#a dead end call center job and failed college degree?? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mondayrobot · 3 years

Text

Year-End Fanfiction List (M)

This year has opened me to so many fan-fictions. Here are the list of EM fan-fictions that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this year.

Warning: The contents contain adult themes.

Rating: Mature

a royal weakness ( liquorisce ) @liquorisce

In everyone else’s eyes, she was just his Commander, the Silver Lady, the first woman to take control over the entire King’s fleet. But to him she was so much more, the girl who’d been by his side for the longest time, his most trusted companion… His lover.

Abditive ( Blanca21 )

It was a countless time he heard them calling her cold-blooded and heartless.In his mind, she was anything except those words.

All I need ( liquorisce ) @liquorisce

This fic features long time lovers Eren and Mikasa, their bid to make their own family, and in that process discovering what family really means.

and i am a smiling woman ( orphan_account )

and they have longed for each other; mourned for each other.

Big Bad World ( MyTARDISsenseIsTingling ) @my-tardis-sense-is-tingling

What if Eren hadn't gotten there to rescue Mikasa in time?

Broken Down ( miikasaa )

It's in the dead of night, with innumerable regrets and dead faces haunting them, that Eren and Mikasa use each other's bodies to chase away the horrors of a failed mission. It never works, they know this all too well, but it doesn't stop them from trying.

Come to Me, My Sweetest Friend ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in an Alternative Modern Day Universe where Mikasa and Eren grew up as neighbors with both their parents still alive.

Degrees of Sleeplessness ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream

“To share in the night’s quiet loneliness, a companion for the vast hours of sleeplessness, is, perhaps, all they’ve ever wanted.” Two teachers at the local high school, Eren and Mikasa, in the midst of work and home-life, find themselves indubitably and inescapably drawn to one another.

Elysian ( miikasaa )

Collection of works showing Eren and Mikasa's relationship in canon, post-canon, and modern settings.

Feels Like Home ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

Even when their homes were a thing of the long past, they always found a home in the comfort of each other.

Games ( miikasaa )

Restless after beginning their days as trainees, the 104th decide to relax a bit by playing strip poker. It goes about as well as anyone can imagine.

Girls and Boys ( Lindsey (Lipstick) )

A collection of one-shots depicting the relationship between Eren and Mikasa in various ways.

Happy Anniversary ( blehbleehhhh )

It's Eren and MIkasa's second anniversary. Things get kinky after returning home from dinner.

How to Coexist ( spoilerarlert ) @spoilerarlert

Rent in NYC is ridiculous, but by a stroke of luck, Mikasa manages to snag an apartment for mindblowingly cheap rates. However, upon moving in, she discovers, to her horror, that her roommate Eren was a past one-night stand. In which two twenty-somethings struggle to shrug aside their misgivings, not to mention diffuse a helluva lotta sexual tension—for the sake of affordable rent.

I Bet My Life For You ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in the canon universe within the story line, or were predictions for future chapters at the time, focusing on Eren and Mikasa.

I'll Take You Back Where You Belong ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in an Alternative Modern Day Universe where Eren saved Mikasa as children from a home invasion that killed her parents and caused her to live with her much older brother Levi.

I'm Gonna Be the Man Whose Coming Home to You ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

Still determined to keep things normal after a twist in their relationship, Eren and Mikasa still go through with their plans to take a road trip to the the Jaeger's beach house with Armin, Connie, Sasha, and Jean their summer after their first year of college. Their friends are weary of everyone being crammed in a car with them at close proximity, but they soon learn not all is as it seems (and that there are far more awkward things to deal with in close spaces).

Kaleidoscopes ( Kaekiro ) @kaekiro

A collection of stories that will follow Eren and Mikasa through various AUs.

Keeping Warm ( lionhart )

Eren and Mikasa’s first time.

king, lover, hold me tight ( artsycat )

Mikasa, as one of the heroes that single-handedly ensured the victory of Eldia against Marley during the war, must now use her newfound status to marry Eren, judged as a traitor in the eyes of Eldia, in order to ensure his protection.

Kiss With a Fist ( DenDenSushi, Lyssala ) @lyssala

It's always a normal day at school when an Apocalypse decides to descend. One minute Eren is trying to pass his chemistry class & the next he's wielding a baseball bat against bodies trying to bite him. Along with Mikasa & Armin, they are forced into a world where all it takes is one bite & you're dead.

Lawless ( kuchenackerman ) @kuchenackerman

Despite his youth, Eren Jaeger is one of the best and most required doctors of the Kingdom. Among those interested on his services is included a recognized criminal clan, which does not hesitate to use the youngest of the Ackerman as bait. Eren never imagined that this "harmless" girl in red dress would get him into so much trouble.

Lullabies in the Night ( happymikasa ) @happymikasa

People's voices sound quite beautiful when they sing, hum, or tweet. Mikasa discovered that after the defeat of the Titans.

Eren's voice is the most powerful though. Especially when he takes her to bed at night.

Lulls in the Sea ( dialectus ) @dialectus

"Lull: a temporary interval of quiet or lack of activity."

milk and honey ( bbyunnie ) @moonguks

a series of oneshots centered around eren and mikasa, across variant universes and situations.

OFFSIDE ( La_Ultima_00 )

Eren returns home and meets someone unexpected. After so long, his poor heart has not forgotten her.

Peace time ( almost_certain )

Eren and Mikasa haven't spoken since the last battle. Perhaps they can be civil long enough for their friends to tie the knot.

Reason for Dreaming ( mikasuhdude ) @mikasuhdude

Mikasa and Armin have known each other for the past three years, having the same college major and all. It's traditional of them to study in Mikasa's dorm with her stoner roommate, Sasha. One afternoon, they opt to study in Armin's apartment, and that's where she meets his roommate. He's a fiery guy, interrupting their study session by loudly cursing over a mustard-stained shirt and a family-owned restaurant.

Reckless Roses ( mikasuhdude ) @mikasuhdude

Not every couple is blessed with fertility.

Ruins In Bloom ( miikasaa )

Three years after the eradication of the Titans, Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and a few other survivors are ready to settle down in the free world. Finished with their travels and free from the oppression of the Titans, they're ready to begin their new lives. However, as each of the veterans knows, somethings are impossible to bury completely in the past. Scars will never completely heal, and sometimes, leaving behind a lifetime of warfare is unattainable.

Mikasa wishes for the domestic life she's always craved, and with Armin and Eren by her side, she thinks she'll finally get it. But the sudden change proves to be too much for Eren, and to her horror, he leaves. He leaves her behind, leaves everyone behind, and leaves her to deal with a change in her life she never wanted to experience on her own.

Say You'll Stay With Me ( miikasaa )

Sometimes it was enough simply to be with Mikasa, to hold her close, to hear her heart and know that they'd survived one more day together. And sometimes, she needed to be closer, to let him help her to forget the terror they witness every day.

Seasons of the Sea ( Lindsey (Lipstick) )

At the age of twenty-three, Mikasa gives birth to their first child – a small, tiny little girl – in their home by the sea, built after the defeat of the titans. An hour later, Eren disappears for three days, only a kiss on her forehead prior to signal his departure.

set in stone ( Beatingheartanthem )

Eren is jostled around by time, experiencing and re-experiencing different moments with Mikasa. Some choices made are the same. Some choices made are different. He knows he's going to die, but he'd like a moment of peace before he does.

So, then— ( Beatingheartanthem )

Over the past two years, Mikasa and Armin have grown estranged from their childhood friend. With a new girlfriend, new friends, Eren Jaeger is a person they don't quite know. Senior year: With graduation around the corner, Eren disappears forever. Now Mikasa wonders if things could've been different. In every version of history, in every universe, every path taken, is his fate set in stone?

the rivers song ( artsycat )

Mikasa has always dreamt about life afterwards.

Under the brine ( milkywaywide ) @milkywaywide

But Eren is still in her. And she can’t shake the utter alienation she feels, so bad it almost feels like an out of body experience, like a weird dream, like she’s drowning.

vermillion ( sionnacha )

Eren’s mouth tastes of blood—like putrid liquefied iron, and still, she cannot stop herself from diving in for more. Even though the earth around them is scorched, even though there is rubble and ash everywhere she looks, all she wants his him.

Washed-Up and Rundown ( spoilerarlert ) @spoilerarlert

Levi, a washed-up ex-journalist working a dead-end custodian job, finds himself transplanted into a suburban neighborhood, serving as the legal guardian of his sixteen-year-old second cousin, twice removed, Mikasa. There, he struggles to navigate the dynamic of this two-person household and in the midst locks horns with the local pain-in-the-ass: a teenager a few houses down the street by the name of Eren Jaeger.

We'll Go Home and Start Again ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in Alternative Universes of many varieties featuring Eren and Mikasa.

When You Break ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream

"And when he kisses her, she can immediately tell that tonight is no different than the others." Eren and Mikasa seek shelter from the memories that haunt them in each other's arms. Mikasa comes to realize that you can't always kiss away the pain.

With You, I Am Home ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream

A collection of drabbles following Eren and Mikasa's relationship through various scenarios.

#eremika #tbd #fanfiction #writing

72 notes · View notes

crimehathnofury · 3 years

Photo

Hey guys it’s Pike. I got a question for you. What comes to your mind when you think of Heaven's Gate? What pops in your mind? What’s the first thing you see? Shiny gates opening to the afterlife? Or is a really cool looking landmark that resembles it? Well one thing that pops into my mind is a California cult. One that has murder in it’s end. That’s my topic for today. The cult known as Heaven’s Gate and it’s leader Marshall Applewhite. So let's begin shall we?

I figure we start with a little information on Marshall Applewhite. He was born on May 17th 1931, in Spur Texas. He had 3 siblings and his father was a presbyterian minister. He had become a very religious child. So he went to school at Corpus Christi. He went to college at Austin College, where he was active in quite a few school organizations and only moderately religious. After he earned a bachelors in philosophy in 1952 he enrolled at Union Presbytrian Seminary to study theology. He got married as well to a lovely girl named Anne Pearce and later they had 2 children Mark and Lane. Early in his studies he decided he wanted to pursue music. He became the music director of a presbyterian church in North Carolina. He was a baritone singer and loved spirituals and the music of Handel. In 1954 he was drafted into the United States Army. He served in Austria and New Mexico as a member of the Army Signal Corps. In 1956, he left and enrolled at the University of Colorado, got his masters degree in music. His focus was musical theater. He moved to New York where he was unsuccessful in becoming a professional singer. He then worked as a teacher at the University of Alabama. However, he lost that position after pursuing a sexual relationship with a male student. His religious education was not ok with same sex relationships. So of course that left Applewhite more than a little frustrated with his desires. In 1965 his wife found out about the affair and they got divorced 3 years down the road. He then left UA and moved to Houston where he served as the Chair of the music department at the University of St. Thomas. Students said that he was engaging and stylish. He was also a well known singer, served as the choral director of an Episcopal church and performed with the Houston Grand Opera. Apparently, while in Houston, he was out as gay. Although he still pursued a relationship with a woman. Who while under pressure from her family left him. This of course upset him greatly. This apparently caused him to have another affair with a male student. In 1970 he left his job. In 1971 he moved to New mexico and owned a delicatessen. Though he was popular with his customers he moved back to texas later that year. A year after that his father passed. Then a year after that he met Bonnie Nettles.

Bonnie Nettles was a nurse interested in Theosophy and Biblical Prophecy. The 2 became close friends. Applewhite even went as far to say that he felt like he had known Nettles for a long time. That they even met in a previous life. Nettles told Applewhite that their meeting was foretold by aliens. She also told him that he had a divine assignment. Around this time, Applewhite began to search for alternatives other than the christian doctrine, like astrology. Also he had visions one telling him that he was made for a role like Jesus. Applewhite soon started to live with Nettles. Although they cohabitated, their relationship was not a sexual one. The relationship though did fulfil his longing for a loving yet platonic relationship. Before meeting Applewhite, Nettles was married with 2 children. As soon as she got closer with Applewhite her husband divorced her and she lost custody of her kids. Applewhite had closed himself off from his family. EVentually he started to see Nettles as his soulmate. Some acquaintances speculated that she had a strong influence on him. The 2 would then later together opened a bookstore called the Cristian Arts Center, that held a great deal of books from many spiritualities. They also started something known as the Know Place, teaching classes on theosophy and mysticism. They closed that business a short time after. In February 1973 they both decided to travel and teach their beliefs. Pretty cool. Not going to lie. Traveling sounds fun. Exploring faith and just having a great time. However with the little money they had led them to do odd jobs and even sell their blood. They only ate bread rolls, camped out, and sometimes skipped out on their lodging bills. A mutual friend from Houston corresponded with them, accepted their teachings, and in may 1974 she became their first convert. Sometimes while traveling Applewhite and Nettles they would poner the life of St. Francis of Assisi. They would also read books written by Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing, and Richard Bach. They kept a King James version of the bible and studied quite a few passages from the New Testament. They focused on teachings about Christology, asceticism, and eschatology. APplewhite also read a lot of science fiction books. June 1974, they had their beliefs solidified into a good outline. They had concluded that they were chosen to fulfil biblical purposes. They had been given higher level minds than other people. They had made a pamphlet that described Jesus as a texan much like Applewhite. They considered themselves the 2 witnesses in the book of revelation. So they would go to churches and tell people they were the 2 or the UFO 2. Applewhite and Nettles believed they would be killed and then would be restored to life, then transported to a spaceship. Not going to lie, their ideas were poorly received.

In August 1974, Applewhite got arrested for failing to return a vehicle that he had rented in Missouri. Like really? He was extradited to St. Louis, and was jailed for 6 months. At this time he had said that he had a divine right to keep the car. While in jail he pondered theology and abandoned occult topics in favor of extraterrestrials and evolution. When he was released, Nettles and himself began to try and reach these extraterrestrials . As well as seek like minded people. They advertised for meetings to recruit disciples or what they would call the crew. At these meetings Nettles and Applewhite would promote themselves as being from another planet, The Next level, who needed people to participate in an experiment. They said that the people who participated would be granted a higher evolutionary level. At this point they were calling their group the Anonymous Sexaholic Celibate Church. But then changed it to the Human Individual Metamorphosis. Applewhite and Nettles sent advertisements to California. They were invited to speak to New Age devotees in April 1975. They were able to persuade half of the 50 that were there. They continued to have success in recruiting people. At a meeting in Oregon in September 1975 30 people left their homes to follow them prompting media coverage. It was a lot of negative. Not so shocking. Commentators and former members of the group mocked them and suggested brainwashing. By 1976, Applewhite and Nettles had decided to be called Do and Ti. And by 1985 Nettles had died. Applewhite had claimed that she had gone to her Next Level. After her death applewhite changed his view on the ascension process. He previously taught the group that they would physically ascend from earth and that death caused reincarnation. But Nettles death left behind an unchanged body had forced him to say that ascension would be spiritual. He concluded that her spirit traveled to the spaceship and she got a new body.

In the wake of Nettles death, Applewhite had become increasingly paranoid. He feared there was a conspiracy against the group. One member recalled that Applewhite didn’t get close to new recruits. He feared that the government was sending in infiltrators. The group increased focus on sexual suppression; Applewhite and seven others opted for castration.In Applewhite’s views sexuality is one of the most powerful forces that attached humans to their bodies. In the late 1980’s the group laid low as much as possible. Only few people knew it still existed. Then in October 1996 2 things happened. The comet Hale-bopp approached the earth. The other was the group renting a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe California and recorded 2 videos in which they offered their viewers one last chance to evacuate earth. Applewhite now believed that Nettles was aboard the spaceship trailing the comet coming to pick up the others. He stated to his followers that the deceased would be taken by the vessel. In March 1997 they isolated themselves and recorded their farewell messages. Then a mass suicide started on March 22nd. They took barbiturates and drank alcohol. Then they put bags on their heads. They wore nikes and all black uniforms that said Heaven’s Gate away team. 39 dead. It was one of the biggest group suicide since Jonestown in 1978. All I can think of is how this occurred? What do you guys think? If someone was compelling enough do you think you guys would follow without question? Even if it seemed wrong? Let me know. I’m all ears to hear what you guys think. Hopefully you guys like this. I’ll try to cover more cults more often. Bye for now.

#murder #cults #suicide #serial killer

5 notes · View notes

dearyoungblackmales · 4 years

Quote

“Dear Young Black Males... Make sure that you take your education seriously. You may not understand it right now, but your education is important. If you’re struggling in high school, don’t fail silently. Speak up and ask for the help that you need. If you’re interested in going to college afterwards, start researching the colleges that you’re interested in attending. If college isn’t for you, consider trade schools or programs for high school students such as ROP (Regional Occupation Program). Depending on what state you live in, it may be called something different. Some colleges offer certificate programs if you’re not interested in earning an actual degree. Go to your neighborhood community center and ask questions. Ask your school counselors for leads. The library is also a great place to get helpful information. Just ask the librarian, he/she will be happy to assist you. It’s important to educate yourself, because if not, you’ll most likely be stuck working a dead-end job. Ask questions as much as you need to. Don’t assume anything. Get the facts that you need in order to succeed.”

