A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
Penguin escapes killer whales by jumping onto a boat.
Antarctic penguins (and most other Antarctic animals for that matter) are very interesting because they lack a natural fear of humans since, of course, humans are not a natural occurrence on the continent. It is one of the few places on earth where it is completely normal for fully wild animals to be comfortable around you. In fact, most react as though humans are just especially large penguins as those are the only flightless biped native to the area.
As far as this gentoo penguin is concerned, it was saved by a float of large yellow penguins also hiding from orcas.
“in this essay i will explore” memes piss me off because it implies y’all still using first person pronouns when writing academically. childish ass
In this essay, this writer will explore the implications of pretending that one’s own personal view is not part of one’s essay, and the inaccessibility of academia related to established custom of artificial detachment.
In this essay, I will demonstrate that the blanket ban on first-person pronouns in high-school and some university English classes is poorly understood and hastily adopted as a result. I will further illustrate that it is a mere substitute for explaining to inexperienced writers that excessive use of phrases like “I think” or “I believe” is unnecessary and rhetorically weakens academic writing, and that opinions expressed in an essay are already assumed to be those of the author. Finally, I will address strategies for effectively conveying that information to students, who often find it difficult to grasp.
In this essay, passive voice will be used throughout in order to distance the work done from any researchers, or, in reality, kind of imply all experiments were done by magical lab gremlins and the results were simply recorded.
in this essay, enlightenment will descend upon you without the agency of any living being. you will know things, yet know not how you know.
prepare yourself. it begins.
In this essay, I will use the first person pronoun as a bludgeoning weapon
