je te pardonne

I don’t want to spend every day thinking of all the possible reasons to hate you just to make myself believe that I’m okay. Because I am not. I want to be okay, but it doesn’t mean I have to bring you down just to lift my spirits up. I want to be alright, be happy and contented with where I am and what I have now. I want to be the best version of myself. I want to regain the pieces of myself that I lost when I loved you too much. I want to be myself again.

I’m forgiving you because as early as now, I want to let you go.

We hurt each other and didn’t do anything good. We were in a toxic friendship that I fought to keep but we soon realized it wasn’t worth it. Now that we’ve come to our senses, this is the best time to continually go our separate ways. I’m letting you go and forgiving you for all the things you’ve done. And I’m forgiving myself for breaking the promise I told myself that I wouldn’t get hurt by the same person who broke me. I’m forgiving you because you deserve it. And I do too. We both deserve to be happy, maybe happier apart.

It takes a lot of courage to forgive but it takes a lot more to ask for forgiveness. And I’m asking you now to forgive me for asking too much. Forgive me for believing that it was all real. Forgive me for the idea that you felt the same way as I did.

I’m forgiving you because I love you and mainly because I love myself more. I want to be free of the toxic thoughts of you and the times that we were in uncertainty. I want to be free of the hatred, anger, and distrust. I want to start over with a heart of hope and peace of mind. I want to start over and get over you. I want to restart. I want to let go, move on and live on.

Life doesn’t stop when you run out of reasons to go on, it continues once you start finding reasons to look forward to. And I have found those reasons.

I’m forgiving you because I’ve realized that I should make peace with my mind, my own sanity. Because I love myself.

brand new things to welcome 2016

1. Let go of your comfort zone.

The truest form of beauty in life, the richness and the experience, is to be found in the areas that are unfamiliar to us. Life opens up in so many awe-inspiring ways when we allow ourselves to face our fears, and trade in our everyday familiarities for things that may breed a lifestyle we have always yearned for. Think about it – if you seek change, if you seek a sense of growth, it is time to do something different, it is time to embrace the unknown. 

2. Let go of everyone’s opinion of your life.

There are always going to be people who will try to give you guidelines in regards to the ‘correct’ way to go about living. However, there is no universally ‘correct’ way to live a life that is solely your own. Everyone has different goals, and different views as to what happiness is. People will judge you, people will try to change you, but if you allow for that to alter your path you’re going to end up living someone else’s life. This year – make your life your own.

3. Let go of your opinion of everyone’s life.

No one has a perfect life. You see filtered photos on Instagram and highlight reels on Facebook; you see blissful accounts of seemingly faultless relationships, and hand picked reflections of those you follow on social media, but you never truly see someone in these situations. In an age where we are so easily capable of curating and painting an immaculately false picture of our lives, it is important to remind ourselves that those we envy, and those we compare ourselves to, are capable of doing the exact same thing. 

4. Let go of your infatuation with waiting.

It is often easy to get caught up in waiting for the things we want in life to simply happen. We wait for the promotions, we wait for the first text, we wait for the easy way out. It is time to stop waiting for our lives to become what we want them to be; it is time to start making them what we want them to be. We all have potential within us – it is pinned and blooming between our palms, it is coursing through our veins, and if we meet our visions with the same level of ruthless effort, we cannot fail at making even our craziest dreams a reality.

5. Let go of your tendency to favor being cool, over being connected.

In a world that seeks connection we oddly avoid eye contact, we time our text responses in order to protect ourselves from seeming too eager or too interested, and we hold our feelings back because we don’t want to seem overly emotional or unreasonable. We silence our instincts, and at the end of the day instead of feeling good about ourselves, we feel alone, we feel misunderstood. Remember – it is okay to be emotional, to seek help, to confidently tell someone you enjoy being around that you are infatuated with them. There is nothing wrong with vulnerability, with being human, for that is what creates depth within our relationships, and that is what ultimately unifies us.

6. Let go of a love that wont love you back.

Love is quite possibly the only thing that can both build and break a human being, and that makes moving on difficult. Remind yourself that it is often the highlights that leave you longing for the past, the good memories, the beautiful moments, the building blocks – but there were also the downfalls, the breaks, the things that caused the relationship to end in the first place. There are so many breathtaking people in the world, people who have the potential to create with you something that is foundational, something that drives and inspires you to be a better person. Open yourself up to them; open yourself up to the kind of love you deserve. 

 

7. Let go of what you tolerate.

It is quite simple – life is not to be endured, life is to be enjoyed. If there is something that you want to change you have all the power in the world to change it. You do not have to keep toxic people in your circle, you do not have to stay in an unfulfilled relationship or ‘put up’ with any aspect of your life. There is courage to be found within the hearts of those who refuse to simply stomach their life, within those who pledge to confront what makes them unhappy, or ungrateful, and focus on the things that do the opposite.

