Future Teacher

This heart-warming Disneyland Paris spot features a sweet CG duck who simply adores Donald Duck. It’s the perfect cure for post-Christmas blues!!!

Relieving the burden on other people not only frees them up and makes their lives easier and better, it reminds you that you’ve got autonomy, and that you’re a useful human being who thinks about someone other than your own damn self.

Is this how you roll?

oh shittt

Credit: Liesl Manone.

“My parents aren’t giving me the freedom to be responsible.  Mama’s fine.  But Papa is an Egyptian father.  He wants me to always be in a safe, cozy home.  Recently I wanted to go on an educational trip to Sri Lanka.  I begged him.  I said, ‘Please, I’ll be living with a family.  I’ll call you ten times a day.’  But he wouldn’t listen.  I locked myself in my room and cried.  I wanted that experience.  I wanted to meet beautiful people, and eat beautiful food, and take beautiful photos.  I know my dad very well.  He just doesn’t trust people.  He thinks that I’m naïve.  He thinks that everyone who helps you wants something in return.  But that’s not why I help people.  I love people.  I love languages.  I can even speak a little Hindi.  I want to see every village and every city.  I even want to work for NASA one day.  I love physics and astronomy.  But Papa thinks astronomy is a bad idea.  He doesn’t get it.  It’s not that he doesn’t understand the stars.  He just doesn’t understand me.”   (Alexandria, Egypt)

— Sophie Heawood  (via brosetta-stone)

“My grandmother was the first in our family to discover it.  One day she joined a meditation in the park.  She was taking so many medications at the time, but she threw them all away and never took another trip to the hospital.  That was before the crackdown.  At one time were one hundred million followers of Falun Gong in China.  It’s a peaceful religion.  But the following grew too big.  Our teacher seemed like a threat to the government.  They said crazy things on state media.  They called it a cult.  They said we’re terrorists and that we kill our parents.  They began to arrest us.  They even harvested our organs.  I know it sounds crazy, but you can Google it.  We tried to resist.  We practiced inside our home.  We secretly handed out fliers to push back against the propaganda.  But they caught me on camera.  Everywhere there are cameras.  They followed me to my home.  They shoved me in their car.  For eight months I was in detention.  The first thing they did was take a sample of my blood.  For hours every day they put us in a room and forced us to watch television about how to be a good citizen.  If anyone looked away, the whole group was punished.  Eventually my family bribed the court with huge money and they let me go.  But for three years I had to write a letter every month saying that I am a guilty person.  When my probation ended, I left the country.”

if voting did not matter, republicans would not be making it this hard for you to vote

“I want to be a hematologist. That’s a blood doctor. Well not a blood doctor, exactly. But a doctor that finds cures for blood diseases.” “How’d you decide on that?” “We were dissecting frogs in class and learning about how the blood flows through the body. And I went home that night and wrote an essay. And it wasn’t like any other essay I’d ever done. Normally when I write essays, it takes me a long time, but this was the fastest essay I ever wrote. So the next day I was asking the teacher mad questions, and she was like, ‘You know you can get a job in this.’ And she pulled it up on the internet, and was showing me all about hematologists.”