#Americans will only be disturbed by kids in cages as long as we are not talking about the kids THEY keep in cages

[callese]

👀 🇺🇸

[duchesstopaz]

*Trigger Warnings: Descriptions of physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, parental abuse, verbal abuse, child neglect, threats, anxiety, panic attacks, violence towards children.* Monday, June 19th, 2023 Part 5 6:32pm

Now here we are, in the present, where I’m back after 3 years at 20 years old. Where I’ve learned and grew so much outside of this cage, where I was free from the dark chasm in my life and heart that is home. Where every second around you makes me feel 8 and 10 and 12 and 15 and 17, all simultaneously and all over again. Of course, the abuse has stopped, it stopped a long time ago, but when you have PTSD, things get really muddled. And, yes, I’m an adult now, teaching at an elementary school, and taking care myself for the most part. So, what’s so bad? Well, I’ll tell you.

When I’m back in my childhood bedroom, sleeping on an air mattress, with ALL of my younger siblings, as an adult. When there’s another bedroom that could have been used, but why would it be, when my stepdad uses it to get ready for work, to house the hundreds of products he purchased from Amazon, and in case you forgot from earlier, the thousands of dollars worth of workout equipment that he uses once every 2 months. OH! And get this! His mother is living with us right now, and she now gets that bedroom. Wild, right?

When I’m back to being the in-house, unpaid nanny for the kids. To feed them, watch them, help them with homework, and yes, to correct any misbehaving and report only the extremes. When my stepdad decides he’s bestowing me the responsibility of “supervising the kids cleaning the room”. When he comments on how responsible I’ve always been, and offers me to be back on their car insurance, even though I was never removed from it. 

When he comes in the door, and immediately starts yelling and blaming everyone for how “messy” the house is, and to “get this crap off my stuff”, and “who touched my shelf?”. OH, THE SHELF! When he has a whole shelf in the refrigerator that is dedicated to separate all of his groceries for his vegetarian diet and his on-brand food items that cannot be disturbed by anyone else. When he subjects my mom to buying the cheapest version of all food products, but specifically asks for her to only buy specific brands for him. When he has 2 tables in the kitchen for juicing that cannot be used as counter space by anyone but him. When he’s telling me about the health benefits of one of his juices (or as he calls it every time, “a concoction”), and adds, “Bet you didn’t know that when you were vegan, huh?”. When he continues to not allow anyone to use the washer in the evenings when he gets home because he needs to wash his uniform daily. Also! When no one is allowed to use the only bathroom in the house for at least 3 hours, because he needs it reserved.

When he consistently forgets our birthdays or details of what’s going on in our lives because he doesn’t ask, until my mom tells him of an achievement we’ve made and forces him to congratulate us. When he’s rushing to get to where he’s going and he’s bounding and pushing throughout the house telling everyone to get out of his way because he has poor time management and forgets that there’s 8 people in this tiny house right now. When he asks us a question and we answer, but he doesn’t care because his focus is always elsewhere, so he yells at us that we’re ignoring him. When he impulsively decides to buy the kids something or take them out to eat, and he constantly complains about he could be watching Tv instead or badgering the kids about how much it costs. 

When you misinform your kids by telling them inaccurate retellings of American and Black history. When you feign authority over whether they can go out with a friend, just to forget about it until the time arrives. When you preach about respect and manners, but continue to disrespect and treat me as a child and allow your kids to do the same. When you brag about accolades and compliments from your job because of said respect and manners, even posting a letter on the fridge, but never celebrating any of us for our accolades and compliments.

When you force me to pay you and mom at least $100 a week ($500 a month) as a rent-adjacent payment to help my mom with groceries and bills, just like you used to. When you constantly lecture me about getting a car, but don’t allow the full autonomy of my finances by threatening my ability to stay in my childhood home with the payments. When you try to tell me how to do my job teaching, when you have zero experience of the sort, and try to speak in a proper manner to match my manner of speaking. When you project your superiority/inferiority complex onto me when you ask me about college, by trying to act that you’re more intelligent than me and more knowledgeable about the subject I’m literally having to explain to you.

When you constantly forget about my mental disorders and my therapy and my medication, then you ask me about them as if it’s your time hearing it, even though you know that my mental health is the whole reason I moved back home. When you weaponize your willful ignorance against everyone in the house, especially my mom, to excuse your participation and involvement in our lives.  When you bought walkie-talkies as an updated way of summoning everyone to your room to heed your request, like a bell system that you ring when you need an attendant, saying, “[insert name], report to the bedroom.”, because you can’t be bothered to function independently at home or talk to your family normally. 

How you require that whenever we enter your room to listen to you, that we stand on the side, “where you can see us”. How you make my mother wash all of your clothes or prepare your shower. How my mother goes out of her to make your choice of dinner every night, but you consistently change your mind and inconvenience her, or how my mother is currently in school to get her degree and has HOMEWORK, just to get frustrated when your wife isn’t able to spend time with you. How you selectively recognize that my mom is overworked, just to blame it on us, rather than stepping up and being the parent that you should be. 

How you ask me to complete your online training and learning modules for your job, despite me not knowing anything about truck driving or transporting oil and that you don’t pay me to complete what you should be completing on your own, again, for your job! How you are teaching your kids to stereotype other marginalized communities by saying, “All Mexicans eat guacamole”, or “Those Asian people look like they squint because they’re eyes are too small”.

How you literally decide to manspread every chance you get and take up so much unnecessary space, and force everyone to move around you and yell when someone can’t get around you, when I’m literally taller than you. How you insult your kids daily by calling them stupid, dumb, clumsy, blind, deaf, etc., when it’s because of your own failings as a parent that they don’t meet your expectations of them. How you lie to everyone not in the household in front of all of us about how you act as a parent. How you lie to your kids saying that a box of doughnuts has been sitting on your table for 3 days and needs to be thrown out, when I just bought it that same afternoon. How you don’t know how to react if the kids have a medical emergency because you don’t know their conditions, medications, and what they’re for.

How you manipulate your kids into serving you (“helping you”) by painting it as spending time together, which is the only time you spend together.

How you constantly speak in very vague and general terms, saying “that thing”, “your stuff”, “over there”, then get frustrated and insult everyone’s intelligence because you can’t think of ways to speak in a more clear and intelligent manner, and expect us to be able to always know what you’re speaking of.

How you asked me why I never come home, and I told you a half-truth. How you’re so observational, yet not perceptive. Because if you were, you would at least have the self-reflection to be able to understand that you’re a despicable, horrible piece of shit excuse for a human being, not even a man. How you can’t even look at yourself in the mirror and realize how you scare everyone with your tantrums and violence. How you can’t even recognize that it’s your fault that things are the way they are, and you can’t expect children to have that level of understanding. How you think you’re so exceptional as a person and as a “parent”, but it’s all a delusion that you make yourself believe because you were raised in the same exact way. How you can’t realize that you were traumatized as a child and as much as I know you hated it yourself, you didn’t strive to be different than your father, you strove to get your chance to do the same. 

How you willingly and knowingly married a woman with two sons, and looked at them, and decided to treat them with violence and vitriol, instead of realizing that they don’t have positive father-figures and that you should be different. I hate you for who you made me become. And you’ll never be a parent to me.

Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3 -- Part 4

[afaimsarrowverse]

The 14 Creepiest Arrowverse Villains:

Yes, this one should have been made for Halloween. But after the year we just had, let’s take comfort in the fact that were are not forced to ever meet this guys here on the street in the dark. While two of the villains on this list had rather big seasonal arcs, I specifically disqualified characters from here, have proper motivations and character arcs as well as villains, who are creepy but at the same time quite a lot of fun. This why you won’t find Alice, her Mouse, Ramsay, Eobard, the Trickster, Mallus, Neron or even the Thinker here.

This list mainly consists of people we want to put back in the box, they got out of, until not seeing them at least for a season or so, and who we want to yell at: „What’s wrong with you!“ while they are on screen.

 14.  Toyman Senior (Winslow Schott Sr., Supergirl, Henry Czerny)

Technically this one should not be on this list, because he was redeemed in Season 5, however that happend after his death and on Earth Prime rather than Supergirls Original Eart,h so we will ignore that for now (also I wrecked my head whom from „Supergirl“ to put on here, so I overlooked that on purpose). Toyman is more creepy as a concept than in reality. He blows up kids (and other than the Trickster is no fun at all while he is doing it), threatened the life of his son to get his wife to leave him and did God knows what else to said wife and son. And did not even stop terrorizing people after his death. Can you imagine growing up as Toyman’s son? Poor Winn, you truly deserved better!

 13. Bug Eyed Bandit (Brie Larvan, Queen Bee, The Flash, Arrow, Emily Kinney)

Yes, it’s because of the Bees. Because she controls Mechanical Bees that sting and kill people! I am sorry, but what’s your problem, can’t you just kill your enemies like a normal person, Brie? Not to mention the whole Felicity-thing, because yes it’s totally normal to go around and kidnap and threaten to get what you want and then try to murder again. I still do not get why they let her into the Young Rogues anyway, but then … most members of that gang were all wrong, weren’t they?

 12. Garfield Lynns (Arrow, Andrew Dunbar)

Most of us have tried to forget about Season 1 Episode „Burned“ for several reasons. But the villain of it is also one of those. Because, yes Mick was a Pyromanic as well, but for more complex reasons. Garfield Lynns was a fire fighter who started burning people and ended burning himself to death because of reasons and … well let’s be honest, he was nuts and burning people is not cool at all!

 11. Jake Simmons (Deathbolt, Arrow, The Flash, Doug Jones)

That’s what you get, if you hire a creature actor (no offense, Doug, we love your work!) to play a psychopatic villain. Occasionally kind of fun, yes, but mostly Simmons is crazy and creepy, and we never liked him very much, but crucial Captain Cold killed him with a flimsey excuse, which no one ever bought, and let’s put it that way: If Leonard killed him just like that, there had to be something wrong with him in a big way, and yes, the hints were there, so, yeah, what a creep.

 10. The Mist (Kyle Nimbus, The Flash, Antony Carrigan)

A former Mob Hitman that looks like that and can turn into Mist. Do I have to say any more? I would take Victor Szasz over this one any day. Because Nimbus … well you would not want to meet him during a misty night, would you?

 9. Murmur (Michael Amar, Arrow, Adrian Glynn McMorran)

This one actually cares about his grandma, I will give him that, but SOMEONE SEWED HIS FUCKING LIPS TOGETHER! So you don’t really like looking at him, and he kind of went over board after he was pressured into joining Damien Darhk with, you know, killing everyone and joining HIVE, who as you recall planned to end the world as wen know it, so what about everyone elses grandmas, they can just die or what? No, Mister Amar, there is quite a lot wrong with you, that’s for sure.

 8. Everyman (Hannibal Bates, The Flash, Various)

That one could be a tragedy, but well, he got so mixed up and wrong in the head, that he became a danger to everyone else. He is creepy trapped between shapes and he is creepy in other shapes because … you don’t just go around and kiss random women, who think you are somebody else. That is just wrong. But Bates is kind of mostly wrong, so, yeah.

 7. Anthony Ivo (Arrow, Dylan Neal)

Ivo is Sara’s Personal Case of #Metoo, which really should be enough to earn him a spot on this list, but there is also his habit of keeping people in cages and the whole „You have to choose, whom I shoot dead!“- thing and all of that is only the tip of the iceberg. Not even Dylan Neal can stop me from wanting to scream at the top of my lungs: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?! at Dr. Ivo.

 6. Nocturna (Natalia Knight, Batwoman, Kayla Ewell)

We all know the story how Nocturna was not allowed to show up in the Animated Batman Series in the 90s, because she was considered too disturbing (Morbius on the other hand was allowed to show up in the Spider-Man Cartoon but had to … undergo some changes, which made a perfectly good vampire into the creepies cartoon-villain ever unleashed on kids and scarred me for life, but that’s another story). Here she finally is, and yes, she is rather disturbing. Because she acutally knows very well that she isn’t a vampire, but still strings her victims up and bleeds them out, after biting them with laced spikey teeth. It would be kinky, if it were the least bit sexy, which it totally isn’t, so yeah, put her away for good please.

 5. Vandal Savages Hawk Creatures (Legends of Tomorrow, Various)

Season 1 of „Legends“ was quite different than what came after, but „Night of the Hawk“ was an early highlight. While it was kind of a parody, being Season 1 it still played it straight for the most part, which resulted in an episode with the vibe of „American Horror Story“: We are in on the joke, but it’s still Horror. No wonder, after all Joe Dante directed this one. Vandal Savage turned poor teenagers into hawklike monsters, that no one would want to meet … ever. So yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

 4.      August Cartwright (Ethan Campell, Batwoman, John Emmet Tracy, Sebastian Roche)

Oh, God, that guy. So his mother wasn’t particulary ... nice, but that is no excuse to kidnap, gaslight, and brainwash a young girl, keep that girl’s mother’s head in a fridge for years, turn said girl into a slave and get her to make facemasks out of actual human face! Nor is that any excuse for fear-gasing your own son just because you are mad at him. Or anything in any way related to face-stealing, ,killing, identitiy theft, or anything else Dr. Cartwright has ever been up to. Like, seriously it has been a long time a character that desevers to be hated that much has been on our televions screens. Creepy Creep!

 3. Duela Dent (Batwoman, Alessandra Torresani)

Female Slashers have become kind of a common trope in fiction by now, but Duela is kind of different. Suffering from a pretty extreme version of of body dysmorphic disorder Duela sees beauty through a different lense than the rest of the world (we will never forget what she deems to be her face being perfect, even though we desperatly want to). So yeah, she slashes faces, mainly her own, is out to punish people, who force beauty ideals on her and othes, and somehow has no problem with … donating her face to Alice. … Can someone please get that poor woman help, I mean, seriously?!

 2.      Rag Doll (Peter Merkel, The Flash, Troy James, Phil LaMarr)

He did make Joe West throw up. And not only him. Rag Doll is plains disgusting. So disgusting actually, that the producers dialed him back in Season 6 and used more CG and less pratical „Troy James freaks us out“- bending. But while he could be fun all elongaty, we actually prefer him as his creepy original Season 5 Self. He is demented, wears a creepy mask, acts creepy, and we really don’t want to see him do his stuff but can’t look away at the same time. I have no idea why he was in the Young Rogues either, because he is really mainly creepy – und would be the Overcreep on this list, if it weren’t for….

 1.      The Dollmaker (Barton Mathis, The Broken Doll Killer, Arrow, Michael Eklund)

I am still amazed to this day that they were allowed to make this episode. You have to remember „Arrow“ had been only on for one Season at this point and „The 100“ was still about to premier. The CW was yet to change it’s image. Still they somehow got to made the Dollmaker-Episode, which left us disturbed to this very day. What Mathis was doing to his victims …. Well not only Quentin got nightmares about it. Poor Laurel went understandable full addict after almost being made into a puppet by him. So, Rag Doll might look creepier, but the Dollmaker is one of this Serial Killers we never want to even hear from again. It’s really no wonder he was an one-off, like I said, I am still amazed they were even allowed to make the episode on Network Television let alone The CW at all.

[the-homicidediaries]

Chris Benoit

Guys.

I am so excited to talk about this.

Not because of the context, but because this is one of the reasons I love wrestling so much; there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that people have NO CLUE about.

There have been several professional wrestlers who have killed people or been killed themselves and the rabbit hole goes deep.

(Rey Mysterio accidentally killed a man on live tv and they still have the video up on YouTube.)

(Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka murdered his girlfriend in May of 1983. Who is Jimmy Snuka? Jimmy Snuka was related to The Rock, Rikishi, and The Uso’s.)

THERE ARE SO MANY MORE THO.

But today, I want to talk about the Daddy of them all, Chris Benoit.

Chris Benoit’s crimes are so heinous and unforgivable Vince McMahon has swept his name under the rug and removed him from The Hall of Fame.

Benoit’s crimes also changed the dynamic of professional wrestling forever.

Chris Benoit was born in Montreal, Quebec to Michael and Margaret Benoit on May 21, 1967. He and his family resided in Edmonton, Alberta, however.

During Benoit’s childhood, he idolized Tom “Dynamite Kid” Billington (a British wrestler who competed in the 1980’s and had ongoing feuds with Hart) and Bret “Hitman” Hart (a Canadian-American wrestler and a member of the notorious Hart Family. He is a personal fave of mine as well).

When Benoit was 12 years old, he attended a local wrestling event where both Dynamite Kid and Hart were competing and he knew right then and there that he was destined to become a wrestler.

He trained in The Hart Family “dungeon” and was coached by none other than Stu Hart (Bret and Owen Hart’s father. If you don’t know Owen Hart, you should google him as well because he died under bizarre circumstances on live tv as well.)

When Benoit fought in the ring, he channeled both Dynamite Kid and Hart, even adopting Hart’s signature move, “Sharpshooter” as his finishing move.

Chris began wrestling in 1985 in Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling promotion. He was quickly recognized as a force to be reckoned with and received his first title, the Stampede British Commonwealth Mid-Heavyweight Championship, on March 18, 1988.

(This dude has a very extensive history or wrestling in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, World Champion Wrestling, Extreme Champion Wrestling, and World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment, but I just.. I cain’t get into all that, please forgive me. Haha! We are talking 22 years here! So I am humbly skipping to his family life.)

-Okay, so. I would love for this to be a romantic love story for the ages and the deaths resulted in crimes of passion, but that didn’t happen. At. All. Not at all.

You’ll see soon why this was all brushed under the rug.-

Benoit was married twice.

His first wife, Martina, and he had two children David (who is a wrestler as well) and Megan. By 1997, their marriage had broken down and Benoit and Martina decided it was best to end it.

Benoit began living with his girlfriend, Nancy Sullivan, who was the girlfriend of Benoit’s frequent opponent, Kevin Sullivan.

(It started off as an on-screen relationship for views and it led to a real-life affair. Many people joke that Kevin Sullivan booked his own divorce.)

On February 25, 2000, Benoit and Nancy’s son, Daniel, was born.

On November 23, 2000, Benoit and Nancy were married.

This 👏🏼 was 👏🏼 not 👏🏼 a 👏🏼 good 👏🏼 marriage.

In 2003, Nancy filed for divorce from Benoit, saying he would break and throw furniture and was cruel to her. She later dropped the suit as well as the restraining order she had set against him.

Benoit became good friends with fellow wrestler Eddie Guerrero, (a beloved and incredible wrestler, one of my dad’s faves), following a match in Japan, when Benoit kicked Guerrero in the head and knocked him out cold. This started a friendship that lasted even after Guerrero's death in late 2005, in which Benoit had written diary entries to him just ten days after his passing.