8. Let go of the idea that it’s too late.

It is truly never too late to change your life. It is never too late to become the person you always hoped you could be, or to love the way you have always wanted to love. We often forget that we are not bound by our past. We don’t have to be who we were a year ago, we don’t have to make the same mistakes we did when we were younger; we can want different things, we can seek different horizons.  We have to believe that we are never too old, never too jaded, and never too broken to take our first steps towards change. We wake up every single day with the ability to start fresh – it is never too late to take advantage of that.

source: Bianca Sparancino in her book "Seeds Planted in Concrete"

perfect

So if you like causing trouble up in hotel rooms
And if you like having secret little rendezvous
If you like to do the things you know that we shouldn’t do
Then baby, I'm perfect
Baby, I'm perfect for you

And if you like midnight driving with the windows down
And if you like going places we can’t even pronounce
If you like to do whatever you've been desiring about
Baby, I am perfect for you ;)

The Friendship of Camus and Sartre

As maître of the mid-century French philosophical scene, Jean-Paul Sartre wielded some considerable influence in his home country and abroad. His celebrity did not prevent him from working under the editorship of his friend and fellow novelist, Albert Camus, however. Camus, the younger of the two and the more restless and unsettled, edited the French resistance newspaper Combat; Sartre wrote for the paper, and even served as its postwar correspondent in New York (where he met Herbert Hoover) in 1945. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the two became acquainted two years earlier at a production of Sartre’s The Flies. They were already mutual admirers from afar, Camus having reviewed Sartre’s work and Sartre having written glowingly of Camus’ The Stranger. Ronald Aronson, a scholar and biographer of the philosophers’ relationship, describes their first meeting below, quoting from de Beauvoir’s memoir The Prime of Life:

“[A] dark-skinned young man came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus.” His novel The Stranger, published a year earlier, was a literary sensation, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus had appeared six months previously. [Camus] wanted to meet the increasingly well-known novelist and philosopher—and now playwright—whose fiction he had reviewed years earlier and who had just published a long article on Camus’s own books. It was a brief encounter. “I’m Camus,” he said. Sartre immediately “found him a most likeable personality.”

As the recently discovered letter above shows—from Camus to Sartre—the two were intimate friends as well as collaborators. Thought to have been written sometime between 1943 and 1948, the letter is familiar and candid. Camus opens with “My dear Sartre, I hope you and Castor [“the beaver,” Sartre’s nickname for de Beauvoir] are working a lot… let me know when you return and we will have a relaxed evening.” Aronson comments that the letter “shows that despite what some writers have said, Sartre and Camus had a close friendship.”
 

Aronson’s comment is understated. The querulous falling out of Sartre and Camus has acquired almost legendary status, with the two sometimes standing in for two divergent paths of French post-war philosophy. Where Sartre gravitated toward orthodox Marxism, and aligned his views with Stalin’s even in the face of the Soviet camps, Camus repudiated revolutionary violence and valorized the tragic struggle of the individual in 1951’s The Rebel, the work that allegedly incited their philosophical split. Andy Martin at the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog writes a concise summary of their intellectual and temperamental differences:
 

While Sartre after the war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn “moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a (pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one audience [in New York].

While Camus’ political disengagement and critique of Communist praxis in The Rebel may have precipitated the increasingly fractious relationship between the two men, there may have also been a personal disagreement over a mutual love interest named Wanda Kosakiewicz, whom both men pursued long before their split over ideas. 

Satre and Camus in New York

In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.

The Chrysler and Empire State buildings seemed to Sartre to be like ancient ruins.

In some sense, existentialism was going home. The “roots” of 20th-century French philosophy are canonically located on mainland Europe, in the fertile terrain of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. But it was not entirely immune to the metaphysical turmoil of the United States at the end of the 19th century. French philosophy retained elements of the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and the psychologism of William James (each receives an honorable mention in Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”). More significantly, both Camus and Sartre had learned and borrowed from 20th-century writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and dos Passos —and, of course, from the films of Humphrey Bogart. Camus, in particular, cultivated the trench coat with the upturned collar and described himself as a mix of Bogart, Fernandel and a samurai.


When Sartre stepped off the plane in New York in January 1945, only months after the liberation of Paris, his head full of American movies, architecture and jazz, he might have expected to feel in his natural habitat — the pre-eminent philosopher of liberté setting foot in the land of freedom, a nation temperamentally and constitutionally addicted to liberty. Was there not already something of the existential cowboy and intellectual gunslinger in Sartre’s take-no-hostages attitude? Camus must have thought so in dispatching him to the United States. 

Albert Camus

Sartre wrote dozens of articles for Combat while in the States, often phoning them back to Camus in Paris, and eventually went on to talk philosophy at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and elsewhere. In the process, he acquired an American girlfriend (about whom he wrote abundantly and explicitly to Simone de Beauvoir: “I am killed by passion and lectures.”). But the very personal article he wrote for Town & Country, “Manhattan: The Great American Desert,” records that he suffered on arrival from “le mal de New York.” He never really recovered.

Sartre, leaving the confines of the Plaza Hotel, walked up Fifth Avenue beneath a frozen sky, looking for New York, but not finding it. There was nothing on which to focus his gaze; it was a city for “the far-sighted,” he wrote, since the natural focal point was somewhere around infinity, over the horizon. He missed the intimate quartiers of Paris, finding in their place only “filmy atmospheres, longitudinally stretched masses with nothing to mark a beginning or end.” Just the kind of place, one might think, where an expatriate existentialist ought to fit right in. And yet he suffered stubbornly from a sense of disorientation. “In the numerical anonymity of roads and avenues, he wrote, “I am just anybody, anywhere.” New York put him in mind of the steppes or the pampas.