Stephanie Lahart Black Male Empowerment Quotes | Young Black Males | At-Risk Teens | Black Male Youth | Black Boys

12 notes · View notes

rainhalydia · 4 years

Note

I wasn't in fandom at the time, so I'm curious about how you felt, as a Throbb shipper, about GRRM confirming Robb didn't love Theon as much as he loved Jon? And how did Throbb shippers in general feel about it?

Well, I can’t say how Throbb shippers in general felt. Not that happy, I’d guess? I can tell how I felt and still feel about it, though I didn’t see that interview until long after the fact so I didn’t catch any drama anyway. To sum it up: I don’t care.

A much longer, rambling word-vomit under the cut:

I think I summed up my feelings very exactly, but I kept thinking a lot about this ask and having lots of opinions, so here we go. I’ll preface this long-ass rant by saying I have no professional training in literary analysis. I just read a lot, overthink everything and had two classes in college about literature.

First of all, this tendency to give great weight - i.e., to care at all - about what writers have to say about their own work is completely foreign to me. I mean it literally - the main framework of literary analysis I’ve encountered throughtout my education was basically centered around the text, and I very much adopt it without even giving it conscious thought. I don’t seek out interviews, addendums, essays, anything at all. Sometimes I read it if they fall on my lap. Such was the case with this interview.

It’s not that writers don’t have things to say, or that those things are not interesting or valuable or sometimes shed a new light on their work. It’s that at the end of the day they’re not important! Only canon is canon. I don’t mean to sound snob or pedantic, like the books are law or something. And any canon has a number of valid interpretations (within limits), they’re not absolute, they allow some wiggle room. But any text needs by definition to stand on its own without writers poking their heads inside the room to say how we should interpret it. If we need imput from the writers to do it, then the text is already bad, it failed, sorry. Interpretation is the reader’s job. In fact, it’s the reader’s prerrogative.

Much of this hipe around authors, I believe, has to do with the rise of social media and how close to the public writers suddenly were. And I feel that applies especially for authors like Martin, who are very talented and have created a very rich world that has become really popular. And ASOIAF is still ongoing. It’s natural that everyone wants to pick at his brain and know where the story is going!

And here I make my second very unpopular point: authors are not specialists in their own work.

He knows more than anyone about it, certainly, and currently Martin is probably the only person who knows how things will end (though we have plenty of bare bones the show left), but he is, as he has admited himself, a gardener. The story was bound to get away from him, given his own writting style. The group of people who will be specialists on his work don’t include him, and they don’t even exist yet. They will only emerge when he’s stopped writing (so probably after his death) and his work has ended (if it was finished or not). Then people can read every single thing he has ever written, which is much more than ASOIAF, and analyse it to death, pick it apart from every single angle, the ones Martin intended to be there and the ones he didn’t.

Again, I don’t mean to come across as snobbish and say Martin does not know his own work, characters, creation, etc. He does! But no writer can leave all their biases behind when they start writing, so these books are not neutral to begin with. Add to it the lots and lots of variables readers will bring when they interpret the text, and any book is always going to be more than the author intends by default.

If my argument seems absurd, let me point out that it has already happened to a certain degree: my own interpretation from reading ASOIAF is that it is full of anti-war, anti-violence messages, and yet from it has sprung an adaptation that, in my own interpretation, glorifies war and violence to a ridiculous degree. I’m not alone in these opinions, btw. They’re pretty common in fandom spaces, so I’m sure I didn’t pull them out of thin air. We can argue until we’re blue in the face that the Ds can’t read anything for shit, they certainly don’t do themselves any favors, but you know, they interpreted the books well enough to correctly guess who was Jon’s mother and get permission to adapt it in the first place. I’ve since seen people (I’m not naming names, anyone still reading will just have to take my word for it, but I swear they do exist) defend that the show is a faithful adaptation of the books and that the glorification of war was there too, and others say that the show didn’t actually glorify war, it had an anti-war message! Who is wrong? Well, I don’t know. As I said, the GRRM’s specialists are yet to come, and I’m certainly not one of them. What I believe, however, is that all of us brought our own biases to the same text, interpreted it according to them, and came to different, often conflicting conclusions.

See also what GRRM said about the partnership between Jaehaerys and Alysanne and what most people made of their relationship from Fire and Blood. See the sept sex/rape scene controversy. See the Dany/Drogo controversy.

Do you get why I put little weight in Martin’s interviews to form my opinion? So given that and my own background, I’ll chose my own interpretation of the text rather than Martin’s apocrypha.

What does the book canon, and the book canon alone, say about Robb’s feelings for Theon? Well, unless new material is released, we’ll just never know for sure, because Robb isn’t a pov character. We do have Theon’s side of things - he has a certain affection for Robb, he’s more of a brother than his own brothers, he wishes he had died with him or at least that he had been there at the moment of Robb’s death, depending on how sincere he feels like being. We also know a little bit of what other characters thought of their relationship. Bran says Robb admired Theon and enjoyed his company, and it’s implied that he finds this baffling. He’s also jealous that Robb spends more time with Theon and other adults doing adult things than with his brothers. And though I’ve talked at lenght about interpretation and wiggle room to understand things, it’s also pretty evident that Robb is down to hear Theon talk about his sexual conquests in some detail as long as his brothers aren’t around.

Of course, Bran is a child and much as he loves Robb, their time together is cut short and Robb is not his main concern anyway. We get most material about Robb and Theon’s relationship from Cat’s pov. There’s a lot we can analyse and Damien had already done a great not-meta about it, but sadly he’s since deleted, thank you to the demons who got on his case, but for me the most damning piece of evidence that Robb feels very strongly for Theon is this:

“Robb will avenge his brothers. Ice can kill as dead as fire. Ice was Ned’s greatsword. Valyrian steel, marked with the ripples of a thousand foldings, so sharp I feared to touch it. Robb’s blade is dull as a cudgel compared to Ice. It will not be easy for him to get Theon’s head off, I fear. The Starks do not use headsmen. Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty.”

So to unpack what is going on: nearly drowing in grief, Cat rambles to Brienne about lots of things, including Theon’s impending death sentence. By Northern dumb tradition, Robb must be the one to behead Theon, his former best friend turned enemy, turned betrayer, turned brother-killer. And she says that it won’t be easy for him to do it.

Now, it can be argued that this is partly because of the sword. They’ve lost their sharp valyrian steel and Robb uses an inferior blade, not as sharp. I reject this interpretation as the only explanation (and here comes my own biases) because she mentions the headsman right after. A headsman might be more experienced, but it’s not like he’d have valyrian steel to do it either. Rather, I think she’s talking about how being able to pass Theon off to be killed by a headsman would be easier on Robb psychologically, but it’s not really an option, so Robb will have to suffer.

At this point, to Robb’s knowledge, Theon has: 1) betrayed his trust and used the ruse of negociations with Balon to escape; 2) attacked the northern shore and enslaved his people; 3) attacked and took control of his home; 4) made his brothers hostages; 5) killed his brothers; 6) denied his brothers the right to be buried in a decent way; and finally, 7) burned their bodies and exposed them for all of the North to see.

And after all this, having to be the one to kill Theon will make him suffer.

We know one of the moments Robb gets the angriest in the books is when Bran is threatened by the wildlings. He is the acting Lord and keeping his little brothers safe is his responsability. He nearly bites Theon’s head off when Theon saves Bran in a risky way and we know that was uncharacteristic because Theon is still sulking about that a whole year later. So his siblings are dear to him, but even after Theon does everything from steps 1 to 4, he’s still sure they’re not in danger and that Theon won’t do anything to them. That’s how much he trusts Theon. It takes literal murder to make him change his mind.

But then he does change his mind. He believes Theon did those awful, awful things to his brothers. After that knowledge has had time to settle in, after he believes the worst of Theon, he has this amazing convo with Cat that I’ll quote whole because it’s amazing:

“Enough.” For just an instant Robb sounded more like Brandon than his father. “No man calls my lady of Winterfell a traitor in my hearing, Lord Rickard.” When he turned to Catelyn, his voice softened. “If I could wish the Kingslayer back in chains I would. You freed him without my knowledge or consent … but what you did, I know you did for love. For Arya and Sansa, and out of grief for Bran and Rickon. Love’s not always wise, I’ve learned. It can lead us to great folly, but we follow our hearts … wherever they take us. Don’t we, Mother?”

Is that what I did? “If my heart led me into folly, I would gladly make whatever amends I can to Lord Karstark and yourself.”

Lord Rickard’s face was implacable. “Will your amends warm Torrhen and Eddard in the cold graves where the Kingslayer laid them?” He shouldered between the Greatjon and Maege Mormont and left the hall.

Robb made no move to detain him. “Forgive him, Mother.”

“If you will forgive me.”

“I have. I know what it is to love so greatly you can think of nothing else.”

Catelyn bowed her head. “Thank you.” I have not lost this child, at least.

So we know that what is going on here is that Robb is buttering Cat up before breaking the news of his marriage to Jeyne to her. One of the possible interpretations supported by the text is that Jeyne is in love with Robb and Robb is not in love with her. It’s a common reading that he married her out of honor and to avoid a possible Jon Snow situation. During their marriage, he seems to grow fond of her - Cat notices he likes her company better, and her brother’s, and that he laughs when he is with the Westerlings - but he also keeps some distance. She’s afraid of Grey Wind, which pretty much means being afraid of a part of him. In turn, he’s attentive, courteous, and a bit touched and annoyed at her public displays of affection.

Then there is this gem:

“His heir failed him.” Robb ran a hand over the rough weathered stone. “I had hoped to leave Jeyne with child … we tried often enough, but I’m not certain…”

And this is more Damien’s not-meta than my own, but once you see it, you can’t ever unsee it. Compare the bolded parts in that quote in the first Cat-Robb convo to the part bolded in the second one, put them side to side and tell me you can’t see the difference. In the first one, Robb basically spells it out that he’s made a mistake out of love, that love turned him into a fool, but it was stronger than him. At that point of the narrative, Robb’s biggest mistake (and notably it was HIS mistale, it was not a case of the narrative screwing him over) was to free Theon. A mistake that caused him to lose his brothers, castle and a significant chunk of political standing. The consequences of marrying Jeyne, which is pretty much only to lose the Freys, don’t even compare - especially because the Stark faction believes they can win their support back.

And this love that made him act like a fool is further described in the second bolded part of that quote. He loved so greatly that he could think of nothing else. That is some passion there, folks. Even considering that he’s trying to get Cat on his side, it strikes me as so sincere and heartfelt. And again, maybe it’s my own biases showing, but that sounds like an all-consuming love, the kind of love that doesn’t go away easily. I don’t see that same depth of emotion on the second bolded quote… they tried often enough. Does it add up with the first part? I don’t think so.

My conclusion, and forgive me if the shipper gogles come in, is that the love that hurt him, that consumed him, is the love he had for Theon. Not for his wife. But it was in the past, one might say. His marriage was just beginning, he and Jeyne grow closer, etc. I’ll quote two more bits:

“I cannot speak to that. There is much confusion in any war. Many false reports. All I can tell you is that my nephews claim it was this bastard son of Bolton’s who saved the women of Winterfell, and the little ones. They are safe at the Dreadfort now, all those who remain.”

“Theon,” Robb said suddenly. “What happened to Theon Greyjoy? Was he slain?”

Here we are nearing the Red Wedding. Some Freys come to pretend to make peace and pressure for a wedding to Edmure and they bring news of the battle of Winterfell. Professional writers don’t often abuse the “suddenly” like us poor fic writers, so when he says it was sudden, i believe it was sudden. I believe it came out of nowhere, in fact, and that Robb was the only one in that room considering Theon’s fate.

Roose Bolton removed a ragged strip of leather from the pouch at his belt. “My son sent this with his letter.”

Ser Wendel turned his fat face away. Robin Flint and Smalljon Umber exchanged a look, and the Greatjon snorted like a bull. “Is that … skin?” said Robb.

“The skin from the little finger of Theon Greyjoy’s left hand. My son is cruel, I confess it. And yet … what is a little skin, against the lives of two young princes? You were their mother, my lady. May I offer you this … small token of revenge?“

Part of Catelyn wanted to clutch the grisly trophy to her heart, but she made herself resist. “Put it away. Please.”

“Flaying Theon will not bring my brothers back,” Robb said. “I want his head, not his skin.”

Aside from Catelyn, who is torn, and maybe the Greatjon (I don’t know what snorting like a bull is supposed to convey), no one in that room approves of torturing Theon, they’re all rightly creeped out. But no one would blink an eye if Robb had ordered Theon flayed alive. Instead, he commands the torture to stop. Of course it’s the only decent thing to do, but let’s all appreciate how the character who is always arguing for peace, end of conflict and letting things go for the sake of the living and what can still be saved instead of more violence, is tempted by it. Robb is the only one who shares the full extent of Cat’s grief here, but he’s also the only one to try and stop the senseless punishment.

I joke all the time about how Throbb is canon, and it’s mostly jokes. They are not canon in the sense that Cat and Ned are canon, and I don’t think we’ll have any more facts added to their story together, there probably won’t be any flashbacks that hint at a romantic relationship between them. But looking at the text alone, what we have of it as of now, it’s possible to support a canonical reading for this ship. This interpretation is there in the text if you want to see it. In fact, some things make more sense if Robb was in love with Theon.

And you know, having a ship be supported by canon is not actually a condition that needs to be met to ship anything. It’s just something I particularly need to get into it. But even if you read Theon and Robb as just friends, it’s a reach to say that Robb didn’t love Theon.

Of course, we have Robb demonstrating affection towards Jon in the books too. He is Robb’s chosen heir, to Cat’s despair. Despite all the negative propaganda bastards get and the fact that the mother he so respected and loved disliked and distrusted Jon, Robb considers him a full brother, to compare to Sansa’s constant “half-brother” from the beginning of her journey. They’re seen having a good time together (they have a horse race in their very first appearance in the books, and Mance recalls them getting into trouble together as children), so they enjoy each other’s company.

Yet there’s also an undercurrent of sibling rivalry between them, seen from Jon’s pov. We have this bit with Benjen:

Benjen gave Jon a careful, measuring look. “You don’t miss much, do you, Jon? We could use a man like you on the Wall.”

Jon swelled with pride. “Robb is a stronger lance than I am, but I’m the better sword, and Hullen says I sit a horse as well as anyone in the castle.”

This is hilarious to me. My uncle paid me a compliment for being perceptive, a skill not at all related to martial skills! Time to compare my martial skills to my brother’s, even though we’re both 14 and there’s lots of more tried warriors in the world and we haven’t even had our last growh spurt! This is sure to impress a seasoned ranger!

Of course we know Jon’s rivalry towards Robb comes from his bastard status, but it’s interesting to me that it’s something that centers around Robb alone; he doesn’t compare himself to Bran or Rickon as far as I remember. That can be explained by their very similar ages and growing up together, I think. Jon has the advantage of being older than his other true born brothers.

Jon also says this:

Bastard children were born from lust and lies, men said; their nature was wanton and treacherous. Once Jon had meant to prove them wrong, to show his lord father that he could be as good and true a son as Robb. I made a botch of that. Robb had become a hero king; if Jon was remembered at all, it would be as a turncloak, an oathbreaker, and a murderer. He was glad that Lord Eddard was not alive to see his shame.

To Jon - and to the other Stark children - Robb is often the model to be emmulated. I won’t dig up all the times they hold him up as the ideal of bravery. Jon’s feelings are not unique in this sense, though they are when it comes to the rivalry. They all admire Robb. From Robb’s side, I don’t remember hints of him admiring Jon or any of his siblings. He certainly loves them, likes them, and enjoys spending time with Jon at the very least.

But Theon is the one Robb admires in text. Bran says it, and Theon too:

“There is nothing small about the letter I bear,” Theon said, “and the offer he makes is one I suggested to him.”

“This wolf king heeds your counsel, does he?” The notion seemed to amuse Lord Balon.

“He heeds me, yes. I’ve hunted with him, trained with him, shared meat and mead with him, warred at his side. I have earned his trust. He looks on me as an older brother, he—”

Readers often dismiss this as Theon’s garden variety empty bragging. To be fair, Theon very much distorts reality in his head to fit his own idea of how things should be, but this is one of the few times when he’s not doing that. He’s genuinely proud that Robb thinks so well of him. And since he’s so sensitive about what people think of him and people not giving him the credit he thinks he deserves, I’m ready to believe his account of facts this one time.

What I get from canon, regarding who Robb loves the most out of Jon and Theon, is that he loves them differently. He might even love Jon more by ASOS; it’s a wonder that we have hints that he still cares about Theon at all by the end, after the murders of who we know are the miller boys, but who Robb thinks are Bran and Rickon.