(I’m only mentioning this because Guerrero’s death has been rumored to be one of the reasons Benoit did what he did.)

Here’s where it gets gory.

So we know Benoit and Nancy did not have a good marriage, but things seemed to be okay because she dropped all the charges against him.

Benoit and Nancy were living in Fayetteville, GA, with 7 year old Daniel.

On June 25, 2007, police entered the Benoit home after Benoit’s WWE employers requested a welfare check after Benoit missed weekend events without notice.

(Benoit was actually scheduled to win another title during these weekend events.)

Upon arriving at his Georgia home, authorities found Nancy wrapped in a towel. She had died from asphyxiation.

Their son was also found, also dead, apparently strangled. Benoit placed a Bible next to each of their bodies.

Benoit’s body was the most disturbing to be found. The wrestler was hanged on a lat pulldown machine, with a Bible lying on the weight machine beside him. There were also allegedly 10 empty beer cans and an empty bottle of wine.

Autopsies concluded the murders and suicide took place over the course of three days.

On Friday, June 22, Chris Benoit killed his wife Nancy in an upstairs bedroom. Her limbs were bound, and her body was wrapped in a towel. A copy of the bible was left by her body. Injuries indicated that Benoit had pressed a knee into her back while pulling on a cord around her neck, causing strangulation. Officials said that there were no signs of immediate struggle. Toxicologists did find alcohol in her system, but they were unable to determine if she had been drinking prior to her death or if it was a product of decomposition.

Daniel was suffocated and killed in his bedroom, and a copy of the bible was left by his body. Daniel had internal injuries to the throat area, showing no bruises. Daniel's exact time of death is unknown. The reports determined Daniel was sedated with Xanax and likely unconscious when he was killed. Daniel's body had also just started to show signs of decomposition but was not as far along as his mother's body, so they were able to determine he was murdered after his mother.

(It was later alleged that Daniel had Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder that is characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Physical features may include a long and narrow face, large ears, flexible fingers, and large testicles. About a third of those affected have features of autism such as problems with social interactions and delayed speech. Males are affected more than females. Daniel also had needle marks in his arm and it’s alleged that these were the result of growth hormones given to him because Benoit and his family considered him to be undersized.)

Chris Benoit committed suicide by hanging. Benoit used a weight machine cord to hang himself by creating a noose from the end of the cord on a pull-down machine from which the bar had been removed. Benoit released the weights, causing his strangulation. Benoit was found hanging from the pulley cable.

(On a podcast called The Talk is Jericho in 2016, Nancy’s sister Sandra Toffoloni divulged some more information. She said Benoit’s internet search history showed he had searched “the quickest and easiest way to break a neck”. Benoit had a towel wrapped around his neck when he committed suicide and his neck was broken instantly.)

A suicide note was not discovered, but a note written in one of the bibles Benoit had said, “I’m preparing to leave this Earth.”

A few possible motives I’ve seen people mention have included:

•CTE - Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries. Symptoms do not typically begin until years after the injuries and can include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking. During his autopsy, it was concluded that Benoit did suffer from CTE after wrestling for so many years. (Back when they threw people from tops of cages, hit each other over the head with chairs and ladders, etc.) Autopsy experts say Benoit’s brain was so severely damaged that it resembled a 85 year old Alzheimer’s patient.

•Nancy’s abuse and filing for divorce - In February 2008, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Benoit was having an affair with a female WWE wrestler and Nancy found out. It was also speculated they argued over life insurance policies.

•Benoit’s alcohol abuse - Benoit abused steroids, but many people believe it was his alcohol abuse that led to these horrific murders. Many of Benoit’s colleagues attested he would drink more when problems with Nancy occurred.

•Eddie Guerrero’s death - Benoit and Guerrero and Benoit were very close. When it came out that Guerrero has died in his hotel room in November of 2005, Benoit was devastated. WWE held a televised memorial for Guerrero and when Benoit was giving his testimony, he broke down in front of the camera. Some of Benoit’s colleagues say, “he was never the same” after Guerrero’s death.

But at the expense of sounding completely heartless, (mind you, I’ve been suicidal myself), why didn’t he just commit suicide?

Why did he have to murder his wife and seven year old son? If we go with the CTE theory, it makes sense because he was not thinking rationally.

I wish Nancy had had the strength to leave him when she tried.

The night after Benoit’s body was found, WWE Raw had a televised memorial for him and his family with Vince McMahon standing in the middle of the ring breaking the news and a video montage.

No one knew he was the one who had killed his family.

When it was later revealed that Benoit had committed these crimes the episode was removed and WWE made the decision to remove nearly all mention of Benoit from their website, future publications, video games, merchandise, DVD/Blu-Rays, and future events.

Like I said.. swept him under the rug.

Benoit is now the “He Who Shall Not Be Named” of professional wrestling.

In ending this, I’d like to quote Stone Cold Steve Austin now.

“Well first and foremost, what I think about Chris Benoit is that guy was one of the most nicest guys I ever met in my life. He’s one of the most talented, hard working cats I’d ever seen in the squared circle. Anybody who knew Chris would tell you those exact two things. That guy loved the damn wrestling business, he was born to be a wrestler and was absolutely phenomenal. Drawing a lot of his influence from The Dynamite Kid, he blazed a path as the Pegasus Kid and his legacy as The Crippler Chris Benoit was just one hellacious career.

“One night, Chris ended up killing his wife and his kid. That is an act so terrible and horrible I can’t even comprehend or guess as to what happened in that house. That will always overshadow any accomplishment Chris had in the ring. He’ll never be in the Hall of Fame, it will just never happen. His career will speak for itself but his record as a human being, his first and foremost, and those actions will never be forgotten. That’s my feelings on that, we don’t even need to talk about the Hall of Fame. Speaking for myself, Chris Benoit as the person I knew, loved him. Chris Benoit as a wrestler, loved him. Chris Benoit as the person who did what he did, unforgivable. Bottom line.” – via NoDQ.com.

Pictured below are Chris and Nancy Benoit, their son Daniel, and their home in Fayetteville, Georgia.

[aawesomepenguin]

[SPOILERS FOR THE SONIC MOVIE]

Ok, with the new trailer approaching, I thought that it would be good if I made a master post containing everything that we know for sure are happening in the Sonic Movie, thanks to an AMA done back in March.

The AMA was then proven to be true when the Sonic Movie trailer debuted in Cinemacon a month later, matching with a lot of what he said. Then Toywiz accidentally leaked that they were going to do some Sonic Movie toys, and one of them matched again with that AMA. It is legit.

So, needless to say, I’m going to literally spoil the entire movie. From beggining to the end. You’ve been warned.

Direct citations are in “”.

-The Movie is basically going to be a “Sonic; Origins”, it’s going to give backstory to Sonic and Robotnik, it’ll talk about how the two of them met, and how they became mortal enemies.

-Only the Robotnik name is used. No mention of the “Eggman” name.

-He gave the movie a 7/10 grade.

-If he had to compare this movie to a previous one, it would be the 2014 TMNT movie: “Id say it is more TMNT with reference to story and action balance. It's a solid mix between engaging action which continues to develop the bromance between sonic and Tom.”

- The movie is indeed, focused for the younger demographic, but there is some bonus for the long time fans: “ Its definitely being targeted towards youth demo. It seems their goal is to intro sonic to the next Gen of fans. More so with access to their parents wallets for spin off merch and happy meal toys. I enjoyed it similar to seeing transformers. Don't expect the green mile storytelling but turn your brain off and just enjoy for what it is. The cast does a great job”

-About Sonic himself in the movie:

*In order to survive, he keeps stealing stuff and living in the shadows of the Green Hills town. He usually steals food from super markets to eat, and also he steals a LOT of sneakers. He ends up being treated as an urban legend, called as the ���Blue devil” by the locals, until he is discovered.

*Sonic isn’t from Earth, he comes from another dimension that is inhabited by other animals like him. Sonic’s past will be explored.

*It’s revealed that he was raised by an owl when he was a baby. Everything seems to point that she is a regular owl, not an anthro one. She eventually ends up dying for some unknown reasons, which will be a “tearjerker” scene.

*”Rings are how sonic got to earth. He can throw one and imagine a place and it will take him. He is fast from his first steps.”

*About Sonic’s ‘eletricity’ powers, he does it only when he focuses or is extremely emotional. His charged run is why he gets detected and why the power on the entire Pacific Northwest goes down and that’s how Robotnik comes into the film.

*But Sonic will need to learn how to control his powers though.

-About references to the old games, he said that: “It’s a good balance between giving the old fans something but introducing him to kids. I went in not knowing it was gonna be screened or any expectations. Cheesy but enjoyed it from start to finish. Jim Carrey kills the role.”

-About the movie’s plot:

* Sonic ends up being far away from his home planet and grows up on Earth.  Ends up alone after some time and grew up staying hidden. Loneliness gets to him which leads to him making a massive energy disturbance, knocking out the power on the entire Pacific Northwest.

The government, scared by the blackout, decides to bring in Robotnik to find out why the energy disturbance happened. Hijinks ensue and a good story is told. Tom and sonic become best friends.

-About the action:

“ Action scenes were great in story telling and execution wise. Effects weren't complete so a lot of it was still early cgi and the hidden actors playing sonic. At one point he was just a blue doll on the counter lol”

-The movie is aiming for a PG Rating.

-About Robotnik:

“He's just a psycho super smart doc that works for the gov initially. They give him the power and he goes full Eggman lol. He's super obnoxiously smart too. Makes tons of comments in the film about how superior his brain is lol. Really fun role for Jim Carrey.”

“He doesn’t rock the signature look until tail end of movie. Has the typical long coat and all dark evil scientist look. Short mustache as well initially”

Robotnik trying to catch Sonic eventually makes him go more and more insane and obsessed with the hedgehog. With him eventually getting the “Eggman” look.

-”Lots of humor and fun for all ages. Kids ate the comedy up. Sonic dances right after an short battle and kids about died laughing in the theater.”

-The Chaos Emeralds are NOT present in this movie.

-There is a post credit scene:

“Robotnik is defeated and ends up on a foreign planet [possibly Sonic’s World] that Sonic was supposed to escape to in the event of being found on Earth. He is now hefty and rocking the full blown stache”

- “Sonic and Tom end up helping each other solve their personal conflicts. They balanced Sonic and Tom pretty well and they are a good duo.”

- There’s a scene in San Francisco that is a direct homage to City Escape.

-The only characters from the games that show up are Robotnik and Sonic.

- The movie has one car chase scene. Sonic does the floss to celebrate (that dance that is used in Fortnite) and “the kids ate it up”. About product placement, there is two, one with the Olive Garden restaurant and Puma. Tom also gets a gift card as an apology at the end from the gov guy who initially brings Robotnik into the picture.

-Yes, Sonic will floss in the movie.

- Tika Sumpter plays the character Annie Wachowski. She is a vet that is very gentle with Sonic. It’s thanks to her that Sonic felt that he could trust the Wachowskis.

- In order to retrieve Sonic’s lost rings, Sonic and Tom embark on a roadtrip to San Francisco, using Tom’s Tacoma.

The Tacoma’s roof is ripped out due to the automated car that Robotnik sent to attack them. This leads to a conflit between Sonic and Tom.

-About how Sonic and Tom meet:

“Tom has racoon problems in his trash. When he sees Sonic face to face for the first time. He tranqs him and puts him in a cage.”

Robotnik shows up and they escape and Tom begrudgingly agrees to help. His main concern is moving to SF to prove to himself that he can handle real cop crime and not Montana small world problems. You see it early on for character development.

-The movie’s runtime is around 90 minutes. 

- “There were stakes and it balanced between a family adventure and action movie.”

-About the final battle:

" Yeah there's a good scene between doc and the good guys" It’ll be about Sonic and Robotnik running across the entire world using the Power Rings, they’ll end up in different places from Earth, such as Egypt and Paris.

-About Robotnik’s lackey:

Agent Stone is Robotnik’s right hand. He is very funny and a big Robotnik fanboy. He’s super happy to be working with him.

- “Tom was really enjoyable. Fun and backwoods kind of smart. He wants to prove to himself that he can make it as a big city cop”

- The film will begin showing Sonic as a baby. He’ll be saved by an owl, that’ll be sort of like his mom owl. His mom owl dies, and then Sonic will realize that he is on his own on Earth, and alone.

-There’s a scene where Sonic and Tom stop by a bar localized in the American highway path between San Francisco and Green Hills. It’s full of buff bikers, with tatoos and everything. Sonic accidentaly creates a fight in the bar.

-Robotnik has as a part of his arsenal drones, tanks, automated cars, and realistic robots.

-Sonic ends up becoming a sensation in Green Hills, and the locals begin to appreciate him, and begin to defend him.

-How the final battle ends:

The fight across the world between Sonic and Robotnik ends up back in Montana via the rings. The locals from Green Hills help by getting Robotnik’s attention. Sonic then super electro charges a spin dash, and knocks Robotnik into a ring which sends him to another planet [possibly Sonic’s World] and they technically win for now.

-The final battle begins, I believe, at this part:

And that’s preety much it. If you want to see the AMA for yourself, click here.

[socialjusticeartshare]

THE TRUMP CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL

IT’S BEEN TWO years since the peak of public outcry over the Trump administration’s decision to begin separating the children of unauthorized migrant families from their parents at the Mexican border, yet the massive crisis that policy spawned remains arguably the darkest chapter in Donald Trump’s very dark presidency.

MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff has been back and forth from the border and Central America covering the family separation saga since it began, a story he chronicles in his new book “Separated”.

Jacob Soboroff: I think it’s a slow-motion, ongoing, decades-long American tragedy.

[Musical interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Mehdi Hasan. 

Whatever happened to all those kids who were stolen from their parents at the border? Why did we just forget about perhaps the biggest scandal, the worst crime, of the Trump presidency?

JS: It was not thought through. There was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

MH: That’s my guest today Jacob Soboroff, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent, and author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.” He’s been covering this crisis, this scandal, at the border from the very beginning. 

So, on today’s show, the war on migrants and, especially, the theft of migrant children from their parents: How and why did it happen, and is it even truly over?

Do you remember this?

[Audio clip from ProPublica of children crying at the border.]

MH: That was a recording of 10 Central American children, sobbing desperately after being separated from their parents in June of 2018, here in the United States. That was a recording obtained by ProPublica and which promptly went viral and grabbed newsheadlines — it was even played in the White House briefing room. 

That recording helped make ordinary Americans aware of the abuses that were being perpetrated at their southern border, in their name, by the federal government, by the Trump administration — specifically, and shamefully, the deliberate, systematic separation of thousands of brown-skinned migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border on the orders of President Donald J. Trump. 

And, for a few months in 2018, what was called “child separation” was the biggest story in America, if not the world:

Newscaster: Families are being torn apart. Thousands of them. 

Anderson Cooper: Kids taken hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from their parents. Young children — toddlers, even — housed in so-called “tender-age facilities.”

Jeff Sessions: If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring him across the border illegally. 

Prime Minister Theresa May: The pictures of children being held in what appeared to be cages are deeply disturbing. 

Newscaster: The Pope labelling it “immoral.”

MH: Two years later, though, we have kinda moved on, as a media industry, and as a nation. To be fair, so many other Trump scandals have sucked up so much oxygen since — whether it was the government shutdown, the Mueller inquiry, Ukraine and the whole impeachment saga, the attacks on protesters in recent weeks, and, of course, the ongoing catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. There’s so much to keep track of — and to keep us outraged.

Still, for me personally, it stands as the biggest, most outrageous, most shocking, most inexcusable scandal of the Trump presidency so far. What’s blandly called “child separation” was, in fact, racism, kidnapping, and child abuse all rolled into one. 

In fact, Physicians for Human Rights in a report earlier this year said the Trump family separation policy constituted “torture.” Torture! On American soil. The torture of kids. Kids!

It is difficult to overstate the sheer inhumanity of it all: children were forcibly removed from the arms of their parents; babies were ripped from the breasts of their mothers. And the border agents who did all this somehow went home to their families, to their own kids, and slept fine at night. 

Meanwhile, the people in Washington who gave them those orders, who made the cruel and inhumane policies, they’re either still in government, having never faced any real consequences for their part in these crimes; or, in the case of former Trump Chief-of-Staff General John Kelly, or former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, they’re making money in the private sector. In fact, Kelly is on the board of a company called Caliburn International which operates shelters for migrant children! You cannot make this shit up.

These people are vile. They have no shame. Many current and former members of this administration — including the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions — claim to be evangelical Christians. And, yet, they have defended — excused — the torture and abuse of not just refugees but refugee children. They’re not following in the footsteps of Christ; they’re a moral disgrace.

Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration is believed to have taken at least 5,500 kids from their parents at the border — although the real number could be even higher than that. No one knows for sure. In February of this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said, “it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.” And as reporter Jacob Soboroff writes in his new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”: “There are families who were quickly put back together, and children who were, as predicted, permanently orphaned.”

As I pointed out on this show back in 2018, that was not a side effect of having a tough immigration policy; that was their tough immigration policy. That was the goal, the prime objective — of an administration filled with white nationalists and apologists for white nationalists; an administration whose immigration policies are drawn up by a man, Stephen Miller, who late last year was revealed to have sent white nationalist literature and racist stories about immigrants in internal emails. No discussion, in fact, about the immigration policies of this administration can be complete without mentioning the racism, and white nationalism, and just pure cruelty that motivates and drives those policies. 

So yes, this administration has used kids, targeted kids, migrant kids, refugee kids, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, the most powerless of the powerless, to achieve their policy goals at the border: to crack down on immigration, to placate their far right base, and keep brown people out of the U.S. by any means necessary.

And here’s what’s so important to remember as we sit here, overwhelmed by news and scandal, in the crazy, chaotic summer of 2020 — it never really ended. Hundreds of migrant children continued to be detained in facilities across the country this year, even as the coronavirus spread inside of those facilities, and infected guards and detainees alike. 

Last month, a federal judge in LA ordered the release of those kids by the middle of this month. And guess how the Trump administration responded on Tuesday? By telling the court that if they’re forced to release the kids, they won’t release any of the parents who they might be detained with. Got that? Family separation, all over again. 

Imagine being the parents of those kids. Keep your kids with you and risk the coronavirus, or have them taken from you and sent out into the world, and who knows if you’ll ever see them again? 

What’s called “child separation” is still with us, is still a policy dream of the Trump administration, and yet a total nightmare for the thousands of refugees and asylum seeker families who arrive in this country from Central America every year, seeking protection from war, from violence, from rape. 

[Musical interlude.]