But soon enough he started to realize what his fundamental objection really was. The whole point of the city was to fortify itself against nature. But Manhattan failed to do that: an “open” city with a limitless sky above, it let nature in on every side. It was, of course, an island, and thus too exposed to the elements: to storm, hurricane, snow, heat, wind, floods. It had no real protection against anything. “I feel as though I were camping in the heart of a jungle crawling with insects.”` Therefore he learned to appreciate it only while crossing it in a car, as if he were “driving across the great plains of Andalusia.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

And just as he inverts the perception of the American city, so too Sartre turns the notion of American freedom inside out. By February, having been shuttled to and fro across the States, wined, dined and given propaganda tours to industrial installations, he comes to the conclusion in another article, written for Le Figaro, that America is the land of conformism. He finds that beneath its notional attachment to “individualism,” America does not actually trust the solitary individual. Despite the “liberal economy,” America is an embodiment of a Rousseauist “social contract” in which the general will of the “collectivity” dominates: “Each American is educated by other Americans and he educates others in turn. Everywhere in New York, in colleges and beyond, there are courses in Americanization.” Existentialist anomie is prohibited: America is hyper-normative, producing citizen clones. 

It is Sartre’s most powerful and recurrent complaint: that people are being treated as things. The “nausea” of the 1930s, elicited by pebbles and trees and ocean depths (and thus, as in New York, nature in general) morphed, in the ’40s and ’50s, into a specific aversion to the nonorganic products of economic forces. In America he understood that things (the “in-itself”), in all their massiveness, were threatening to reify the amorphous human (or “for-itself”) and produce what he called in a later formulation the “practico-inert.” 

Still, Sartre holds out the hope that New York is moving in a generally Sartrean and semi-apocalyptic direction. All those skyscrapers? Obviously, they are doomed. “They are already a bit run-down; tomorrow, perhaps, they will be torn down. In any case, their construction required a faith that we no longer have.” The Chrysler and the Empire State already appear to Sartre like ancient ruins. 

Camus — officially a cultural emissary of the French government — followed in Sartre’s footsteps in 1946, providing an ironic commentary on his predecessor. Where Sartre was obsessed with architecture, Camus was indifferent, oblivious. “I notice that I have not noticed the skyscrapers, they seemed to me perfectly natural.” He had no issues with commodity capitalism. He admired colors, foodstuffs, smells, taxis, tie shops, ice cream, the “orgy of violent lights” that was Broadway, a jazz bar in Harlem and the giant Camel advertising icon of “an American soldier, his mouth open, puffing out clouds of real smoke.” 

He fell in love several times over, notably with Patricia Blake, a 19-year-old student and Vogue apprentice. He read her pages from “The Plague” and she, in return, noting his fascination with the American way of death, found him issues of undertakers’ trade magazines — Sunnyside, Casket,and Embalmer’s Monthly. He particularly admired a funeral parlor ad: “You die. We do the rest.”

Camus had to keep explaining to American students that he never had been an ‘existentialist.’

At Vassar he gave a lecture on “The Crisis of Mankind” and was dazzled by the spectacle of “an army of long-legged young starlets, lazing on the lawn.” But he was preoccupied by what he thought of as the “American tragedy.” The tragedy of the students was that they lacked a sense of the tragic. For Sartre the tragic was the mechanization and objectification of the human. For Camus, the tragic was something more elusive: whatever it was, it was missing in America. 

There was an obvious difference of context between Camus and the students he was addressing. He’d come from Europe, which had just spent several years tearing itself apart, whereas they remained more or less physically untouched by the war. Camus was welcomed both as literary luminary (the translation of “The Outsider” came out during his stay) and Resistance hero. But his tragic perception of life was not reducible to the question of the Second World War. Sailing back from New York to France, at night in the middle of the Atlantic, staring down from the deck into the ocean, mesmerized by the wake of the ship, Camus spoke of his love for “these seas of forgetfulness, these unlimited silences that are like the enchantment of death.”

Camus, the Resistance philosopher of solidarity, discovered (or perhaps re-discovered) the problem of other minds in New York. Unlike Sartre, he had no difficulty with things, trees, the Empire State Building, the impersonal ocean. It was only on looking into the face of another human being that he fully experienced a sense of the tragic. While hell-is-other-people Sartre came to invoke a notion of the “group-in-fusion,” Camus — who had to keep explaining to the students that he was not and never had been an “existentialist” — increasingly redefined the “absurd” in terms of an inevitable failure of language to bridge the gap between individuals. And it was not just the problem of inadequate English in speaking to Americans. He had the same feeling in Quebec. 

The clash between Sartre and Camus would come to be defined by their political divergence in the ’50s, crystallized by the publication of “The Rebel” by Camus. But already, in their different reactions to the United States — and particularly New York — we have the ingredients of a philosophical schism. Sartre, on his return to Europe, recalls above all America’s racism and practice of segregation, the inevitable counterpart to its drive to conformity. He writes a play, “The Respectful Prostitute,” that dramatizes the episode of the Scottsboro Boys in the ’30s. The split between contending forces — East and West, black and white, bourgeoisie and proletariat, humans and things — becomes the defining concern of his philosophy, summarized in the (admittedly rebarbative) phrase he comes up with in his “Critique of Dialectical Reason” to define boxing, but which also applies to his relationship with Camus: “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.” Existentialism in this form, inflected with Marxism, infiltrates the American intelligentsia, is absorbed into black power philosophy (“black existentialism”) and finds an echo in writers as disparate as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.

