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20 New Year’s Resolutions For 20-Somethings. The Joy of Quiet. One Sentence Love Story. Things A Person Is Not. A person is not a character. You can’t know their motivation. You can’t cut out the bits that don’t fit just to simplify their story (he wants to get the girl, she wants to get the job, he would rather be right than kind). They won’t follow the script you wrote or serve as a vehicle to prove your point.
They might not grow, they might not help you grow and there won’t always be a tidy resolution, or even a vague artistic one. A person is not spackle. A person is not a prize. A person is not an answer. A person is not a work of art. A person is not a rescue dog. A person is not sorbet. A person is not a play. Seven Things You Will Never Know. 1. You don’t know why things are different between you and your best friend. You don’t know why things feel off. They just do. And here you are, feeling this immense amount of pressure to make it feel how it used to, and you both end up failing.
You’re at lunch surrendering to the things you can’t control. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. How To Survive Living In A Foreign Country. Allow yourself to miss things: food, clothes, being able to communicate easily. Don’t allow yourself to miss: narrow thinking, getting bored, feeling trapped. Learn the language but don’t get upset with yourself if it’s difficult and takes time to master. Enjoy the period where you can sit in coffee shops and restaurants and not have to block out inane chatter. It’s effortless when it’s all gibberish. Get used to the problems of the country not really being your problems. Use the Internet and watch it become even more amazing than it already is.
If you have a phone, call your family every week. Take comfort in knowing that once you got beyond your country’s borders you already began winning. Know that most places in the world where you would end up living for any real period of time can get you to an airport in a day. Give up on where you’re from but don’t give up on the people. Date someone from the country you’re living in. Plan on making friends that will stick. Questions I Shouldn’t Ask People. Remember when we used to take pictures all day and have bad skin but good everything else? Remember when you couldn’t get the girl so we were left with our hands and AIM and porn underneath the bed?
I do. Remember when we said we wouldn’t do certain things? It’s easy to have convictions when you’re fifteen. It’s easy to say no when you don’t know how to say yes yet. Remember when we knew our friends better than we knew ourselves? Remember having an endless amount of time? Remember when summers meant fun things, when Saturday afternoons didn’t feel so short, when we didn’t feel like we were constantly running on little energy?
Remember when we knew what home meant? Remember when we didn’t know certain things? Remember when we didn’t constantly test everyone who loved us and drive them out of our lives with our crap? Advice I Would Like To Give To Teenagers. Hi teenagers, Don’t roll your eyes at me. This is serious. I’m here to give you some helpful advice and it will only take a second. Then you can go to In N’ Out and eat your animal fries, drink Smirnoff, sulk in your bedroom, or whatever it is you kids do these days. First and foremost, I want you to know that what your feeling right now is 90% bogus. Everything you’re crying about will make you laugh in about five years. Oh, your parents! You know your best friend?
Don’t do anything harder than weed. A lot of the things you’re learning in school won’t matter BUT it does teach you how to do things you don’t want to do, which is a valuable lesson. Have sex but not with too many people. Lastly, get ready to feel intense nostalgia for this period of your life for, like, ever. Signed, A psycho 25-year-old Tagged Advice, Drugs, High School, Insanity, Life, Love & Sex, teenagers, The Smiths, Uncategorized, Youth. Why Saying “I Love You” To Someone For The First Time Shouldn’t Be That Big Of A Deal. Am I the only person who thinks saying “I love you” to your significant other for the first time isn’t that big of a deal? People ask silly questions like, “BUT WHEN DO YOU KKNOW IT’S REALLY LOVE?” And I wanna just scream and shake them while screaming, “When you’re climaxing together on an Indian summer night?
When they buy you a pack of gum at the bodega? WHENEVER. Geez!” I’m not downplaying the significance of falling in love. Think about all the things you love. Of course comparing your love for a human being to a delicious sour candy is sort of ridiculous. People are so scared to say it because they’re afraid of rejection. I think we forget how easy it for us to actually love someone. So my advice is this: If you feel like you love someone, you probably do so you should just say it. Stop Feeling Sad (For No Reason) Stop feeling sad for no reason. Stop placing all of your happiness into whether or not your crush will text you back.
Stop feeling a vague sense of melancholy, something that you aren’t able to pinpoint but you know is there. I woke up today feeling that quiet sense of melancholy. The steps I took on the way to the bathroom felt heavy and when I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see myself cringing. This doesn’t happen very often, I don’t usually meet the day with a “Screw you!” Kind of attitude but when I do, I get angry. How is it possible to feel so crappy at 8:30 in the morning? For those of us who don’t have chemical imbalances but are rather just prone to feeling a boatload of emotions, we have to learn not to indulge every thought we have. We need to start figuring out what emotions are legitimate and which ones are bogus. Except it’s not better. The One Person You Never Really Get Over. There will always be that one person you’ll never really get over. I know, I know, Connie Chung delivering groundbreaking news over here, but it’s true.
Sure, you can go days, weeks, months, years without thinking of them but the second you see their face or their name gets mentioned in passing, your stomach drops and you feel like you could puke. You’ve lost control and all of these feelings suddenly rise to the surface to say, “Sup? Have you missed us?’ You’ll hate yourself for this, for all of it. You won’t be able to recognize why this one person can still garner this type of reaction. You’re not over this person because you still want to see them naked. You’re not over this person because they still have the ability to piss you off. You’re not over this person because you can still remember the little details, like the way their sweat smelled (ew, make that memory go away), their favorite song at seventeen, or a day you held hands in the backseat of a car.