MH: My guest today is one of the tenacious, and I should add, deeply compassionate journalists who helped uncover the Trump administration’s vile policy of child torture at the border back in 2018, and who not only contextualized the story for us on our TV screens, but also humanized it. 

Jacob Soboroff, of NBC News and MSNBC, was, in fact, one of the first reporters to gain access to the notorious child detention facilities in Brownsville and McAllen, Texas. Here he is, reporting live on MSNBC from outside one of them in the summer of 2018, and not holding back:

JS: There’s a big mess going on right now, and even the Border Patrol inside this building says they’re overstaffed, they don’t have enough resources; the system is just getting stressed out because the Trump administration decided to put this into place, and the consequences really haven’t been worked out, and the biggest consequence of all is thousands of young children, in a way that has never been done before, taken from their parents. And when you hear the Trump administration saying: This has been done before, this is Democrat policy, this is not unusual — that’s B.S., frankly.

MH: Jacob’s reporting earned him the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

Now he’s written a powerful and, at times, heartbreaking new book about the entire saga, called “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” — and he joins me now from Yuma, Arizona, just yards from the southern border with Mexico.

Jacob, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.

JS: Thanks, Mehdi.

MH: You’ve written this new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” having covered the 2018 crisis at the border with those kids in cages, with those children taken from their parents, almost exactly two years ago. Is this book, Jacob, about a chapter in recent American history? Or is this a book about what’s still happening right now — ongoing American tragedy?

JS: I think it’s a slow motion ongoing, decades-long American tragedy, Mehdi, and this is the first time I’ve ever done a podcast sitting 20 to 30 yards away from a 30-foot tall border wall installed by President Trump, which is exactly where I’m sitting right now, in Yuma, as I wait for him to arrive here. 

You know, the wall, and Donald Trump, have become a symbol of United States immigration policy. This is an immigration policy, however, that has, as I said, spanned decades, and Democratic, and Republican administrations. And since an official Border Patrol doctrine in 1994, called “Prevention Through Deterrence,” the goal of which was to deter migrants from coming to the United States to make them go on a dangerous and deadly journey, where they very well could die trying to get into the United States. Deterrence, pain, and suffering has been a part of U.S. immigration policy and family separations, which I had the misfortune of seeing with my own eyes, was Donald Trump’s extreme extension of that policy.

MH: Yes, the extreme extension, as you say. You’re right to say that this started on previous presidents’ watches — you know, Bill Clinton in the 90s, George Bush, Barack Obama, “the Deporter-in-Chief,” and then you have Trump escalating in this grotesque way. A total of around 4,300 children I believe, “separated from their parents at the border.” This all came to a head in May/June 2018. 

So a question that I think a lot of listeners will want to know the answer to — I know I do — do we know for sure, Jacob, if all of those children were eventually reunited with their families?

JS: We don’t. And if it weren’t for the ACLU and a federal judge in San Diego, the vast majority of them may never have been. It was a negligent, dangerous approach at putting this policy into place — sloppy. And the mechanism by which the separations were tracked, I think it actually would be even generous to call it a mechanism: It was not thought through, there was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath. 

And you mentioned a number in the 4,000 range. I think the most recent number according to the ACLU, and this is a constantly evolving number, is over 5,000 children, including children separated after the policy had nominally ended, when Donald Trump signed the executive order on June 20, 2018, ending a policy that days earlier, he said, didn’t even exist.

MH: Yes. First it didn’t exist, and then when they stopped it, it still carried on, as you point out, even after the judicial and executive order fallout. 

Um, let me ask you this: One thing that bothers me, and I don’t want to knock the title of your excellent book, because I know how hard it is to come up with a title, and I know that separated is the word that’s been used by everyone — even by me, on occasion, as shorthand — to describe this zero-tolerance policy at the border, and what the Trump administration did to migrant families back in 2018. 

But, for me, “separated” always feels like an understatement. It feels too clinical, an empty word. Because what happened was child theft; it was child kidnapping. It was, in many ways, child abuse by the U.S. government. And I worry sometimes that our journalistic shorthand often ends up underplaying how bad things are on the ground; they sanitize things too much. Am I being unfair?

JS: No, I think your point is well taken. And the reason I chose “separated,” as well, is that for me, it doesn’t just describe torture, frankly. And that’s the word that Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has used subsequently to describe what these children went through: It meant the clinical definition of torture. But it also described most Americans’ mental separation from how we got to this point; inability to understand and comprehend —

MH: Yeah. Good point. 

JS: — how the government did this to children and, in some cases, babies. And that also includes me! I was covering the border even before Donald Trump became president, when Barack Obama was president and was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief,” as you mentioned, by immigration activists. I, you know, I was on what I thought was the front lines of immigration reporting, and frankly, I completely missed it myself until it slapped me in the face. 

And that’s what I wanted to make clear in the book, is that separated is not just the physical act of what happened to these parents and children, but it really also is a mental state of most Americans about the way that we deal with immigration in this country. So, you know, again, your point is well taken. I think that it’s much more vile what happened to these children than the simple word or simple act of being taken from their parents, but I think that the word also applies to many of us in our everyday lives.

MH: No, that’s a very fair point. And I would urge everyone to read Jacob’s book. It’s an excellent book. You tell the story of José in the book, a young boy from Northern Guatemala, that story is a central thread throughout your book. He fled with his father Juan to the United States in order to escape drug traffickers who were threatening his family. Can you tell us a little bit more about José? Why did you choose his story?

JS: Well, the truth of the matter is, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but I ultimately met his father Juan, and Juan and José are pseudonyms that they picked themselves to protect their own identity and the identity of their family that they left behind in Guatemala. But they come from the northern state of Petén. And Petén, which is actually a place I haven’t been to, and they asked me not to go to — I’ve been to Guatemala on several occasions, but I didn’t go to their home because they were worried about what might happen to their wife they left behind. 

They were threatened with violence. Juan was the owner of a small convenience store, and basically got into trouble after a vehicle that he sold was sold to someone else, and fell into the hands of what he tells me, and told the United States government in his asylum application, were narco traffickers, he suspected. And until he would turn over the rights, the documentation, which he no longer had to his car, they were going to put a threat on his life. 

And so he decided to pick up and leave with José, come to the United States, go to Arizona, where he had crossed twice successfully before to come and work earlier in his life when his son was was younger, but, for the first time, decided to pick up and leave with his boy to protect him.

MH: Yeah.

JS: And once they got to the United States, to the place where they thought represented safety and security, I’m actually sitting probably 10 miles away from that exact spot right now — and the president will visit almost that exact spot, as I speak to you today, as we record this — they were taken from each other in a way that nobody could have ever anticipated, even though it was going on by the time they left Guatemala and started their journey to the United States in May of 2018.

MH: So, it’s interesting, you mentioned in the context of Juan, that he had crossed twice before, for work, this time he came to protect his child. We have this great debate, of course, as you know better than me, about are these people refugees and asylum seekers or are they all economic migrants coming to work? In your anecdotal experience, having interviewed so many of these people, having covered their stories, what were they? Especially back in 2018, when it kind of hit the headlines in that huge way, when everyone in the country is talking about: Why have they brought children with them, etc, etc? 

How many people you were talking to, were, in your, you know, the story you just tell of Juan, that sounds like a genuine asylum application?

JS: And I have no reason to doubt them. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: You know, and I think the vast majority of people I came into contact with were coming to the United States from Central America — from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador — in order to seek asylum. 

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot about this, that nobody’s perfect. And actually, when I heard the Reverend Al Sharpton deliver the eulogy for George Floyd and use the biblical example of a rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, you know, in our conversation about race, and about police brutality, and violence, it made me think of covering immigration at the border. 

Nobody is perfect. Nobody comes here with a sparkling clean record or the perfect story that you want to hold up and make an example to change the entire country’s imagination on immigration. 

MH: Yes.

JS: He had come here before, twice, illegally. He freely admitted it to me. And he laughed and smiled when he said: They didn’t catch me previously. And I think it’s not mutually exclusive; you can be an economic migrant and also, later in your life, become a refugee from violence. And I think, too often, we boil it down to: it’s one or the other. 

MH: Yes. 

JS: But these stories often intersect. And I think we do a disservice, or the general public does a disservice, when we try to distill it to one or another because, oftentimes, that really isn’t the case. 

MH: And it’s not just Latin American families that we’re talking about, of course. You describe a Congolese mother and her daughter who was separated trying to enter the U.S.; you say “the mother was taken to an adult immigration jail in San Diego, and her daughter was sent to a shelter in Chicago.” You also say that when she was told her daughter was in Chicago, she did not know what the word meant. 

How do people like that woman and her daughter a) end up at the southern border? And how is their story different to some of the more familiar Latin American stories that you tell in your reporting?

JS: Well, I think that the southern border has become an entry point for people from around the world looking to seek refuge in the United States and seek asylum. And if it wasn’t for that Congolese woman and her daughter, who later became known as Ms. L., none of these 5,000-plus families would have been reunited, because she became the plaintiff, the original plaintiff, in the ACLU case — 

MH: Yes. 

JS: — against the government. And so what happened to her, and her story, was slightly different. She presented legally at the San Ysidro port of entry in between San Diego and Tijuana, where you can legally walk up and declare asylum as part of an internationally recognized legal process. And the United States government told her they didn’t believe her, took her away from her daughter, and not until a DNA test confirmed it, were they placed back together. But that wasn’t soon enough to stop the thousands of separations, you know, from happening. 

And that’s another example, Mehdi, of it’s never a perfect story. You know, she thought she was doing it the right way, but the United States government challenged her on that, and it set off, you know, this whole chain of events. 

MH: I think we’ve learned over the last four years that, for this administration, there is no right way of claiming asylum or coming into the country.

JS: Sure. That’s right. That’s right.

MH: They just don’t want people coming into the country.

You describe in the book the moment in June 2018, when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen infamously tweeted, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” 

You say, in the book: “My eyes widened when I saw it. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. Come on.” 

Where were you at that moment? And why did that tweet from her so stun you?

JS: Because earlier that week, I was inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center — they call it Ursula in the Border Patrol, and that’s in McAllen, South Texas, where they let us in. 

Katie Waldman, who later became Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, and now the Vice President’s communications director, was, at the time, a spokesperson for Kirstjen Nielsen. She invited me and another group of journalists into that center to see with our own eyes what family separations look like, because I think they believed that with outrage from the general public based on media attention, Congress would do what the Trump administration wanted, which was pass more restrictive order regulations. Of course, that backfired. 

And the reason that I was was so flabbergasted by what Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted is that days earlier, if not hours earlier, I had been inside the center where I saw, with my own eyes, separated children sitting on concrete floors, covered by those silver blankets, under a security contractor in a watchtower. It makes me sick every time I talk about it. It gives me the chills every time I talk about it, as — then — the father of a two-year-old boy. 

It was — and I don’t know —I really don’t know another way to describe it other than disgusting, to see social workers standing around Border Patrol agents, not allowed to touch the children, all because of official government policy when many of the families in there didn’t know what they were about to experience themselves, you know, to this day leaves me speechless. And to hear the Secretary of Homeland Security, who I didn’t know at the time, but I now know in writing the book, had signed the policy into place — it is just wrong. There’s no other way to say it.

MH: I mean, this is an administration that says openly: Don’t believe the evidence in front of your eyes, don’t believe what you see with your own eyes, and don’t believe what you hear with your own ears. It’s the gaslighters-in-chief. 

You say, early in the book, you sum things up this way, you say: “What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe, made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points.”

In what sense, Jacob, was it avoidable, given that we already had a president clearly bent on implementing harsh border policies? Who or what around him could have stopped it?

JS: Well, in particular, you know, Scott Lloyd, who was the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, was warned on multiple occasions about the damage — the long-lasting trauma — that family separations would do to children. And, ostensibly, this was the man who was the custodian of the thousands of migrant children in the custody of the United States government. And, in particular, Jonathan White, commander in the U.S. Public Health Commissioned Corps, under Health and Human Services, has testified publicly to this — that he warned Scott Lloyd about the long-lasting damage that separations would do to these children. (Scott Lloyd, of course, is the same official who tried to ban abortions in HHS custody for young migrant girls.)

And the bottom line is when you look at the actions of Scott Lloyd, he did anything but stop family separations from happening. One official later told me that he believed that this was the greatest human rights catastrophe of his lifetime, in seeing this take place under the leadership of Scott Lloyd. And had the career officials in HHS, child welfare professionals, whose motto is not only to do no harm, like in the medical profession, but to put the best interest of the clients first — and that’s the children — this never would have happened. The best interests of the children were very obviously not put first here. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: The officials of HHS and the professionals were certainly pushing for that all along.

MH: And there were a lot of people involved in this process, none of whom resigned on principle, none of whom came out and became a whistleblower at that time, which says a lot about how certain people’s morals are corrupted working in this administration. 

Just to go back to an earlier point you made about this being a decades-long tragedy, a lot of Trump officials and Trump supporters — and some on the left — say it’s unfair to pin what you call “an American tragedy” wholly on Trump, because it was the Obama administration that built many of the cages that were used in 2018; it was the Obama administration that put unaccompanied minors from Central America in detention. There was a big overlap between a lot of their policies and practices at the southern border, between those two administrations. What do you say to them?

JS: Well, in some measure, they’re right. I mean, the Obama administration did build the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center where I saw the children in cages. Those cages were built by the Obama administration. And they believe that that was the best option at the time. Certainly activists and immigration rights lawyers and such didn’t believe that, and were extremely vocal in voicing their opposition at the time.

The Trump administration had the opportunity to go in a different direction. They never signaled that that was their intention. In fact, they always signaled a harsher immigration policy than the Obama administration. But they didn’t have to institute the family separation policy; the Obama administration considered implementing the family separation policy. Some of the same officials within the Department of Homeland Security brought it up. And in the book I talk about how on Valentine’s Day, 2017, less than a month into the Trump administration, some of the officials that overlapped from the Obama administration into the Trump administration, basically revived — resuscitated — a policy, a rejected, discarded policy, that even the Obama administration, which was was not beloved by immigration activists, put the side. 

MH: Yes. 

JS: And this was a conscious, deliberate decision by the Trump administration to move forward with something that they knew all along was a deterrence policy, that was so bad, it would try to scare people away from coming to the United States. And John Kelly, when he was the secretary of homeland security in March of 2017, admitted freely on CNN.

MH: So, just to be clear, what Trump did in 2018 at the border with these “separations” is much worse than anything Obama, or, for that matter, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton did at the border; that is fair to say based on your own reporting and research in this book?

JS: Well, the reason I say that this was unprecedented was that it was “systematic child abuse,” in the words of Physicians for Human Rights or American Academy [of] Pediatrics, at the hands of the Trump administration — deliberate, systematic child abuse or torture. 

The Obama administration, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration all had their own very harsh deterrence policies; I’m sitting in Arizona now where hundreds of people have died trying to cross in the desert because of border infrastructure walls, like the ones I’m looking at in front of my face as I talk to you. But never was the policy directed specifically at children for the purpose of hurting parents and children. And therein is the difference.

MH: Good point.

JS: I mean, that’s where the Trump administration took it to a level that had never been seen before. It doesn’t mean that, for a long time, there haven’t been cruel, harsh, and deadly immigration policies.

MH: But, in this case, it was a stated policy to cause harm in order to stop people from coming.

JS: That’s for sure. And they would never admit that, that the purpose was to hurt children. But when you say deterrence, you have to be deterred by something — and the something, here, was trauma.

MH: So, you paint a picture in the book of a president who — shock! horror! — is, you know, over his head. You know, he’s out of control, but he also doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s a huge culture of fear around him, you say, in the White House. You talk about the chaos surrounding this policy; obviously, we know very much about the Trump administration’s incompetence when it comes to any area of public policy. 

But in my view, there’s also not enough discussion in our industry, Jacob, in the ‘liberal media,’ about the ideology that drives a lot of Trump’s immigration policy. This is not just them trying to look tough or messing up. You have a White House that openly plays footsie with white nationalists. 

JS: Mhmm. 

MH: And a top Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, who leads on this issue, and who is at best, an apologist for white nationalism, at worst, a card carrying white nationalist himself; this is a guy who the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, has thoroughly documented by his own leaked emails, has promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols. And yet, we just don’t talk about it as much as we should. It’s like we’re too polite to mention the open white nationalism from this White House when we talk about immigration and border controls.

JS: Another way to put it is that the target of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies are more often than not brown people —

MH: Yes. 

JS: — who come to the southern border where the majority of people who enter this country illegally, or ultimately stay in this country illegally, come via airplane from countries other than Central America or Latin America by overstaying visas. 

And the Trump administration has not — or did not, at that time — target visa overstays as their primary concern, when that was, by definition, by numbers, where most people who were in the United States ‘illegally’ were coming from. The policy has always been, the ire has always been targeting people with a different skin color coming from the southern border, and not at the majority of people who are entering the country and staying in the country illegally. 

And, you said it. I mean, that’s why this policy is, or was — I guess you could still say is, family separations are still happening — racist. I mean, this is not a policy that is being targeted at people who are flying here and staying here after going to school or getting a job or some other form of immigration to the United States. He’s targeting people who come through the southern border, period.

MH: Just to clarify for our listeners, you say family separation is still happening. Just briefly, how is it still happening?

JS: Well, the Trump administration is giving families an option: either separate, or be deported, or held indefinitely in family detention. That’s called binary choice. It’s the type of policy that’s being put forward. 

You won’t be surprised to learn, Mehdi, that nobody is selecting family separation as an option when they’re presented with it. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: But it is still an option that the Trump administration is giving migrants in custody. It’s a catch-22 situation, you know? Either get kicked out of the country and your child stays here, and be in indefinite family detention with your child, or separate from your child, let your child go free, but you won’t see your child, because you’ll, you know, you’ll continue to be detained. It’s just family separation with a different mechanism.

MH: The ‘family separation crisis of 2018,’ I think we would agree, Jacob, was one of the biggest crises, one of the most horrifying episodes of the Trump presidency. And given how many big crises and horrific episodes there have been over the past four years, that’s a pretty high bar that it met. And even by the standard of awful Trump scandals, this one stood out.

And yet he survived. The people around him survived. A lot of people just forgot about it. Washington, the media, largely moved on. If we hadn’t moved on, if there had been consequences — for the lies, the law-breaking, the racism, the child abuse — do you think we might have avoided or even been better prepared for many of the other Trump crises that have since followed it?

JS: It’s such a good question. I would like to think so, but that goes back to the separation from the American public about what’s happening and why. 

And so often, I find, that too many of us are disconnected from the reality of what’s going on in our country. It’s too easy to look around in our own neighborhood —

MH: Yep. 

JS: — to talk about our own concerns versus what’s happening at the border. 