Camus, on the other hand, begins to sound more like Samuel Beckett. While Sartre after the war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn “moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a (pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one audience. And it is this anti-systematic aspect of America that he retains and refuses to clarify: “After so many months I know nothing about New York.”

Paradoxically, it is clear that Sartre took his notion of collective action from what he witnessed in the United States rather than in the Soviet Union. It is typical that he should choose to frame his notion of freedom and the fate of individual identity in essentially literary (or textual) terms. Beware the editor! He didn’t like the way his articles were butchered when they appeared in American journals and admits to being apprehensive of something similar — “le rewriting” — happening to his plays, should they ever be put on in the United States. The F.B.I., while accusing Camus of writing “inaccurate reports,” also misidentified him as “Canus” and “Corus.”

Sartre and Camus’s love-hate relationship was played out and reflected in their on-off romance with America. As Camus put it, “It is necessary to fall in love … if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.” Above all the two thinkers emphasize that America is always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of a philosophical dialectic.

Kafka's love letter to Felice

In November of 1912, three months after he met Felice, Kafka writes:

Fräulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?

Whether out of self-protective rationalization or mere pragmatism — the onset of tuberculosis was, after all, what ended the relationship five years later — he plaintively points to a physiological reason, almost as an excuse for the psychological:

Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not doing so. To make it short: My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

He resumes his plea, which seems directed more at himself than at her:

If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise. Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with what energy remains to me at the end of this letter…

He closes in true Kafkaesque fashion:

If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.

Tesla: a certified psychic

This is one of the reasons why Nikolai Tesla, a Serbian genius,  was also a certified psychic :

“This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.” - Tesla in his interview 1926

And his prediction towards the future, oh well merely about our smart phone shit:

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

Damn you, Tesla!

Moi

In the depth of winter 

I finally learned

that there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Riddle

I was just wondering how many people think about things that I always think everyday .

(well, yeah pretty rhetoric)

This afternoon, I drank many cups of coffee with a good friend and talked about Life.

Yeah, Life .

Pretty ironic and naive, see that we are just a mere human who got nothing (yet).

Is it wrong if we wanna talk about The World, in our perspective?

Call me a cynical, or narrow-minded, because my thoughts are rarely the same with the others.

Most girls in my age, often talk about marriage, kids, lovers.

Whilst, on my mind, I am worried about  Russian Jet that was downed by Turkish air force (25 November 2015, fact).

Girls love reading romances, with happy endings.

And I am consumed with Camus, Orwell, and Sartre and their poignant views. Maybe I have read too much information, and I still feel like a fool.

As my good friend, Tegar, said "the more you read, the more you suffer"

In another world, Girls love posting their pics with their lovers, with blabbering captions, wise words made by them or stole it from Google yet I only post pictures about stray cats.

I am afraid of World War III.

I am scared that most people are controlled by media.

I gave up when I knew about the fact that we cannot live on Mars.

Some said that I am too complicated. I think too much, too far.

And I hate reading bad comments and shallow views of people who think they know everything.

All my discussions with best friends mostly end up with questioning ourselves, "what are we talking about? are we aliens? are we normal?"

And I realize that, It is not you. It is me.

and I asked myself, "what is being normal anyway?"

Is it that to live a life like most of people do: being born, study, work, married, kids, being rich?

Or being one step richer , or smarter, or more "sophisticated" among your friends?

Is it too cliche if I say, "I wanna change the world, I wanna change my nation"

On the other hand, I am still stupid, lazy, don't have lots of money yet.

Maybe, that's why,  I have been thinking that I am gonna change myself first , will start from little things.

I am gonna be more on time.

I will not litter on road.

I will be a good listener, don't give unnecessary suggestion  before the speaker asks about it.

I will phone my parents more often.

I will start wake up in early morning again, like I did before (hmm.. even on weekends *crossfinger)

I will learn cooking, even that is not my thing.

I will help people without thinking for returns, even just their smiles.

and what else... (I am still thinking about it).

Perhaps, I am weird, I don't know how weird I am, 

Then I can only assume that each person has their own uniqueness. And who are you to judge?

well, even you, can't judge me too :)

Sometimes, I feel that not many people could understand me.

It feels like I speak riddles and rhymes only few people know.

If I am honest about everything, I am afraid that they would think that I am insane, and as an ordinary human, I am frightened of rejection and humiliation, and being insulted could hurt my feelings, too.

Well, I do apologize if I am being sensitive tonight.

I blame the coffee.

Checking the academic level of our writing

 Y'ello folks, maybe it's useful for ye! Check it out:

Writing academic articles like journal in English is challenging to some people. We are often unsure whether our writing is already academic or not. 

Actually, there is one feature/test in ms.words that can answer our doubt. We can use it to check how academic our writing is. 

I wanna share the information as I believe it will be beneficial for my friends, especially for last year students. 

Here are the Steps: 

1. Click the File Tab, and then click Options. 

2. Click Proofing. 

3. Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, make sure the Check grammar with spelling check box is selected. 