He had different relationships with them. Even if you reject the reading of Throbb as romantic, friends and siblings are not interchangable, even if you’re out there calling close friends brothers or if your brother is your best friend. It’s different sorts of affection. At the beginning of the series, Robb and Theon seemed closer to me than Robb and Jon - let’s not forget that Jon’s favorite is Arya, and the biggest family drama at that time has to do with Jon and Cat. They grow even closer as they go to war together, and then they’re pushed apart by circumstances and by Theon’s actions.

But okay, this is not long enough yet, so let’s say that this is an invalid framework of analysis and Martin’s word of god has as much weight as canon, and that in fact, we’re 100% certain that Robb loved Jon more than Theon.

Why does it even need to be a competition? No one holds it against Ygritte that Jon loves Arya more. Asha has a steady boyfriend that she’d gladly marry, and still she takes risk after risk for Theon. Ned was probably the greatest love of Cat’s life, but her interactions with her brother and uncle are still emotional and moving in great part because of the depth of her love for them.

Robb loving Jon more doesn’t take anything away from Theon. He doesn’t love Theon less because he loves Jon more, love is not a finite resource. And Robb loved Theon plenty, be it in a familial, friends or romantic way. If it diminished, that was a result of Theon’s choices alone.

#Anonymous #throbb #long post #and i mean long

39 notes · View notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

Death Toll in West Texas Shooting Climbs to 7 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/us/death-toll-texas-shooting.html

Death Toll in West Texas Shooting Climbs to 7

By Lucinda Holt and Manny Fernandez |

Published Sept. 1, 2019Updated 12:17 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 1, 2019 12:52 PM ET |

ODESSA, Tex. — The death toll from a shooting spree Saturday afternoon in the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa increased overnight from five to seven, as investigators continued to piece together the bizarre and violent chain of events that had led a gunman to open fire on motorists and officers while driving on highways and alongside shopping centers.

Devin Sanchez, a spokesman for the City of Odessa, said seven people had been killed, in addition to the gunman. At least 21 others were wounded, including three law enforcement officers and a 17-month-old toddler who remained in serious condition Sunday morning.

[Read more about how the Odessa shooting unfolded.]

The gunman has not been identified, but authorities described him as a man in his mid-30s who fled from state troopers who had tried to pull him over. The gunman then hijacked a United States postal van and indiscriminately fired from a rifle at people before the authorities shot and killed him outside a movie theater in Odessa.

The attack on Saturday spread panic and fear for hours across West Texas, hundreds of miles from the border city of El Paso, where just 28 days earlier a gunman had killed 22 people at a Walmart in an anti-Hispanic attack. The motive behind Saturday’s shooting remained unclear.

Local and state officials said the shooting began with an attempted traffic stop on Interstate 20, a busy artery connecting Midland to Odessa.

At 3:13 p.m. Saturday, state troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety tried to pull over a man driving a gold car for failing to signal a left turn, the authorities said. The car was headed west and was near the Midland airport. Before it came to a complete stop, the driver pointed a rifle toward the rear window and fired several shots at the state troopers, injuring one, the Department of Public Safety said in a statement.

The gunman then drove west toward Odessa, shooting a person as he sped away on I-20 and east Loop 338.

He then began what officials called a shooting spree in Odessa. At some point, the gunman hijacked a postal van in Odessa and drove to the Cinergy movie theater on Highway 191. He shot an Odessa police officer and a Midland police officer. Officers returned fire, killing the suspect, the authorities said.

Cellphone video from witnesses captured the final moments of the attack on the back side of the movie theater.

The videos show police vehicles appearing to block a street outside the theater, around the corner from the entrances and in front of the building’s barren and beige side walls. The postal van speeds into view and the driver turns the van so its side slams into a police cruiser. A burst of gunfire follows as officers who have been chasing the van rush out of their vehicles to shoot at the gunman, who appears to remain inside the van.

On Sunday morning, the white postal van and the Odessa police vehicle remained in the same spot where the shooting had ended. Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were among the officers examining the crime scene on Sunday.

More than a dozen people were being treated at hospitals Saturday and Sunday. The wounded state trooper was in serious but stable condition, and the two officers were in stable condition, the authorities said.

The injured Midland officer, Zack Owens, was shot several times in an arm and hand, but relatives said his most serious injury had resulted from having glass shards in one eye.

Officer Owens’ brother, Jake Owens, is also an officer with the Midland Police Department. Abigail McCullough, the wife of Mr. Owens’ cousin, set up a donation page on GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site, to help pay the medical expenses for Zack Owens. By Sunday, more than $47,000 had been raised.

The 17-month-old girl who was shot was identified by family friends as Anderson Davis. A GoFundMe page for Anderson said the toddler had been wounded by a bullet fragment. The page was created by Haylee Wilkerson, a friend of Anderson’s mother, and had raised more than $119,000 by Sunday morning.

A note from Anderson’s mother on the page said her daughter was alive, which was “a prayer answered bigger than I’ve ever had to pray.” Her mother wrote that Anderson’s vitals were good and that she had shrapnel in her chest, her front teeth had been knocked out, and she had a hole through her bottom lip and tongue.

Residents in Odessa, a city of 120,000, remained on edge Sunday. Though Odessa and El Paso are separated by nearly 300 miles, the cities share some ties and a Western sensibility.

On Saturday night, at the University of Texas Permian Basin in Odessa, Stephanie Stonecliffe watched as her children played with rocks. She said her friend had been shopping at the Walmart in El Paso when the gunman there opened fire.

“Eventually I knew it was going to happen closer to home, especially with what’s going on in the world,” said Ms. Stonecliffe, who moved to the area recently from College Station, Tex. “This just tells me the world’s getting a little bit more dangerous.”

53 People Died in Mass Shootings in August Alone in the U.S.

So far this year, there have been at least 38 shootings with three or more fatalities, data shows.

By Neil Vigdor | Published August 31, 2019 Updated Sept. 1, 2019, 12:11 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 1, 2019 12:55 PM ET |

The month of August ended as it began: with a shooting rampage and a significant death toll.

Seven people were killed near Odessa, Tex., on Saturday as a gunman started shooting indiscriminately at cars, bringing the number of victims of mass killings by firearms to 53 for the month. The authorities on Sunday revised the death toll from the shooting in Odessa to seven from five, excluding the gunman.

The term mass killings is defined by the Justice Department as three or more killings in a single episode, excluding the death of a gunman. There is no legal definition for the term mass shooting, despite its frequent use by gun control groups and the news media.

This month’s loss of life was most acute in Texas, where four of the eight deadliest shootings occurred, including an Aug. 3 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 22 people.

The spate of gun violence has left the country on edge and catalyzed a more intense debate over gun control.

The carnage in West Texas on Saturday was the 38th mass killing by firearms in the United States this year.

Here are some of the deadliest shootings so far in 2019 based on figures from the website Mass Shooting Tracker and local news media accounts. The death tolls do not include the people who carried out the attacks, and not every episode of 2019 is listed.

AUG. 4 — 9 KILLED

Dayton, Ohio

Nine people were killed and 27 others were wounded after a gunman wearing a mask and body armor opened fire in a busy entertainment district. The gunman’s sister was among the dead, according to the police.

AUG. 3 — 22 KILLED

El Paso

Twenty-two people were killed and 26 others wounded in a shooting that targeted shoppers in a Walmart store in El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic border city. The suspect, a white man in his 20s who was taken into custody, wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that was posted online shortly before the attack, the authorities said.

JULY 28 — 3 KILLED

Gilroy, Calif.

An annual garlic festival in an agricultural community south of San Jose turned deadly when a 19-year-old man opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle that he had bought legally in Nevada. The gunman killed himself in the attack. The victims included a 13-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy.

JULY 6 — 5 FOUND DEAD

St. Louis County, Mo.

The bodies of five men who had been fatally shot were discovered in an apartment building by police officers in north St. Louis County, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The victims ranged in age from 37 to 65. Two men were arrested in the killings, which the police said were connected to “drug activity,” The Post-Dispatch reported.

JUNE 8 — 5 KILLED

White Swan, Wash.

Five members of the Yakama Nation were killed in White Swan, a remote community on the Yakama Indian Reservation in central Washington State. Four people were arrested in the shootings, the latest act in a cycle of criminal activity on the reservation, which is between the Cascade mountains and the Columbia River. Two of the men charged in the killings took a child hostage at gunpoint, the authorities said.

MAY 31 — 12 KILLED

Virginia Beach, Va.

A city engineer quit his job and then went on a shooting rampage at Building No. 2 of the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. The gunman, a former soldier, was armed with two handguns and a cache of ammunition as he targeted his former co-workers in offices and hallways, according to the authorities. His victims were civil servants in the public works and public utilities departments and a contractor who was at the offices to discuss a permit.

FEB. 15 — 5 KILLED

Aurora, Ill.

A disgruntled employee who had been fired from his job returned to a suburban Chicago factory with a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun with a laser sight, which the authorities said he used to kill five of his former co-workers. The gunman was not supposed to have a weapon, as his gun permit had been revoked a year earlier because of a felony assault conviction. The victims included an intern who was on his first day of work and a grandfather of eight.

JAN. 23 — 5 KILLED

Sebring, Fla.

Five women were fatally shot while they were lying on the ground in a SunTrust Bank branch by a 21-year-old man, who called an emergency dispatcher and said, “I have shot five people.” The suspect, who was charged with five counts of first-degree premeditated murder, was wearing a T-shirt that bore the image of four scythe-wielding grim reapers on horseback.

#gun violence #gun control #guns #mass shooting #mass murder #u.s. news #the nra is a terrorist organization #boycott nra #nra #us politics #politics #world news #worldpolitics #Odessa

9 notes · View notes

stars--n--stripes-blog · 5 years

Link

“Socialist!” is no longer a McCarthyite slur.

Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen – Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; – often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas.

A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country.

Five years ago, septuagenarian Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was considered an irrelevant lone socialist in the U.S. Senate – Vermont’s trademark contribution to cranky quirkiness.

But in 2016 Sanders’ improbable Democratic primary run almost knocked off front-runner Hillary Clinton, even as socialist governments were either imploding or stagnating the world over.

After Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, Sanders is back, running as a socialist warhorse, promising endless amounts of free stuff, with those promises suddenly being taken seriously.

Sanders, like the members of the “Squad,” has limited political power. But the celebrity and social media influence of these new and retread socialists has been on the upswing – especially in the current 21st century climate of radical transformations in economic and political life.

Note the shock over Clinton’s 2016 defeat, the furor directed at a take-no-prisoners Trump, and sudden progressive criticism of the Obama presidency as too temporizing, weak and ineffectual. And there are still other undercurrents that explain why currently socialism polls so well among young Americans.

Lots of young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry because they cannot afford a home, a new car or nice things in their “woke” urban neighborhoods.

College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans. Many of these debtors despair of ever paying the huge sums back.

Canceling debt is an ancient socialist rallying cry. Starting over with a clean slate appeals to those “oppressed” with college loans.

A force multiplier of debt is the realization that many students borrowed to focus on mostly irrelevant college majors. Such degrees usually offer few opportunities to find jobs high-paying enough to pay back staggering obligations.

Asymmetrical globalization over the last 30 years has created levels of wealth among the elite never envisioned in the history of civilization. In addition to these disparities, “free” but unfair trade – especially with China and to a lesser extent with the European Union, Japan and South Korea – hollowed out the interior of the United States, impoverishing and diluting the once-solid middle class.

Warped free trade and Chinese buccaneerism, not free-market capitalism per se, impoverished millions of Americans.

Lots of young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry because they cannot afford a home, a new car or nice things in their “woke” urban neighborhoods.

Usually, Americans become more traditional, self-reliant and suspicious of big government as they age. Reasons for such conservatism have often included early marriage, child-raising, homeownership and residence in a suburb, small town or rural area.

Today’s youth are generally marrying later. Most have few if any children. Twenty- and 30-somethings are not buying homes as quickly or easily as in the past.

They are concentrating in the urban centers of big- and medium-sized coastal blue cities, such as Boston, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle – but often at dead-end jobs that pay them just enough to get by and enjoy the appetites and perks of cool life in the big city.

These are the ingredients for a culture that emphasizes the self, blames others for a sense of personal failure, and wants instant social justice.

Finally, schools and colleges have replaced the empirical study of economics, history and politics with race, class and gender indoctrination.

Few young activists of the old Occupy Wall Street bunch, and few of the current violent Antifa street fighters, know the 20th century history of “socialists” who were actually hardcore communists.

Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin and Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong each killed millions of their own people.

Today’s students romanticize Che Guevara and Fidel Castro because they are clueless about their bloody careers. The Castro government for over a half-century was responsible for the murders of thousands of Cubans and Latin Americans in efforts to solidify Cuban “socialism” throughout Latin America.

When our schools and colleges do not teach unbiased economics and history, then millions of youth have no idea why the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Japan became wealthy and stable by embracing free-market capitalism and constitutional government.

Few learn why naturally rich nations such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela – or entire regions such as Central America, Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia – have traditionally lagged far behind due to years of destructive central planning, socialist economics and coerced communist government.

The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past and present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically and historically illiterate) youth.

- Victor Davis Hanson

#u.s. politics #socialism #millennials #*

2 notes · View notes

justpeachyshua · 6 years

Text

good luck

pairing: hoshi x reader rating/warnings: teen+ for language; no warnings au: college au?? word count: 4,045 summary: “Ever since my first date, I’ve had the absolute worst luck when it comes to relationships. Bad dates, lying, cheating - I’ve seen it all. So, I decided to give up dating completely. It’s just better that way. No hurting, no heartbreak. I’ve strictly stuck by this rule for years now. That is, until I ran into a particularly spunky dancer on campus.”

note: so uhhh, I should definitely point out that I haven’t posted in months and that this was supposed to be for hoshi’s bday but it’s.... definitely way past that. but it’s done ya know! I’d like to believe that the quality maybe makes up for how late it is. It’s worth noting that over the summer I was on kind of a hiatus since I was in japan for a month and, now that school’s going on, updates are probably gonna be even slower, at least for longer fics like these. that being said, I’m gonna try branching out and making shorter imagines, maybe even some bulleted ones? just so I can post more often without my content being actual shit lmao. anyways enjoy the fic <3

I've never been the type of person who was good at dating. In fact, I'm fairly confident that some force in this universe was entirely dead set on making sure that every single relationship I entered ended in disaster. It all started in 6th grade when a classmate of mine asked me to watch a movie with him. I was all done up, wearing an outfit I had bought only the day before, and yet halfway through the movie, I felt something come up my throat and before I knew it I was vomiting onto the floor in front of me due to the sheer amount of caffeine, sugar, and nerves running through me. In sophomore year, I got my first real boyfriend, but that relationship lasted about a week before he revealed that he asked me out as a dare and couldn't bring himself to break up with me until then. This pattern of misfortune only continued through high school with various failed dates and boyfriends who lied and cheated. At some point, I got sick of it and, after graduating, I vowed to give up on dating completely.

From then on, I avoided romance like the plague. If anyone seemed to like me or even asked me out, I would gently let them down. I made sure that close friendships were just friendships and that I never led anyone on. At least, I tried. You see, for the first time in my life, there was an exception to my rule. Towards the beginning of my freshman year of college, Kwon Soonyoung stepped, or rather crashed, into my life.

I was a few yards away from the entrance to the dorms and I was rushing inside to retrieve a textbook from a friend, when someone ran right into me, knocking me down. I fell against my bag with a thud and, looking up, I saw the small wheels of a... Razor scooter? The person riding the scooter – a young guy with floppy black hair – had fallen, too, and I could see that he had scraped his knee on the concrete.

"Are you okay?!" The guy crawled up to me, still on the ground. He looked me over, checking to see if I was injured with a comically concerned face.

"Yeah, I'm fine, don't worry about it," I assured him. "What about you, though? Is your knee okay?"

I pointed to his scraped knee which was already beginning to bleed. He looked down, noticing the wound and, to my surprise, laughed. "I'll be okay! It happens all the time when I'm practicing." Before I could ask him what he meant, he added, "Which reminds me!" He shoved a flyer into my hands. "You should come see the dance team's performance tonight!"

I turned the flyer over, revealing a hand-drawn night sky with a large star in the center, containing the information for the performance. It was endearing. "Did you do this?"

"Ah no, my friend Mingyu did, actually. He's an art major so we asked him to design the flyers for us. I'm just the leader of the team," he explained, a large grin ever present on his face.

"Oh." I folded the flyer and stuffed it into my bag. I stood up, offered my hand to the guy, and helped him up. "I'll see if I can go." My eyes landed on his scooter again. "Uh, what’s the scooter for?"

"It's a faster way to get around," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm pretty new with it, though, so I need to get better at riding it."

"Well, good luck with that. Try not to run into anyone else today," I said, turning to enter the dorm again.

"Oh wait!" He called out. "What's your name? I'll put you on the VIP list. For, you know, accidentally running into you."

"It's Y/N. What's yours?"

"Soonyoung! But when I'm performing, call me Hoshi!" His grin grew wider and spread to his eyes, which shut into half-moons. The brightness in his eyes was captivating and his happiness was infectious, so much so that I practically forgot about our little crash entirely.

