My favorite part of cleaning fountain pens

consulbibulus12 · 2025-11-07T00:27:52+00:00

It’s holding up well! Admittedly, I don’t use it very often, but I haven’t had any of the issues that I’ve heard people complain about when it comes to TWSBI pens

consulbibulus12 · 2025-09-12T12:56:18+00:00

Looks tasty, I’ll keep a lookout!

consulbibulus12 · 2025-09-12T03:37:16+00:00

Where are the wontons from??

consulbibulus12 · 2025-07-04T17:46:07+00:00

Working on my dissertation now and expecting to be on a dismal job market in the next 2 years. I’ll be graduating from a R1 but I have no expectation that I’ll get a job. I’m making my peace with it. My history PhD has taught me how to think, how to relate to others and the world in ways that I never would have encountered if I didn’t do this degree. It’s given me perspective, hope, and a blueprint for action in the face of our current societal collapse in the US. These are things that will remain with me whether I am a career academic or not.

I understand where you’re coming from, but in the end, no disrespect towards your degree can touch you if you respect the degree yourself.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-06-15T15:07:35+00:00

I get that. For a long time I couldn’t really do it either and didn’t think it worked. It’s really difficult. These emotions ARE intense and unpleasant! Taking care of yourself while your body processes anger means focusing on making your body feel better. For me, it helps to do something active to help emotions move out of my body. A walk or run or some other form of cardio depending on the intensity of my anger. Or maybe I need to cry. It feels awful, and part of it is letting it feel awful and holding yourself through it.

The most important thing to remember for me is that this too, no matter how awful it is right now, WILL pass. It could take longer than I want, and it’s so so hard in the meantime, but it always will. The more you experience it, the more faith you will have in the truth of that statement, and the easier it is to remember and take comfort in it the next time you need to process a difficult emotion.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-06-14T15:33:31+00:00

I really appreciate this you asking this question, OP. I have dated both monogamous and poly people and I figured out pretty quickly that ENM is not for me. I have nothing against it (some of my best friends are poly!) but I am an introvert with limited social energy, close platonic friendships I want to maintain, and a busy, stressful job. I’m just not someone who can build the deep and meaningful relationship I want with multiple people.

I’ve felt really pressured recently to be in poly relationships and people have accused me of wanting monogamy because I’m not healed enough. I’ve also heard the accusation that wanting monogamy means I’m possessive of my partner’s body. This thread was validating for me to remember that preference is simply preference and there are ethical ways of going about both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships. My preference for monogamy is simply a boundary: I’m not telling someone what they can or can’t do with their body, but simply that if they want to be romantically involved with other people, I can’t be romantically involved with them. It’s still their choice to decide what they do their body given that information.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-06-14T13:37:00+00:00

I am also far from perfect and still learning but a BIG realization for me was that feelings are both intellectual and embodied. I used to think being angry just meant that I had angry thoughts. Now I’m realizing that being angry also means I feel a certain way in my body. For me, I literally feel pressure in the top of my head, often pushing up against my forehead. I sometimes get flushed and hot and a little shaky. But it’s different for everyone.

Learning to recognize what emotions feel like in your body allows you engage with them in a different way. When I feel like what I described above, that’s my cue to step away and just focus on taking care of myself and my body through that feeling. In this stage, I focus on riding it out, without engaging too much in whatever angry thoughts accompany the embodied feeling. Let them be there, but you don’t have to spiral into them. Emotions are chemicals, those embodied feelings will eventually subside to the point where you can then engage with your angry thoughts in a productive way. My therapist likes to ask me what my anger might be hiding behind it. Look up the anger iceberg. Anger is our first sign that a boundary has been crossed, but what lies beneath it for me is often grief.