4. Select show readability statistics. 

5. After you enable this feature, open a file that you want to check. Make sure the language is English US or UK. 

6. Highlight the texts or paragraph that you want to check. Then, click review tab > spelling and grammar. After that, click no when there is a pop up to check the rest of the document. 

7. When Word finishes checking the spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading level of the document. 

Notes: The one that you should see on the information box is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. For example, if your Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 7, that means your writing level is similar to 7th grade student's writing and suitable to be read by the same grade students. If you are a college student, the score that you are supposed to obtain should range from 13-16. That means your writing fulfills university writing standard and it's already academic.

The result can be considered accurate because the test rates text on U.S. school grade level. However, if you have non-English words in your writing or paragraph, the result might be slightly inaccurate. 

I'll give you an example. I used my thesis abstract to be tested with this feature. In my abstract, I have several non-English words like Balai Bahasa and Jawa Timur. The result that I got after using this readability test is 17.2. In my case, 17.2 is still considered okay and academic. I concluded that the result might be slighly inaccurate because some non-English words are present in my text. Nevertheless, if you get higher than 17 even 20, that means your writing is too complicated and complex, not understandable. 

In another word, your language mastery level is as same as Noam Chomsky. Too sophisticated until no one understands what you write. If you wanna remain ordinary human unlike Mr. Chomsky, consequently, you have to revise your text by simplyifing some sentences and breaking down your excessively long sentences (reducing the number of clauses in one sentence).

Thanks to my classmate for this tips .

A self-reminder

Well, perhaps, we have been dealing with many things which occupied our head. The world is spinning around. We are restless. Defenseless. 

We think something is wrong, but we don't know what it is.

we think too far, perhaps. we have been doing many things, putting so much efforts to reach goals, yet, we feel like we are running at the same place.

Hazy, Scary, and all this absurdity gagged us.

Sometimes, our mind is exhausted of everything. Nothing has changed, and we are in deeply morose, shouting and punching nothing in the air.

This article that I have read probably could make us rethink and ponder about things that we face.

When you are tired,  read this and you know what you will do next , you know you can do it, and most of all: because you deserve to be happy ,

"I know what it’s like to feel tired — and not just in the physical sense. 

The world that we live in is an exhausting place to be. It is wearing. It is thankless. It is endlessly trying and scarcely rewarding. You’re tired simply because you live in it. You’re tired of loving too much, caring too much, giving too much to a world that never gives anything back. You are tired of investing in indefinite outcomes. You’re tired of uncertainties. Tired of grey.

I know you haven’t always been this worn out — that there was a time when you were hopeful and pure. When your optimism outweighed your cynicism and you had an infinite amount in you to give. I know you have been chipped away and worn down piece by piece — a broken heart here and an un-kept promise there. I know the world hasn’t always been kind throughout the games you’ve played and that you’ve lost more times than you have ever won. I know you’re feeling uninspired to try again. I know.

Because the truth is, we’re all tired. Every single one of us. By a certain age, we are all nothing more than an army of broken hearts and aching souls, desperately searching for fulfillment. We want more but we’re too tired to ask for it. We’re sick of where we are but we are too scared to begin again. We need to take risks but we’re afraid to watch it all come crashing down around us. After all, we’re not sure how many times we will be able to start over.

We all think we’re alone in our exhaustion. But the truth is we’re tired of each other — tired of the games we play and the lies we tell and the uncertainties we present to each other. We don’t want to play the villain but we don’t want to play the fool either. So our guards go up. Our defences rile. And we take on the role that we loathe to see played because we’re not sure what choice we have left.

I know how impossible it can feel to go on trying and giving and becoming when you are exhausted straight through to the soul. I know that the cheerful ideals you were once promised now seem tired and hopeless. 

But here’s what I beg if you’re this close to giving up: give it one more try, with feeling. I know you’re tired of your attempts. I know that you’re at your wit’s end. But the truth about that second wind of passion is that you’re never going to realize you have it if you do not keep on running past your first.

We’re all more resilient than we think, and that’s an indisputable truth. There is always more love that we are capable of giving, more hope that we are capable of having, more passion that we’re capable of unleashing and flooding out into the world. We just don’t walk far enough down our own roads to reach the point where we’re seeing those actions pay off. 

We want immediate results and when we see none, we give up. We let the exhaustion stop us. We grow frustrated with the lack of feedback and we assume that means we have to throw the entire attempt right out the window.

Because here’s something we all loathe to admit — none of us are inspired every day. We all get exhausted. We all get discouraged. And we’re allowed to work on through those feelings. Just because you’re beaten down and worn out and sick of the life that you’re living doesn’t mean you’re not making a change. Every person you have ever admired has had times where they felt utterly defeated in the pursuit of their dreams. But that didn’t prevent them from reaching them. You’re allowed to stumble slowly towards your biggest transformations. It doesn’t always have to be a blazing, flagrant affair.

Some parts of life happen quietly. They happen slowly. They happen because of the small, careful choices that we make everyday, that turn us into better versions of ourselves. We have to allow ourselves the time to let those alterations happen. To watch them evolve. To not grow hopelessly frustrated in the in-between.

When you’re tired, go slowly. Go quietly. Go timidly. But do not stop.  