"See you later then, Hoshi." I waved him goodbye and finally went inside the dorm as I planned.

After I finished my last class that night, I decided to attend the performance and, to my amazement, Soonyoung was spectacular. He had kept his word of putting me on the "VIP list," though I found out when I got there that I was the only one on the list and that there wasn't really a list to begin with, just a simple promise. Before the show began, someone from the team (who I presumed to be a long-time member) brought Soonyoung out on stage, after which he gave a small introduction and revealed that he choreographed the whole show. I seemed to be the only one in the audience that was shocked at this and I was only further impressed when I saw the choreography itself. As soon as the team stepped on stage together and began their first song, my eyes were locked on Soonyoung – Hoshi in this setting – who was front and center. His moves were simultaneously fluid and powerful and unlike any dancing I had seen before. I began to wonder if he was secretly a professional choreographer masked as a college student.

When the performance ended, I was the first to approach him and congratulate him on his job well done, going on and on about the quality of the show. He seemed ecstatic, his face lighting up ten times brighter than it was earlier in the day.

"So, you'll come to our next performance, right? It'll be a couple of months from now." He asked with the widest smile on his face.

I nodded. "Sure." I pulled my phone out of my bag. "Here, put your number in my phone and let me know about the next performance." He took my phone and quickly typed in his number before handing it back to me. I noticed he had put it in as "Kwon Hoshi ☆" and I couldn’t help but laugh.

"I'll make sure I remind you of everything we do, don't worry!" He beamed. "You know, I think we're going to be good friends."

"I think so too."

That was years ago and, in the time between then and now, we really had become great friends. He convinced me to become the manager of the dance team, though that just meant giving them song suggestions and feedback when they practiced and lounging around with them when they hung out outside of meetings. Through that, I managed to make a ton more friends than I was anticipating, including the other "founders" of the team, Minghao, Jun, and Chan. The five of us became extremely close and, before I knew it, we were drinking together, spilling secrets, and having movie nights every week. Soonyoung especially became my best friend with him often spending the night at my apartment off-campus and even exchanging clothes with me sometimes.

He was a grade ahead of me, so I had to watch him graduate a year before I did. Admittedly, a lot of tears were shed, but he came back the very next year to cheer for me as I crossed the stage with my degree. After that, we decided we might as well become roomies as we figured shit out and he officially moved into my tiny apartment, taking what used to be the guest room. We've been living together for about a year and a half now and, over the course of this time, I've come dangerously close to loving Kwon Soonyoung.

What used to be small, cute mannerisms when we were in college have become all too alluring now that it's just the two of us. Before, neither of us would really cook when he was over and instead just order chicken and pizza, but now that he lives here full-time, I've noticed how he talks to himself as he figures out online recipes. When he styles his hair every morning, he always asks how it looks and I always push a few stray hairs away before I tell him he looks cool. Often, he'll wake up and walk straight to the kitchen without his pants on because he took them off before sleeping and forgot to put them on again. I don't stare, of course, but I can't ignore it either. Of course, the other guys do come by and make it feel like the old days again, but I can never shake the image of him falling asleep on the coach after a long night of watching anime or him dancing around the living room as he brushes his teeth. Everything he does totes the line between goofy and charming and it has me falling for him harder than I’d like to be.

Which brings me to a very important day: Soonyoung's birthday. See, for as long as we've been friends, Soonyoung and I have always made each other's birthdays as stellar as possible. One year I took him to paint a giant mural with me; The next year he took me bungee jumping. Generally, we tried to one up what we did the year before or at least do something equally as spectacular This year, however, I did something different. For his last birthday I had taken him to a SHINee fansign and had already planned to take him to Japan the next year, but I ended up changing my mind. This year, I instead decided to go on a simple picnic with Soonyoung. This decision came partially from the lack of funds for plane tickets and partially from one desire: To finally tell Soonyoung my thoughts on dating. For as long as we’d been friends, I had never quite opened to him about my fear of dating and, even considering how endearing and comfortable he was, I had to set some sort of boundary to prevent misfortune. So, it was decided. I would have to make our relationship clear – just friends, no feelings. At least, I hoped.

When he woke up that morning (wearing his pajama pants for once), I was already awake and making breakfast for the both of us. He sniffed the air and instantly became more alert. "Pancakes? You're spoiling me." He rushed over to sit at the island counter. "So, what's on the agenda for today?"

I placed the last finished pancake onto a plate and carried it over to him, setting a bottle of syrup in front of him as well. "Well, I was thinking we could just have a chill day and maybe go on a picnic at the park nearby?"

He looked up at me, scanning my face for any sign that I was joking. When he saw that I was completely serious, he silently nodded. "Awesome! What time should we go?" I could tell he wanted to ask why we weren't going all out this year, but he probably sensed that it would've been an awkward thing to pry about. I didn't want to disappoint him, so I hoped that he would at least enjoy today's activities.

"Maybe around 1:00?" I checked my phone, seeing that it was only 10:28. "That gives us about two and a half hours before then."

"Sounds good, then." He smiled before digging into the pancakes in front of him. He let out a long and satisfied sigh. "God, these are so good." I only grinned as I watched him eat, slowly picking at a plate of my own.

Within a few minutes we were both finished, and I took his plate to put in the sink. He padded over to the couch and I soon joined him, plopping down in the crevice I'd made from sitting in that exact spot for over two years. "By the way, I'm going to need you to leave the house for at least an hour before we leave."

He whipped his head towards me. "Aha! So there is a catch!"

"What?"

"You're planning something special for me, aren't you? That's why you want me out of the house, right? So you can bring a whole bunch of people in. Or better yet! You're bringing a dog home!" He exclaimed.

"I’m- I’m sorry, Soonyoung. No, I just need the time to make the food for the picnic and to get some things together. It's a surprise so I don't want you to see it.”

He became visibly more disappointed, albeit by just a bit. "Oh. That's okay. I'm sure I'll love whatever we do." He gave me his usual toothy smile. "I could see about hanging out with Chan for a bit to give you time."

"Thanks. And let him know he left some socks here the last time he stopped by."

"You got it," he said, already messaging Chan and beginning to get ready. "I'll be out of your hair in a bit. Just let me know when you're done!"

Within a few minutes, he was out of the door and I was left to begin my plan. I had already gotten a few recipes from my mom on a terribly long phone call the night before and cooking it took about an hour on its own, so the rest of the time was spent gathering everything else such as fruit, chips, drinks, and of course the crucial basket and blanket. At that point, I still had about 40 minutes remaining, so I found myself scrolling on my phone and becoming increasingly worried as my thoughts roamed. What if the food spills in the basket and we don’t have anything to eat? What if he has a secret allergy he never told me about and he goes into anaphylactic shock because of something I made? What if he ends our friendship after I tell him how I feel? The whole point of my plan is so I can avoid ruining our friendship, but what if that’s exactly what happens? What if he has feelings for me?

My phone pinged with a new text, snapping me out of my thoughts.

Kwon Hoshi ☆: hey! you almost ready? I can start heading back anytime you want~

I was relieved to be pulled out of my mental spiral. Looking at his message, I smiled at the squiggly he so often used when texting. It was cute and somehow evoked the exact tone he spoke with in person. I wanted to be able to hear that for a while, especially after today.

Me: hey, yeah I’m all done. you can come back now. just meet me at the entrance to the park, ok?

Kwon Hoshi ☆: you got it!!

The walk to the park took only a couple of minutes and, once I arrived, I sat on the neartest bench and waited for Soonyoung to walk up any second. Twenty minutes passed by, then thirty, then fifty, and soon well over an hour had passed and I was still sat there. No messages. No Soonyoung. Plenty of people had passed by – families with small children, a few groups of teenagers looking to play some sports in the open fields, and couples walking along the path, hands intertwined. I tried not to watch.

Finally, once I was about ready to give up and just head home, I heard someone shout my name from a few yards away. It was Soonyoung, out of breath and jogging towards me.

“Soonyoung, are you okay? Where have you been?”

“I was,” Pant. “In the car with Chan,” Pant. “He was driving me back.” Pant. “And I-”

“Okay, you need to sit down and catch your breath, you’re breathing way too hard right now.”

He sat and took a moment to calm down. “There was a huge accident that happened right in front of us. Someone completely swerved out of their lane and crashed into another car. So, for a while, we were in shock. At that point, my phone was dead because my charger stopped working while I was at Chan’s. Anyways, traffic was so bad that we were there for like twenty minutes just waiting to go past this super busy intersection that was all clogged up. In the end, Chan said I should just get out of the car and walk to the park since he’d probably be there a while. The walk took me a while, but I’m here now.”

“Sooyoung that’s- that’s crazy. I’m really sorry that all happened.” I had to take a few seconds to comprehend all that he had recounted to me. There was a very visceral, very unnerving feeling within me at that moment. Something was telling me that this wasn’t going to go well.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m super late and you’ve probably been sitting here for so long after you went through all the trouble to make food and everything.” But then again, with Soonyoung’s radiating optimism, I’m sure I’ll be able to get over it.

“It’s all good.” I gave him a reassuring smile. “I’m just glad you’re here now. Now come on, we should find a good spot to sit.”

We walked, gazing at the various photo-esque locations and quickly finding their flaws: a cute spot under the shade of a tree (too many bugs), a spot with some breeze by the stream (uncomfortable rocks and uneven terrain), a spot on the stone in front of a water fountain (as cute as they were, too many screaming, jumping kids). Yet finally, as we approached the far end of the park, we found the quaintest, quietest, most peaceful spot in the grass. It was sunny and warm and surrounded by yards of bright flowers. We agreed to settle there and placed our blanket down, beginning to unpack our lunch.

I found my initial bad impression begin to fade as we calmly ate, going in and out of conversation and generally just enjoying the other’s presence. Despite the simplicity of the meal, Soonyoung continuously reminded me how much he loved it. I was pleased to hear his compliments even if I did deny them. Soon enough we were finished with the food and I was reading the newest novel I had bought, picking back up from where I left off. In the cool and comfortable atmosphere, it almost felt as though we were one of the many couples in the park that day, enjoying a nice day out in the sun together, in love. I could see how a random passerby could glance at us and think, “Ah, what a cute date.” After all, with Soonyoung’s head laying on my lap as I read out loud to him, he did sort of look like my boyfriend. The entire time my eyes were fixed to the page as I focused on following the story and adding voices to each character for entertainment’s sake, but I took a pause for once to look down at Soonyoung. He was looking directly at me, eyes peering into my own, and I suddenly felt very vulnerable under his gaze.

“Soonyoung, I have to tell you something.”

Plop. Right in the middle of Soonyoung’s forehead landed a drop of water. Plop plop plop. Quickly, the rain began to fall and spiraled into a thunderstorm within seconds. Soonyoung jumped up as I rushed to throw my book and all our containers into the basket and run for cover, using the picnic blanket to shield the both of us. The other parkgoers also hurried to find a spot to stay dry and, evidently, we were left with nowhere to go.

“Let’s try to catch a bus home!” Soonyoung suggested. I nodded, and we sprinted to the stop outside the park entrance, dodging the rain under a couple of trees along the way.

“You have got to be kidding me!” I shouted. Just outside the gates was a bus, empty and unmoving, with about ten bus drivers with varying degrees of intense protests written on picket signs.

“Shit, how could I forget? Bus drivers have been on strike all week, there’s no way we’re gonna convince them to bring us home.”

By now we had been out in the rain for at least four minutes and we were drenched despite our efforts to protect ourselves with the blanket. I should have known. Soonyoung being late in the first place was the first red flag, but I chose to ignore it. I chose to ignore it because I knew I was enjoying what we had, pretending we were a couple. It was so incredibly selfish. It was selfish the way I let myself get caught up in the moment. It was selfish the way I let my bad luck get in the way. It was selfish the way I ruined Soonyoung’s birthday by making it all about me.

I kept my head down in shame. While my body was freezing cold, my eyes began to burn with tears. I willed them to stay back but I couldn’t stop them, and so they fell and I heaved.

He turned to me and began to rub my back. “Hey, are you okay?”

I sobbed then. “I’m sorry, Soonyoung. I wanted to make your birthday nice, but I just ruined it.”

He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into his chest. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, this was supposed to be your day. Today was supposed to be special. I was supposed to take you to Japan and instead we’re stuck here in the rain, freezing our asses off,” I choked out.

Looking up, I saw his brow furrow into an unreadable expression. “Maybe we don’t have to be.” He shrugged the blanket off his shoulder, wrapping it around my head, and gently grabbed my hand. In a spontaneous burst of energy not uncommon to Soonyoung, he took off in a run with me trailing behind. He dragged me to the nearest store awning and plucked an umbrella from the bin beside the door.

“Soonyoung, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Just follow my lead.”

With a flourish, he pushed the umbrella open, held it over his head, and sprang out onto the street with a splash. He motioned back to the bin, urging me to grab an umbrella for myself. I hesitantly pulled one out and opened it before joining Soonyoung on the street. He grabbed my hand once again and led me into a simple dance. As we moved about, we kicked up large splashes of rain on the street below us. We spun around, making large strides from side to side and twirling the handles of our umbrellas. Once we were both completely out of breath, we returned to the store awning.

I regulated my breathing before starting. “Now what was all that about?”

“I wanted to show you that this day hasn’t been completely ruined. Even if it’s pouring, we can still have a good time if we’re together.” He took my hand in his once more, this time clasping both of his hands around it. They were comfortably and unusually warm considering the current weather conditions. “I say we head home with these umbrellas and make some frozen pizza. What do you think?”

“That sounds pretty good.” I couldn’t help but smile. “But I still feel pretty shitty about today. I- I don’t exactly have the best luck with these kinds of things.”

The corner of his lips tugged into a sympathetic grin. “Don’t worry about it.” He gingerly pressed a kiss onto the top of my head. “This is the best birthday date I could ask for.”

And in that moment, I came to accept what I had with Kwon Soonyoung, my best friend, my roommate, and the object of my affection. After all these years of letting guys into my life and repeatedly getting knocked down, I found the one boy who could quell those worries. I found the one boy who could step up to the universe and tell it to fuck right off as he danced away in the middle of a thunderstorm. I found the one boy who I finally felt lucky to have.

#hello this took me like 4 months to finish #bc im an actual piece of shit haha #but yes i'll try to write shorter things to update more frequently #seventeen #svt #seventeen imagines #svt imagines #seventeen fic #svt fic #seventeen fanfic #svt fanfic #hoshi #kwon soonyoung #hoshi imagine #hoshi fanfic #hoshi fic #hoshi seventeen

22 notes · View notes

digigal-transbian · 5 years

Text

Better to?

Is it better to be alive and constantly miserable? Or dead and know peace?

If I fail a class this semester, there is an extremely high likelihood that i will be pulled out of college for financial reasons. If that happens I've been told I will have no choices, my life will be ultimately destroyed. The only job I'd be able to get is a minimum wage, soul crushing mindless existence. I'd never be able to afford a second chance at college. I'd never be able to survive on minimum wage, I'd have to get two jobs and even then I'd barely make ends meet.

And that's if I was able to get a second job. I'd never know love because I'd be too busy trying just to survive and after that too tired to function. 2 full time jobs is not exactly free to have feelings like love. And with who I am, finding someone would be a damn miracle and god has already proven he shall have no mercy on me.

And the gods know I'd never have a lucky break with writing or art, if I even had the time or energy to put into either of them.

Every check just going to not being dead for another week, stuck in a job or if I'm lucky, 2, that I hate, barely making ends meet, all because when I was 19 I got cocky and ended up failing Precal or was forgetful and failed English because if it.

To be able to say, "I was young, dumb, sure of myself, and because of it I've amounted to nothing, never known love, was never able to have a family, and lived a fate comparable to hell on earth."

I've been religiously told this for the last 6 months by my parents. And 6 months is lowballing it.

My biggest fear is dying alone. My second biggest fear to be forgotten. If I fail both are going to happen. I'm going to die alone in a house that is barely holding together without a soul to remember me.

I'll be forgotten within a week of my death, if not, a month at most. Nothing I've ever done will have mattered, ultimately I was just a waste of the universes time, even if I did make a couple peoples days just a little bit brighter.

Is it better to live and be miserable with no hope, or to die and be done with it?

At this point it's basically pass or die. A 70 on my math final to pass and have to retake because of how it is with my major, an 85 on it to never take that class again, and with English I've done what I can and at this point all I can do is hope.

And don't any of you dare call me selfish for this. To call suicidal people selfish is selfish itself. You're only concerned about the impact that persons death would have on you or their family, worry about the person who wants to kill themselves because they are in pain or see no other option.

And never call me selfish. I've made every choice for somebody else. Choice in college was because if years of "if you go to clemson you'll make your grandfather proud." And he's the actual kindest person I've ever met of course I dont want to let him down, I couldn't get there on my highschool GPA or ACTs so I found some backass method to get there. CSU has an applied math program that does 4 years there, 2 years at Clemson and you get two degrees for the 6 year period.