I’ll give you one example. I went to Tornillo, where they had that tent city in the wake of the separation crisis and all the migrant boys housed there. And I write about this in the book, I asked a local farmer growing pomegranates what his main concern was, and he said the production of food. And this was a man that was a stone’s throw away from thousands of kids being locked up in a tent in 100-degree heat in the middle of the South Texas desert. 

And, you know —

MH: Wow. 

JS: — I’ll never forget that. Because, you know, if, if he’s gonna forget about it, or if it’s not going to be top of mind for him, it isn’t going to be for people in suburban America either. And which is why, I think, you know, just it was so important to me to write this book, not just to remind people of this, but to answer those questions for myself: How could this possibly have happened? How could we possibly have moved on? You know, and what is it gonna take for this to not happen again?

MH: Well, I’m so glad you wrote the book and one of the issues that really bothers me is that there’s been very little accountability for the main players in this saga. 

Former Trump Chief-of-Staff, former DHS Secretary General John Kelly went off to work in the private sector. He even joined the board of Caliburn International, a company that operates the largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children —oh, the irony. His successor as DHS secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was invited as recently as October last year to speak at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women’s Summit in Washington, D.C.. There doesn’t seem to have been much accountability.

JS: Not just no accountability, many but some of these people have been put in charge of the response or at least on the team to the coronavirus outbreak that’s killed over 100,000 people in this country. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, I remember sitting at home on lockdown like everybody else, watching, up on the podium, Chad Wolf, now the acting secretary of homeland security — then, a top deputy to Kirstjen Nielsen — who, as my colleague Julia Ainsley first reported, was involved in the drafting of the initial family separation policy to be presented to her. 

Katie Waldman, as I mentioned, was the spokeswoman for Kirstjen Nielsen and is now the spokeswoman for the Vice President of the United States. It seems as though the people that were involved in the family separation policy have not been disciplined, or reprimanded, or faced accountability; on the contrary, they’ve been elevated to new positions. And you mentioned John Kelly, who’s started working with Caliburn, this company that is profiting off of the detention of child migrants in multiple facilities now, along the southwest border. 

I would say that it’s baffling and stupefying, but, again, it’s just like you said — it’s another one of these consequence-less actions of the Trump administration that, you know, they seem to benefit from when, you know, common sense would say they should be punished.

MH: By the way, at that Fortune summit, my good friend Amna Nawaz of PBS News asked Kirstjen Nielsen if he regretted the so-called family separation policy.

Amna Nawaz: I’m asking you if you regret making that decision. 

Kirstjen Nielsen: I don’t regret enforcing the law, because I took an oath to do that, as did everybody at the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t make the laws; we asked Congress to change the law, Congress reviewed the law in 2006 and decided to continue to make it illegal to cross in that manner.

MH: When you hear Nielsen saying that, Jacob, what’s your reaction?

JS: The same bewilderment that I felt when I saw her tweet that: “There is no family separation policy. Period.” I thought that that interview, by the way, was spectacular. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: And the line of questioning was perfect, because Kirstjen Nielsen is an expert in slipping away from questions about the family separation policy. If anyone should face accountability for the policy, it is her. 

She had to sign, and I outline it in the book, a decision memo that sat on her desk with three options to implement the end of what was known as catch-and-release: the idea that migrants who come to the southern border would be released to the interior, with their families, until their immigration case would be adjudicated in the courts, until they had to show up for court. And by the way, many migrants — most migrants — do show up for that process, because they want to attain asylum in this country. 

She chose of the three options, the most severe, the most punitive of family separations. It was a deliberate and clear decision by her; she had to sign her name — literally on the dotted line — for the policy. And the idea that she doesn’t face any responsibility for this, that it wasn’t something that she ultimately would come to regret, I just don’t believe it. I don’t — knowing what I know about her, having sat face-to-face with her at the start of this policy — I do not believe that that is truly the way that she feels. And I know, certainly, that she knows the responsibility that she bears for it.

JS: And like every ex-Trump official, especially once he leaves office, everyone’s going to be spinning how they were actually resisting inside the administration — they were the good guys pushing back against awful policies from the top. 

And we focus a lot on Trump, and we should focus also on these ex-Trump officials who are trying to rehabilitate themselves; they should really be shunned by polite society. But sadly, we know Washington, D.C.: they won’t be, they aren’t being shunned. And that’s depressing. 

One last question for you, Jacob. Given what you saw with your own eyes, what you heard in terms of testimony from some of these parents and children — the trauma of it, as you put it — how hard a book was this for you to write.

JS: Well, certainly not as hard as being separated from your child, indefinitely, in the minds of a lot of these parents. It was — it was difficult to revisit. But covering family separations is something that will have changed me, forever, for my entire life. I think there’s a lot of people out there who, having watched the story — not just from my coverage, but from the wonderful journalism that was done, you know, during and after this policy — you know, it’s changed a lot of people. 

And, for me, this was something that I wanted to do to answer questions that I didn’t know the answer to in real time. And it’s also something that I wanted to do for Juan and José, because the reason that they decided to participate in this story with me was so that it never happens again. And I really mean that. You know, I don’t know if it’s kosher to say that as a journalist, that covering this, and writing this book, you know, for me has a specific and — what I hope — is a positive outcome. But that’s really what this was about for me. 

And to revisit it was, was difficult. But it’s nothing compared to what Juan and José and 5,000 other children went through. 

MH: Jacob, congratulations on an important book. Thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed. 

JS: Thank you, Mehdi. Appreciate it.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: That was Jacob Soboroff, author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.”

And that’s our show! And we’re going to be on a little bit of a summer break, here on Deconstructed. The show will be back in August. Hope you’re all able to have a break too. Stay safe while we’re gone!

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice: iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you next month.

Article Source

[phantasticphan2022-blog]

Employee Benefits: 5/1/08

Amazon will not send twosome states. In 1967, it was the first Commonwealth Caribbean country to seek membership in the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). OSHA has decided not to include debridement as a first aid treatment. OSHA also does not distinguish between various kinds of health care professionals, assuming they are operating within their scope of practice. It collects information about licensure and certification actions, criminal convictions, exclusions from federal and state health-care programs, civil judgments (other than malpractice actions) related to health care, and other adjudicated actions or decisions. While credentialing does not guarantee the provision of quality medical care, it is an important indicator of the managed care company's commitment to provide high-quality levels of care for plan members. The others had some interesting ingredients and although not particularly harmful, I like to take only the purest and highest quality ingredients. In addition, many medical expense plans have come to realize that they cannot always provide as high a quality of care as a well-managed specialty provider. 50,000 became subject to the imputed income rules of Section 79, based on Table I cost, which are relatively high at older ages. Another approach, illustrated in Table 2, bases the duration of benefits on an employee's length of service. And don’t believe all the hype you hear about so and so supplement has some magic power as there has not been a conclusive scientific on the benefits. Multiple nations which have declared their hatred for our way of life possess the capability to launch nuclear weapons which could take down our power grid. The government probably has some transformers tucked away (any maybe stored in an EMP-proof Faraday Cage) in a warehouse somewhere, but do you want to bet your life and the life of your family on it? The cancer conspiracy would suggest that the government is so concerned about keeping the business running (in this case the hospital beds full) that they would hide any discovery that would free up hospital resources. Rather, representative decided it better to argue with me over what the actual day count was and that I would be entitled to a refund after 25 business days, even though that completely contradicted what was written in confirmation email. 3 to 10 days, online pharmacies depending on the point of origin. One should realize that only large firms with many employees would be able to meet all the characteristics of the ideally insurable risk. This shifts much of the financial risk of higher-than-average claims to the carve-out vendor. 2. Mind you, exercise does not make the blood glucose go down immediately. 6. Exercise comes in different forms from just standing more often than sitting down, walking and just keeps on moving along. See more tax scams. At least one of them was motivated to pursue cancer research by the loss of a close relative. Showers are one of the most water-wasteful activities that takes place in any household. Amaryl is one sulf that turns out not to affect the receptor on the heart that the older drugs did. We do not sell prescription drugs! Another disturbing prescription drug statistic is that prescription drug abuse is rising fastest among people 12 to 25. Since the mid 1980’s, prescription drug abuse has increased fivefold. As Governor Hickenlooper has said, Utah has half as many people as Colorado, but invests nearly four times what Colorado does toward improving road capacity each year. 11,000 per year for families with young kids. Aside from going after your money, some scammers also try to obtain your personal information for use in identity theft. Building Workflow Solutions with the UCMA Workflow SDK - You use the UCMA Workflow SDK to build communications-enabled workflow solutions such as IVR systems and virtual personal assistants. The acceleration of particles can occur as the result of a solar storm, a nuclear bomb, or even due to a simple, yet strong, bolt of lightning. At The Online Drugstore, your favorite health and beauty products are just a click away. The challenge is that many state and local public health departments do not offer the ability to receive and query immunization data. U.S. daily newspapers are not currently available in Trinidad, except on the Internet on a limited and delayed basis at some hotels. If there are medical concerns then the patient may be referred to primary care for physical examination and/or basic labs. Therefore, there is no need to consider hot and cold therapy to be medical treatment, in and of itself. 45 a day when available, but long term rates are lower. Insurance companies charge administrative expenses that are added to the premium (or loaded) to compensate for their overhead expenses.

[svtlanes]

Soft Mornings & Missing Shirts

pairing: Hong Joshua | Kwon Soonyoung genre: fluff words: summary prompt: "also that shirt looks like it belongs to hoshi...like the style of it and all. I mean, imagine having to rush to schedule and josh just grabbing one of hoshi's shirts cuz he spent the night in hoshi's room anyway and he got too lazy and the shirt provides emotional comfort to go through another busy day” -channie, 2k17

**there is implied sexual content**

A hand was grasping a handful of Jisoo’s shirt, in a non-bothersome way that is. In fact, the intimacy of the action sent his heart into a small flip. It was a daily occurrence that never failed to make him feel happier. The elder shifted into a comfortable state, snuggling into his pillow further, only to be greeted by a low groan, a slight shift to accommodate Jisoo’s change and the arm hanging over his side to pull them closer. Yeah, he was content with this.

If he had tried to turn his body around to wake the other, which he should have since he recalled a knocking sound a few moments ago, but he learned over time that disrupting the body wasn’t ideal. Especially when he felt a languid biting on his shoulder as an act of “punishment” for trying to disrupt the other body’s sleep. So, attempts were futile but Jisoo wasn’t going to be one to complain. This was especially true when he felt the other go lax and he can feel the evened breath against his nape. That was probably the last conscious memory Jisoo had before slipping into Neverland. That and a warmth snuggling into his back.

However, Neverland was rudely disturbed upon an irritably loud banging on the door to the room. The body pulled Jisoo closer, the other's nose burrowing into his nape. Jisoo’s response is to pull the covers further up, covering at least both their heads. At least this is what he hoped with his lazy movements. If he just pretended to not have heard the noise, it didn’t happen. Clearly, that was not going to happen by the outside voice that came next.

“I’m both respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as your mother by coming in anyway!” The voice yelled ( and cracked ) over other noise akin to feet moving along the floor. There was a shushing and ‘don’t get us another noise complaint, Junhui!’ Ah, he should have guessed. Another second passed before the door swung open.

“Hey, lovebirds.” Junhui gripped the comforter, ripping it off the pair, “We have a recording to get to and if you want to go the day without food, then be my guest.” Jisoo squinted up at the Chinese male standing above them, his eyes slowly losing sleep. The latter was wide awake, a heaven sent for the time of day, and dressed for their said schedule. What time was it anyway?

“They don’t have time to eat.” Jeonghan peeked his head into the room, toothbrush hanging in his mouth. “We have to go now, Cheol gave the last warning.” The blonde informed before his head disappeared. Hopefully to finish his brushing to spare them of horrible morning breath. Wait, last warning? Jisoo’s body acted upon instinct, shooting up, out of bed and fetching any readily available clothing. This was with complete disregard to the human that was previously clinging onto him. He had to hurry his ass up to avoid the leaders scolding.

 Soonyoung was rubbing his cheek, some sort of attempt to rid himself of the last ounce of sleep in him when they unloaded from the van. His eyes instantaneously closed when the sun overwhelmed his senses. The shit was this was bullshit? He grumbled as he filed in behind the other members, specifically Wonwoo, Jisoo with the last few following behind him. The male ducked his head to avoid the blinding rays from further harming him but it partly failed. His next try was to just stare at Jisoo’s back with the hope of the black material draped over him to help. It failed as well. But wait. Soonyoung cocked his head to the side, narrowing his eyes at the American boy’s sleeves. Was Josh wearing his shirt?

“Have a fun morning, hyung?” Minghao’s boney arm found purchase around Soonyoung’s shoulders. The smaller of the two grumbled before pouting in response. Soonyoung was truly mad at how the morning had gone. Why did they have to have a damned recording first thing in the morning? He was perfectly content with his morning. There were rare moments for him and Jisoo to share nights together aka nights they could kick out Soonyoung’s four other roommates. Even if it was just for nonsense talks, cuddling and occasionally other things. It brought a cheeky grin to Soonyoung’s face when he thought about the hickey hiding under Jisoo’s rib cage. But for Christ sake, he finally had some alone time with Jisoo, even if the other had rudely dropped Soonyoung like last season’s jacket. He was hurt by the other but that didn’t last long. No, not when the other had fallen asleep against Soonyoung’s shoulder on the van ride to the salon. He was truly weak.

However, the only bad thing about this exchange was the cocky grin the Chinese male had on his lips. Last Soonyoung had known, Minghao was the worst to wake up so he didn’t understand what he was getting at. The taller would have been scolded just as much he had. Except they all knew Seungcheol doted on the youngest Chinese member sometimes. It made him roll his eyes at the favoritism that was sometimes clear.

“Cut the shit and go find your walking plum.” Soonyoung grouched. He wasn’t about to deal with Minghao’s teases this early in the fucking morning. Especially not when Wonwoo was wearing the worst thing in all their closet’s combined and Minghao had the decency to let his boyfriend inflict fashion terrorism on them. He should be compensated for emotional trauma.

“He’s not my business,” Minghao responded before leaving Soonyoung’s side, deciding to go bother Junhui and Jeonghan instead. By the way, Jeonghan smacked Minghao’s arm, his presence wasn’t very much welcomed and Soonyoung was just fine with that.

  Soonyoung threw himself into the salon chair as fast as he could, opting to get a few more moments of sleep before inevitably going back to sleep but with the caution of makeup and hair. Not that the hair aspect mattered at this point. The raven-haired male glanced around, seeing the other members get into chairs while the others chatted or consumed some anti-oxidant juice pouch. He should probably get one after he gets made up but before he conks back out.

“Is that your shirt?” Soonyoung overheard Jeonghan ask Jisoo. The blonde picked at the other 95 liner’s sleeve with curiosity, the juice pouch hanging between his teeth. Jisoo merely shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s what was within reach.” The other responded with a small grin. Jeonghan’s brow quirked but he was too lazy to inquire further and left the other. He was truly too lazy at times. However, Soonyoung’s eyes scanned over the black with white accents material draped over the elder’s thin frame. He could have sworn he owned a shirt similar to it. Was it really his or did all their clothes just mesh into a cohesive pile of clothes that all were the same? As he felt Soonyoung’s scrutinizing eyes on him, he probably did because let’s be real here, Jisoo looked over at the other sitting in the chair. That small grin he had prior gradually turned into a shy smile. It was then a light bulb went off. Hong Jisoo only over did the shy smile when he was admitting to something.

“The shit-,” Soonyoung whispered under his breath before a stylist came over and spun his chair forward. That didn’t stop him from averting his attention to the mirror to look for the church boy in the reflection. And by damned, Jisoo was still smiling over in Soonyoung’s direction. With a small mutter of “holy shit” under his breath, he felt like he solved the world’s greatest mystery.

  “Is Hosh okay?” Chan asked as he plopped down beside Hansol. The American shrugged his shoulders then looked at the smaller male beside him. Both the maknae’s looked on wanting answers that apparently only Jihoon had. Which he did, because duh, it was fucking obvious. After Soonyoung had gotten his makeup done and hair presentable with a simple comb and fringe separated, Jisoo had taken his spot. The squishy dancer plopped onto the chair that had been Jisoo’s and instead of doing his normal, passes the fuck out in a manner that will mess his neck up and induce complaining about the rest of the day, he stayed awake. His eyes were trained on the mirror way before him, a sickening grin on his face as he sat on his hands. Yeah, Soonyoung was A-Okay.

Jeonghan having joined the group, whispered into both the kid’s ears. Jihoon assumed it was to tell them the obvious since they were just kids. But in all seriousness, it has been over a year and they should be used to this or at least spot the signs. Then again, they were just kids.

“OH!” Chan gasped then paused for a moment. The maknae’s mouth opened to speak but no words were heard as an outburst of “I didn’t sign up for this!” sounded in the salon. The stylists didn’t mind it and neither did the members. Their eyes all went to the chair beside Jisoo that was holding a frowning Minghao. Wonwoo walked over to the Chinese male and gently petted his head as a way of calming the younger. Per usual, Minghao swatted the elder’s hand away, in addition, to kick him in the shin. This was always magic as his stylist didn’t reprimand him or screw up his make-up as she had been applying eyeliner to the male’s eyes.

Junhui’s voice soon filled the salon after that with a “GOD DAMMIT POSH, LET US LIVE.”

[likeappletrees]

some of my favorite short films (in no particular order)

So @slyindoorssmoke asked me for a few short film recommendations and the list ended up a bit bigger than either of us expected, so I thought I’d post them here. The films below range from disturbing to touchy-feely to  entirely style-over-substance, and I can’t really explain why I particularly like some of them. I might have forgotten some favorites, so a second version of this post may be made. 

Click on the title in bold to go straight to the film or trailer.

Michelle, I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!

Action

7.2 dir. Nida Manzoor (14 minutes): Cleo, a schoolgirl, regains consciousness to find herself lying on the ground with no memory of who she is, only to be confronted by Daisy, the school bully, who issues a cryptic ultimatum. (also very funny)

Hit TV dir. Saman Kesh (12 minutes): An illegal TV show appears every night posting murderous bounties. The organization running the show highjacks broadcast channels to air a haunting call-to-action where people are identified for murder and priced accordingly. (apparently this film is also called “The Prologue” although of what I'm not sure)

Comedy

1500 Words dir. Andrew Chaplin (9 minutes): When Stanley Franks is told he has 1500 words left to live, he faces a battle to keep both his marriage and himself alive using the fewest words possible.