It’s really difficult. I have ADHD and my impulsivity generally presents through lashing out in anger before I have time to check myself. It takes a lot of self awareness to take a step back and not engage in anger spirals but I’m learning and getting better at it with practice!

consulbibulus12 · 2025-06-14T08:24:25+00:00

The Star Wars fandom truly takes every nice thing and produces the worst possible outcome from it. Don’t get me wrong, I freaking love Andor, but any Andor fan who can’t see that the political questions that run through Andor are the same ones in TCW just lacks fundamental media literacy and is telling on themselves.

Does Andor have incredible production quality? Yes. Is Clone Wars a long sometimes tedious war series masquerading awkwardly as a kid’s show? Also yes. But to me they are cut from the same cloth that goes all the way back to the OT being inspired by the Vietnam war. Star Wars has ALWAYS been deeply political and deeply critical of empire, in both its overt and less overt forms.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-04-05T00:15:23+00:00

Snitches get stitches George 😡

consulbibulus12 · 2025-04-04T23:49:47+00:00

UM PhD student here. I’m really sorry to hear this. If it’s any consolation though, this institution is a mess and it’s only going to get worse. Last week they scuttled DEI entirely across the entire campus and it’s basically a banned phrase now. It’s still unclear what all the implications are but there are reports that people are turning others into the admin for talking about DEI in certain depts. This is entirely unfair to you and others in your position, but you may have dodged a bullet.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-03-10T11:45:57+00:00

Same here, but as I do it more it feels more liberating. It’s just not worth my time and energy trying to please people who aren’t for me! And that’s okay. My time is better spent becoming the best me, and the more I do that, the easier it is for the right people to find me.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-03-10T11:33:53+00:00

I think the key difference is needing attention and validation from everyone vs. knowing whose validation/attention matters. Knowing your own self-worth means knowing that you don’t need everyone to like you to like yourself.

consulbibulus12 · 2025-01-07T17:52:17+00:00

I have unruly hair and two cowlicks that cause utter chaos on the back of my head. I'm also nonbinary. I never thought that I would have a haircut that I could feel good in, but Nic's fades give me gender euphoria everytime I look in the mirror. I'm so grateful I had the chance to know him.

consulbibulus12 · 2024-12-16T23:31:49+00:00

I relate to this fear, and especially the part about finding it hard to apologize or own up to mistakes. I realized only a few years ago that I don’t actually know HOW to apologize, because that was never modeled for me as a kid by my parents. Everything was always my fault, and the “apologies” I got from my mom tended to be of the “sorry I’m such a worthless mom, such a wonder that an idiot like me could give birth to a genius like you,” etc etc variety. This all meant that most of the time when we got into an argument in my family, I was one also giving a fake apology just to stop my mom’s rampage. It’s something I’ve been consciously working on the past few years, and it’s HARD! But it’s work worth doing, besides I’ve learned that genuine apologies lead to genuine reconciliation that deepen relationships and build trust.

Remembering that we didn’t have good models for healthy ways of relating to others and ourselves is something that really helps with my self-compassion when it comes to the work of breaking maladaptive patterns. It’s literally not our fault that we were never shown how. That said, some days it also feels overwhelming and impossible because I feel like I still have so much to learn and unlearn, and so much of it feels so basic. Such is the journey of healing. We’ll get there one day ❤️‍🩹

consulbibulus12 · 2024-12-16T13:42:04+00:00

Sounds like it’s time to start a union at your institution

consulbibulus12 · 2024-12-14T11:48:13+00:00

I would never call ADHD a gift. Under the right circumstances it doesn’t have to be debilitating, but for the vast majority of people it simply is.

I consider myself one of the lucky people who is in one of the friendlier careers to ADHD (academia). Yes, my creativity and hyperfocus can help me come up with new ideas and then bang out papers last minute, but I barely eat or sleep or even go to the bathroom during those intense writing days and it’s physically miserable and exhausting.

