Not in the mood

2023.01.26 // 18:03  reading for class (from leslie m. alexander’s african or american) about a black neighborhood that was destroyed to build central park

second week of June and yesterday it rained for the first time when i had gone for an evening walk and got drenched in rain, surprisingly almost everyone pulled out their umbrellas and raincoats and just few children played around, capturing moments on their cellphones. I returned back home with a smile reminiscing about all my moments of rainy days, but as soon as I changed into a warm set of clothes and made some coffee i found uncertainty waving at me through the glass window. Ofcourse i let it in and i began wondering how everybody has a script to life. For eg- back there, immediately everybody was prepared with umbrellas and raincoats and i wasn't, college will reopen on Monday and all my classmates have already covered half of the syllabus while i am still stuck on the first chapter of economics, what did i do all this time? Waited for my so called art of writing to return back? I tried, i really tried this time.

I searched for prompts on every site possible, read thousands of poems on Pinterest, read the dictionary, forced myself to describe events of my life on my diary, and yet i couldn't complete any of my notes. I tried keeping my mind away from poems, but somehow, they make me feel like a bad person now, like a lawyer who couldn't serve justice to their client, i feel the guilt of a parent who couldn't spent quality time with their child.

Anyway, apart from this, i feel under prepared all the time, it's like life is moving on, people are doing exactly what they're supposed to do and i am not even walking or moving , not even at a slow pace. I am just here, watching clouds take different shapes, passing vehicles, observing people, envying birds flying high into the sky, reading umpteen poems, sleeping and staring at my textbooks.

What exactly am i afraid of?

안녕하세요! Hey everyone! In this lesson, we’re going to learn about -더라고요, a sentence ending that will make your Korean sound very natural! It’s used for expressing surprise at something you experienced. Let’s start!

What is -더라고(요)? 

-더라고(요) is a sentence ending that is always in the past tense. Here’s a formula:

[verb / adjective stem] + 더라고(요) 

Notice how you don’t have to attach -았/었, even though this structure is always used when talking about the past tense – just attach it to the regular verb stem!

-더라고(요) is used for speaking from your own personal experience. It’s usually used when you’re recalling something that happened, and you’re detailing what you saw/heard/experienced. There can also be a slight nuance of surprise when using -더라고(요) as well. Let’s see some examples!

캘리포니아에 가 봤는데 날씨가 엄청나게 좋더라고요. = I went to California, and the weather was really nice.

Here, you’re talking about the time that you went to California; based on your own personal experience in California, you noticed that the weather is really nice. A more natural translation of this, in my opinion, would be “I went to California and realized that the weather is really nice” or “I went to California and recall that the weather was really nice.”

A note about tense – this could translate to “the weather is really nice” or “the weather was really nice.” You could either be talking about the weather during the particular time that you visited, or you could be speaking more generally about California weather based on what you learned from visiting, if that makes sense. Either way, you’re talking about your past experience with something.

BTS 콘서트 티켓을 찾았는데 되게 비싸더라고요. = I was looking for BTS tickets, and I saw that they were really expensive. / I was looking for BTS tickets, and I realized that they’re really expensive.

Again, you’re speaking from your own experience of searching for BTS tickets. There’s also a hint of surprise, like “I realized, wow, they’re really expensive.”

지난 학기에 미적분학을 봤는데 생각보다 쉽더라고요. = I took calculus last semester and it was easier than I thought.

그 사람은 무서워보이지만 진짜 착하더라고요. = He looks scary, but he’s really kind.

This would imply that you have met this person before and realized that he is actually kinder than he looks.

A Note about Formality

If you want to speak formally, you could just end your sentence with -더라고요. If you want to speak informally, you could drop the -요  and end it with -더라고. You might also hear sentences ending with -더라, which is also very informal, and gives a greater nuance of surprise than -더라고(요) – it’s a little stronger. 

That’s about all for this lesson! Hope it was helpful! See you next time! 다음에 봐요!

My masterlist

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Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

my masterpost | my studygram | ask me anything

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[transcript under the cut]

Other advice posts that may be of interest:

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

Active Revision Techniques

How To Do Uni Readings

How to Revise BIG Subjects

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