You are tired for all the right reasons. You are tired because you’re supposed to be. You’re tired because you’re making a change. You are exhausted for all the right reasons and it’s only an indication to go on. You are tired because you’re growing. And someday that growth will give way to the exact rejuvenation that you need."

P.S. I am writing this when I am sober, fully well-preserved with two big cups of Mocca coffee.

oooo

Maybe these topics: The current Muslim trends and perspectives on feminism. Within Islam and in pluralistic contexts, how do commitments to feminism, personal religious practice, and pluralism work together? How are they in tension?  What are the common stereo-type threats of Muslim women and how do Muslim women approach traditional interpretations of their roles? Can a Muslim woman remain faithful to her tradition while embracing a feminist worldview? Join us in this intriguing conversation as we unveil the many facets to understanding Postmodern Muslim Feminism.

To get kids interested in maths we have to make it real

this one is a nice post from a good friend from AUS, let's have a look .

I'll start by being upfront. I take a very pragmatic view of maths. I'm not a pure mathematician. I'm not a person who finds it inherently beautiful... Sure it can be cool, interesting, illuminating even sometimes exciting, but never beautiful (at least in my mind). Fundamentally, I see maths as a tool, not something that should be studied for the sake of it. And I think that one thing our maths education forgets is that most people would agree with me. Much of what we learn in maths is fundamentally useless, or at least it appears that way. And this is a problem...
In a time when the amount on people taking higher maths is rapidly decreasing, we still continue teaching the same irrelevant problems. Graphing x against y is, by itself, useless. In reality, professionals rarely graph x against y, and even more rarely for the sake of it. Finding the midpoint of a line is not inherently useful either, if that line is just a line on a page. And, let's be honest, it's not very interesting either.
However, if we give these mathematical applications physical meanings, we make maths interesting and relatable to our world. Now we are graphing a car's speed against its time traveled, or we are finding the midpoint of a railing we want to hang flowers on. The maths we teach our children is almost always useful in the real world, its just not taught that way; this leaves pupils wondering "when will we ever need to know this?" This shouldn't be the case, we should make it clear where this knowledge will serve our students in the future. Sure some teachers can do this, but many either can't or try to. If we make these applications a part of our syllabus we increase the resources available to teach these things. Essentially, if maths is viewed as something that is useful students will study it and more will study it at a high level. Education is becoming more career centered and we need maths to appear as a solution to the increasingly difficult job market to make it appealing and increase enrollments.

8 Tips Jika Anda Jomblo Lokal di Perth

Hahahaha

Sori banget kalo lagi baca judul yang agak miris begini, anyway, ini cuma perumpaan aja kok. Kali ini aku mau cerita soal pengalaman jalan sendiri dan nongkrong ga jelas sendiri pas waktu di Perth. Buat kamu para cewek, sekali-kali, keluarlah sendiri, makan sendiri di cheap resto (kalo emang ada duit yah boleh lah self-indulgence sekali kali di resto mahal) atau coba jalan gak jelas sendirian. IT WOULD MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE!

Karena sewaktu di Perth ini bukanlah dalam rangka holiday, walaupun juga disempet-sempetin holiday tipis tipis, tapi kayaknya gpp deh kalo aku sedikit share gimana cara memanfaatkan waktu sebaik mungkin dan catch every moment di setiap kesempatan pas kamu pengen jalan sendirian.

Honestly, sebagai warga surabaya yang gak pernah naik public transport (haeyaaaah gaya banget *timpuk pake stiletto*) agak merasa merana juga pas awal-awal datang ke Perth, dimana taksi yang begitu mahal, sekali naik bisa 20-30 dollar (tips pertama: jangan sekali kali mikir mengkurs kan uang dollar ke rupiah, trust me baby, ngenes sendiri kalo lihat nasib mata uang negara kita, santai aja gak usah terlalu pelit sama diri sendiri), transportasi satu-satunya adalah naik bus atau jalan kaki, syukur-syukur kalau ada tetangga atau teman baik  kalian bisa nebeng naek mobil mereka atau pinjem sepeda..

Tips dan saran kedua kalau mau jalan jalan sampai malem pastikan jangan sampai lupa waktu kecuali kamu ada duit lebih buat naik taksi.
Tarif naik bis sekali di Perth itu AUD3, dan bus cuma keliaran dari jam 5 pagi sampai jam 12 malam terakhir. 

Enaknya di Perth transportasi seperti bus, haltenya dimana-mana, jadi tiap hari aku harus jalan kaki sekitar  5 menit buat nunggu bus dan bus disini ini TEPAT WAKTU. Inget banget pas hari pertama nyoba bus, aku sama temen-temen sok sok nyantai foto-foto dulu di sekitar jalan, yaelah pas kita mau sampai di halte pemberhentian, eh si bus langsung ngacir aja. Kalo di indonesia mah, kita ngejer bus, bus bakal berhenti sembarangan, kalo disini ditinggal yah ditinggal!! HUAAAAA , jadi kit harus puter balik ke halte lain yang jaraknya 3km karena bus di halte deket rumah baru ada 30 menit lagi, otomatis kalo nungguin bus selama itu kita bakal telat, WHAT THE FUCK. 