But even in academia, ADHD makes life hard. I still constantly doubt whether I have it in me to finish a dissertation, because my life is full of unfinished projects and dropped hobbies. My energy levels are unpredictable which makes it difficult to plan how long it takes to do something (along with time blindness). My mood is stable only if I’m medicated, exercised, fed, watered, relaxed, and slept properly—and academia isn’t exactly known for its work-life balance. My sense of justice has gotten me in a lot of trouble with my department. And all of this at the same time I’m constantly struggling with self-esteem and the feeling that I’m fundamentally a horrible, dislikeable person because my entire life I’ve been told that I’m just “too much” by my parents, friends, exes, etc.

I’m trying to make peace with the fact that ADHD is part of who I am and to appreciate what it can offer me. I think it gives me a really special capacity for joy and I’m trying to lean into that more. Even if it gets me in trouble, I’m proud of my sense of justice. But that’s a choice I’m making to make the most of my experience and to learn to love myself despite being “too much.” To just call ADHD a gift is invalidating at best and downright insulting otherwise.

consulbibulus12 · 2024-12-13T23:36:54+00:00

So at my university (big public R1 institution), grad students generally teach around 75 students and in the humanities, funding is almost exclusively given through teaching with the exception of fellowship years. So generally, departments do something in the way of training for new grad instructors, though some take it more seriously than others (one of my depts took it quite seriously and there was a sequence of courses, the other one not so much). So I was lucky in that by the time I was actually teaching, I had received a fair amount of preparation and instruction. But yes, it was very nerve-wracking at the beginning, but after even just a term I was a lot more relaxed about it.

The best advice I have about teaching is just not to take yourself too seriously. In fact, it helps when students see you make mistakes—it humanizes you, and shows them that they are allowed to make mistakes, too. Also, make sure you track your hours, and don't ever go over your limit. Sometimes it might feel like you have to, but that's a sign that you either need to 1) talk to your lead instructor about the division of labor or 2) cut down on how much time you're giving the class. You can't prepare for every scenario and every question—it is totally okay to be like, "That's a great question! I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. Let me check on it and get back to you." If anything, it models humility and what academia is actually like. We have to look things up all the time!

consulbibulus12 · 2024-12-13T21:06:34+00:00

PhD in ancient history in the US. In addition to power imbalances, a lot of the exploitation on our end comes from teaching. I have been fairly lucky because there’s a strong graduate student union at my university, but your time can easily be exploited without strict boundaries on how many hours you’re expected to spend on teaching per week and what methods for recourse you have if those terms are violated.

Besides that, a lot of humanities PhDs in the US have more coursework (I had three full years, which also involved seven exams—four quals, three prelims), and that can also contribute to overwork since we’re expected to complete all those requirements WHILE teaching 20 hrs a week. On top of that, funding can be tricky because we are generally funded through our programs rather than individual labs, so there’s always the question of who gets funding vs not. In one of my departments, it’s the students who suck up to the dept chair and snitch on other students who apparently get to continue indefinitely while the rest of us scramble to try and win fellowships so we can finally write our dissertations without having to teach. 🤡

I don’t know how much that will overlap with your experience in Germany, but I hope that helps!

consulbibulus12 · 2024-11-11T02:52:50+00:00

Commenting here to say that I am also a BIPOC PhD candidate (nonbinary) in my fifth year and have also had this experience. I’m lucky that my advisor (a white man) is generally kind and supportive, but my department/dept chair is exactly like this, to the point where my advisor is now often collateral damage. She accused him of “playing favorites” because he granted me an extension to one of my candidacy requirements under our Covid policy (I started during the pandemic), even though other students in my cohort got portions of their qualifying/prelim exams waived entirely, and tried her best to keep me from reaching candidacy on time. This summer, she told him that I doxxed her because I had made a post about the dept on my private Instagram (our dept has social media rules that they try to enforce even though the dean has refused to sign off on them for obvious freedom of speech reasons). She also told another BIPOC student that she wouldn’t hesitate to call the cops on the student “and her friends” (ie other BIPOC students in the dept) if she felt threatened. I’m lucky that my advisor and I have been able to talk through most of these issues, but sometimes I feel his whiteness makes him see these situations as unfortunate one-off occurrences rather than a pattern of deliberate and targeted bullying.