Optimism Bias: Human Brain May Be Hardwired for Hope. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more). The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.
Ann Shoket: 5 Secrets to Writing an Amazing Story | Figment Blog. Ann Shoket is the editor-in-chief of Seventeen Magazine, so she knows what she’s doing when it comes to writing for teens. Here, she shares five insider tips for writing a relatable, interesting story for Seventeen‘s My Life feature. Each month, Seventeen runs a two-page article spotlighting a real girl and a life-changing experience she’s had. Sound like something you’d be good at writing? Check out the instructions for submissions at the bottom of the post! And if you haven’t entered the Seventeen Magazine Fiction Writing Contest. . . what are you waiting for?! The prize is a chat with Maggie Stiefvater, author of the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy and The Scorpio Races.
Oh, and a cool $5,000. Hey, you know that it’s FUN to be 17—so write like it! Set the scene. Connect with one girl. Write it like you’d say it to your best friend. Read it out loud. Want to pitch a story to Seventeen? All girls who are featured in the My Life column must: -Be 16-21 years old -Be living in the U.S. Love, Actually - Magazine. Ellen Weinstein This article has been corrected since it was published in the print magazine.
In case you haven’t noticed, millions of girls are in the midst of a cultural insurrection. Armed with the pocket money that has made them a powerful consumer force since the 1920s, girls have set their communal sights on a particular kind of entertainment, and when they find it, they transform it into a commercial phenomenon that leaves even the creators and marketers of that entertainment dumbfounded. What do these girls—with such different backgrounds and aspirations, foreign to one another in so many respects—demand right now? The old story, the one they were forced to abandon for a while, but will be denied no longer: the Boyfriend Story. She wears high heels, I wear sneakers; She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers. Why are so many teenage girls so interested in the kind of super-reactionary love stories that would have been perfectly at home during the Eisenhower administration?
Why I Have No Interest In Being Your Friend. I don’t want to be friends with you because you’re a taker, not a giver. You’ll sit here and laugh at my jokes, asking me to tell more stories, but you won’t give me anything in return. You’ll come to me for advice but fail to even ask how I’m doing. You suck the energy out of me. You don’t add anything to any given situation and I’m too old and busy now to carve out time for people who don’t mean the world to me. I don’t want to be friends with you because the one thing that bound us together is now over. I don’t want to be friends with you because we hang in different crowds. I don’t want to be friends with you because you’re shady. I don’t want to be friends with you because I want to have sex with you. I don’t want to be friends with you because you don’t get it. I don’t want to be friends with you because you don’t talk crap.
Tagged As If, Bad Friends, Boring People, Crushes, Life, Rants, Takers, Talking Crap, Toxic People, Uncategorized. DR4WARD. The New Yorker. Can FBI Agent James Gagliano Make Newburgh Safe? Photographs by Joseph Rodriguez One morning earlier this month, just before sunrise, a silent convoy of SUVs streamed into the tiny, troubled city of Newburgh, New York. Over 200 law-enforcement officers descended on the blighted heart of town, and a company of military-style commandos prepared for a synchronized raid. Armed with M4 assault rifles and dressed in helmets, goggles, and green fatigues, SWAT teams burst into a series of dilapidated houses, shouting, “FBI! Get down!” By late morning, twelve alleged members of the Bloods street gang were in federal custody. Beautifully situated on a picturesque bend in the Hudson about a 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City, Newburgh does not look, from a distance, like a community mired in High Noon levels of lawlessness.
For two decades, American inner-city crime has been dropping. Nor is Newburgh an anomaly. Just recently, however, things have started to look up for Newburgh. Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia. 60 Small Ways to Improve Your Life in the Next 100 Days - StumbleUpon. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make drastic changes in order to notice an improvement in the quality of your life. At the same time, you don’t need to wait a long time in order to see the measurable results that come from taking positive action. All you have to do is take small steps, and take them consistently, for a period of 100 days. Below you’ll find 60 small ways to improve all areas of your life in the next 100 days. Home 1. Create a “100 Days to Conquer Clutter Calendar” by penciling in one group of items you plan to declutter every day, for the next 100 days.
Day 1: Declutter MagazinesDay 2: Declutter DVD’sDay 3: Declutter booksDay 4: Declutter kitchen appliances 2. If you take it out, put it back.If you open it, close it.If you throw it down, pick it up.If you take it off, hang it up. 3. Happiness 4. 5. Eating your lunch outside.Calling your best friend to chat.Taking the time to sit down and read a novel by your favorite author for a few minutes. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
50 Life Secrets and Tips. Memorize something everyday.Not only will this leave your brain sharp and your memory functioning, you will also have a huge library of quotes to bust out at any moment. Poetry, sayings and philosophies are your best options.Constantly try to reduce your attachment to possessions.Those who are heavy-set with material desires will have a lot of trouble when their things are taken away from them or lost. Possessions do end up owning you, not the other way around. Become a person of minimal needs and you will be much more content.Develop an endless curiosity about this world.Become an explorer and view the world as your jungle.
Stop and observe all of the little things as completely unique events. Try new things. Get out of your comfort zone and try to experience as many different environments and sensations as possible. This world has so much to offer, so why not take advantage of it?
JK Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech Part 1 - June 5 2008. Help.