Jadi deh kita lari-lari ngejar bus di halte yang lain, which meant kita lari kenceng (dan ada satu temen yang kebetulan pake heels langsung dah di copot kayak bencong di kejer satpol PP hahaha) dan sampai dihalte yang lain, 1 menit kemudian eh si bus datang dan mempersilahkan kami para cewek-cewek yang ngos-ngos an kayak abis lari dikejar anjing. Untung juga pas itu pak sopirnya kebetulan ganteng :).

 

Tips ketiga: kalian bisa download aplikasi transperth di hape kalian, atau bisa buka www.transperth.co.au , gunanya dan enaknya bisa nunjukin jam, berapa jarak yg harus ditempuh dan harus naik tranportasi apa aja. Kalau gak mau ribet bayar receh receh di bus, bisa beli kartu bus di terminal terdekat seharga AUD10  kemudian bisa isi deposit.

Tips keempat bagaimana cara jalan-jalan tipis tipis sendiri di tempat orang adalah, THANKS TO TECHNOLOGY, manfaatkan GPS sebaik mungkin dan jika kalian payah dalam membaca peta , coba cari orang-orang yang keliatan ramah (biasanya orang-orang yg udah tua) dan bertanyalah dengan sopan kalau mau tanya jalan. Pengalaman sendiri , kalau tanya sama teenagers dan mas-mas kece tapi dongok adalah bukannya malah nyampai tujuan malah kesasar pas hari pertama jalan sendiri pas istirahat sekolah,  selidik punya selidik ternyata yah emang mostly penduduk Perth adalah "masyarakat pindahan" atau masyarakat urban atau imigran dan emang bener-bener gak hapal nama jalan.  Contohnya, temen aku Sam, dia orang Tasmania yang baru 2 bulan pindah ke Perth buat kerja, jadi dia kasik saran sama aku buat download aplikasi ini itu biar bisa mandiri kemana-mana, dan gak nyasar. Kalo tanya sama orang-orang tua biasanya mereka baik dan akurat kalo ngasik petunjuk. Tapi emang yg paling bagus yah, rely on yourself, belajarlah baca peta dan harus mandiri!

Tips kelima, selalu berhati-hati dimana pun anda berada terutama kalian wahai para wanita. Apalagi kalau anda jalan sendirian di daerah nightlife, seperti Northbridge. Jadi ceritanya, aku diajakin sama temen sekelas buat ke nongkrong di Bar. Karena baru kenal, dan aku juga sungkan, akhirnya kita janjian ketemuan langsung di Sports bar (yang katanya) di daerah sekitar Northbridge. Dengan modal nekat, aku pergi sore jam 7 malam abis buka puasa. Karena aku tinggal di daerah suburb, jam 7 di sekitar perumahan udah sepi banget, mana lampu jalan gak ada, jadi gelap banget begitu (jangan lupa kalian harus punya night vision yang baik, takuntnya kalau gelap jadi lupa jalan atau nabrak pohon). Aku duduk manis di halte di Albany highway depan perumahan. Di sekitar Albany Highway memang agak rame sih, banyak resto yang buka walaupun sepi pengunjung, secara itu hari weekdays ga banyak orang yang makan di luat (ga kayak di surabaya,  hampir gak ada warung yg sepi hahaha). 

Karena Bus yang menuju ke northbridge tidak ada (seharusnya aku bisa pakai kereta, tapi stasiun kereta jauh banget dari rumah). jadi aku cuma turun di sekitar Perth city terus jalan kaki menuju Northbridge. Lucky me, karena sebelumnya aku sudah pernah ke rumah Sam which is di daerah sekitar northbridge dan ingatan aku yang gak buruk amat, makanya sudah lumayan hapal kalau mau jalan ke Northbridge. TAPI masalahnya ini baru pertama kalinya jalan ke northbridge malam malam. Sam, tante ato bang Ara udah ngingetin kalo malam sebaiknya jangan jalan di sekitar Northbridge sendirian karena banyak orang mabuk dan mungkin ada orang-orang iseng yang seliweran. Pas mau masuk ke jalan northbridge tunnel yg lumayan sepi pas waktu itu, ada 4 orang cowo yang nguntitin dari belakang sambil siul siul, pertama cuek aja eh tapi jalan mereka makin cepet langsung deh aku lari kenceeeeeengg whuuzzz dan mereka cuma teriak , "Hey Miss, why are you running?". Pas udah sampai perempatan northbridge dan mulai mencari bar yang dituju, mulai deh jalan kaki lagi, dan pas noleh ke belakang 4 cowo itu sudah tidak ada lagi. Alhamdulillah.

Anyway, ternyata lokasi bar tersebut berada di..... Aberdeen street yang mana jauh dari Northbridge *ahahahaha ketawa garing*. Ternyata tempatnya nyempil di sekitar perumahan dan stelah aku hitung hitung ternyata 20 menitan jalan dari Northbridge (dan dihitung dari jalan kaki dari city ke northbridge 20 menit) jadi yah lumayan lah anggep aja joging malam plus ditambah ekstra lari kenceng dari mas-mas di tunnel. Sampainya di bar, ketemu temen dan karena gak bisa pulang malam takut gak ada bus yang lewat akhirnya aku pamitan pulang. Mungkin karena melas apa gimana, temen aku tadi nawarin aku pulang sampai ke halte bus di city. Dia sendiri dari sydney dan juga lupa lupa inget dimana apartemennya dia (hahaha dia cuma exchange student sama kayak aku), tapi rasanya pas perjalan pulang nganterin aku, dan disusul sama dua temennya dia yang berbaik hati mau ikut nganterin aku juga, akhirnya perjalan dari bar ke halte yang 40 menit itu jadi gak kerasa. 