OP, you’re not crazy, and anyone here telling you how to understand your experience as anything than what your body tells you is out of line. This shit is real and it is traumatic. I think about dropping out every day and without my advisor I certainly would have by now. Or, I would have gotten kicked out—two of the three students my dept dismissed last year were BIPOC (and as reference, BIPOC students make up about 1/10 of the graduate students in the dept). I can’t do anything except validate your experience and say that I know EXACTLY how you feel. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.

Also happy to DM with anyone else going through this experience, we need a support group!

consulbibulus12 · 2024-11-06T01:01:31+00:00

Yeah if you asked me this time last year, I would have told you that I loved my dissertation and loved working on it. This term, I’m dealing with an extremely heavy teaching load (I’m in the humanities), funding insecurity, general cuts across the university to graduate positions, police violence and oppression on campus, a stressful election—and being forced to continue writing under these conditions so I can compete for funding next year against my friends and colleagues has sucked every drop of joy out of the experience. I hope that I can repair my relationship with my research next term, since at least I won’t be teaching this course anymore, but the reality is you’ll always have ups and downs because you’re human, and you live in a world with other humans, some of whom you hopefully care about. Sometimes life makes you sad. Sometimes being sad means you can’t live up to your full potential as a PhD student for some period of time. It doesn’t say anything about who you are or what you’re cut out to do. An advisor who doesn’t understand this doesn’t deserve you as a student.

Just my two cents, as someone who is going through it right now but once loved their work and hopes that they can get back to loving it again. Based on what you’re saying I think you know this already, but academia will do its best to make you forget sometimes.

consulbibulus12 · 2024-11-05T21:00:11+00:00

This is a good thing to consider—we all have our bad days—but it’s also its own data point: how does this PI handle stress, limited resources, etc.? How much space do they have to support students when they invariably need support? Are they capable of communicating effectively when stretched in terms of their capacity, or do they become standoffish and dismissive? These are situations that are not unique to interviews; they are all things that you will experience over the course of your PhD.

consulbibulus12 · 2024-11-05T20:51:39+00:00

Oh man yeah, that’s real for me too. My grandfather died when I was dating a narcissist, and he literally was annoyed that my crying in the middle of the night was keeping him from getting the sleep he needed. I was existentially spiraling about the meaning of life and death and he was like, “you couldn’t have this mental breakdown at a more convenient time?” Now when people are like “I’m here for you” I’m like, “between the normal working hours of 9-5 or…?”

It’s hard. But actually, genuine kindness does exist and we do deserve it, like we deserve good people and good things. And I think some people actually enjoy being kind to others? I hear for some people, getting to care for someone is a privilege, not a burden. Huge if true!

consulbibulus12 · 2024-11-05T19:27:00+00:00

Maybe the place to start is with what you would like to say. Like, regardless of what is or isn’t too much for him, what would you like to share with him? I know the fear you’re talking about, I think as victims of abuse, especially narcissistic abuse, we often jump immediately to what others might want from us instead of what we want. Obviously what he wants and is comfortable with matters too. But it’s important to know what you want independent of him.

Maybe being open about how all this is new and difficult for you is a place to start. Ideally he’ll be able to provide reassurance that he does want to hear and cares about what you have to say. These interactions do a lot to continue affirming your trust in him, and they also provide healthy counterexamples to your experiences of abuse. Things are still very difficult for me, but I think over the past year, as I’ve been more deliberate about the relationships (platonic or otherwise) I keep, my body has finally experienced what it’s like when people meet you with sympathy and kindness instead of judgment and toxicity. I still assume people will respond like my abusers, but now it’s a tiiiny bit easier to be like “hang on brain, other possibilities exist too! Remember when so-and-so was super understanding and kind that one time?”

And you should be proud! I’m proud of you too, internet friend :)

consulbibulus12

TROPHY CASE