that you entertain what they say to you.

Stop making yourself invulnerable to other people by laying waste to your mind-castle, friends, and start channeling your inner Nancy Pelosi. These people are staff, flunkies of the pointless and meanspirited. Do you engage with staff? You do not.

Everyone gets exactly one opinion and, imagining a world in which your estimation of yourself was more positive than someone else’s, you’re under no obligation to “face facts” as defined by that person. People who try to force you to accept their shitty thoughts and feelings as your personal reality are holding up, not a mirror, but their own weirdly private selfie. They are not a useful source of information about who you are. 

You are the speaker of your own goddamn house. They are Kelly Ann Conways, yapping with hungry eyes in the hopes that some random piece of mouth-garbage they spit out will hit somewhere and stick. (Guys, remember when Kelly Ann insulted Michelle Obama? Of course not, because no one cares about Kelly Ann and her garbage opinions).

Second thing: I don’t know the degree to which other people feel like they have to normalize painful beliefs about themselves to feel invulnerable. But judging by the odds that a stranger or acquaintance will lash out at obstacles or negative feedback or poor deli service or undocumented immigration in a given day, I will guess that I am not the only one who’s been doing this.

So, you know, be kind. People need your negative feedback much less often than you think. Most people aren’t being dicks to you because they just feel too great about themselves.

Every single person you know is getting older, and there is only one Beyonce, friends. I can think of few situations in which affirming the worth of these around you is a poor move, and to the degree that it makes you feel vulnerable, remind yourself that you’re telling that person something about them, not you.

Today, friends, picture a world where you don’t have to talk shit about yourself and you also don’t have to talk shit about anyone else, however distressing their attitude or work ethic or politics seem to you. Could there be a bigger get out of jail free card?

Happy Friday, you absolutely fucking rock star. You are 100% enough for your life, today and all the days.