My father was all for that for the reason of being able to rub it in my aunts and uncles faces.

This is the same man that punched a brick wall hard enough to let out a blood curdling scream, make the house shake from the punch, and instill the fear of death in a child because a 12 year old didnt do his English homework. Why that 12 year old didnt do their homework? Just didnt want to, so over time did less and less of it.

Which is a legitimately normal thing by the way, 6th graders dont always want to do their homework and of course they are going to lie about it, dont act like his responce was in any way justifiable.

The man to this day still threatens to pin me to a wall and beat the shit out of me if I lie to him again, which wouldnt be as much of an issue if he didn't terrify me to the point of never telling him anything ever again out of fear for my life.

My choice of major was because of him. I wanted to be a doctor for a while but then my mom spent a collective 5 years dying in the hospital, so that dream died. No fault to her she couldn't control it. I then wanted to be a psychiatrist, therapist, that deal. Made the mistake of mentioning it around dad and got told promptly "it's not a real job." 10 year old me gave up on that real quick.

Then it went lawyer for a while because I figured a good paying job will be acceptable, hes always on about money anyways. After months upon like a year or something of "oh it's a lot of school and it's really hard and are you sure about it?" That dream too, was killed.

So the next thing I said was computers. Nothing more, nothing less, and it was finally acceptable. It was the most predicatable answer out of me and the first one to really be approved of. So for years i was content not having my dreams put down, then came college and I put my dreams down for computer engineering, on the track to clemson.

I then changed my major to computer science and over time put some thought into my actual interests.

Astronomy, the language of the stars. Physics, the language of the universe. Linguistics, the study of language. Writing, where you can be a god of your own little world. Geology, because rocks are just cool yo. Intetior Design, every time dad drags me to work with him I sit around and mentally start designing each room. And at the bottom of the list, Computer Science.

And the final mistake made in this whole college thing, I applied to only 1 college and to 0 scholarships. The scholarships I got are state ones, and I was told to keep a 3.0 GPA, which if you've ever seen one of my report cards you know how bad of an idea relying on that is. You have to have no idea what any of my report cards have ever looked like to think for a minute that trusting I will keep a B average for 6 years with no problems at all is even slightly a good idea.

So when my grades came in first semester, the night of December 13 I was legitimately shaking in fear for my life. December 23 when my parents found my grades out they gave me a 2~3 hour scream and then since then all my tech, aside from my phone and laptop, has been sitting in a tote box in my closet.

April they see my grades again and since then I havent been allowed to even have my door closed, and was strongly told that if I'm caught reading anything that isnt for school they'd burn it.

I could have probably avoided half of this if I was just a little more selfish, but I made every choice for someone else. If I was just a little more selfish I would be in a college half the price of CSU in a major that wouldnt be my last choice. Were I just a little more self centered, I wouldn't fear my father killing me over my grades.

Maybe I'm so destructively selfless because every moment that was supposed to have been about me quickly became about someone else. High school graduation after the fact during the pictures I got pushed to the side so my cousins could have a picture of just them, when there literally were three other walls and outside that they could have done that. Have you ever taken a picture outside at night? It's got a beautiful magic about it, and the lights were on dont even try to say "oh it's too dark", also cameras tend to have a flash so that's no excuse to push ME out of the way on MY graduation day. Kinda a big deal to me because when you look at my extended family I am among the few that have graduated high school, like half of them haven't even done that.

My graduation party the next day, I was given my gifts and then ignored most of the rest of the time. I was there for about 6~7 hours, and relevant for about 15 minutes. My college acceptance letter was opened and read by my parents before I even woke up. In fact, they woke me up by yelling at me from the kitchen to get in there. I walk in there, they're at the table smiling like idiots that just won the Nobel prize, and they hand me an open letter and tell me to read.

And my birthdays result in me being relevant for ten minutes of the hour at the pizza hut, and most of that is being asked about school and grades. The rest of the time is my parents and grandparents bitching about my drug addict unfit parent cousins. Like, my birthday is supposed to be about me, not them. And I am more than just school and grades, you would not believe how long it took me to realize that.

I have one bit of advice for anyone that might need it. Live your life for yourself for your reasons and never let somebody else live through you.

#personal #delete later #xni

1 note · View note

makemyskinyoursanctuary · 6 years

Photo

I hope you take the time to read this. Her story deserves to be heard. For months now, people have been telling me that I am so strong, but my mother was the definition of strength. She was also humble, generous, brave, funny, beautiful, stubborn, selfless and my hero. I'm not sure she ever understood the impact she left on people, especially me. Her story is heavy, from beginning to end. She never let me feel any of the weight. This isn't a read for the light hearted, but I want people to know what a warrior she truly was. My mom was born in Saigon, Vietnam. She was one of six children- the rebellious one at that. She was the socialite, the troublemaker, and very independent. She was the most unique of the sisters, as she was not analytical- she thrived in all forms of art. From early on, my mom was determined to follow her passions even though my grandparents were not able support it while living under the communist reign. She saved up all of her money, bought a classical guitar & sheet music, and taught herself how to play. She used to tell me about how she had a band with her friends and they would get together to sing pop music. Late one night, when my mom was playing, communist officers stood outside and listened for hours. After she finished, they came in and destroyed her instruments and music books.They tried to arrest her for playing songs from "the old country". My grandpa had to beg and pleaded until they agreed not to take her away. My mom was always fearless. She tried to escape the country 9 times, with a few of the attempts leading to jail time. But, even in jail, she made the best of it and made friends. The tenth and final attempt was made with her sister. She was in a group of 71 with 200 people overall that were trying to escape the shore. Her group hid beneath the deck of a disguised cargo ship. Between the captin not making it aboard and the storms that blew them far into the ocean, the two day trip turned into surviving 3 days and 4 nights in the terrifying waters. When they came into the sights of the pirates, they were luckily left alone and not pillaged like many ships before them because of the direction they were coming to shore from. They landed and began their chapter in refugee camps. There they stayed in camps in Thailand and the Philippines for two very difficult years, sometimes not having any food or water. My mom told me stories about sleeping on the ground under trees and collecting rain in plastic bags just to have water to drink. In 1983 the United Nations sponsored my mom and aunt and they moved to Utica. Her fight for the American dream was never easy. She had her heart set on going to college but had to take a job to provide for her and her sister. My mom ALWAYS had the strongest work ethic. She eventually married my father, got the chance to complete a degree in the Science of Photography and then opened our family legacy of Aversa Photography. My parents were a power house. Their business was undeniably one of the best studios of its time. They poured everything into the business and worked around the clock. My mom’s one regret was that she felt like she worked too much when I was young. When my parents eventually divorced, she became the sole owner and continued to keep the business going in case I ever wanted to take it over. Although I had worked in the studio for over a decade and also went to college for a Photo degree, she never pressured me into taking over the business. She always wanted me to create my own legacy and chase my own dreams. She took me to cheerleading practice, piano and violin lessons, theatre and drama club, art classes, voice lessons, choir rehearsals, and even ballet for the couple months I tried it. She actually did ballet herself for a while, which I don't think very many people knew. She was always my number one supporter. She even let me have house shows when venues would back out last minute, knowing how import the local music scene was to me. She also was a huge supporter of my friends. She put so much effort into going to their shows, galleries, and events. She treated so many of my friends as her own children. She just had a natural way of making everyone feel welcome and safe. Last May, my mom found out she might have cervical cancer. Wanting to protect me, she kept me in the dark. She wanted to get everything under control then tell me she was going to be fine. She never got the chance. In June she was forced to tell me about her diagnosis, as she was having trouble with scheduling her hysterectomy and needed me to be on call to take her, something she didn't want me to be a witness to. After a few weeks after her surgery, I took her to her follow up appointment, where the Doctor told her she was in the clear. He looked at me and said she didn't need any further treatment. It would be the same as me getting radiation or chemo because nothing was showing signs of possible cancer. I remember getting in the car after and my mom questioning it and I just tried to reassure her because I heard news that I wanted to hear. Still keeping very quiet about her health. She started to have pain in her leg and side and followed up with the original surgeon. He completely wrote her off and told her that she must be sleeping funny and to follow up with her primary doctor. They scanned and found no cause for the pain, no blood clot, nothing, but during her yearly appointment, her GYN reviewed all the reports and discovered that it stated that there were large fragments of mass remaining in her cervix all along. She fought with her insurance again to get a biopsy. Once again, she kept this from me because she never wanted me to worry. I'm very grateful for her friends that helped her through these times. When she got the biopsy finally scheduled after weeks and weeks, she broke the news that she may not be ok. I took her to get the biopsy and wanting to protect me as always, she waited until after Thanksgiving to tell me the news. My mom was a stage 4 with pelvic cancer. The months that followed were hard and painful. We went in and out of the emergency rooms dealing with the side effects of chemo. She suffered from multiple blood clots, a failing kidney, hallucinations, and hearing that she didn't have options left, but she didn't give up. My mom didn't want to give up for me. She agreed to go to the Roswell Cancer Center in Buffalo and keep fighting. She went through six full rounds of chemo and we hit a dead end. The doctor said we could try to do surgery to alleviate some of her discomfort and maybe eventually try other treatments. In late April, my mom went into surgery and two hours later the doctor came out to speak to me. I'm pretty sure my heart and time stopped completely. I thought he was going to tell me he lost her, as the surgery was so complex, however, he gave us news of a miracle. They were able to remove almost all off the mass and said that she should be able to have many good years ahead, with a few precautionary treatments. The day after the surgery, my mom stood up and walked on her own for the first time in so long. I remember her looking over to Sean and I with tears in her eyes thanking us as she processed everything that had happened to her. This was the first time in so long we felt real hope. She was released, and we took her home to Syracuse. She walked up and down stairs, cooked once in a while and started to have a little bit of life again. Within a few weeks her stomach swelled, and we found out the mass returned. Along with that came the pains in her leg and she once again lost most of the ability to walk. The doctor performed another surgery and placed a drain from the mass in hopes to shrink it to possibly do radiation. I took her to her radiation consultation in June, a year after she told me about her original diagnosis. They said radiation was absolutely not an option. They were going to try a different type of chemo and the chances of it working were below 30%, but if she wanted to they would try. I promise you there is only one worse feeling than explaining to your mother that we've reached the end of the rope. With the little bit of her that was left she decided to try the chemo knowing the chances. Because life wasn't tough enough as is, we lost my grandma the weekend before her scheduled chemo session. My mom was so tough. She wanted to see my grandma off and pay respects and come with us the long, grueling, 4-hour drive to Massachusetts. I think in her heart of hearts she knew it was the last chance to see the whole family at once. We came back that Sunday and Sean took her to chemo on that Tuesday. She really loved Sean and had a special bond with him the entire time she lived with us. When they got home, everything seemed fine. She didn't seem to have any really bad side effects this time around and then Friday came. We called an ambulance and she spent the next two weeks in emergency rooms fighting off sepsis. She spent her last Birthday in the hospital. That's something I'll always hate. Over the two weeks she was in the hospital Sean and I talked and decided we were going to move back to Utica. We didn't know if she had years left, but either way we were willing to commute everyday so that she could be with her community again. She had so many friends from all over, many of which didn't know the gravity of the situation (which I think is why I feel the need to write all of this). When we told her, she tried to fight us, because once again she was looking out for me. She often told me she hated that she was a burden. To this day, I still feel like going through this whole year or so was an honor, but we aren't getting into that yet. When she was finally released, we brought her back to her home. Within an hour people were at our door waiting to see her. My mom was such a special person. We had her next appointment for chemo and as we were driving to Buffalo I could feel something in the Universe shift. I knew this was going to be our last visit. I knew what they were going to say. She was too weak for any treatment. She was angry at the news. She didn't want to stay for her remaining appointments, she just wanted to go home. I had to sit there and plan out Hospice and watch my mom's heart shatter. The ride home however was not as grim as I expected. My mom seemed like there was a weight lifted off of her suddenly and she was in good spirits. The next day we began Hospice and things seemed relatively calm. Last Friday my aunt called me at work, she was visiting my mom for the week, and said something changed. Things didn't seem right. I rushed home and she told me my mom was doing a little bit better than when she called, but my mom wouldn't eat. Saturday morning my mom got up by herself and walked a couple feet, but by the time the night came around she was barely responsive. Sunday my mom was in incredible pain and spoke maybe 3 words. By this time all my aunts were either there, flying in, or in the car driving. I went to get some groceries to make dinner and said I'd be right back. This was the last time my mom kissed me on the cheek. She could barely lift her head or pucker her lips. I came home 15 minutes later to my aunt in the kitchen. We talked for a bit and then I went over to my mom. The time had come, it was beginning. She stopped responding. She was breathing but wouldn't wake up. The next couple days and nights were spent by her bedside. I slept in a chair at night holding her hand. I left to go see the funeral director as we knew it was a matter of time and got the call that it was starting. I rushed home trying to make it in time, but when I walked through the door she was gone. Everyone believes she waited until I wouldn't see, protecting me yet again. I have something inside me that's pushing me to tell these hard parts of her story. She would want anyone to keep fighting. She would want them to not believe the first doctor and to get a second and third opinion. She would want her story to help someone else. My mom's faith through the entire journey was remarkable. She believed that god had a plan and that was why she forgave the original doctor. It's true she was curable at one point, but she said that if God wanted her to live she would. She didn't believe people were meant to be bitter even through all of her hardships. I remember asking her if she was afraid of dying and her concern was that I wasn't ready for her to leave. My mom is undeniably irreplaceable. She is the Queen B. She is the reason I cherish art. She is the reason why I do everything to support the music scene. She is the reason I try to find grace in all situations and only find the best in people. She is the reason I try to be selfless like her and why I will constantly fight to be a better person than the day I was before. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to be half the woman she was. I just hope I make her proud. Her struggle is over and even in her passing she continues to teach me how to find strength. There's a void in my heavy heart that will never be filled. I love you forever lady. Thank you for everything, always. I hope that wherever you may be, there are NO peppers on your pizza.