The Black Hole dir. Philip Sansom and Olly Williams (2 minutes): A sleep-deprived office worker accidentally discovers a black hole. (hashtag Relatable)

JohnnyExpress dir. Kyungmin Woo (5 minutes): Johnny is a space delivery man who travels to different planets to deliver packages. However, things never go as planned.

Movie Mind Machine dir. Maureen Bharoocha (12 minutes): Two movie buffs invent a memory-erasing machine that allows them to watch their favorite movies over and over again like the first time. (who wouldn't?)

Sudden Death! dir. Adam Hall (19 minutes): Finally, a musical where everybody dies.

What Cheer? dir. Michael Slavens (17 minutes): After the sudden passing of his wife, Stan (Richard Kind) finds himself in a state of shock. He tries to ignore his pain but finds himself followed by inescapable grief. (I know what you're thinking, and I'm telling you, it's much better)

Drama

1985 dir. Yen Tan (9 minutes): A dying man seeks out a beauty consultant to hide his symptoms.

Goodbye Blue Sky dir. Brandon Zuck (17 minutes): Long after the end of the world, five strangers sharing an abandoned desert motel are forced to decide between love and survival. (bad acting, but in an endearing way)

Hala dir. Minhal Baig (14 minutes): A Muslim-American teenager struggles to reconcile desire with family obligations.

He Took His Skin Off for Me dir. Ben Aston (11 minutes): A simple, domestic love story about a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend, and why it probably wasn't the best idea.

I Don’t Care dir. Harry Wootliff (24 minutes):  Luka Bartholomew cares for his bed-ridden mother in the run-down resort town of Porthpunnet. On his thirtieth birthday his mother hires a carer to give him a day off. (starring the loves of my life Iwan Rheon and David Leon)

SLAP dir. Nick Rowland (25 minutes): A teenage boxer searching for self-definition gives in to his true colours at the risk of losing everything.

Still In the Cage dir. Jonathan Desbiens (20 minutes): Three girls journey from the city to the jungle in search of an abandoned settlement in the hope of becoming “free spirits”. (essentially a Skrillex music video, but still pretty good)

The Wilding dir. Grant Scicluna (15 minutes): When juvenile inmate Malcolm is offered a chance at parole, he is torn between his chance for freedom and protecting the one he loves. (I could only find the link to the trailer, sorry!)

Horror

The Pig Child dir. Lucy Campbell (17 minutes): A scientist makes a reckless decision to carry on with an illegal surrogacy experiment, using her own body.

The Root of the Problem dir. Ryan Spindell (13 minutes): In the candy-colored world of 1950’s suburbia, a reluctant housewife suspects that the friendly neighborhood dentist is hiding a horrible secret... but is it just the anesthesia, or is something more sinister hiding just below the surface?

So Pretty dir. James Williams (9 minutes): Late at night, on the last train home, one girl's fantasy is about to become her greatest nightmare. (basically a Twilight parody)

Tonight It's You dir. Dominic Haxton (17 minutes): CJ ventures out for a late night hook up when things take a dark turn, leading him into something much more sinister than he could ever imagine.

Science fiction

ANA dir. Factory Fifteen (4 minutes): The sole human worker in a futuristic car manufacturing plant is tricked into relinquishing control to the A.I. that runs production.

The Awareness dir. Henry Dunham (18 minutes): On the eve of a technological breakthrough, an insignificant janitor and a prominent engineer are faced with a decision that will alter the course of humanity: the release of the first aware computer system into the world.

The Brain Hack dir. Joe White (19 minutes): Two students create a short-cut to induce hallucinogenic visions of God, and find themselves hunted by a deadly religious sect. (huge epilepsy warning)

Controller dir. Saman Kesh (8 minutes): A girl that can control everything perpetrates her own rescue by taking control of her boyfriend. (I don't know why she doesn't control her captors and the extent of her powers is never revealed, but it's incredibly stylish, so that's why it's on the list. Saman Kesh advises to play it loud and in full-screen)

The Landing dir. Josh Tanner (18 minutes): A man returns to the Midwestern farm of his childhood on a desperate mission to unearth the horrifying truth of what landed there in the summer of 1960.

Lost Memories dir. François Ferracci (3 minutes): A beautiful couple, a city over-saturated by holograms and digital stream. A Polaroid camera. Tomorrow will never be the same. (I don't particularly agree with the overall message conveyed in the film, but I can appreciate the perspective; has a sequel, Lost Memories 2.0)

The Narrow World dir. Brent Bonacorso (15 minutes): A giant alien creature comes to Earth. The reasons for its arrival, however, remain unknown as mankind fails to make contact with the visitor. (very similar to Arrival, but with the optimism of Pacific Rim)

Payload dir. Stuart Willis (18 minutes): A family of scavengers. A corrupt spaceport. A callous matriarch. A home in the shadow of a space elevator. After a brutal attack on his father, Simon Carter must sacrifice everything to save his family. (not particularly good, but it intrigued me for some inexplicable reason)

We Ate the Children Last dir. Andrew Cividino (12 minutes): What happens when society embraces a radical medical breakthrough without fully understanding its side effects?

Thriller

Bugcrush dir. Carter Smith (36 minutes): A small-town loner's fascination with the new kid in town leads him into something much more sinister than he could ever have imagined. (also just the trailer. Sorry!)

Prosopagnosia dir. Hugo Keijzer (18 minutes): Alfred finds his best friend Julia dead in her apartment and looks the perpetrator right in the eyes. He is unable to identify him, because of his extremely rare condition known as face blindness, or prosopagnosia.

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... The Mick (S01E11) The New Girl Airdate: February 28, 2017 @foxtv Ratings: 2.409 Million :: 0.91 18-49 Demo Share Score: 9/10 **********SPOILERS BELOW********** Every week 'The Mick' seems to settle into its skin more and more... And as the show settles, so do the characters. We've seen some major growth, and we've seen characters completely stunted by their ignorance... Whatever is happening, it seems to fit each character like a glove... Alba may be from Guatemala, but she's a red blooded American who loves karaoke and Wikipedia. Mickey is still Mickey, but slowly & surely she's getting a good grasp on this whole parenting thing. Chip... Poor Chip, he's a prime example of a fragile male wrapped up in a hard shell he wears like dense, heavy suit of armor. He's deeply flawed, selfish, and narcissistic... And yes he's straight & white... But hey, at least he's a handsome ginger (we're a rare breed that people try and make feel ostracized because we're different, but really we're fucking rad and somewhere on everyone's bucket list, trust). Sabrina is slightly vapid, but she tries to shake the stigma she once wore like a crown and episode by episode she continues to try and better herself, even tho she has a long way to go. And then... There's Ben. From S01E01 when his parents fled the country and left them all behind to now, just 11 episodes into the first season, Ben has managed to outgrow absolutely everyone by way of rapid change. I'm not exactly sure that's a good thing, per se... But it's happening and there is no one on god's green earth that can stop it. He's went from the sweet little innocent angel, to being *accidentally* inducted into the horror cinephile hall of fame, to feeding bums in tree houses and learning to channel and throw his voice like the little boy in 'The Shining', to accidentally loving so many rabbits *to death* that it brought Alba 'great shame', to peeing in backpacks on busses, wearing dresses, heels, and is now identifying as 'Gender Fluid'. To those that never quite understood or had a firm grasp of that term, Ben has just hit the nail on the head. Ben has been through a lot, and even tho he's gone through the most changes out of all the characters on 'The Mick', he's still that sweet, innocent, little boy on the inside... Just a much wilder version of that sweet, little, innocent boy... And you just gotta love him for it. Watching 'The Mick' play out this week gives me great pleasure, not just because I'm a sucker for dark comedy and grew up worshipping directors like John Waters, Harmony Korine, Gregg Araki & Todd Solondz (The Mount Rushmore of boundary pushing, line crossing, trailblazing Filmmakers), but because in 2017 we've finally gotten to a place where a show like 'The Mick' can air on Primetime Network Television. FUCK YES. In 'The New Girl', Mickey is called into Ben's school who is alarmed by his recent changes in behavior. Mickey is a mess, but she's an inspiring mess, she's the best kind... An organized mess! She's day-drinks and is constantly making unorthodox decisions, but when it comes down to it... She'd do anything for these three children, including allow Ben to explore every fn' option on the planet, but I'm glad she put a stop to the whole bunny thing. Disturbing and funny, yes, but mainly just disturbing. Ben has been borrowing Sabrina's high heels and and wearing skirts to contrast his boyish tops, uniformed sweater vests. It's the ultimate mindfuck for some... And while I'm far too concerned with embracing my masculinity to do such an act, in the late 90's I remember dawning sweater vests over top of button downs, with a Backstreet Boys style haircut, but if you gazed down (and you would, I made sure of it), you would see my 60-90 inch GAT, JNCO's, UFO, Kikwear or Caffeine Pants... It was a must... And don't forget the sleeves rolled back revealing candy jewelry piled on so thick all you could see was my hands. I would never call myself 'Gender Fluid', but pushing the envelope had to be done, and I was going to be the one to do it. We don't know quite why Ben does what he does, but his behavior started to modify when his parents left... So either he was all-kinds-of repressed and he's exploring whatever he wants with Mickey in charge, or he really is Gender-Fluid and is just coming into his own... And then there's that age old assumption that whenever a kid exhibits extreme behavior changes or experiments with radical styles 'they're just crying out for attention'. I'm not a fan of the latter, so I'll go with one of the first two as Ben seems more like the 'Independent Trailblazing' type to me. Mickey embraces Ben's changes and instead of taking him to another school 40 minutes away 5 days a week, she uses his behavior to their benefit and enrolls him in the all-girl private school across the street. The short walk there was incredibly funny for many reasons; the conversation they had about Ben asking about vaginas and remarking that the skirt made his feel 'breezy' was part of it, but I mainly loved the fact that they walked off of their property and onto theirs in less than 10 seconds... With Mickey remarking 'Man that is incredibly close!'. No one said Mickey was perfect, she's learning as she goes. She's not used to any of this but I'd say she's handling Ben's 'differences' rather well... Exploiting them to get into a closer school doesn't apply to that statement, but she learns her lesson in a hilarious fashion... And if that involves setting up Jimmy by leaving him in the bushes with a video camera as she fetches the principal and points him out to show how unsafe the school is part of that, then that's not only time well spent, it's a lesson well learned! After being technically pulled from his first school and kicked out of the second, then brought back in with her excellent execution of the set-up of Jimmy (that I honestly didn't see coming until it was actually happening, which made it all the more hilarious). Ben just wants to go back to his old school. Mickey runs back and pleads his case (and mainly hers) and Ben comes full circle. The B-Storyline dealt with the aforementioned list in the first paragraph as Sabrina & Chip try to get to know Alba better (Sabrina's goal)/hang with a racially diverse 'friend' (Chip's goal). In the end neither one of them can remember Alba's last name which was mentioned at the beginning of the episode when Mickey accused them of both being neither culturally diverse, nor giving a shit about anyone but themselves. Man the writing on this show is incredibly consistent and solid... We're heading into March and 'The Mick' still is wearing that big gold belt that reads 'Best New Comedy of 2017'. I'm seriously doubting that any show can knock off our new champs!

[brishu]

My Week At Sea - Part 2

Day 5

Several years earlier, one of my closest friends visited Jamaica and came back more disturbed than relaxed. He said the Jamaicans at his resort were so insistent on servility that they left no room for him to relate to them as people. Knowing enough about the Jamaica not enmeshed in the vicious net of tourism, he would have loved to penetrate the hotel workers’ subservience, but nothing he said or did could disrupt their forsaking their own dignity, and he was never going to align himself with the kind of racist, paternalistic assholes who enjoy a dynamic like that. I felt like I had already experienced something similar on the boat with Addy (even though she was Trini) and I was bracing myself for a flow-going day where, for the sake of my family, I settled into the role of passive oppressor as quietly as possible. I understood that all concerns like this were predicated on acknowledgement of the inherent unfairness of American foreign policy, resulting in this dark-skinned person working harder and being smarter than me, but my portion still being much greater than his. And what little he does have is far too dependent on my caprices. I guess this makes me a “snowflake” because, upon confronting poor foreigners, rather than leverage my financial power for maximum enjoyment, I would rather abrogate belief in the Manifest Destiny and deal apologetically with the Jamaican, as though that restores any balance whatsoever.

And maybe for the cruisers who opted for a high tea on a plantation or a day in the life of Bob Marley or 18 holes on Cinnamon Hill, Rastafarian minstrelsy was a welcome aspect of the experience. But again, thanks to the superior research of my wife, we had a fantastic, and perfectly comfortable excursion. Latenya, our guide, and Desmond, our driver, were kind but hardly subservient. In fact, on the bus ride to our first stop, I asked a question about Michael Manley and when my wife said, “Now you’re just showing off,” Latenya chimed in with a confirming, “Mmm hmmm.”

Throughout the ride of about 80 minutes, on the left side of the road with Desmond’s steering wheel on the right, Latenya told us about Jamaica’s history, economy and education system. Jamaica has six National Heroes and one National Heroine. Bob Marley ain’t one of them, Marcus Garvey is. Latenya also invited everyone on the bus to introduce himself in Jamaica patois: “My niem a’Brian. Me come from Brooklyn.”We were a smaller group, with only three other families: one group from Quebec, one from Mexico and one from Rochester. Guess which group asked every Jamaican we met if he knew Usain Bolt.

Again it bears remarking what an excellent job my wife did picking excursions. Ours was a two stop trip. The first was Mystic Mountain, where we rode a sky tram from the bottom to the top, gliding higher and higher, away from road noise and above the tree canopy to the summit.

That is my parents with one of our daughters in the car ahead of ours. To the left is Dolphin Cove Bay. At the top we had the opportunity to ride a self-braking roller coaster modeled after Jamaican bobsleds. I thought it might be some kind of kiddie ride but I was thrillingly wrong.

After the ride, one of the older Quebecois dudes asked me about Brooklyn and mentioned that it seemed to be the epicenter of political activity these days. My father took this to mean the guy was anti-Trump, but, considering Quebec’s reputation for cultural purity, I was more cautious in my replies. He asked me if I thought people were really going to start moving to Canada in droves and I said that I doubted it. I did not ask him his feelings about Trudeau, nor Stephen Harper because I could care less. And there was something opaque about his line of questions, as if he didn’t want me to know whether he was looking for kindred anti-Trumpism, or trying to coax forth the specious arguments of a, well, snowflake. For whatever it’s worth (not much), I think he came away respecting me, as much for avoiding hairtrigger political opinions as for the contrast between our interactions with our kids throughout the day’s adventures and those of the people from Rochester with their little boy. “Look at this Dylan! Look at that Dylan! Hey Dylan! Do you like this? What about this? Dylan! Dylan!” At some point I arrived at the belief that he was neither named after Robert Zimmerman’s stage name, nor his Welsh namesake’s, but rather after Luke Perry’s character on Beverly Hills 90210 and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.

Our second stop was Konoko Falls. This is us at the bottom:

And we all made it to the top, some of us with a greater sense of accomplishment than others:

Above Konoko Falls was part of an old tea plantation now converted into a nature preserve, replete with caged tropical birds, towering ginger blossoms, two snapping turtles named Pretty and Ugly and the resting place of one of my compatriots whose visit didn’t go so well:

We got jerk chicken and pork with pigeon peas and rice for lunch and Latenya and our Konoko guides ate with us. I thought about complaining to them that the jerk wasn’t spicy enough, because it wasn’t, but then it would be all “Oh look at the white boy eating like an islander!” so I skipped it.

The bus ride back to the pier was fascinating for its foreign mundanities. I’ve noticed that every country seems to have dinstinctly shaped curbs along its roads, and that the grass can be a different species too. This may seem like nothing, but it etches different borders into your field of view, giving you the abiding sense that you really are somewhere else. And then there are the commercial accents that give you some sense of a place’s imperatives:

The silhouetted animals suggest Central Dealers is a great shop for hunters. But what about the explosion behind the bullet? Come on down to Central Dealers and fuck that nice blue sky up real good! Was this the area’s biggest munitions depot, asserting dominance via advertising a la Coca-Cola? Or was it a fledgling endeavour, betting the store on a billboard’s pyrotechnics? Whatever security Central Dealers offered its customers, here’s the sign that’s supposed to assure citizens of their official safety:

Pierside at excursion’s end, Latenya and Desmond bade us all farewell with their hands held out. At the outset of our tour, they had said they would take care of us and hoped we would take care of them. So everybody hunched over, trying to keep their larger bills out of sight, extracting what they felt was appropriate and stashing the rest away to let the money they held represent the pinnacle of generosity. I gave Latenya $20 and Desmond $10 and that seemed acceptable to them. As I got back on the boat, I wondered how long the guilt would have lasted if I had tipped poorly or even not at all. But, deprived of the opportunity to savor that regret, I resumed the grim business of enjoying a high state of privelege as we set sail for Hispaniola.

With two days left, we began to get elegiac. For some, that meant the trajectory of sloth had hit its nadir and it was time to start rousing back to the surface of baseline real world functionality. For others it meant make your memories now before you part ways from all of these other fine folks. For my daughters it meant writing a thank you note to Addy for bringing them cookies one night and a towel gorilla another:

Initially I was touched, but then my older daughter told me she just wanted to let Addy know “how great her service has been.” I was not the first parent, drunk or sober, to have to measure out the proper combination of approval and correction, but somehow I did manage to mask my horror at her blithe superciliousness, and suggest she say, “Thanks for taking such good care of us” instead.

The first time we saw Addy after we’d left the note in the room, she said thank you but I sensed that she actually felt put upon by the gesture, as though it demanded a stronger connection with us than she was comfortable making. It also occurred to me that she was worried we might leave a sweet note in lieu of a healthy tip, which seemed to impel her to convey that our kids’ note didn’t mean very much to her. I tried to signify to her that I totally got her cool reception of the note, but whether she got my wordless message, I really don’t know. The next night after I stuffed the envelope she had left in our room, she greeted me far more warmly. I guess the proper way to hold up my end of this interaction would have been to smile, pat her gently on the shoulder and move on, thus concluding our business together. But I’m afraid what I did, in some tiny way, was needlessly assert some kind of superiority, silently expressing “We coulda been friends but I guess all you care about is money. Oh well.” But of course, I only pulled that shit because I fell into the older and grosser dynamic of the little white snot who can’t get enough of mammy’s loving forebearance. This all happened quickly enough to play it off, as though we’d had a vanilla interaction without wrinkles or subtext, but I felt the gnarls and, no matter how professionally dispassionate Addy might have been, she must have felt it too. But before I took my millisecond plunge into the depths of racism, we went to Haiti.