Tips keenam, jika anda sendirian dan ingin makan di Perth, sekedar saran lebih baik pilih menu di resto yang ukuran mini. Boleh dibilang, aku ini mood-mood an kalo makan, kadang banyak kadang sedikit, tapi pas itu buka puasa dan keadaan lagi mau jalan pulang ke rumah akhirnya iseng beli Burritos di terminal. Dari contoh gambar sih, yang porsi mini kok fotonya kecil banget, nanti takut gak kenyang, dan porsi regular nampaknya cukup buat sekalian ngenyangin perut. Sebelumnya di Indo emang gak pernah makan burritos, isenglah mencoba, ga jelas juga mau pilih rasa apa, pokonya aku bilang ke mbaknya yang jual kalo kasik yang super pedes. Burritos reguler cukup murah untuk ukuran jajan di Aussie sekitar 8AUD dan yasalam ternyata ini mah porsi orang utan. Gila ! porsinya guedeee bangets!!!! sampe bingung harus makan mulai dari mana (iyah tau mulai dari baca Bismillah dulu) dan itu dalemnya isi full nasi sama daging. Walhasil, pas di bus coba makan , dan sampek pulang pun baru kemakan seperempat dan udah kenyaaang banget. Heran banget deh, pas hari-hari selanjutnya liat orang-orang sekitar yang makan buritos reguler bisa habis, mungkin dalem perut mereka banyak cacingnya *meringis*. Kalo perut-perut indo dan moody-an kayak aku gini sangat disarankan untuk membeli porsi mini saja kalo makan di resto. Emang porsinya sini porsi gorilla.

ps. rasa burritos tersebut... GAK PEDES DAN GAK JELAS. blame my taste then.

Tips ketujuh, bawalah benda seperlunya: uang secukupnya, dompet, copy paspor, hape, dan kamera. Toh lagian jomblo, jadi gak perlu ntraktir 'kan?

Dan MENGAPA COPY PASPOR? well, yah siapa tahu kamu tiba-tiba karena keasyikan ngobrol, terus tiba-tiba tas kamu mendadak hilang (Naudzubillah), atau misalkan keliru buang tisu di tempat sampah, eh ternyata tas kamu yang kebuang, atau kejadian aneh-aneh yang lain dan pelik untuk dijelaskan. Setiap aku keluar negri, aku gak pernah bawa paspor kalau jalan kecuali diperlukan banget misalkan untuk keperluan yang butuh paspor asli. Paspor asli lebih baik ditaruk di hotel atau tempat tinggal kamu aja. Dan selalu bawa copy paspor minimal tiga, dua buat cadangan, satu buat jalan-jalan. Karena kalau kita mau masuk bar biasanya ada pengecekan paspor, biar tahu kita udah cukup umur apa gak. Dan ga usah bawa uang tunai terlalu banyak, kalo ada kartu kredit lebih bagus sih, tapi aturlah pengeluaran kamu sedemikian rupa. Dan ambillah setiap kembalian walaupun itu receh, itu sangat berarti *wejangan ala Suneo*. Pernah waktu itu jalan sama temen, kita makan di nandos, dia sangat meremehkan kekuatan uang receh padahal kembalian recehannya lumayan banyak. Eh dia langsur aja ngeloyor pergi, uang recehannya masih di meja (mau aku ambil aja sih, tapi gengsi :'>) dan ternyata dia butuh receh buat bayar parkir, akhirnya terpaksa deh pake CC. Uang receh bisa dipake buat bayar kereta, bayar bus, dan koleksi. Usahakan kalau mau balik ke Indo, habiskan uang receh dan sisakan aja sedikit kalau mau buat kenang-kenangan. 

aku termasuk penghobi uang koin, maunya sih koleksi dikit aja beberapa, eh tapi karena kebanyakan ngumpulin koin di dompet dan lupa ngebelanjain, tau tau sudah ada 20 AUD di dompet (pantesan dompet berat ternyata isinya recehan, beneran kayak habis manggung dapet saweran koin). AND, for your infos, uang koin gak bisa ditukerin di money changer! ingat itu!!!

At last but not least, tips kedelapan adalah "selalu berbuat baiklah terhadap sesama" *ehem ehem ala mario teguh* tapi emang bener loh kalo kita ngelakuin good deeds nanti akan dibalas good deeds juga. Apa mungkin karena pas itu bulan puasa dan banyak sekali cobaan yang datang dan aku tetap bersabar :) Alhamdulillah sering banget ditolong orang dan dapat makan gratisan HAHAHA. Contohnya aku dua kali naik bus gratis, pak sopirnya lagi baik dan udelnya bodong atau memang dia kasian lihat anak Indo dengan wajah pucet kelaperan, berantakan pulang sekolah. Sempet ngerasain juga gimana nyasar di Fremantle dan dijemput sama temen pake mobil terus dianterin pulang, sering dapet makan gratis dan diundang ke Konjen hiihi.

Jalan-jalan sendirian dan jadi Jomblo lokal di tempat orang ternyata menyenangkan juga, bukan?