#cancer restinpower mom

2 notes · View notes

dftgrftgh · 3 years

Text

With rear wheel drive

With rear wheel drive, the EPA says Silverados nike air max thea atomic pink with the 5.3 liter V8 will achieve 19 mpg combined (16 city/23 highway). In general, I've found roads in comparable European and British cities seem a good deal quieter than those around Canberra.. And give me your word that you’ll always believe me, and I will believe you. This increase in pressure creates a strong foundation for your body and allows it to handle more weight. Her whole dress Mens JORDAN Hoodie might be described as rags and tatters. When we got into the Gulf Stream, I came to the men, and took off their handcuffs. Machine Gun Kelly's advice for up and coming Cleveland artists Rapper Machine Gun Kelly is back in town and sharing some thoughts on why Cleveland success story may make it harder for aspiring musicians. ?25: Ruth Cawley, Blackrock, Co. Thursday at Southern Maryland Hospital Center, 7503 Surratts Road, Clinton. But I got all the cool souveneirs there. The smile that peeled upon facade bore a death toll bell of laughter, hands clapping slowly like in view of the par. Fox News has consistently been the most watched network in all of cable television, not just news, over the past few months. So great was the zeal of the church for the ransom of unhappy captives, that even the ornaments and sacred vessels of the 240church were sold for their ransom. With Effie's character, I talked about it with Francis and with Elizabeth. Scrubbed and groomed, clad in green velvets and an ermine half-cape, with his long red hair freshly washed and his fiery beard shaped and trimmed, the wildling looked every inch a southron lord. WWI saw much trench warfare. Another dead city, ten times as large as Ghoyan Drohe. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out at her from sockets weeping blood. “I knew nike air max thea atomic pink it would rain,” he said in a gloomy tone. If he did not enter the game in the 9th, Angel Nesbitt would have entered in the 9th and there is no catalog cercei aur turcia guarantee what happened in the 10th would have happened in the 9th. They walked the streets both day and night, in dark hoods and brazen masks. Even better, Intel uses solder as an interface material between its Haswell E die and the large heat spreader covering these Core i7 5000 series CPUs. Much has been said of the disparity of punishment between the white inhabitants and the slaves hanorace panda barbati and negroes of the same state; that slaves are punished with much more severity, for the commission of similar crimes, by white persons, than the latter. In the meantime this government seems determined to open the doors to Australian bigotry while waging war against Islamist bigots and admonishing Asian bigots and damning bigotry in other cultures. It was better inside Summer. Neither bird had flown a hundred yards before an arrow took it down. To develop those rules first and foremost means doing some homework after market hours. But for Paragon, the 39 year old family owned brand from Kerala, which actually popularised branded rubber chappals in India, this product segment is no more a significant growth driver. But after seeing TV broadcasts of the awful smog in China and in Salt Lake City, many have no problems with our type of fuel especially when cazadora vaquera tommy hilfiger they can see the eastern foothills that too often were blocked by valley smog when we moved here in 1984.. He hacked down at Rattleshirt’s calf, only to have him deftly leap the blade. But it's on economy and emissions that VW have concentrated kimono long femme grande taille their efforts as part of their strong environmental commitment. Ser Barristan had played a similar game with his cousins when he was just a boy at Harvest Hall … though in Westeros, as he recalled, kissing had been involved as well. This increases the risk of local side effects such as skin thinning, and those on other parts of the body, such as a decrease in the production of natural hormones by the adrenal glands. Send word to Ralf the Limper, Bloodless Tom, and the Black Shepherd. Pilots need normal color vision, and they must meet eyesight refraction and astigmatism requirements. The most suitable course to protect bundle while you consumed on outing is that you should perform immediacy to those tour packages that includes more tourist journey end on your pocket palliative budget so that you will not suffer with to pay out again and again to call your universal places. Kenning jerked violently, then lay still. He knew the answer, though. Now the chart needs to be populated with additional data. Outlook: The Purple Warriors have a new head coach in John Hall for the 2007 season. Admission will be by donation at the door. Homer Murray of Holly Springs Baptist Church officiating. Wallace had been named evro kalkulator defensive player of the year маратонки puma mercedes amg twice in his career (and would be named twice more), and O'Neal wanted Wallace one on one.. Unseasonably warm weather had recently forced the two men to climb mostly at night, when they aren't likely to sweat and the rubber on their shoes sticks better to the rock. Then open "System". Benson plans to attend the Air Force Academy in the fall, and Arts wishes to attend college to get a degree in environmental science and become a National Park ranger.. But your child isn't doomed to a diet of white bread and chicken nuggets there's hope. One had slain his father, the other his elder brother. A woman sometimes has a craving to feel unhappy and aggrieved, though she has no misfortune or grievance. “The black priest is calling demons down on us,” one oarsman was heard to say. Smith going first overall will become more likely if Montreal Carabins offensive lineman David Foucault, who is No. “My b-b-bastard. The detective obtained subpoenas from internet providers to learn the blogger's identity, then quickly closed the case. I much rather dolce gabanna adidași bărbații see that investment in education for the jobs of the future or saving cities like Detroit rather than Cairo.. With a $995 delivery fee, the test truck was nearly $65,000, but you don't have to spend that much. Le seul domaine o tre pieds nus peut tre trs diffrent est au long du mouvement d'orteil, mais je trouve la Free devenir un grand quilibre. At the swanky affair, which is co hosted by the gallery's own style queen Julia Peyton Jones, fashion weary guests will enjoy DJ sets by Nick Grimshaw as well as a special live performance by LA based girl band Warpaint.. He was, however, very urgent to know whether, if it should appear for the greatest good of the universe, she would be willing to be damned. We must not suffer it to degenerate, in our hands, into a violent prejudice against the South; and, to this end, we must keep continually before our minds the more amiable features and attractive qualities of those 254with whose principles we are obliged to conflict. “I shall marry Hizdahr in the Temple of the Graces wrapped in a white tokar fringed with baby pearls. So the sooner we end military operations in Libya, the better.. This answer applies to any extra service on any airline for which you pay, but an airline refuses or fails to deliver.. Down his throat, down his chin.

0 notes

stretchjournalemerson · 3 years

Text

What a Teacher Can Do

By Daniella Lopez White

I don’t recall much from the night. There was a tiny rolling table with a white table cloth neatly laid over the surface which held oatmeal cookies, a silver pot, and a card from the nurses on the floor that read Our Condolences. From the silver pot, the scent of coffee brewed much too long wafted its way into my nose; and despite the burnt taste I knew it would have, I poured myself a serving into the hospital styrofoam cups anyways. My mother’s sobs could be heard from the tiny room, with my older brother gently placing his arm around her back. My half-sister stood by the side of our father’s bed, and I imagined all the things she could be thinking about with her nursing degree— did he finally drink himself to death? Is that it? Was his liver working too hard to flush out all the alcohol? Or was it another drunken fall? One that would cause yet another laceration in his skull that had bled too much by the time someone had found him?

Family members, ones I did not even remember, were crowded in the compact room. Though wretched in my eyes, he seemed to have quite a lot of people crying for him the night that he died. His ex-wife’s brothers and sisters, his first grandson, the wife to which he was currently separated from. It took most of my strength not to ask them what they were crying about. My father had held an addiction to alcohol and drug use for the last 18 years—my entire life—and I could not recall one good memory about him. But that was not an acceptable thing to say at the foot of his death bed. So instead, I used what was left of my strength to serve my coffee, and to dial a number on my phone and listen to it ring.

“Hello?”

I sucked in a hasty breath at the voice.

“Dani?”

“Hey, Mrs. M,” I choked out.

I don’t recall much from the night, but I do remember standing in the hallways of the hospital five minutes away from my house where my father died, which was full of people I have known all my life, and choosing to call my yearbook teacher instead of talking to anyone else.

“My dad’s dead,” I blurted out into the speaker of my phone. “Do you think I have to change the information on my FAFSA? Because I put that he was alive, but now he’s not, and I can’t lie to the government.”

I imagined that Mrs. M’s face lost all playfulness that it usually had. I could picture her soft brown eyes pooling with sympathy. Her voice seemed so gentle when she said, “I’m so sorry,” as though the breeze had carried it all the way from her house to the walls I stood between, breaking down the words with each gust of wind until it was nothing more than a whisper. I shrugged, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“It’s fine,” I replied. “I’m just really worried about my FAFSA because I need the aid and if they think I lied on it then I won’t get any. And I don’t know how to call them up and say, ‘hey, my dad’s dead!’ y’know?”

When I look back on this moment, I wonder if she had contemplated what to reply. I wonder if she had the ache to sympathize with me or ask if she could do anything about it. But she simply told me that we’d have to ask the college center tomorrow, to which I gave her a simple “thanks” and a “see you later,” and hung up. A year later, I know now that it was the best thing she could have said to me. She knew I was not one to publicly wallow on something like my father, and she knew that, despite the circumstances, I’d still be in her class tomorrow, just as I said. She was a woman who had seen me grow in the past four years of high school exponentially faster than expected, and she knew me better than anyone in that little hospital room ever could.

In all honesty, the majority of my teachers did. While I locked myself in my room at home and only ever communicated with yells bouncing off the stained walls, at school, I flew. It is amazing what a good teacher—a good adult—can do for a child who knows only the barren trees of a failing marriage. To go to school at a young age and be surrounded by people who knew how to show me that adults were more than arguments and objects being thrown across the room was to see a landscape of fruitful green for the first time. And, even as I changed from that naive young child, every year I received a teacher who showed me how to fly just a little bit higher.

When I walked into her classroom the next day, breathing in the comfortable scent of the old AC, feeling the dust blowing off of the yerd posters, Mrs. M tilted her head at me. I pressed my lips together in reply.

“How ya doing?” she asked with a quizzical eyebrow raise.

I flashed her a grin. “I’m in the dead dads club now.”

Mrs. M shook her head and gave me a hug. For the entire hour and a half of class, she let me make jokes about my father being dead that probably would have alarmed any other person who did not know me. But she did. And she knew that was what I needed and that, when I was ready to confront it, if I ever was ready, she’d be there if I needed her to. But, until that moment came, she would continue to let me crack inappropriate tales about child support and dead dads, and assigned me the work I needed to distract myself. And that was that.

Growing up in a problematic family made me appreciate my teachers in ways that are unexplainable. My mother— who had come from an entirely different country— married the man she loved and watched her “American dream” crumble in front of her as our family went bankrupt from my father’s addiction. She was often too busy for my brother and I while trying to make ends meet. I cannot blame her. As a Latina single mother with no child support and a very low pay, raising our family on an expensive island thousands of miles away from her motherland was a struggle. One that would eventually pay off. But my mother’s endless devotion to working and my father’s far-too-common alcohol induced comatose state made me cling to the support of my teachers.

At home, no matter how many times I lifted the couch cushions or the living room rugs, desperately searching for an ounce of recognition, I could never find what I needed. However, I didn’t need to search as hard at school. I quickly learned that teachers took pride in the students who participated in class, and although they were not supposed to, always showed a hint of favoritism to those specific kids. It was at the young age of five in my kindergarten class that I swore to myself to be an amazing learner, one that would make my teachers proud. The idea of an adult taking all this time to simply help me learn and grow flabbergasted me, and I clung to this as if my life depended on it. My brother often poked fun at me for crying about an A-, but I never understood how he couldn’t be miserably terrified of disappointing the only adults in our life that seemed to pay us any mind.

As a young adult myself now, I often feel pangs of guilt for the reliance I had on my teachers. Teachers are essential parts of society that give so much and gain so little. Especially in my home state of Hawai’i, teachers are paid far too small of an amount to keep a stable life. I can recall days of sitting in classrooms during lunch and hearing my teachers discuss enrichment activities for their classes that sounded like the most fun those kids would have all year, only to realize that they would have to pay for it out of pocket. My summers were often spent away from home, and while I benefited from the distance, I know that my teachers benefited from my presence at school in the middle of a vacation, as well. Making bulletin boards and decorating classrooms so that students are comfortable in their learning environment isn’t quite reflected in a Hawai’i teacher’s paycheck. Hand-me-down novels and interactive lesson plans that still include Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet don’t show up at school on their own, but teachers do a good job at bringing them there. On an island in Hawai’i where kids are already subjected to isolation from mainstream education, teachers are packed with responsibility and hardship that they certainly are not paid well enough for.

But still, I have never had a teacher turn me away in a time of need. To be in a position of teaching means to be in a position where you change hundreds of kids’ lives each year, sometimes without knowing. I can’t count on my own fingers how many times a teacher has saved my life with a simple “you did a really good job today,” or a raise of an eyebrow my way because they know I know what they’re thinking. My teachers have passed me off to one another each year, every single one of them raising me until I held what I needed in order to grow.

I don’t recall much from the night that my father died. Burnt coffee. A crowded room. Eyes asking me why I was not crying with them. But I remember, clear as day, the need to hear my favorite teacher’s voice. A reminder that, just like thousands of days before, once I showed up at school, everything would be fine. At least for six hours. I needed a reminder that tomorrow, I would have whatever support I needed to this reaction I did not know how to handle. But however I reacted, a support system would be there. First in history class. Then in english. Then in math. Then, of course, in yearbook. Each one with a teacher who has built up my body with reinforcement in the form of encouragement, like watering a seed with positivity until it is ready to stand alone.

Acknowledgments: This is a short memoir I was assigned to write in my WR-121 class. When told to write about something that was important to me, my mind immediately raced back to my home, Hawai’i, and the people that have had the greatest impact on me. As this essay expresses, my teachers have always held such an important imprint on who I am, and this specific memory that I have of my yearbook teacher stays present in my mind consistently. Even while I’m thousands of miles away, I use what she taught me about life every day, and I can never thank her enough.

#stretch2021 #memoir

0 notes

autistic-science-cryptid · 6 years

Text

Introduction

I am an autistic person, as I’m sure you know. And, as the title suggests, while I am not literally a cryptid, I might as well be a cryptid, at least according to autism researchers, for a number of reasons. You see, for starters,I was diagnosed with autism in the late 80s as a baby, and I mean a literal baby, just over a year old, because my mom (who later realized she was autistic and self-diagnosed as a result of watching me grow) talked to the doctors and was like “Oh by the way, I noticed that other babies look at me but my kid does not. Hmmm. I wonder why that is”. That’s the first cryptid point right there - researchers are still looking for ways to diagnose autistic kids at age 2 (so they can push that hellish ABA therapy on them - boooo) even though like two seconds of observation would enable them to see who is autistic much earlier. Which is probably a good thing if that kid has the type of parents who would push them into ABA. Good thing my parents didn’t buy into that crap, no matter how much later experience with abusive assholes convinced me they did or it was only a matter of time before they did.

Secondly, since I didn’t know how to please IQ testers when I was really little and had not been pushed through official ABA by my parents, the “experts” claimed I was (and this is their word, not mine) “retarded”. Which, as we know, is a slur, but was a medical term in use back then, before they said “intellectually disabled”. Fine thing to put on a baby. And here’s the thing: No intellectually disabled person can write the way I’m doing right now. So one more cryptid point - apparently the real me didn’t exist to them then, either.

Thirdly, when I was really little, a dog (whose owner foolishly claimed he “loves kids”) got its mouth around my throat, and my autistic nervous response of freezing up in the face of that type of danger is the only reason I’m not six feet under right now, as pretty much any neurotypical kid would have been when confronted with a situation like that. So one more cryptid point for me. Especially since I always have and still love dogs, and if anything, that incident had me firmly convinced that dogs are not mindless killing machines, because if they were, I’d be dead. Whereas a response I had to a teacher ducking me underwater and giving me fake praise was more normal - it made me afraid of the water, and only a teacher from the YMCA cured me of that fear, whereas the special ed middle school I went to, which had a pool, only punished me for that fear. I’ll get back to special ed later.

Yay “errorless learning! (/sarcasm)

I also used to stack a little table on top of a chair when I was a kid to reach stuff because for some reason, my dad always put Cheerios on top of a really high wardrobe (Gee, thanks) And I never fell because I was careful climbing that precarious structure. One more cryptid point for me - kids normally aren’t able to do that.

I am also a person who was in private Special Ed schools from the time I was like ten months old throughout high school, and my middle and high school in particular was emotionally abusive to me. While they never officially claimed to use ABA, they did - if it walks like ABA, talks like ABA, and quacks like ABA, it is ABA no matter what you call it. And really, it’s quite weaselly presenting your core discipline method as like a fun extra for your students to earn (which I found out on their website years later). It’s especially weaselly given that this method was the exact method used to punish me for not swimming a length of the school’s pool due to the fear of the water (and especially the deep end) that I mentioned earlier, a fear that wasn’t even as difficult to solve as many other hydrophobia cases, so of course a Y teacher was able to fix it. Throughout that time, but particularly during middle school years, I tried multiple different little schemes (not adult-level schemes, kid-sized ones) to try to be a more successful kid (so yes, I do sympathize with Pa Ingalls, even as I recognize that it is far more problematic for him to do that than for kid me to because he had several people to look out for and I had zero). That’s another cryptid point - usually you see that kind of behavior pattern from grown men, not tween girls.

As an extra bonus, the special ed high school I went to let me into their college program the first year, one where you take college courses for credit, and I got an A in that course. Nevertheless, my school had set me up to fail that - they had a lady teacher sit next to me, one who was entitled as fuck. This teacher whined about her job to us, and also bragged at one point about how Tom Cruise called her and was polite to her. I mean, hello? Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, and assuming that teacher wasn’t lying, the only reason Tom Cruise would call some random teacher is to recruit her into Scientology. But of course, that teacher was so full of herself that she could not see that. This teacher also, when confronted, said “I have other kids to worry about”. Nevermind that I was the only student from that special ed program that she was sitting next to. She also allowed me to work on a project alone instead of in a group because of course I was going to take that option when they offered it (even though I am perfectly capable of working on group projects). But them allowing me that option was a setup.

That, combined with talking to myself and maybe poor grooming was what they used as an excuse to kick me out of that program. Though they never told me about poor grooming as a reason, and it was usually my parents they hid things from, so I’m not sure poor grooming was what they were primarily concerned with. Anyhoo, it seems as though talking to myself was enough to get me kicked out of that program in spite of getting an A, with the teachers literally laughing like bullies at my parents as they told my parents the news, and furthermore, they recommended me for VESID, which was really just recommending that I live in a sheltered workshop (which I would have shot myself in the foot in - I am a fast worker at certain tasks, and had my parents agreed to the sheltered workshop placement, I would have given the people my best performance, and ended up getting paid less than minimum wage, and worse, they would never let me go because they would be using me to pick up the slack for other workers and would find all sorts of excuses not to let me move on).

So the A alone may as well be a cryptid point. As is my using NYC public transportation all by myself - those fuckheads claimed I couldn’t travel independently, even though I had been using the subway all by my lonesome to get to the work experience programs I did the last year (in former years, I had gone to work experience stints on the bus). So, pathetic as it may seem, my ability to use the subway/bus all by my lonesome is another cryptid point.

I also get a few more cryptid points for currently studying animal behavior and cognition in grad school and working on a Master’s thesis (which I won’t talk about so, again, as not to dox myself). Let me explain.

First of all, in spite of being kicked out of that program, the high school let me graduate, and the way they described me was literally how intellectually disabled people are described. And, while intellectually disabled people are themselves severely underestimated, they certainly are not going to be in graduate school working on a Master’s thesis in animal behavior and cognition, because the scientific papers alone would be cognitively inaccessible to them - even the lay version of scientific papers might not be cognitively accessible to an intellectually disabled person. So, according to that logic, I should not even be where I am right now.