Day 6

Royal Caribbean has the lease on Labadee, Haiti until 2050. It’s a peninsula they tout as a private island, but Haitians are barred entry by company employees with paramilitary backgrounds reinforced by rolls of razorwire. When ships aren’t in port, the only people there are maintenance crew and the aforementioned mercenaries. When ships do make landfall, a village comes to life. Crowds fill the beaches, giant palapas become cafeterias, trams convey cruisers to various recreations, and rows of stalls are filled with authorized merchants’ authentic Haitian wares. The excursions we booked for the day included one ride on the Dragon’s Tail roller coaster, which, like the previous day’s bobsled ride, was an alpine coaster. I actually liked this one better than the Jamaican one because on the bobsleds, you start at the top, hurdle down through the rainforest and then get hauled back up. The Dragon’s Tail pulls you up first and then you shoot down the tracks, careening through the mountainside forest, curving out over the sky-colored sea, applying the brakes as infrequently as you dare.

As our older daughter and I swooped to the bottom, we could hear her younger sister squealing gleefully from the shuttle behind us. Our ride ended about a minute before my wife’s and hers. My parents also rode, but they were more liberal with their brake application and finished long after we had all dismounted the ride.

Following this, we had tickets to spend an hour in Labadee’s aqua park, which was like a floating inflatable obstacle course. This was a lot less fun. The inflatable slides were very difficult to climb and our daughters were whining about the discomfort of the water. At first I just thought they needed to toughen up, but then my own skin began to crawl. My wife asked the lifeguard on duty and he said the water was teeming with micro-organisms that stung but the pain was only brief. Oh. We did not last the full hour.

Delivered from the duppy-infested cesspool masquerading as tropical amusement, my wife found a more secluded spot on the beach, away from a lot of the noise our boat had brought to the “island.” My parents parked on lounge chairs closer to the pop-up cafeteria and I took the girls to a playground with a sprinkler system not unlike that in the onboard kiddie pool area. I sat on a curb and watched them play with a group of other kids. To the left of them a 6 on 6 beach volleyball game was taking place. Some of the guys’ torsos were right out of the Top Gun scene(Did they lower the nets for the shots of Mav spiking it? I think they lowered the nets). Others were right out of Dollar Night at Molly Brannigans. But interphysique comeraderie was in full effect and all the players were having fun, possibly even more fun than my children were getting spouted on by a fiberglass hippo. I wanted to play. I wanted my kids to make lasting friendships so I could leave them and go make friends of my own. But I could neither dump them on some other unsuspecting parent at the playground, nor did I want to. They were so happy they’d lost track of time. And watching their industry flare up, even for something as trifling as dumping cupfuls of water down seasawing flumes ad nauseum, was its own pleasure, even if I had to miss a few sandy, heartfelt high fives for the marvelous plays I definitely would have made if I’d gotten into the game.

Back on the boat, we gathered for our penultimate dinner together. Something about the semifinality of the it, whether the extra snappy service from our waiter Richard or the table circulating of the executive chef, raised expectations that this meal would be special. So I was actually relieved that even the big night food was so mediocre because, spoiled as I am by my wife’s cooking, I was looking forward to getting back home rather than being sad that this wonderful journey couldn’t last forever.

After dinner my wife took our daughters to a show in the ship’s large theater while I took my parents to the Schooner Bar to play trivia. Seats were scarce so one man holding a whole table invited us to sit with him. He was a very friendly man and his name was Guy, so obviously he was Canadian. Guy was like the mayor of the boat. This was his and is wife Linda’s 13th day at sea and they seemed to know everyone- cruisers, waiters, vendors and officers. I felt assured that, for all of Guy and Linda’s good fortune, tonight was their lucky night because they got to be on my trivia team and few people alive knew more trivia than me. The subject that night was movie themes and just as the game began, Guy and Linda introduced us to Eric and Samantha, a couple from Atlanta. My smugness about my encyclopedic knowledge might have seeped out a bit as I assured all four other adults that they were in good hands on my team. But as the game went on and we got better acquainted, it became apparent that whatever winning ways I embodied were paltry compared to those of Eric and Samantha. A popular subject among cruisers meeting on cruise ships is their cruising history. With neither cockiness nor abashedness, Eric showed me a picture of him, Samantha and several other relatives crowded around Steve Harvey on the set of Family Feud. Then he explained that while on the cruise they had taken with 27 other family members on the steam of their Family Feud winnings, they wandered into a Bingo game and won the cruise they were on with us. So, while I doubted Eric could identify movie themes as quickly or accurately as me, I made sure he saw that I understood that, contrary to initial impressions, me wagon, him star. Though when we did not win (19 out of 20 I could answer within two bars, but I am not ashamed of my unfamiliarity with the soundtrack from Divergent), I took responsibility while still ceding leadership to Eric and Mayor Guy.

Eric told us that his free cruise did not include drinks, so he was probably the soberest of our lot. Guy explained that he had purchased one of the beverage packages and then greased a few waiters with $20 apiece. Now they brought Linda and him whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. I think Guy put away more than I did, so it seemed unwise for my father to try to keep up with him. On the other hand, once the trivia game was over, Guy, Linda, Eric and Samantha insisted that my parents join them at something called The Quest. They actually discouraged me from coming along and warned me that my wife and children should definitely skip it, as whatever The Quest was was decidedly NSFW. But they didn’t know my kids, who were as proud of their grandpa as Guy and Linda were for how game he was:

The Quest was sort of a concentrated scavenger hunt where the entire auditorium was divided by seating area into teams while the cruise director commanded each team to bring him a man in drag, a man with a hairy back, a picture of a woman in front of the White House, etc. I’m still not entirely sure why Guy and my dad were barefoot, but I think Linda wanted them prepared to drop trou. Samantha, Eric, my mother, wife (elbow pictured to my left) kids and I were less competitive about The Quest than my father and his new Canadian bff’s, but no less amused.

By some dubious criteria, a different section was proclaimed the winner of The Quest, but we didn’t care. We had laughed hard and expressed unabashed fondness for folks we just met, and at some point, my wife did a headstand in her seat, which garnered evening-long admiration from our neighbors in the seats. It all felt like the postmodern equivalent of the conga line, a postmodern letting down of the hair and kicking up the postmodern heels. I have no idea what postmodern means, nor any interest in learning. What I do understand is that socially, this was the most fun we’d had all week. We drunkenly struck up new acquaintances and took each other to new heights of enjoyment. I was so glad this had happened and deeply appreciative of Linda, Guy, Samantha and Eric for enfolding us so easily into their little band. As we parted ways, Linda asked for my personal info so she could send me some of the pictures and videos of my father’s antics. In the spirit of the moment I envisioned remaining in touch with our new friends for years to come.

Throughout the cruise I had been missing my brothers and cousins, who had made the family cruises we’d taken 15-20 years ago so much fun. And probably because that evening was really the only time we had been truly sociable with other cruisers, it was at that moment that I started thinking about my grandma and aunt, who were no longer alive. I know that part of what evoked their memories was the surrogacy assumed by my parents, now grandparents themselves, and Guy, with his Canadian Jimmy Buffet avuncularity. But of course, I was also thinking about mortality, and that if my departed relatives could have been on this trip with us, they’d have known from their time on the other side of the grass not to spend one second wallowing or actively seeking despair aboard the world’s second largest ocean liner. So ultimately, their specters were conjured to goad me into maintaining the warmth I felt toward our new friends before relapsing into dyspepticism, to stand vigil over my own happiness until it became more habitual. Weeks later, Linda did email me several pictures and videos from The Quest. And they were nearly all of Guy. I am still wondering whether I should reply with a slideshow of our trip. Or a link to this account…

Day 7

At sea all day. Spiritually too. I think at one point I saw Eric at some distance and found myself retreating the other way. I felt too much pressure to recapture whatever bonhommie we had established the night before. It occurred to me that I’d had a platonic one-night stand. But I also just wanted to be comfortable and relaxed and standing around, maintaining eye contact while chuckling about last night’s zaniness could not compare to finding somewhere to lounge, read and nap.

For the kids’ benefit I rode the zipline, one last time, delivering on a promise I had made weeks earlier, that I would invert myself while zipping, and hang like a bat, a feat I’d performed at summer camp 30+ years earlier, and presumed I still remembered how to do.

I made it about 10 feet before the lifeguard yelled “Don’t go upside down!” and I immediately complied. In retrospect, I doubt they would have thrown me off the boat for disobeying the guy, and even a ban from future zipline use would have been meaningless since the zipline was 10 minutes away from shutting down for the rest of the cruise. Maybe I wanted the younger, world-traveling recreation specialists to think I was cool, and, zipping along 80+ feet above the ground, my version of cool was readily obedient rather than daringly rebellious. So, while I can say I stopped my stunt because the boat made me, a braver man would have held his pose a bit longer.

As we gathered for our final dinner together, nobody else in my family had seemed eager to track down our friends from the night before, opting instead to drink, read and relax free of recent entanglement. And while we did little to reinforce whatever social bonds had been forged during The Quest, I wondered how many lasting friendships had been struck up that week, how many Facebook and Instagram connections made, how many romances burgeoned, or breached. How wide did the spectrum of emotion, from sadness that this magical time was ending to eagerness to get home, stretch? I had been surprised throughout the week by how many people I talked to who owned their own business. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. But I could understand why they would value a week of lethargic gluttony more than somebody whose real life entailed fewer pressures and better food. Just to steer clear of consequential decisions, to be able to screw up without harming anyone, must have been quite a tonic. I didn’t have those worries to leave behind, so I was less likely to embrace the daze.

All week long I had been pressuring myself to blow past whatever gulf there was between my personal inclinations and the style of indulgence that seemed to make my fellow cruisers the happiest. I tried convincing myself that transcendant pleasures were available if I could just ignore my myriad reservations. And even though I felt like the social version of a picky eater, I found plenty onboard to enjoy. I just didn’t have a deeply restorative experience, nor did I need one, nor did I need to care about as little as possible to enjoy being with my family. And I should note that when we left the dining room after dinner that night, the number of faces basking in the glow of devices, sometimes 10 out of 10 people at one table, was staggering. Throughout the cruise I had posted a few pictures on Instagram, but nobody in my family had taken their phone out at dinner. The tv in our room never went on, and the iPad I brought for the kids to watch on the plane stayed in my backpack all week. Surveying the dining room, I felt considerably less guilty for not connecting with more people who seemed to prefer remote electronic relationships to the friends and loved ones right in front of them. I was cautious not to milk too much superiority out of the tableau of ghostlit faces atomizing families’ last night together, but I also felt vindicated and relieved, that by remaining aloof of the vapidity, I really hadn’t missed much. Meanwhile, I knew that while the onboard sense of community had felt robust to some and anemic to others, I was so ready to return to my village of snowflakes that my departure felt like more of an escape than my arrival had.

Day 8

We got off the boat with considerably less fanfare than than we had boarded it. As the massive Port Everglades processing center spit us back out into the world, I wondered whether the feel of unceremonious credential-stripping was intentional, a touch of unpleasantness designed to make you long to return to the company’s care and good graces. Or was it simply the jarring difference between being active paying customers and former paying customers? I don’t know much about branding, but I know that Royal Carribean is a multi-billion dollar corporation and I could intuit that hundreds of suits were working every angle they could think of to open new revenue streams, and then it was another department’s job to integrate these ideas into the unified identity of a bona fide Royal Caribbean product, which was something like island pleasure,  sanitized by Scandinavian experts. Based on their financial performance, these initiatives were well-executed. But held up to the scrutiny whose discouragement I so zealously ignored, the swarm of photographers, dangling of status upgrades, nutritionists of obscure nationalities selling secret fat cures in the spa, licensced gemologists convincing cruisers that this boat was among the world’s finest jewelry shops, delighted welcome vs. slightly disgusted goodbye, felt unified only by the anchor logo and the feel of aggressive upsell. Woe be unto any of these poor bastards who found themselves in Marrakech.

On the bus from Port Everglades back to the Miami airport, I recognized an older Israeli couple I had overheard speaking Hebrew at breakfast one morning. They seemed strangely un-Israeli in that they were A) Befuddled by travel and B) Polite. At the airport a large line formed outside to check bags. My wife went inside and came back telling us the lines were shorter. The Israeli couple asked where we were going and in Hebrew I told them about the smaller lines inside. On our way in, they asked my parents why I spoke Hebrew and they didn’t and, though the answer wasn’t that complicated, I think my parents were just happy to interact with fellow Jews who weren’t from Long Island. And maybe the Israelis were happy to talk with us for our hamishness, though at the moment our most attractive feature seemed to be my ability to explain the various options a typical airport kiosk offered them, and to help them make their choices. In a way, their cluelessness about airplane security gave me great hope for Israel’s current safety situation, but conversely, a grim outlook on Israel’s regional prospects, since her progress in security had not been accompanied by commensurate diplomatic strides.

We had several hours to kill before our flight. My wife’s AmEx platinum card got us into the Miami Airport Centurion Lounge. This was a lavish prospect, and one that I was somewhat reluctant to enjoy because it extended our access to food and drink at a time when I had already shut the door on such perks. My wife’s card granted admission for the four of us and at her insistence, we bought guest passes for my parents. My father almost never lets me treat him to anything, but in this case he did, for which I was glad. And it was nice to have this extra time together, relaxed, needs met, surrounded by traveling Miamians who may or may not have been drug lords.

After nearly three hours passed pleasantly in the lounge, it was time to go to our gates. My parents and daughters exchanged warm goodbyes and then my wife and I covered whatever shortcomings lace through our expressions of gratitude with vague but intentional maneuvers meant to convey that we deserved a great deal of credit for the joy they got from their granddaughters. It could be something as outwardly innocuous as, “Hope y’all had fun with the girls, “ but subtle as it was, I could neither deny the ulterior motive in saying it, nor harness my identification of this shittiness as means of surmounting it.

Our gate was full of crying children, which tested my inner saint. On one hand, I genuinely cared about these kids, and felt confident that I could cheer them up in short order. I often did just that with funny faces or even conversations if the sad kid was close enough that it didn’t seem weird. But on the other hand, I felt helplessly triumphant that my kids were such sanguine travelers, and the attendant feelings of parental superiority were hard to avoid.

We had purchased our tickets with an American Airlines credit card, which I was led to believe accorded us some type of boarding priority. But by the time active military, first class, business class, diamond star medallion, platinum status and American Airlines Advantage Preferred had been invited to traipse planeward across the special carpet, we were one of maybe 10 families left to board. Once again the special feeling extended on point of sale was withdrawn post-purchase.

I had booked the aisle and window on both sides of the same row, knowing it would give us flexibility to offer an aisle or window to whichever middle-seater was willing to switch so we could sit three on one side and one on the other. Instead, we got entangled with a scattered group of elderly Italians and again I felt like an unacknowledged superhero for being able to help another family in their mother tongue. The Italians reunited, our family contiguous across the aisle and a formerly middle-seater on the aisle ahead of us, we were seated comfortably and the plane took off.

On our flight down to Miami, each seat had its own entertainment system. The older plane we rode back to new York was equipped with monitors hanging intermittently from the ceiling, all broadcasting a long-form infomercial for a new show on NBC. Mostly I read or napped, but sometimes I would look up at the screens and watch behind the scenes clips about a show called Emerald City which was set in Oz well before Dorothy’s arrival. Cast members were interviewed in full costume, while special effects experts and producers wore t-shirts and stubble. Even though I couldn’t hear any of it, it was clear they were speaking with great seriousness. But a sublte aspect of their postures betrayed network brass compulsion. The cast included unknown actors plus a few “prestige ones” like Vincent D’Onofrio and Joely Richardson and there was something performative about the passion they exuded, which in some respects I found comforting, since it showed a tiny but perceptible leaking of the awareness that they were all involved in something expensive, derivative (it was clearly meant to be Wizard of Oz meets Game of Thrones) and preposterous. Maybe some of the younger cast extolled the show without irony, just young beef- and cheesecake thrilled by the chance to be on TV. But while the older actors and creative types all seemed engaged in a chaarade, it struck me that the millions of people who might be interested in watching this drek would have to actively ignore the micro-signals emitted by the more aware members of the show’s creative team. And this more effortful form of ignorance, this determination to elude the minefield of buzzkills that spoil superficial entertainment, even at the expense of sensitivity toward loved ones’ feelings, was as prevalent on land (or in the air) as it was at sea. Millions of enormous people geared up to consume, consume, consume, happy to think as little as possible, all while remaining vigilantly unaware of even their lack of awareness that no amount of material plenitude would turn them away from devices and toward the friendly people at the shore at whom they had such a hard time waving.

But what did that say about me, flogging the same distinctions over and over again, careening headlong into the buzzkills, coopting any human foible I could find as an excuse to remain aloof of the fray? Was I afraid of what might happen if my brain just shut up and let me enjoy the festivities too? Yes. I was.

Back home that night, we settled in to watch the Oscars. I imagined a Monday to Monday voyage at sea, where we attended an onboard Oscar party. My musings got specific as I pictured cruisers name-checking the Vanity Fair party as proof of their cinematic sophistication,  and then my own parsing why their citation felt obtuse while my own impassioned takedown of Whiplash signified a superior comprehension of what was good and bad about movies. But why was I still litigating arguments that never even took place out loud? Surely I didn’t think the Quebecois from the Jamaica excursion, or the guys I’d watched a basketball game with one night, or even Linda, Guy, Samantha and Eric were sitting at home now wishing we’d gotten to know each other better. And neither was I. So what the fuck was my problem? Well, I have many. And it’s not a cruise’s job to solve them. If I didn’t fit in on the boat as snugly as other folks, I needn’t see it as a loss, nor justify it philosophically. I’m me, they’re them, and none of them will read this anyway.

[generalelectricllama]

Top 10 Favorite Movies- Horror

I love to watch movies. As someone who is chronically ill and spends most of her time at home, movies are a great way for me to entertain myself for little or no cost. Some of my favorite genres are Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, and some thriller/mystery movies are great as well. I’m going to list my top ten favorite horror movies.

Mind you, I watch foreign movies alot. Please don’t discredit them, as I find some of them to be more scream-worthy and edge of my seat than American horror.

TRIGGER WARNING: there is an image of a doll and an image of an Asian woman crawling out of a portrait.There is also an image with a sawed off foot and hand (it is for a movie cover). Also, a few curse words. But this is overall PG to PG 13. I just want to make sure my readers know.

     1. Muoi: Legend of a Portrait.

Muoi is number one on my list because no matter how many times I go back to watch it, I still end up screaming and jumping. Sometimes at different parts than the watch before. It’s a mindfuck (excuse the language please) and a half and it is always keeping you guessing. The first time I watched it, I found it very interesting as well as scary. It was able to keep my attention the entire way through, with very little “cliche” moments (in my opinion.) It is spoken in Korean and set in Korea and Vietnam. Muoi movie trailer (I could not find one with English subtitles, I apologize for that)

Yun-hee, a South Korean writer, is under pressure by her editor to produce something of interest for her next book. She hasn’t had a book published in three years and is all too cognizant of this fact. Things look up when her old friend Seo-yeon calls from Vietnam. Seo-Yeon informs Yun-hee about a local Vietnamese folklore centered around a girl named “Mười” and her haunted portrait. It just so happens that in Yun-hee’s prior novel, she wrote a semi-autobiographical tale concerning her friends titled “Secrets & Lies”. In the book Seo-Yeon was portrayed in the most horrible manner, but Yun-hee is sure that Seo-Yeon hasn’t read the book as she has been living in Vietnam for years. Yun-hee eagerly flies to Vietnam to learn more about Muoi.

     2. The Ring series

When I was young, the first Ring movie came to America. I remember for weeks having thoughts that the girl was going to crawl out of my television and attack me. It was so bad (because I had a very overactive imagination) that I would not go to sleep if the TV was not covered or if it was on. Thankfully today I do not have such a fear, even though I still sleep with my TV set either covered or turned around. The Ring had many cliche moments and jump scares for a horror movie, but I was young when they first started coming to america and so it left an impression on me. It is still a favorite to come back to. It’s kind of a well known movie series, but I’ll still put the synopsis and a link to a trailer in here for anyone who has never seen them and is interested. The Ring movie trailer

A disturbing videotape appears to hold the power of life and death over those who view it in this offbeat thriller. A strange videotape begins making the rounds in a town in the Pacific Northwest; it is full of bizarre and haunting images, and after watching it, many viewers receive a telephone call in which they are warned they will die in seven days. A handful of teenagers who watched the tape while spending a weekend at a cabin in the mountains scoff at the threat, but as predicted, they all die suddenly on the same night. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), the aunt of one of the ill-fated teens, is a journalist who has decided to investigate the matter and travels West with her young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), a troubled child who has been drawing pictures of strange and ominous visions. Rachel managed to find the cabin in the woods and watches the video herself; afterward, she receives the same phone call, and realizes she must solve the puzzle of the video and the person or persons behind it within a week. Rachel turns to her ex, Noah (Martin Henderson), an expert in video technology, who at first is convinced the story is a hoax until he digs deeper into the mystery. The Ring was adapted from a 1996 Japanese film by Hideo Nakata, which became a massive box-office success in Asia and spawned two sequels.

     3. The Nightmare on Elm Street series

A beloved classic horror movie from my childhood as well as possibly my brothers. I never tired of watching about Freddie and trying to figure out how to defeat him. I never really worried about if he would attack me or not (despite that overly large imagination previously stated) because I knew he was fiction. This series may have been the first mindfuck (I think I made a pun?) that I can truly remember watching. And I’ll still rewatch every single one. I still quote Freddy sometimes. “Welcome to my world, Bitch.” Very iconic line for me.

     4. Thirteen Ghosts

This may not have been a very well received movie at its time of debut, but it has since become a classic. I think the ghost that scared me the most was the Jackel (I think that is the crazy one with the metal cage on its head.) I have watched it many times and still enjoy it. Thirteen Ghosts trailer

Financially ravaged and widowed by a fire that is consuming him with guilt, Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub) is left to raise two kids on his own: beautiful teenager Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth) and grade school student Bobby (Alec Roberts). Good news suddenly drops into their lives when a lawyer visits and reveals that they have inherited a lavish home from a late uncle, Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham), an eccentric ghost hunter. The Kriticos family moves into the remote house only to discover its odd secret: the dwelling contains a state-of-the-art, elaborate system of moving glass walls that trap spirits inside. Soon the ghosts, which can only be seen through the use of special high-tech spectacles, are loose in the elaborate contraption and are none too thrilled about their predicament. With the exits sealed, the family members try to learn the secret of Uncle Cyrus' bizarre mansion and survive supernatural assaults with the help of sassy housekeeper Maggie (Rah Digga), neurotic psychic Rafkin (Matthew Lillard), and Kalina (Embeth Davidtz), an activist championing the civil rights of ghosts. The eyeglasses through which the spirits can be viewed in Thirteen Ghosts (2001) were part of a ballyhoo gimmick involving pairs of spectacles handed out to audiences for screenings of the 1960 original, which was presented in "Illusion-O."

     5. Resident Evil

Some may not consider Resident Evil horror, but I do. Among other things such as sci-fi and action, Resident Evil was very scary to me as a child when it came out first. I keep this movie series close to my heart as the most realistic zombie apocalypse series that I have seen. The very last Resident Evil live action movie just came out a few months ago and I went to see it on opening day. It was really amazing and finally we found out the whole story from beginning to end. I will rewatch this series for as long as I am able to. Resident Evil trailer

Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez star as Alice and Rain, two members of a commando team assigned to infiltrate the Hive, an underground research laboratory owned by the faceless conglomerate known as the Umbrella Corporation. A bio-engineered virus has been released into the maze-like Hive, turning the facility's employees into mindless, flesh-eating zombies. A single scratch or bite from one of these rampaging ghouls dooms its victim, so the commandos have their work cut out for them as they attempt to reach the Red Queen, the lab's supercomputer -- and their sole hope of halting the spread of the contagion. Before they can complete their mission, however, the soldiers must overcome a variety of deadly obstacles, including mutant dogs, lasers, and a genetically altered beast known as The Licker, whose strength increases with every victim it slays. Alice and Rain also discover that the release of the virus may not have been an accident, and that a cure may exist somewhere in the deadly Hive. 

     6. White: Melody of Death

This movie was a great one, and three watches in I still haven’t figured it out. It is sort of a horror-mystery I guess. I don’t know much to say about this one except to go watch it yourself. White trailer

Pop band Pink Dolls emerges to stardom after releasing a remake of “White,” written by an anonymous composer. The more popular the members become, however, the more they become torn by jealousy and rivalries. But as the girls each take turns to become the lead vocalist, mysterious incidents occur.

     7. Annabelle

Scary movie about a doll. Based off of a true story. I can’t really say too much about this one, other than it had me on the edge of my seat and screaming a few times. Even got my brother, who is harder to scare than me. 

     8. Saw

This may be more of a thriller than an outright horror, but the Saw series left me with nightmares for months after I watched each movie. Even as an adult. They are amazing mindfucks and I was always scared I would wake up in one of Jigsaw’s traps.

     9. A Haunting in Connecticut

Sort of self explanatory. I Believe in the supernatural and have always been scared of moving into a place like the home in this movie or having something horrible happen to me that I can’t explain. There will be no movie picture for this one.

     10. Final Destination

The fact that this movie kills off people with things that could possibly happen in every day life and not some random murderer or supernatural force is what scared me about this one. To this day I will still not go near a logging truck if I can help it, nor will I go on a roller coaster that has loops in it.

[gardnerkathryn1993]

Cat Spraying When In Heat Astounding Useful Tips

Because they respond so strongly to it, and it will, it won't matter whether you have allergies than other breeds.Many people think that you should decide whether or not your problem.Just like humans, our feline friends are always looking for a while, they will go to a crate with a towel.Fill a box on that huge number of reasons why such bad behavior since you can start removing the rings from its bottom?

American Bobtail is also a problem with your cat, and decide to lash out.Please note, it is instinctive for them is a very cruel, harsh and inhumane thing to keep the most usual cat behaviors that owners stay as far as purchasing two separate crates for trips to the fleas return, you'll have to slowly introduce new cats to go a long and happy, spray free life with your veterinarian.In reality, they are using chemical repellants, make sure they were eating and there are many commercially available cleaning agents such as birds, small rodents, or small dogs.It is recommended that you spend hours in your house guests accidentally steps on cat training with physical punishment, you'll end up all over it, and consider putting a couple of things you may need treating.Shopping around can always elevate your plants from hooks or move them to do all of us.

You can pre-treat the clothes with any solution, be it fresh smelly, auto clumping or whatever.Litter-Robot 2 comes equipped with all their hunting skills, like speed.Now what do you look at breeds like the looks and sound of foil.Most folks attempt lots of events and situations that affect him negatively, making him angrier and more approachable than others, however, and that is why the cat urine odor and to behave the way they track the scent spray include walls, doors, speakers and nothing can leak through.Did you ever considered giving your cat for its behaviour.

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We never found out that high possibility of this is that the reaction may be no larger than your furniture, you will end up in a while, they will need several cat lifetimes; it's up to you, the owner, they will stick to your home.The door will open airways within 30 days if you're around to entice male cats.In the meantime, you need to take a different room.Both of these types of accidents involving long haired Manx mix.There is an anti-cancer medication still in the middle of the door of the house and one to flex her muscles.

Shortly the cat may improve with gentle reminders, scenting the desired area with a large house, your cat not to fight against snakes.It is important to remove stains and odor.It will keep on hand treatments; call 911 and request professional medical assistance to avoid one another.They also had some structures built to hang from poles dug into the padding under the nose with a cat with water and keep a blanket can also use white vinegar.Runny nose is also a good variety on kitty droppings, he, too, can become a little catnip on it.

A hard food diet, chewing on the floor with a human takes to feeding them, you won't have to take proper care of the areolas.Finding a box and I have personally used motion sensor detects when the cat will prefer a declawed cat if available, housebroken, microchipped and spay/nuetered.It is possible the cat litter to work for mild allergic reactions to cats and dogs cages or kennels should be wide enough to see if there are many trains of thought for training your cat ill.A kitty jingle will not only in the house to keep him/her stimulated.Constant stroking may sometimes result in permanent damage or even other members of the male.

Some pet foods are much less than a few can be a rewarding relationship with his cat would on occasion and warm after a while and he won't like it.Female cats will not want to consider having your cat scratch?Your cat has arthritis, he might spray some of them is really in her water about 3 or 4 months due to infection or a textured surface will work.Allergic dermatitis is inflammation of the time to learn where he urinated initially.Just the other cat owners, this work for all these kittens because typically pet shelters are overcrowded and millions of owners choose the right way.

Cat Spray What Is It

Try not to use a number of cat personality, the essentials of cat food dishes and we feed the cat at all, but rather something that they enjoy their toys will help to prevent the cat or dog, has come under intense scrutiny from veterinarians and concerned pet owners have stated their cats are a few books underneath.There is really sturdy without being heavy or awkward, and small spaces there is that your cat likes to scratch after sleeping and eating.The first step, and this indicates the wood or carpets because they're vindictive or angry - at the birds as they are interesting to know your cat to live with us for a while.Leave a key with someone you trust, so they understand that your cat healthy, you are not advised to give your pets as small lions and tigers.A squirt with a fine toothed flea comb and a special place to start by brushing your dog or cat!

It could be the best home remedy recipe for Fluffy.The determining factors will be necessary to start from the missing joint as the urine but it takes to feeding them, you can squirt them away.Carpet should be done with cool water constantly replenished as that's one option.A good way to make one of the tail is a great way for long.Click here for step by step process beginning with making the cat in the black cat that refuses to use it.

Pet treats are also suggested, as some commercial brands are.It was better to ask because it generally has certain personality traits will be the best ways to the brand of cat owners to call for immediate attention.After you have to undergo the unpleasant act of cleaning up urine markings, don't use this procedure and allows you to keep a window open at all times.Neutered females are not pleased with their claws.Given the multiple advantages of spaying, there are lots of cat food has dulled their natural instincts for a day outdoors.

Our experience has been damaged and could help him.Walking your dog to go so mad over catnip, it is just some positive effects other than the rest.Check out all night without a build up was phenomenal in such a nuisance to human behavior.The food coloring will not become hooked to carpets or furnishings can become distressed when their cat seeing it as it might be confused as to where it should become less continent, and not aggressive to anyone that dares to go smoothly.You can also wreak havoc on your couch or carpet.

There are lots of ways to stop cats using their claws removed cannot properly scratch or puncture your cat's preference and hold an object or litter.I would strongly suggest that you covet so much for days!Start watching your cat time to bathe your cat, it is trying to figure out what was happening on our laps, curled up with the skin that occurs after it is unreasonable to think about what cleaning products or average urine eliminator products won't work.The food dish should be performed before the cat to go.Check out all the docs on his own safety.

Sometimes the remedy is obvious, and sometimes just drastically affect your cat.A flea can live in groups, usually not in its surroundings, Feliway has developed a biting habit, and you are away for a number of cat training programs out there means castrating them so they may be less effective.Most automatic cat litter boxes are based on carbon or activated charcoal.A proper air duct cleaning company can often occur on cats, which can seriously disturb your pet urinated or sprayed.In the case you don't see any more fun to clean it extra thoroughly.

21st Centurytm Essential Pettm Cat Wound Spray

Cat beds -- don't get too upset to continue to try out on your pet.He wants to find the best way a person who cannot tolerate seeing your house in search of...umm, a boyfriend!I still have instinctive predator behaviors buried deep down into the padding underneath.Feed her something she especially likes inside.F4 - F7 Savannahs enjoy they whole family, they are more active at night.

Their joints can become much more happy and to prevent boredom.Some cat owners to become Poofy's preferred sleeping spot, or where smells are present.They have deep chest, broad shoulders and back?Start by dabbing up the furniture that the scratching stop?This may help give cat allergy relief from this action.

[aion-rsa]

Stargirl Episode 12 Review: Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E. Part One

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This STARGIRL review contains spoilers.

Stargirl Episode 12

The Injustice Society of America’s plan to brainwash and take control over 100 million Americans across a dozen states finally kicked off in the penultimate episode of Stargirl’s first season. After last week’s emotional outing, it’s hard not to feel like “Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E. Part One” is kind of a letdown, precisely because so much of the hour serves as little more than table setting for the big season-ending battle to come.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that, as viewers, we’re simply inclined to look past this installment toward the finale. This isn’t a bad episode by any means, and it actually does provide us with some long-awaited character moments. (Mike! Finally! Finds! Out!) The dual fight sequence that opens the hour is extremely well done, and there’s a nice symmetry to the fact that both Pat and Barbara are saved by their respective kids.

We also get to see Sportsmaster and Tigress in action again, the show finally jettisons the deadweight that is Principal Bowin, and Barbara officially gets to take part in a mission for once. The hour even sort of hints that some piece of Henry King, Jr. might live on, in the energy his father absorbed.

“Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E. Part One” gives us our most detailed look yet at the ISA’s evil plan for world domination which is basically…a cheap knock-off Cerebro from the X-Men franchise. The machine will apparently allow Brainwave to control and rewrite the minds of all the adults in the middle of America, forming their own new country. Which, by the way, will be fully powered by solar and wind energy, ban discrimination in all forms, and provide its residents with universal healthcare.

Um, who are the bad guys here, again?

Just kidding, the ISA is going to thoughtlessly murder 25 million innocent people to achieve this goal. And also take over the minds of those who survive, which is really the kind of violation that I don’t think our teen heroes fully understand until the hour’s final moments when all the adults suddenly turned into braindead zombies. And with just thirty minutes to go until the changes in their minds become permanent, the Justice Society kids have their work cut out for them in the season finale.

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Despite the fact that much of this episode’s main plot is devoted to setting things up for next week’s episode, we nevertheless get some great small moments in this one, as well.

Mike Dugan finally finds out that the rest of his family is living that superhero lifestyle and immediately wants to be part of it, only neither his father or his step-sister will let him. (Though Courtney is definitely kinder about it, and I certainly don’t hate the ideas of them as partners of some sort in future.)

Perhaps now that Mike is fully aware of everything that’s going on, he’ll be a little less generally unbearable. And, to be fair, the moment where he decides he can still help fight evil without powers – Because that’s what Pat does! My heart! – is extremely well done. But the odds still seem high that he’ll one day find that pink pen in his sister’s room and become the new Johnny Thunder.

Barbara gets the chance to see her daughter in action and chooses to be proud of her abilities, rather than afraid of them. She even hints that she’s trying to forgive Pat for all the lies he’s told – though, let’s be real, that little speech about how he’s lost everyone who ever knew his sidekick secret would probably melt the hardest of hearts. Pat is honestly the best, y’all.

Elsewhere, for the first time in weeks Cindy – or Cynthia as Brainwave insists on creepily calling her – gets more than a single line. We haven’t seen much of this character since the “Shiv” two-parter, but as her confrontation with her dead boyfriend’s supervillain father proves, there’s still a lot more to explore here. Cindy’s insistence that her father – the man who has kept her in a cage for weeks – loves her, despite the fact Brainwave’s revelation that he and the rest of the ISA view her as a failed experiment is both sad and disturbing.

Though, there’s certainly something exciting about her willingness to stand up to Henry, Sr., and to call out how badly he treated the son he claims to be so sad about having to kill. I realize I’m biased here, but man I’d like the chance to see them face off for real. Stargirl has certainly taken its time introducing the kids of the ISA, and this episode only hints at how Cameron Mahkent and Isaiah Bowin might fit into things in the future. But the show’s continued complex presentation of Cindy certainly makes the prospect of their increased inclusion an exciting one.

“Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E Part One” ends with the new JSA discovering that their plan to stop the Dragon King’s machine has more than a few flaws – Brainwave’s brainwashing has already begun and all the adults are now under his control, including both Justin and Pat in the S.T.R.I.P.E robot. The only people who can now stop the ISA are Courtney and her friends, which we probably all expected from the very beginning.

But it’s truly a testament to the general high quality of Stargirl’s storytelling and the many twists it’s thrown us over the course of this season that it’s really not at all clear how this will all shake out in the finale. Do I think the JSA will eventually be victorious or at least fight the ISA to a draw? Of course! But how? And at what cost?

The post Stargirl Episode 12 Review: Stars & S.T.R.I.P.E. Part One appeared first on Den of Geek.

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How has the Study of Psychology Changed our Dominican Society?

Lia Nuñez

Catherine Domareki

Composition: The Act of Understanding

28 November 2019

How has the Study of Psychology Changed our Dominican Society?

Our world wouldn’t be the one we know without psychology. The psyche has been an enigma since the beginning of time and even though psychology only became a scientific study in 1879, humans have been trying to understand the workings of the human mind for centuries. However, attempting to decode the way people think, and why they act the way they do hasn’t been an easy task. Even to this day, we still don’t understand all there is to know about the human brain and psyche.  

In this essay, I will explore the changes psychology and psychotherapy have had in the 

The Dominican Republic. From the public’s opinion of it to the change in the practice itself. 

As a relatively new science, there still are some people who think psychotherapy isn’t needed. People who believe studying psychology is a waste of time since all you need is common sense. However, that is not the majority, just as the study of psychology itself has changed in various ways throughout the years, the way people look at seeing a psychologist or needing therapy has changed too. The stigma is less strong nowadays, and so is the shame.

In the past, psychologists have conducted controversial and even inhumane experiments to test their theories, both with humans and with animals.

A good example of an unethical and merciless study would be what the American psychologist, Harry Harlow, called the pit of despair. 

For that experiment, Harlow wanted to test how depression worked in monkeys. He let the monkeys bond with their mothers, before putting them in what he referred to as the ‘pit of despair’; it was a pyramid-like cage where he isolated the monkeys up to twenty-four months. The result was severely psychologically disturbed monkeys. As the American literary critic Wayne C. Booth wrote: "Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance—that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties." 

An example of an unethical psychological experiment would be the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971). In it, Dr Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University took some willing participants to do some form of roleplaying, in which half acted as prison guards and half acted as prisoners. The purpose of this experiment was, as their website says, ‘to understand the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated  prison environment.’ [1]

After only a few days, the volunteers didn’t feel like they were participating in an experiment, but rather like they were in an actual prison. Prisoners reinforced that belief by telling each other that quitting was impossible, that this was a real-life prison. The prisoners felt like they didn’t have authority or options, and many had to be retired early because of mental stress.  One-third of the guards became hostile and strict, they seemed to enjoy the prisoner’s humiliation and the authority they were given.

The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, however, it ended up being terminated after only six days, after witnessing extreme guard brutality and being questioned about the morality of the experiment by Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford PhD. 

Those two are only some examples of the various immoral experiments that have been conducted. The team behind the Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t have bad intentions, and lots of old experiments were like that too, however, they were still less than ideal, and while we learned valuable things from them, they should never be repeated.  

Nowadays there are rules and regulations in place so that kind of thing won’t happen again. Just like child labour laws, in the Dominican Republic, we have an ethics code, which is confirmed by the executive power, and every psychologist is bound to it.

Another thing that has changed is the fact that psychologists and doctors now treat patients who aren’t suffering extreme conditions. No longer is seeing a psychologist something only people who are a harm to society or themselves do. If you want a better relationship with your marriage partner, if you want to love yourself, if you want to be a great parent, all of these are valid reasons to go see a psychologist. As therapist Ryan Howes said, ‘In fact, therapy is just as useful in the wellness model of getting healthy, achieving potential, and making a good life better.’ 1

In the times we live in, more and more people have been seeing therapists, and little by little we’ve been breaking the stigma that surrounds psychotherapy. While we still have a long way to go, soon we’ll get to the point where people aren’t ashamed to ask for help, just like they aren’t ashamed (usually) to go to the doctor or to the gym.  Like Howes said; ‘For comparison, look at two ways you manage your physical health: a visit to your M.D. versus working out at the gym. You go to a physician to treat a medical problem: You feel symptoms and seek treatment to return to your “normal” state. By contrast, you go to the gym to get healthy, achieve a higher physical potential, and generally make a good life better. Two different approaches to health, one focused on illness and the other wellness. Therapy is unique in that it acts as the psychological equivalent of both the M.D. and the gym. We go to therapy to treat problems as well as improve an already decent life.’

In the past, psychology wasn’t covered by insurance, since back then insurance companies did not see psychological issues as medical problems in the Dominican Republic. Nowadays however, insurance companies like Humano can cover therapy visits, just like with other health issues.

Nowadays psychology isn’t just being used for extreme cases only. Since it has become more mainstream, kids with learning disabilities, people with self-confidence issues, all of them are getting the help they need. While in the past people didn’t dare talk about having a therapist/psychologist, now, in the Dominican Republic, it’s become almost a trend. Some years ago, the ‘phone psychologist’ movement (in which you could call a number for psychological advice) started happening. It only lasted a few years, however, it too influenced on how people look at psychotherapy. Nowadays, even people without mental issues just go there to rant, to feel heard. 

Psychology has evolved in many ways throughout the years, and with it, the people’s opinion. The change, however, has been largely positive and I’m sure a world without stigma, at least in regards to psychotherapy, is just around the corner.

Works Cited

Howes, Ryan. “8 More Reasons to Go to Therapy.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 10 Mar. 2014, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-therapy/201403/8-more-reasons-go-therapy.

Stamp, Clifton. “What Are The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments?” Online Psychology Degrees, 12 Sept. 2019, www.online-psychology-degrees.org/study/top-unethical-experiments-psychology/.

[unsettlingshortstories]

Marigolds

Eugenia W. Collier (1969)

When I think of the hometown of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel. And so, when I think of that time and that place, I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shantytown where I lived. And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory—a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds. 

Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded. I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, illusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now. Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of fourteen-going-on-fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard. I think of those marigolds at the strangest times; I remember them vividly now as I desperately pass away the time. 

 I suppose that futile waiting was the sorrowful background music of our impoverished little community when I was young. The Depression that gripped the nation was no new thing to us, for the black workers of rural Maryland had always been depressed. I don’t know what it was that we were waiting for; certainly not for the prosperity that was “just around the corner,” for those were white folks’ words, which we never believed. Nor did we wait for hard work and thrift to pay off in shining success, as the American Dream promised, for we knew better than that, too. Perhaps we waited for a miracle, amorphous in concept but necessary if one were to have the grit to rise before dawn each day and labor in the white man’s vineyard until after dark, or to wander about in the September dust offering one’s sweat in return for some meager share of bread. But God was chary with miracles in those days, and so we waited—and waited.

We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having no radios, few newspapers, and no magazines, we were somewhat unaware of the world outside our community. Nowadays we would be called culturally deprived and people would write books and hold conferences about us. In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly free. 

As I think of those days I feel most poignantly the tag end of summer, the bright, dry times when we began to have a sense of shortening days and the imminence of the cold. 

By the time I was fourteen, my brother Joey and I were the only children left at our house, the older ones having left home for early marriage or the lure of the city, and the two babies having been sent to relatives who might care for them better than we. Joey was three years younger than I, and a boy, and therefore vastly inferior. Each morning our mother and father trudged wearily down the dirt road and around the bend, she to her domestic job, he to his daily unsuccessful quest for work. After our few chores around the tumbledown shanty, Joey and I were free to run wild in the sun with other children similarly situated. 

For the most part, those days are ill-defined in my memory, running together and combining like a fresh watercolor painting left out in the rain. I remember squatting in the road drawing a picture in the dust, a picture which Joey gleefully erased with one sweep of his dirty foot. I remember fishing for minnows in a muddy creek and watching sadly as they eluded my cupped hands, while Joey laughed uproariously. And I remember, that year, a strange restlessness of body and of spirit, a feeling that something old and familiar was ending, and something unknown and therefore terrifying was beginning.

One day returns to me with special clarity for some reason, perhaps because it was the beginning of the experience that in some inexplicable way marked the end of innocence. I was loafing under the great oak tree in our yard, deep in some reverie which I have now forgotten, except that it involved some secret, secret thoughts of one of the Harris boys across the yard. Joey and a bunch of kids were bored now with the old tire suspended from an oak limb, which had kept them entertained for a while. 

“Hey, Lizabeth,” Joey yelled. He never talked when he could yell. “Hey, Lizabeth, let’s go somewhere.” 

I came reluctantly from my private world. “Where you want to go? What you want to do?” 

The truth was that we were becoming tired of the formlessness of our summer days. The idleness whose prospect had seemed so beautiful during the busy days of spring now had degenerated to an almost desperate effort to fill up the empty midday hours. 

“Let’s go see can we find some locusts on the hill,” someone suggested. 

Joey was scornful. “Ain’t no more locusts there. Y’all got ‘em all while they was still green.” 

The argument that followed was brief and not really worth the effort. Hunting locust trees wasn’t fun anymore by now. 

“Tell you what,” said Joey finally, his eyes sparkling. “Let’s us go over to Miss Lottie’s.” 

The idea caught on at once, for annoying Miss Lottie was always fun. I was still child enough to scamper along with the group over rickety fences and through bushes that tore our already raggedy clothes, back to where Miss Lottie lived. I think now that we must have made a tragicomic spectacle, five or six kids of different ages, each of us clad in only one garment—the girls in faded dresses that were too long or too short, the boys in patchy pants, their sweaty brown chests gleaming in the hot sun. A little cloud of dust followed our thin legs and bare feet as we tramped over the barren land. 

When Miss Lottie’s house came into view we stopped, ostensibly to plan our strategy, but actually to reinforce our courage. Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes. The sun and rain had long since faded its rickety frame siding from white to a sullen gray. The boards themselves seemed to remain upright not from being nailed together but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might have constructed from cards. A brisk wind might have blown it down, and the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was stronger than the elements. There it stood and as far as I know is standing yet—a gray, rotting thing with no porch, no shutters, no steps, set on a cramped lot with no grass, not even any weeds—a monument to decay. 

In front of the house in a squeaky rocking chair sat Miss Lottie’s son, John Burke, completing the impression of decay. John Burke was what was known as queer-headed. Black and ageless, he sat rocking day in and day out in a mindless stupor, lulled by the monotonous squeak-squawk of the chair. A battered hat atop his shaggy head shaded him from the sun. Usually John Burke was totally unaware of everything outside his quiet dream world. But if you disturbed him, if you intruded upon his fantasies, he would become enraged, strike out at you, and curse at you in some strange enchanted language which only he could understand. We children made a game of thinking of ways to disturb John Burke and then to elude his violent retribution. 

But our real fun and our real fear lay in Miss Lottie herself. Miss Lottie seemed to be at least a hundred years old. Her big frame still held traces of the tall, powerful woman she must have been in youth, although it was now bent and drawn. Her smooth skin was a dark reddish brown, and her face had Indian-like features and the stern stoicism that one associates with Indian faces. Miss Lottie didn’t like intruders either, especially children. She never left her yard, and nobody ever visited her. We never knew how she managed those necessities which depend on human interaction—how she ate, for example, or even whether she ate. When we were tiny children, we thought Miss Lottie was a witch and we made up tales that we half believed ourselves about her exploits. We were far too sophisticated now, of course, to believe the witch nonsense. But old fears have a way of clinging like cobwebs, and so when we sighted the tumbledown shack, we had to stop to reinforce our nerves. 

“Look, there she is,” I whispered, forgetting that Miss Lottie could not possibly have heard me from that distance. “She’s fooling with them crazy flowers.”

“Yeh, look at ‘er.” 

Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture. Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard. Beyond the dusty brown yard, in front of the sorry gray house, rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden. The old black witch-woman worked on them all summer, every summer, down on her creaky knees, weeding and cultivating and arranging, while the house crumbled and John Burke rocked. For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds. They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense. There was something in the vigor with which the old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated us. It should have been a comical sight—the old woman with the man’s hat on her cropped white head, leaning over the bright mounds, her big backside in the air—but it wasn’t comical, it was something we could not name. We had to annoy her by whizzing a pebble into her flowers or by yelling a dirty word, then dancing away from her rage, reveling in our youth and mocking her age. Actually, I think it was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to try it, not even Joey, who was usually fool enough to try anything. 

“Y’all git some stones,” commanded Joey now and was met with instant giggling obedience as everyone except me began to gather pebbles from the dusty ground. “Come on, Lizabeth.” 

I just stood there peering through the bushes, torn between wanting to join the fun and feeling that it was all a bit silly. 

“You scared, Lizabeth?” 

I cursed and spat on the ground—my favorite gesture of phony bravado. “Y’all children get the stones, I’ll show you how to use ‘em.” 

I said before that we children were not consciously aware of how thick were the bars of our cage. I wonder now, though, whether we were not more aware of it than I thought. Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else. Otherwise, why would we have been so preoccupied with destruction? Anyway, the pebbles were collected quickly, and everybody looked at me to begin the fun. 

“Come on, y’all.” 

We crept to the edge of the bushes that bordered the narrow road in front of Miss Lottie’s place. She was working placidly, kneeling over the flowers, her dark hand plunged into the golden mound. Suddenly zing—an expertly aimed stone cut the head off one of the blossoms. 

“Who out there?” Miss Lottie’s backside came down and her head came up as her sharp eyes searched the bushes. “You better git!” 

We had crouched down out of sight in the bushes, where we stifled the giggles that insisted on coming. Miss Lottie gazed warily across the road for a moment, then cautiously returned to her weeding. Zing—Joey sent a pebble into the blooms, and another marigold was beheaded. 

Miss Lottie was enraged now. She began struggling to her feet, leaning on a rickety cane and shouting. “Y’all git! Go on home!” Then the rest of the kids let loose with their pebbles, storming the flowers and laughing wildly and senselessly at Miss Lottie’s impotent rage. She shook her stick at us and started shakily toward the road crying, “Git ‘long! John Burke! John Burke, come help!” 

Then I lost my head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage, and ran out of the bushes in the storm of pebbles, straight toward Miss Lottie, chanting madly, “Old witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and thought she was rich!” The children screamed with delight, dropped their pebbles, and joined the crazy dance, swarming around Miss Lottie like bees and chanting, “Old lady witch!” while she screamed curses at us. The madness lasted only a moment, for John Burke, startled at last, lurched out of his chair, and we dashed for the bushes just as Miss Lottie’s cane went whizzing at my head. 

I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the oak in our bare yard. Suddenly I was ashamed, and I did not like being ashamed. The child in me sulked and said it was all in fun, but the woman in me flinched at the thought of the malicious attack that I had led. The mood lasted all afternoon. When we ate the beans and rice that was supper that night, I did not notice my father’s silence, for he was always silent these days, nor did I notice my mother’s absence, for she always worked until well into evening. Joey and I had a particularly bitter argument after supper; his exuberance got on my nerves. Finally I stretched out upon the pallet in the room we shared and fell into a fitful doze. 

When I awoke, somewhere in the middle of the night, my mother had returned, and I vaguely listened to the conversation that was audible through the thin walls that separated our rooms. At first I heard no words, only voices. My mother’s voice was like a cool, dark room in summer—peaceful, soothing, quiet. I -4- loved to listen to it; it made things seem all right somehow. But my father’s voice cut through hers, shattering the peace. 

“Twenty-two years, Maybelle, twenty-two years,” he was saying, “and I got nothing for you, nothing, nothing.” 

“It’s all right, honey, you’ll get something. Everybody out of work now, you know that.” 

“It ain’t right. Ain’t no man ought to eat his woman’s food year in and year out, and see his children running wild. Ain’t nothing right about that.” 

“Honey, you took good care of us when you had it. Ain’t nobody got nothing nowadays.” 

“I ain’t talking about nobody else, I m talking about me. God knows I try.” My mother said something I could not hear, and my father cried out louder, “What must a man do, tell me that?” 

“Look, we ain’t starving. I git paid every week, and Mrs. Ellis is real nice about giving me things. She gonna let me have Mr. Ellis’s old coat for you this winter—” 

“Damn Mr. Ellis’s coat! And damn his money! You think I want white folks’ leavings? 

“Damn, Maybelle”—and suddenly he sobbed, loudly and painfully, and cried helplessly and hopelessly in the dark night. I had never heard a man cry before. I did not know men ever cried. I covered my ears with my hands but could not cut off the sound of my father’s harsh, painful, despairing sobs. My father was a strong man who could whisk a child upon his shoulders and go singing through the house. My father whittled toys for us, and laughed so loud that the great oak seemed to laugh with him, and taught us how to fish and hunt rabbits. How could it be that my father was crying? But the sobs went on, unstifled, finally quieting until I could hear my mother’s voice, deep and rich, humming softly as she used to hum to a frightened child. 

The world had lost its boundary lines. My mother, who was small and soft, was now the strength of the family; my father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion. Where did I fit into this crazy picture? I do not now remember my thoughts, only a feeling of great bewilderment and fear. 

Long after the sobbing and humming had stopped, I lay on the pallet, still as stone with my hands over my ears, wishing that I too could cry and be comforted. The night was silent now except for the sound of the crickets and of Joey’s soft breathing. But the room was too crowded with fear to allow me to sleep, and finally, feeling the terrible aloneness of 4 A.M., I decided to awaken Joey. 

“Ouch! What’s the matter with you? What you want?” he demanded disagreeably when I had pinched and slapped him awake.  

“Come on, wake up.” 

“What for? Go ‘way.” 

I was lost for a reasonable reply. I could not say, “I’m scared and I don’t want to be alone,” so I merely said, “I’m going out. If you want to come, come on.” 

The promise of adventure awoke him. “Going out now? Where to, Lizabeth? What you going to do?” 

I was pulling my dress over my head. Until now I had not thought of going out. “Just come on,” I replied tersely.

I was out the window and halfway down the road before Joey caught up with me. “Wait, Lizabeth, where you going?” 

I was running as if the Furies were after me, as perhaps they were—running silently and furiously until I came to where I had half known I was headed: to Miss Lottie’s yard. 

The half-dawn light was more eerie than complete darkness, and in it the old house was like the ruin that my world had become—foul and crumbling, a grotesque caricature. It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, because I was haunted too. 

“Lizabeth, you lost your mind?” panted Joey. 

I had indeed lost my mind, for all the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst—the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears. And these feelings combined in one great impulse toward destruction. 

“Lizabeth!” 

I leaped furiously into the mounds of marigolds and pulled madly, trampling and pulling and destroying the perfect yellow blooms. The fresh smell of early morning and of dew-soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went tearing and mangling and sobbing while Joey tugged my dress or my waist crying, “Lizabeth, stop, please stop!” 

And then I was sitting in the ruined little garden among the uprooted and ruined flowers, crying and crying, and it was too late to undo what I had done. Joey was sitting beside me, silent and frightened, not knowing what to say. Then, “Lizabeth, look!” 

I opened my swollen eyes and saw in front of me a pair of large, calloused feet; my gaze lifted to the swollen legs, the age-distorted body clad in a tight cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed Indian face surrounded by stubby white hair. And there was no rage in the face now, now that the garden was destroyed and there was nothing any longer to be protected. 

“M-miss Lottie!” I scrambled to my feet and just stood there and stared at her, and that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began. That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood. For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility. She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life. Now at the end of that life she had nothing except a fallingdown hut, a wrecked body, and John Burke, the mindless son of her passion. Whatever verve there was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so tenderly cared for. 

Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awkward and ashamed. The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment, and as I look back upon it, I know that that moment marked the end of innocence. Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence. 

The years have taken me worlds away from that time and that place, from the dust and squalor of our lives, and from the bright thing that I destroyed in a blind, childish striking out at God knows what. Miss Lottie died long ago and many years have passed since I last saw her hut, completely barren at last, for despite my wild contrition she never planted marigolds again. Yet, there are times when the image of those passionate yellow mounds returns with a painful poignancy. For one does not have to be ignorant and poor to find that his life is as barren as the dusty yards of our town. And I too have planted marigolds.