Furthermore, some of the top people at that school are ableist as fuck, and totally champion clicker training, both for animals (which is iffy in and of itself, especially as a general behavior training for highly social and compliant species like dogs) and for, you guessed it, autistic people. They totally support ABA “therapy” as well (and yes, they support electrically shocking kids as punishment and claim it is less cruel than either medicating or restraining kids who self-injure, which is bullshit and completely dances around the fact that kids at the Judge Rotenberg Center get shocked for minor things) and they totally gloss over some pretty alarming signs. They, of course, claim I am totally high-functioning with no issues whatsoever, so to them, the side of me that has meltdowns and occasionally self-injures is also a cryptid, since apparently autistic people who can get a Master’s degree can’t have meltdowns. Even though I do get those from time to time. So one more cryptid point for meltdowns.

This is a random list of talents and abilities I have (just those, if you don’t feel like reading a list of talents, you can always skip that part)

I can do a perfect kitty meow (seriously, you would think there is a cat in there if you were in the room when I did it). And I can also stim (god, I wish autocorrect would use that as an actual word) by rhythmically tossing a ball back and forth without looking, and I can also produce songs simply by clicking my tongue. Yes, that’s a thing, although I’ve never seen anyone else do it. Believe me or not if you wish, but I’m not about to dox myself by putting up a video, especially since I don’t want to be blacklisted as a result of smear campaigns by ableist researchers. Three cryptid points right there. Four if you count me teaching myself some sort of impromptu gymnastics move at one point (well below Olympic level - it wouldn’t even qualify for a low-level gymnastics competition)- I have no idea what the hell that move looks like or what to call it. I only know how it feels, so don’t ask.

Five cryptid points if you count the fact that on occasion the neuronal electricity from my hand jumps out and “pushes” a computer button before I even touch it - it’s not really a reliably controllable act, but it is a weird quirk I have, and that I share with my mom. The only reason that isn’t a problem is because it only seems to “push” a few types of buttons and coincides only with my hand approaching the button, never before that, which is how I know it’s nerve electricity and not a glitch. If you think that’s woo, don’t follow me - I never claimed to be able to teach anyone how to do that or to identify whether someone has that ability (unless they tell me and don't falsely claim to be able to control it only to show no such ability), and it’s not like I can sell that quirk for money, either. And I can’t control it anywhere near reliably enough to prove it scientifically, either, which is probably a big reason why abilities like that (along with telepathy, which I have only ever heard of in real life, mostly not from me but from others I know, as being a random, uncontrollable occurrence or else, as in one case, so laughably pathetic that pretty much any scientific test for telepathy will never detect said ability) were never officially found, so don’t hold your breath waiting for that kind of thing.

One more talent I have is this: after seeing Orlando Bloom as Legolas (I’m aroace, so I don’t have a crush on him and don’t get any ideas) do a catlike leap onto a rock, I tried that same move and got it right on the first try, even though I had read he found it difficult to do. But then again, he’s a foot taller than me, and he has an acquired disability from foolishly walking, sober, onto a thin piece of metal that could not support his weight, and falling three stories, so maybe it’s a cryptid point, maybe not, because being a foot shorter than the guy you see doing a catlike balance move would make it pretty easy to out-cat him any day. Especially since I would never make the kind of mistake he did, because from what I can gather, Orlando Bloom is a pretty cocksure guy (kind of like Legolas, really, personality wise - too bad they made him play what seemed to be an entirely different character than the one in the book who is probably more like Orlando Bloom than the Legolas Orlando Bloom played), and I am not cocksure. Obviously not literally, because I am cis female, and not metaphorically, either.

#emotional abuse #abuse #child abuse #dangerous animals #dangerous dogs #aba #actuallyautistic #special ed #special education #judge rotenberg center #jrc #tongue-in-cheek #but the story is true #not fictionalized

12 notes · View notes

agecfmiracles-archive2 · 5 years

Text

MOBILE MUSES - GRACE HOWARD

GENDER ↠ CIS WOMAN AGE ↠ 26 SPECIES ↠ HUMAN

All Grace Howard has ever wanted is the one thing she’s never had: a real home, and a real family. She had a parents, of a sort. Most kids worship their mothers, the center of a universal orbit, but looking back, Grace really did liken her mom to an angel who got kicked out of Heaven. Mom was pretty, and kind, and always a little sad. Their tiny double-wide trailer on Staten Island was filled with pictures and posters of beautiful desert landscapes that Mom called her home, a long time ago. She never talked about her own family, or why she ended up so far away, and it never occurred to her little daughter to ask. Kids are inherently selfish; they don’t know any better. Still, it would bother Grace for the rest of her life that she never bothered to ask. That Jessica Howard wasn’t really her mom’s name. That she’ll never know the things you start to learn about your parents as you both get older, because Jessica Howard didn’t get to grow old.

Enter Dad. He didn’t come around often, and never stayed long, and that’s exactly how Grace and Jessica liked things. Visitation was his right in the custody agreement, though, in exchange for child support, so once a month (but never on the same day) he would show up with a check, give Grace a cursory pat on the head, and find a reason to fight with Mom over the money. She was always asking too much, or wasn’t grateful enough, or was too eager to take his money and must be blowing it all on drugs or gifts for her boyfriends. Mom’s pride never could stand much damage, and Dad knew it. Within a few minutes of him showing up they’d be locked in the bedroom screaming at each other, with Grace in her room on the opposite end of the trailer pretending she couldn’t hear him hitting her.

Just once, Grace tried to help her mom. Just once, she tried to break the flimsy lock and get inside and tell him to stop. Dad heard her screaming and swung the door open so hard and fast that it broke her nose. Afraid of losing the child support, Mom told the ER nurse that Grace stepped on a rake in the yard and the handle hit her. Grace didn’t blame Mom for lying; it was her own fault for getting in the way.

A few weeks after Grace’s eleventh birthday, a woman called the landline and said she was Harlan Meyer’s wife in a hard, scary voice. Mom took the phone into her room and didn’t come out for hours. Grace played outside until it was long past dark, then put herself to bed.

She never found out what the woman wanted, or why she sounded so scary saying Dad’s name, because a few days later Dad came unexpectedly. They argued, Mom told Grace not to answer the door for anyone and that she would be back soon, and then she left with Dad, looking scared and worried.

The police came two days later and told her Mom was dead, and Dad was in jail. Grace identified him in court, and told the jury that she had seen them leave together that night, and told the jury all the times she could remember him hitting Mom, and told the jury about her own broken nose. Harlan Meyer was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, due to the disturbing and violent nature of the act.

For the next seven years, with no living family to claim her, Grace was a ward of the state. She doesn’t like to think about that time. There were a few sleepovers with foster parents; some went well, some went badly, and a few went really, really badly. Tired all the time, miserable and alone, she kept to herself intentionally throughout high school, because her middle school classmates treated her different when they found out her dad murdered her mom. Some kids tried to be nice, but she knew they were scared of her, like being evil was catching and she was Typhoid Mary.

After burying herself in her studies to get through high school alone, but with no idea what she wanted to do with her life, she tried to join the army and failed the physical exam. Asthma since she was ten. She went to a community college in New York, unable to find the point in it but with nothing else to do with her life.

It wasn’t until shortly before she finished her general studies that it occurred to Grace to find out more about her mother’s death. That maybe she owed it to Jessica to learn the details she couldn’t handle at eleven. Looking at the original police report, though, only made her feel worse. Sick and sad and just as helpless as she had felt those two nights alone, waiting for Mom to come back. No one had thought to check on her, Jessica’s self-sufficient girl, abandoned to fend for herself every time a new man came sniffing around. All that loneliness and fear and desolation came rushing back as if it was only yesterday, and at 20 years old Grace decided what she would do with her life. She was going to devote her life to helping other people through awful times like these—just as long as she didn’t go anywhere near traumatized children. Nothing too close to home. She would live her life as well as she could, and maybe she would learn how to be happy.

For the next two years of college Grace shifted her focus to major in psychology with a minor in education, and she did it with a sense of purpose she had never felt before. So many years had been obscured by her own tragedy that she didn’t have the chance to form any opinions about life other than alive was a terrible state to be in. By the time she finished her bachelor’s degree she was eagerly making plans to move on to her master’s in...something useful. Only her financial aid ran out, and she couldn’t afford to take on any loans.

A blessing came in the form of an end-of-semester careers fair, where the still-legitimate SHIELD organization had a booth stationed. A bored-looking recruiter gave her a pamphlet about continuing education on the government’s dime while gaining valuable experience; it seemed too good to be true. Probably because it was. Other than a few crappy part time jobs waitressing, Grace had never had a career; walking into the SHIELD’s New York headquarters for her interview was a culture shock like no other. People were serious but friendly, they were tidy, professional, everyone seemed to know their place, and before she even had the job she felt herself breathing a sigh of relief. Order in a world of chaos. This was perfect. Twenty-two and scared out of her mind, she fumbled her way through the interview and got a job as the counseling office’s assistant, where she would be able to train under the SHIELD mental health counselors and study part-time for her master’s degree. Within four years, three if she worked very hard, she would be prepared to take the licensure exam and become a counselor herself.

By the time she was 23, Grace was transferred to be a counselor at the Triskelion, in Washington, DC, and with the change of scenery she felt like she could finally let herself settle into adulthood. No chance of running into classmates who heard about the trial because their uncle worked at the courthouse. She was finally free of the shackles that had bound her to her childhood. Never since she was eleven had Grace been so happy. Still, Grace wasn't used to having friends. It took her a long time to warm up to her coworkers, even though they were all perfectly kind. Especially Mason, who was a few clearance levels above her — but not technically her supervisor, it turned out when she couldn't help herself asking. Mason made it his responsibility to make sure she knew exactly what was what around the office. He showed a kind interest in her that didn't feel like the interest some of her foster parents had shown, or the interest a particularly malevolent TA in college had shown, either. Just interest. He asked questions, and didn't push if she couldn't answer them.

When she couldn't tell him about herself, he told her about himself instead. How he grew up in foster care after his parents died in a car accident, and he was adopted at the age of seven by the nicest couple in the world who had been fostering kids for twenty years. Grace was intensely jealous of him, and the first time he took her to a family birthday party she had to leave early and cried all the way home. They were all so happy, and only reminded her of her own miserable experience in foster care. But Mason didn't shy away from any of that. He just let her hurt and remember and made sure she knew he was there if she wanted him. And eventually, she did want him.

They started dating, and after six months of pure happiness Grace found out she was pregnant. Maybe it was stupid, being her first serious relationship, but they were in love and decided this was a sign they should get married. They went to a jeweler, picked out rings, and were planning a quiet courthouse ceremony — and then came Insight Day.

It was a quiet morning. Everyone was a little excited about the big day, a little nervous because apparently Captain America was a fugitive, but it didn't have a huge effect on the counseling offices. Grace did her work around the office, worked on some homework, when suddenly Steve Rogers's voice came over the intercoms and half her coworkers pulled out weapons and started firing on the other half. It was instant pandemonium. Grace hid under her desk and hoped she would be passed over, but then a different kind of screaming started. The Helicarriers were colliding and careening toward the Triskelion. Mason dragged her out from under her desk and they ran for the stairwells along with everyone else on their floor and the floors above. The stairs became instantly congested with bodies trying to flee, being picked off from above by the armed agents. A few flights from the bottom, a falling body hit Grace from behind and she was trampled, losing consciousness in the tumult. Hours later, Grace came to in a hospital crammed to overflowing occupancy. She had a broken arm, two broken ribs, a concussion, and had miscarried at eighteen weeks.Two days later, Mason's body was pulled out of the Potomac.

On the third day, she was sent back to her apartment. No family, no SHIELD to return to, half her belongings in boxes in anticipation of moving in with Mason. In the span of a few hours the life she struggled to build had been destroyed. She went back to the Potomac and tried to throw herself in. Her broken arm was just enough of a hindrance, though, that a bystander was able to restrain her and call the authorities, who brought her back to the hospital for 72-hour observation.

With nowhere else to go and an incomplete education to get her counseling licensure, after being released from the hospital Grace returned to New York and started working as line staff at the foster group home where she lived from eleven to eighteen. It was the last thing she ever wanted to do with her life, but the staff reached out to her when news of SHIELD's collapse broke, and the current climate didn't leave an ex-SHIELD agent with many alternative choices.

Salvation came in the form of the newly founded SHIELD, working underground until it could gain some legitimacy and desperate for support. She didn't ask but drew the conclusion for herself that there was no one left to ask besides herself. Still, working with children who reminded her too much of her own upbringing was a daily torment, so she agreed to rejoin SHIELD as an unlicensed counselor. It was better than nothing, for herself and for the agents who were wrestling with the morality of their actions every day.

She did have one condition to re-joining, though: Grace asked to be trained in the same way a field agent would. Not because she wanted to work in the field, but in case anything like Insight Day ever happened again. She had been completely helpless when the insidious Hydra presence started firing on her friends and coworkers, and needed to be prepared and capable of protecting herself, if not others.

The events of Insight Day have left their toll on Grace that will never leave her. After an early life struggling with self-harm and suicidal thoughts due to so violently losing her mother, she also started drinking to help herself sleep at night after returning to New York, and still struggles with those tendencies, severe anxiety, and PTSD.

#mobile muses #grace bio #terrorism cw #murder cw #abuse cw #long post for ts

0 notes

neuroticfishbish · 7 years

Text

Everyone I know is broken-hearted

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Tumblr more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urban person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very best lunches ever. Facebook is surface; Tumblr is subtext, and judging by what I’ve seen, the subtext is aching sadness. I’m not immune to this. I don’t remember ever feeling this miserable and depressed in my life, this sense of futility that makes you wish you’d simply go numb and not care anymore. I think a lot about killing myself these days. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it and this isn’t a cry for help. But I wake up and think: fuck, more of this? Really? How much more? And is it really worth it? In my case, much of it stems from my childhood experiences and the collapse of the many relationships I had. But that’s not really the cause I think that those relationships were bulwarks, charms against the dark I’ve felt growing in this world for a long time now. When I was in love, the world outside didn’t matter so much. But without it, there is nothing keeping the wolf from the door. It's not to say I do not have good or kind people in my life, because I do. More than I deserve. It always used to be like this. Life sucked when I was young and I was unhappy then too. But there was always the sense that it was just a temporary thing, that if I stuck it out eventually the world was going to get better — become awesome, in fact. But here I am, and things aren't getting better I'm just getting older. I became an adolescent at the time Music was ushering in a decade of “slacker” ideology, as the pundits liked to put it. But the reality is that I didn’t know a whole lot of actual slackers in the until my early 20's I did know a lot of people who found themselves disillusioned with the materialism of the 1990s and what we saw as the failed rhetoric of the Sixties generation, who were all about peace and love right until the time they put on suits and ties and figured out how to divide up the world. I knew a lot of people who weren’t very interested in that path. The joke, of course, is that every generation kills the thing they love. The hippies became yuppies; Gen X talked a lot about the revolution, and then went and got themselves some venture capital and started laying into place the oversaturated, paranoid world we live in now. A lot of them tried to tell themselves they were still punk as fuck, but it’s hard to morally reconcile the thing where you listen to Fugazi on the way to your job where you help find new ways to trick people into giving up their data to advertisers. Most people don’t even bother. They just compartmentalize. And then the World Trade Center went down. And all of a sudden calling yourself an “anticapitalist terrorist” was no longer a cool posture to psych yourself up for protest. It became something you might go to jail for — or worse, to one of the Black Camps on some shithole island somewhere. Corporate capitalism became conflated somehow with patriotism. And the idea that the things you own end up defining you became quaint, as ridiculous spoken aloud as “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In fact, it became a positive: if you bought the right laptop, the right smartphone, the right backpack, exciting strangers would want to have sex with you! It’s no wonder that Gen X began seeking the largely mythological stability of their forebearers; to stop fucking around and eating mushrooms at the Rage Against The Machine show, and to try and root yourself. Get a decent car — something you can pass off as utilitarian — and a solid career. Put your babies in Black Flag onesies, but make sure their stroller is more high tech than anything mankind ever took to the Moon, because that wolf is always at the door. And buy yourself a house, because property is always valuable. Even if you don’t have the credit, because there’s this thing called a “subprime mortgage” you can get now! But the world changed again. And kept changing. So now you’ve got this degree that’s worth fuck-all, a house that’s worth more as scrap lumber than as a substantial investment, and you’re either going to lose your job or have to do the work of two people, because there’s a recession on. Except they keep saying the recession ended, so why are you still working twice as hard for the same amount of money? We started two wars, only one of them even marginally justifiable, and thousands and thousands of people died. Some of them were Americans, most of them weren’t. The world hated us again. It’s psychically oppressive to realize you’re the bad guy. Of course, for a lot of the world, America had always been the bad guy…but we didn’t really know that before, because we didn’t have the Internet in our pocket, to be pulled out at every lunch break and before the meal came and when the episode of Scrubs on TV dragged a little, and before bed. We were encouraged to immerse ourselves in the endless flow of information, to become better informed, because knowing more about the world made us better people. And maybe it did, but it also made us haunted people. Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I clicked on a video in my Tumblr feed that showed mutilated children being dragged from the streets of Gaza. And I started sobbing — just sobbing, sitting there in my bed with the covers around my waist, saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” over and over to the empty room. Dead children, torn to bits. And then it was time for…what? Get up, eat my cereal, go about my day? Every day? So you’re haunted, and you’re outraged, and you go on Twitter and you go on Facebook and you change your avatar or your profile picture to a slogan somebody thoughtfully made for you, so that you can show the world that you’re watching, that you care, that it matters. But if you’re at all observant, you begin to realize after a while that it doesn’t matter; that your opinion matters for very little in the world. You voted for Obama, because Obama was about hope and change; except he seems to be mostly about hope and change for rich people, and not about hope at all for the people who are killed by American drones or who are locked away without trial in American internment camps or who are prosecuted because they stand up and tell the truth about their employers. There does seem to be a lot of hope and change in Fort Meade and Langley, though, where the NSA and CIA are given more and more leeway to spy on everyone in the world, including American citizens, not for what they’ve done but what they might do. And the rest of the world? They keep making more dead children. They slaughter each other in the streets of Baghdad and Libya and Gaza and Tel Aviv; they slaughter each other in the hills of Syria; and, increasingly, they slaughter each other in American schools and movie theaters and college campuses. And when you speak up about that — when you write to your Congressperson to say that you believe in, say, stricter control on the purchase of assault weapons, or limiting the rights of corporations to do astonishing environmental damage, or not sending billions of dollars to the kind of people who think it’s funny to launch missiles filled with flechette rounds into the middle of schools where children huddle together — you’re told that, no, you’re the fascist: that people have the right to defend themselves and make money, and that those rights trump your right to not be killed by some fucking lunatic when you’re waiting in line at Chipotle to grab a chicken burrito, and your right to not be able to light your tapwater on fire with a Zippo because of the chemicals in it, or not to end up in a grainy YouTube video while some demented religious fanatic hacks your head off with a rusty bayonet because your country — not you, but who’s counting — is the Great Satan. And the music sucks. Dear God, the music sucks. Witless, vapid bullshit that makes the worst airheaded wannabe profundities of the grunge era look like the collected works of Thomas Locke. Half the songs on the radio aren’t anything more than a looped 808 beat and some dude grunting and occasionally talking about how he likes to fuck bitches in the ass. The other half are grown-ass adults singing about their stunted, adolescent romantic ideals and playing a goddamn washtub while dressed like extras from The Waltons. The music sucks. The movies suck — I mean, they didn’t suck the first time they came out, in the 1980s, but the remakes and gritty reboots and decades-past-their-sell-by-date sequels suck. Indiana Jones is awesome, but nobody needs to see a geriatric Harrison Ford, lured out of retirement by the promise of building another mansion onto his mansion, running around with fucking Shia LeBeouf in the jungle. And besides, we’re all media experts now; we can spot the merchandising nods from the trailer all the way to the final credits. There’s no magic left. It’s just another company figuring out a way to suck the very last molecules of profit out of the things we cherish, because that’s what corporations do. Everything is branded. Even people. People are “personal brands”, despite the fact that, by and large, you can’t figure out what most of them are actually even good for. They just exist to be snarky and post selfies and demand that you buy something, anything, with their picture on it. You actually know who Kim Kardashian is. In an ideal world, you’d be as unaware of her existence as you are of the names of the Chinese kids who made the futurephone or featherweight laptop you’re almost certainly reading this on. In an ideal world, Kim Kardashian would have spent her life getting sport-fucked anonymously by hip-hop stars in some Bel Air mansion, ran a salon, and either died of a coke overdose or Botox poisoning. There is no reason that her face and her life and her tits and her deathless thoughts needed to be foisted upon the world outside of the 90210 ZIP code. Except that somebody figured out that you could make money off showing people the car accident in slow motion, that people would watch that. Sure they will. People love to watch stupid people do stupid things. It makes them feel less stupid. And the Internet. We built this thing — and was part of the generation who took to the new medium like water and have made the majority of our adult lives creating it, to a greater or lesser degree — because we believed it would make things better for everyone. We believed it would give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless, bring us all together, help us to understand and empathize and share with one another. We believed it could tear down the walls. And in a lot of ways it has. But in just as many ways, it has driven us all insane. There’s an old story — I have no idea if it’s true — about monkeys who had the pleasure centers of their brains wired up to a button. Push it, Mr. Monkey, and you have an orgasm. And the monkeys did. They pushed the button and they pushed the button, until they forgot about eating and they forgot about drinking and sleeping and simply fell down and died. What do you do when you first wake up? What do you do as soon as you get into work? After work? Before bed? Hell, some of us wake up in the night and check our feeds, terrified that we’ve missed out on something. We do it because we are given that reward, that stimulus that tells us oooh, a new shiny! It’s the fourteenth Guardians Of The Galaxy trailer, with 200% more Rocket Raccoon! Some fucking null node in Portland made a portrait of every single character from Adventure Time out of bacon and Legos! And, maybe most poisonous, maybe most soul-crushing: somebody said something I don’t like that makes me feel frightened and threatened! It’s time to put on my superhero costume and forward unto battle! Except it doesn’t matter. Because you’re not really changing anybody’s mind. How often does that little skirmish end with anybody changing their mind at all, even a little bit? Or does it just end with one of you invariably either blocking the other or saying something like “You know what, I’m going to stop now, because this is getting out of hand.” Getting out of hand? Everything they told you about how to live in the world when you were a kid is a lie. Education doesn’t matter, not even on paper. Being ethical doesn’t matter. Being a good person doesn’t matter. What matters now is that you’re endlessly capable of the hustle, of bringing in that long green, of being entertaining to enough people that somebody will want to give you money or fuck you or fund your startup. We’re all sharks now; if we stop swimming for just a little too long, we die. We lose followers. We’re lame. We’re not worth funding, or fucking. Because all that matters is the endless churn, the endless parade, the endless cycle of buying and trying to sell and being bought and sold by people who tell you that they’re your friends, man, not like those others. Microsoft is evil and Google is not evil, except when they are, but that’s not really important, and if you decide that maybe you’re tired of being reduced to nothing more than a potential lead for a sales pitch, like something out of a fucking David Mamet play, then you’re a hater and irrelevant and a Luddite. And besides, what would you do with yourself if you weren’t checking Facebook or playing Candy Crush Saga or watching some teenage dumbass smash his genitals on the side of a pool on YouTube? What the fuck would you even do, bro? The comedian Bill Hicks used to do a bit where he invited the advertisers and marketers in his audience to kill themselves. He imagined them turning it into an ad campaign: “Oh, the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a good dollar, Bill’s smart to do that.” He laid out the futility of trying to escape: “I’m just caught in a fucking web,” he’d say. And that’s where we are. You, me, we’re trapped, between being nothing more than consumers, every aspect of our lives quantified and turned into demographic data, or being fucking Amish cavemen drifting into increasing irrelevancy. Because it really does feel like there’s no middle ground anymore, doesn’t it? There’s no way to stay an active, informed citizen of the world without some motherfucker figuring out a way to squirm into your life to try and get a dollar out of you. Only fools expect something for free, and only bigger fools believe they’re anything other than a consumable or a consumer. We didn’t get the William Gibson future where you can live like a stainless steel rat in the walls between the corporate enclaves, tearing at the system from within with your anarchy and your superior knowledge of Unix command lines. Now it’s just pissed off teenagers who blame you because their lives are going to suck a cock and billionaire thugs trying to sell you headphones and handbags, all to a soundtrack of some waterhead muttering “Bubble butt, bubble bubble bubble butt” over and over while a shite beat thumps in the background. I know a lot of people who privately long for an apocalypse of some kind, a breakdown of the ancient Western code, because then they’d either be dead or free. How fucking horrifying is that? But nobody pulls that trigger, because now we’ve all seen what apocalypses look like. We saw Manhattan in 2001 and New Orleans in 2005 and Thailand in 2004 and the Middle East pretty much any given day. Nobody wants to hate, because we’re pummeled with hate every day, by people who are too fucking stupid to understand that the world has passed them by as much as it’s passed by the dude in the Soundgarden t-shirt who still drives around singing along to “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” on his way to his dead-end job. The best lack all conviction, and the people who are full of passionate intensity? Fuck them. We’re all sick of their shit anyway. And that’s where we are, and is it any goddamn wonder at all that the most profitable drugs sold in America for like a decade running have been antipsychotics? The world seems psychotic. I feel like I need to figure this out, like figuring all of this out and finding new ways to live has become the most important thing I could possibly do, not just for myself and the people I love but for the entire human race. I don’t mean me alone — I’m far too self-loathing to have a messiah complex — but I feel like, for me, this is the best use of my time. Because the world is making me crazy and sad and wanting to just put a gun in my mouth, and it’s doing the same thing to a lot of people who shouldn’t have to feel this way. I don’t believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark. I don’t mean in any hateful or exclusionary way, of course. But I think like minds need to pull together and pool our resources and rage against the dying of the light. And I do think rage is a component that’s necessary here: a final fundamental fed-up-ness with the bullshit and an unwillingness to give any more ground to the things that are doing us in. To stop being reasonable. To stop being well-behaved. Not to hate those who are hurting us with their greed and psychopathic self-interest, but to simply stop letting them do it. The best way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to make them irrelevant. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know some truth that I can reveal to everyone. All I can do is hurt, and try to stop hurting, and try to help other people stop hurting. Maybe that’s all any of us can do. But isn’t that something worth devoting yourself to, more than building another retarded app that just puts more nonsense and bullshit into the world? Just finding people to love, and healing each other? I think it is. Until I know more, I’ll just keep holding on. I won’t put the gun in my mouth. Because all of this sadness is worth it if there’s still hope. And I want to still have hope so badly. I still want to believe, in myself, and in you.

1 note · View note

biofunmy · 4 years

Text

Jay Kriegel, a ‘New York City Patriot,’ Is Dead at 79

Jay L. Kriegel, who as a 25-year-old prodigy helped shape the Lindsay administration’s progressive challenge to New York City’s entrenched power brokers, and who later emerged as one himself, in fields ranging from television broadcasting to real estate development, died on Thursday at his weekend home in South Kent, Conn. He was 79.

The cause was complications of melanoma, his wife, Kathryn McAuliffe, said.

A charter member of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s so-called kiddie corps, Mr. Kriegel played an outsize role as chief of staff and special counsel in an administration that held power from 1966 to 1973. Later, as an indefatigable but pragmatic outside process broker, he continued to influence a broad spectrum of policymaking through the same power of persuasion.

His behind-the-scenes counsel, on behalf of private clients or the civic groups he volunteered to help, made him everyone’s go-to guy in navigating government bureaucracy. Recognizable in later years by his formidable gray mane, he would argue their cases, with his adenoidal inflection, at a machine-gun pace.

“Talking to Jay Kriegel,” a colleague once said, “is like putting your finger in an electric light socket.”

“A New York City patriot” was how Mayor Bill de Blasio described Mr. Kriegel last month at a tribute organized by former colleagues. “For half a century Jay has been devoted to making this a better place,” the mayor said, “and there’s no question in my mind that we are better because of Jay Kriegel.”

The feeling was mutual. New York, Mr. Kriegel would say, “is my love affair.”

His impact on urban affairs was wide and enduring.

Working for Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Kriegel helped initiate civilian oversight of citizens’ complaints against the police.

In 1968, when Mayor Lindsay was vice chairman of the Kerner Commission on civil disorders, it was Mr. Kriegel and another Lindsay aide, Peter C. Goldmark Jr., who were assigned to draft overnight a more muscular preface to the commission’s final report, a 426-page analysis of urban race riots, before it was to be released the next morning.

They synthesized a sentence that had been buried in the report and made it immortal: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

In the late 1970s, Mr. Kriegel and Steven Brill founded The American Lawyer magazine, with Mr. Kriegel as its publisher.

In 1986, facing a Reagan administration proposal to repeal state and local tax deductions on federal returns, Mr. Kriegel galvanized the New York opposition that helped scuttle it. (Among his allies then was the developer Donald J. Trump, who as president would reverse his position, signing legislation that limited those deductions.)

As the senior vice president of CBS Inc. in the late 1980s and early ’90s — working under Laurence A. Tisch, its chief executive and largest stockholder at the time — Mr. Kriegel engineered a major, lucrative legislative victory for broadcasters over the cable television industry.

He was later executive director of NYC2012, a long-shot campaign set up by Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration to woo the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York. While falling short in its efforts — London won the Games — the campaign, organized by Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff, nevertheless helped the city derive some enduring benefits from the bid, including an extension of the Flushing subway, the commercial and residential development of Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side and the building of Citi Field in Queens, home of the Mets, and the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, home of the Nets.

Mr. Kriegel was also counselor to the financial communications firm Abernathy MacGregor Group; counseled the governments of Turkey and Kazakhstan; and most recently served as senior adviser to the Related Companies, the global developer that created Hudson Yards.

Jay Lawrence Kriegel was born on Oct. 10, 1940, in Brooklyn to the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, I. Stanley Kriegel, who headed an accounting firm, and Charlotte (Karish) Kriegel.

After graduating from Midwood High School in Flatbush, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College in 1962 and a law degree from Harvard.

Mr. Kriegel was introduced to politics, on the Democratic side, when he was 12, doing odd jobs at the Manhattan headquarters of Adlai E. Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign. During a summer break from college he went to Washington as an intern for Representative William Fitts Ryan, a Manhattan Democrat.

Early in 1965, Mr. Kriegel and several other Harvard Law students were recruited by Mr. Lindsay, then a Republican congressman, to draft sections of what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Afterward, instead of accepting a job with Judge Thurgood Marshall, the newly named solicitor general and future Supreme Court justice, Mr. Kriegel joined Mr. Lindsay’s 1965 mayoral campaign to conduct research. When Mr. Lindsay won the election, Mr. Kriegel was named assistant to the mayor for social welfare and law enforcement. The new administration was quick to identify him as a Democrat, to validate Mr. Lindsay’s bona fides as politically independent.

As the mayor’s chief of staff, Mr. Kriegel was thrust into the limelight in the early 1970s after two whistle-blowing police officers, quoted by The New York Times, accused the administration of having failed to pursue their specific allegations of police corruption. The officers were later identified as Sgt. David Durk and Detective Frank Serpico.

The Times’s reporting on their allegations and on the Police Department’s sluggish response prompted Mr. Lindsay to create the Knapp Commission.

In December 1972, the commission found that corruption — from accepting gratuities to extorting drug dealers — was widespread in the police force, but that the department’s top officials had done little about the problem after being alerted to it by the whistle-blowers and The Times’s reporting.

Whitman Knapp, the commission’s chairman, concluded that Mayor Lindsay could not “escape responsibility” for the department’s foot-dragging. But the degree of the mayor’s culpability hinged on what appeared to be Mr. Kriegel’s contradictory testimony about how much the mayor had known about the corruption allegations.

In one instance, Mr. Kriegel suggested that he had told the mayor about the officers’ accusations; in another, he testified that the mayor had not known of those allegations.

Criticized over his conflicting statements, Mr. Kriegel found a loyal supporter in Mayor Lindsay, who defended him as “a man of unbending integrity and decency.”

After Mr. Lindsay left office at the end of his second term in 1973, Mr. Kriegel was named director of special projects for the Loews Corporation, which Mr. Tisch owned with his brother, Preston Robert Tisch; he served in that capacity from 1975 to 1978. He was publisher of The American Lawyer from 1979 to 1982.

At CBS, where he was senior vice president from 1988 to 1993, Mr. Kriegel helped persuade Congress to require the cable TV industry to pay broadcasters for the right to retransmit over-the-air programming. Those efforts “literally saved broadcast TV and hundreds of national and local news stations,” Mr. Tisch’s nephew Jonathan, the chief executive of Loews Hotels, said at last month’s tribute to Mr. Kriegel.

“I think we might even blame ‘The Apprentice’ on you,” Mr. Tisch said to the gathering, referring to the long-running NBC reality show that made its star, Mr. Trump, a household fixture across America.

Mr. Kriegel later ran his own strategic consulting firm and served on numerous philanthropic and civic group boards, including Prep for Prep and New Visions for Public Schools.

His marriage to Joanne Connors in 1971 ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Ms. McAuliffe, an artist, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Isabel Hardy and Connor Kriegel; his stepchildren, Jevon and Caitlin Roush and Tessa Bridge; his sister, Myra Zuckerbraun; four grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.

A workaholic known to juggle multiple callers on hold simultaneously, Mr. Kriegel remained a sometimes wistful unofficial custodian of the equivocal and long-debated Lindsay legacy, forged when he and other mayoral tyros were, in the words of one of them, Barry Gottehrer, “young, beautiful, invincible, and we all really cared.”

As keeper of the flame, Mr. Kriegel organized reunions, remembrances and retrospectives, including a book on the 50th anniversary of Mr. Lindsay’s 1965 election.

“It seems ironic,” Mr. Kriegel wrote in the foreword to that book, “that ‘Man of La Mancha’ opened three weeks after Lindsay’s election, with its ‘Impossible Dream.’ ”

Sahred From Source link Business

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2PlLPFi via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes