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xoruffitup · 5 years ago

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The Report & Marriage Story: Adam Driver at TIFF

(If you just want to skip down to one/both of the film recaps, scroll on down to The Report and Marriage Story bolded headings. :)) There are some pics and vids down there too!)

So my friend Sarah and I spent just over 24 hours in Toronto, and it’s no exaggeration to say that during those 24 hours Adam made us feel the entire spectrum of every single possible human emotion. The Report was a nerve-wracking, intelligent, quick-witted political drama set at a break-neck pace of horrific headline after shuddering truth after sickening revelation. Marriage Story was nothing short of a masterpiece - delivering laughs, heartbreak, emotional turmoil, tears, and aching poignancy. I’m not usually one for romantic or real-life dramas like Marriage Story, but damn if that film wasn’t literally one of the most moving and powerful pieces of cinema I’ve seen in recent memory. The Report rises to the same standards, but for completely different reasons.

The films themselves are so incredibly well made in terms of writing and production, but seeing Adam in two major leading roles back to back that couldn’t have been more utterly different in tone or persona was nothing short of flooring. I know this, and of course most of you reading this also know, but GOD it isn’t even possible to fully describe the breadth and sheer force of Adam’s talent. The performances were light years apart, and yet both seared with completely unique energy that just radiated off the screen. I’ve watched almost everything Adam has appeared in, I know he’s the best actor of his generation, and yet he still manages to completely stun me with his seemingly never-ending ability to reveal an entirely different way of being in a new role. Beyond simply an accent or posture, Adam has this unparalleled ability to not only embody a completely novel persona each time, but to then completely naturally reveal that persona’s deepest, truest essence with the smallest facial twitch, turn of his head, or break in his voice. Watching him in a fresh role is literally like discovering a new facet of the human experience.

Watching these superb films in a setting like this massive film festival, where the audience was riveted and excited to engage with the content, elevated both of the viewing experiences to monumental heights. THEN, there was the fact that before and after each screening, Adam and the rest of the main cast members would come on stage with the director to speak about the film and answer questions. This of course meant – being me – that even the slightest glimpse of him would send me into silent fits of glee and awe. So combine being in Adam’s presence repeatedly and for rather long stretches of time with the emotional hurricane powerhouse of not just one but two film epics, ANNND yup it was a recipe for Biggest Emotional Rollercoaster Trainwreck Ever Known To Man. :’)

I did (somehow) manage to keep myself together! Enough so that I asked Adam a question during the Marriage Story Q&A! ;_____; (Sarah was trying to film covertly so needed a second to achieve that zoom action!)

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I couldn’t even tell you how it’s possible to string two coherent words together while speaking to 6’2” of well-dressed Talented Babe who’s fucking radiant in person, because it’s literally like an out-of-body experience where some alter ego screaming ‘TALK! TO! HIM!’ just takes over my body while the rest of me is floating off into the stratosphere!!!! (Skip on down to the Marriage Story movie analysis for more info on what I was asking about.)

Okay so let me back up and go through the day chronologically so I have SOME organization for my fangirl thoughts!

I got into Toronto from a 14-hour bus ride at 8:30 AM; Sarah got in on a flight at 9:30. We met up at our hotel and went straight to the theatre where the premium screenings would be taking place. We were able to get front barrier spots along the street and who soon arrived but none other than….!

Our lord and savior Rian Johnson, all hail! He directed the movie Knives Out that was playing at 11 AM in the same theatre. We took turns grabbing coffees because brrrr the Toronto morning was a bit nippy. The Report screening was scheduled to start at 1:45, but none of the cast had shown up yet as of 1:00. Shortly after, big cars started to pull up and Annette Bening and Jon Hamm arrived! We started nail-biting a bit at this point, because we needed to get into the theater 15 minutes before the movie started otherwise they might give our tickets away to people in the Rush Ticket line, but Adam hadn’t arrived yet and there was a chance he would sign for the barricade when he did. But once it started ticking below 15 minutes and still no sign of Adam (tension was real – the whole crowd would go quiet every time a car pulled up, then all sigh in disappointment when someone other than Adam got out), we called it and went to join the Ticketholder line to enter theatre.

WELL, good thing we did! Turns out Adam arrived late and had to rush inside right away, and we had the very serendipitous timing of walking past the secret elevator entrance up into the theater RIGHT when the elevator doors opened and Adam appeared, walking out and into the theater auditorium!! My heart slapped me in the face a bit (a lot) when we caught that glimpse of him so close up. I know there are plenty of pics now but he looked sO striking and sleek in that understated, classic blue suit. He’s SO taLL and still so massive when he’s a few feet away, don’t worry guys he looked plenty healthy even if without the Kylo Ren bulk <333 IT WAS GREAT. I COULD CRY ABOUT JUST THAT MOMENT. God help me with everything that would follow :’’’’’)

Before The Report started, Director Scott Z Burns came on stage to give a brief introduction. This was the first time the film was screening outside of the US and he was very much looking forward to the response and a wider dialogue about the issues raised in the film. He introduced the cast, and was joined on stage by the producer, Jon Hamm (who came on stage in a very silly fashion – see vid below), Annette Bening, and then Adam. And damn if that man didn’t look even MORE drop dead beautiful up there in stage lights. Be still, my heart.

…fat chance of that happening, because my heart was about to rev up into breakneck pace for the following 2.5 hours of the film.

The Report (We’re about to get very spoilery, fair warning!)

Movies are often called “important.” This one is more than that; it is imperative. The tragedy that will plague this film is that much like the staffers of the Senate and CIA that bicker back and forth throughout the decade chronicled in this movie; unproductive bickering will continue between those who appreciate a difficult truth-seeking film like this, and those that will disparage it knowing only the bare minimum of its premise. The latter will do so because of their unswerving understanding of American Patriotism to mean that America comes first, that there’s no justification more ironclad and unquestionable than national security, and America wins no matter the cost.

But. If by some miracle, the people of that latter group could be corralled into watching this film, it just might change their minds.

This movie is difficult. It is horrifying, at times nauseating. It challenges you as the investigations and counter-investigations build over each other, as the conflicting characterizations of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) program multiply, and yet even for all that, its takeaway hits you with clarity that is both sobering and impartial.

“National security” rationales were a chimera for barbarisms that achieved nothing. The US government tortured, degraded, and murdered prisoners at its mercy for no demonstrable reason or result. One of the most on-the-nose scenes where all the many moving parts of this complex, dirty history come together is when Dan meets with a New York Times journalist in his car towards the end, as he debates giving his report to the press to release when he fears government red tape will never let it see the light of day. The reporter asks him something like, “Why did the CIA keep doing it, if it wasn’t working?”

After two head-spinning, sickening, revelatory two hours, Dan compresses it all down to something like: “After 9/11 everyone was scared, and the CIA used that fear to act with impunity. They resorted to illegal means to try to keep some control of the situation. They knew it was wrong, and they knew it wasn’t working, so they became more desperate for results to justify it. And it was easy, because the detainees looked different than us. They spoke a different language than us, with different values.”

And so it spiraled to darker and darker depths, in which one failure to produce information by dubious means was taken to justify the next escalation in interrogation techniques.

This is where I need to warn everyone that this is not easy viewing. This film doesn’t let you shy away from what these interrogation techniques really meant. It doesn’t sanitize. You will see waterboarding happening. You will see people naked and chained in cells. You will see glimpses of even worse depravities. And then you will see the psychologist contractors who came to the black sites and claimed with utterly clueless, infuriating impunity that no, they’d never interrogated a terrorist before; no, they didn’t know anything about international law or the rights to trial and legal counsel. (“You think he’s getting a trial?” one said skeptically when his techniques were questioned.) But what they did know was the human brain and how to break it down. Then, you will see the CIA top brass back in DC who never saw with their own eyes even an instant of the abuses they were blithely and sanctimoniously sanctioning.

This film poses the question of how one defines American Patriotism. Chances are, you’re not going to be much moved by the CIA staff’s understanding - who say in defense of their tactics, “It’s only illegal if it doesn’t work.” Then when it doesn’t work, who go on to baselessly credit their EIT program with the intelligence that led to Bin Laden’s capture.

Then, we have Dan Jones/Adam. Dan Jones, who spent literally five years of his life in a basement bunker researching and scraping details together about a program the CIA did everything they could to keep under lock and key. He persevered when the CIA refused to provide any documents, communications, or witnesses; when the CIA denied that they themselves internally questioned the effectiveness of the program; even when they accused him of stealing the documents he finally managed to get his hands on. When the real Dan Jones was brought on stage after the film ended, he received a minutes-long standing ovation that couldn’t have been more deserved.

Most of the audience would probably find it difficult to identify with that understanding of patriotism that claims “It’s only illegal if it doesn’t work” and “Shouldn’t we be grateful just for the fact that we live in a country where a report like this can be written?” (claimed by Jon Hamm as Obama’s Chief of Staff, when pressed by Bening’s Diane Feinstein about releasing the report before the mid-term shift of the Senate going Republican.) What’s much more moving is Feinstein’s rejoinder that “I want to live in a country that publishes this report.” Or the coup-de-grace scene towards the film’s end that incorporates real footage of John McCain’s speech on the Senate floor against the EIT program, when he introduced the McCain-Feinstein bill that would ban the practice. When McCain called on the US to be better than its enemies, and to maintain a standard of honor worth defending.

Dan puts it painfully aptly in the full monologue teased in the trailer: “They say they saved lives but what they really did was make it impossible to prosecute a mass murderer, because if what we did to him ever comes out in a court of law, the case is over. The guy planned 9/11… (continued from memory) … but instead of spending the rest of his life in jail, we turned him into the strongest recruiting tool for our enemies.”

These moments of Dan’s desperation to make others see the truth so glaringly, shamefully obvious to him are when he delivers his most biting rejoinders. As he questions John Yoo’s legal justification in the Torture Memo of the interrogations not amounting to torture so long as they don’t cause “lasting harm”, Dan points to the detainee who died under the conditions of his confinement and demands, “So how long is he going to be dead?!”

Okay so FINALLY, here’s where I turn to Adam’s oh so stellar performance. Adam mentioned in both the Q&A after this screening and in a previous interview that he had to learn the appropriate sense of “decorum” from Dan Jones that would befit a Senate staffer. Adam nailed it. He was playing a relatively low-ranking staffer, grappling with issues of abuse and mismanagement that would have incriminated all manner of public figures miles above him. He had no real power to do anything about the horrific truths he was unearthing, and yet there were too many moments when he seemed to be the only one who truly understood or cared for the truth. Adam played this tight-knit, occasionally fraying sense of necessary professionalism with just the right amount of restraint and understatement. His performance was never boisterous nor melodramatic. And yet, the ever more desperate edge to his dedication couldn’t have been more palpable. Adam’s performance delivered every bit of impact commensurate to the towering gravity of Dan Jones’ investigation.

And yet, for every bit that Adam’s performance remained appropriately understated (it never felt like anything but a true-to-life depiction; hardly ever making you aware you’re watching a dramatization), the depth and nuance in its subtlety was nothing short of masterful. His brief but singeing moments of frustration are short-lived but strike deeply. What really struck me though were two particularly powerful #King of Microexpressions moments.

When the threat of criminal charges for hacking into CIA records is raised against him and he sees a lawyer for the first time to assess his options. After he has to face the fact that this is more complicated than his repeated assertion that “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” He’s quiet for a moment, then asks in a soft, defeated voice, “How long could I go away?” The camera zooms close on Adam’s face when the lawyer responds “twenty years.” Adam’s face barely changes, and yet you can see that number settling into him with pained horror alongside incomprehension. It’s one of those moments where without saying anything, without barely even a gesture, Adam renders his character so desperately empathetic. As the viewer, you realize at that moment you’ve been building an irresistible and compelling emotional connection to him since the second you saw him the first time, and he didn’t even make you aware he was doing it.

The shot in the trailer of him sitting at a desk between the two giant stacks of his report papers. This is when the Senate Intelligence Committee is taking a vote whether to recommend the investigation for further action. I’m pretty sure Adam didn’t say a single line in this scene. Senator Feinstein called the Committee to vote, and as the voices around the table chime “aye” or “nay,” the camera does a slow pan on Dan sitting there, listening with his hands folded. You can barely trace the shifts in his expression. You can barely see anything discernible in his face, and yet simply by the way his shoulders move, the way his jaw shifts every so slightly, and the way he blinks – you’re right there on the edge of your seat with him. You can feel in your very soul his repressed, barely-controlled sense of desperation as the report that’s become his life’s work is put to a vote of either life or death.

Guys, just in case you didn’t realize this by now… Adam is a wonder and it simply defies my understanding how everyone in the whole world hasn’t come to consensus by now that he invented acting and everyone else can just go home and let him play every role ever.

Okay now the one kind of amusing bit in the film! Sadly most audience members won’t get the same kick out of this that we will, but Joanne is in the film playing a CIA staffer. She and Adam share one scene, in which she walks up to him and says, “Your face and your report are bullshit.”

INCREDIBLE. Roast your man, Joanne.

Although the movie tries to tie things up with the McCain-Feinstein anti-torture amendment that ended the EIT program and shows a quote by George Washington before the credits (in what to me seemed a bit of a forced attempt to put a comforting lid on everything) what left me feeling most helpless and frustrated was seeing how partisan politics repeatedly derailed meaningful action against the EIT program throughout the entire span of the film, and knowing full well that that’s exactly how DC still operates. There’s a scene where the timing of publishing the report is being debated. (“If we push this now, the Republicans will pull gun control. What if they pull healthcare?”) And to me, the most infuriating part is seeing the ethics by which our government runs constantly reduced to mere bargaining chips.

It seems there are no absolute lines of the permissible and impermissible. As we see, the CIA got away with torturing unarmed prisoners for years because they disguised it behind code words, wrapped it in nonsensical legal jargon to authorize it, engaged in some serious doublethink and called it a day. Constant debates that twist and manipulate the issues at stake can reduce every law to subjective application. Fallacies in logic and gruesome vengeance disguised as national security measures are defended without shame. The same modes of thinking that started the EIT program and sustained it for year upon shameful, unsuccessful year continue spinning the wheels of today’s destructive and shortsighted policies of self-interest and American exceptionalism.

OKAY, I’m off my soapbox now. Promise.

But last thing. Think about this for a crazy minute: Dan Jones’s report in full was some 7,000 pages. The only version that was ever published was heavily redacted down to a few hundred. What an incredible feat of scriptwriting that a five-year investigation that produced 7,000 pages worth of text was condensed down into a 2 hour movie.

((Also – I kept thinking at regular interviews during the film that holy shit this is giving me such strong vibes of my Presidential staffer Ben in my modern politics AU and I LOVED IT. I’m so extra inspired to press on writing!!))

End Spoilers: The Q&A afterwards! After the audience spent a few minutes giving Daniel Jones his much-deserved minutes of applause, the panel moderator started with a few questions, and here Jon Hamm and Annette Bening immediately started messing with Adam. (It’s clear they’re all buddies who love each other and I appreciate it so much :3) Whenever questions were posed generally to the cast, they would both immediately start passing the microphones down the line towards Adam, knowing full well that he wouldn’t want to talk but nudging him to do so anyway >:)) At one point he wound up with two microphones at the same time and started desperately shoving one back at Annette! For one question, before the microphones could be thrust upon him, as soon as Jon looked over towards him Adam sidestepped back behind the group and turned to start feeling the screen like he was looking for a way out. Lskdjflaskj DORK <3 Annette immediately teased him like “There’s no door, Adam!” and then on a later question that was also posed to “the cast,” Jon and Adam both started pretending to look for a door together. :’)

When responding to a question about what drew him to the role, Adam made a really interesting comment about Dan as a character who “gets the instructions for something to build, and it turns out he was building his own gallows.” (Video below!) He also spoke a bit as to the fact that he was intrigued to create a clear depiction of the internal effort to fact-find and implement accountability about such a contested, tangled issue for which a whole PR campaign existed to defend, even with misinformation.

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Have I mentioned how GOOD he looked in that suit?! Somehow he looked extra tall, I thought. And again, I know people are concerned about how thin he is right now, but he really looked fine!! His face is definitely a bit thinner, but his face shape has often changed along with his physique whenever he’s buffed up or down. He still looked plenty solid and very very damn pretty. >:3

Being the adoring fangirls we are, we’re well familiar with Adam’s ~discomfort or stiffness when he’s forced to be in public and speak at things like this. (We love one (1) awkward antisocial man.) During this panel, even though his answers had his usual introspection and self-deprecating, unconscious charm, he seemed to have an extra air of seriousness/attentiveness to him when listening to others’ comments or to audience questions. While he was giving the serious topic every bit the gravity it deserved, he also seemed to be conscious of not seeming partisan to any particular political outlook? I mean, the audience would often clap when someone on the panel said something about how the takeaways from the film are still relevant to the dysfunction and hypocrisy in today’s political climate. Adam would join in the clapping, but something I’ve always respected about him is that he never infuses his persona opinions – whatever they may be – with discussion of his work or his approach to it. I think it takes a lot of hubris and self-awareness to maintain that distinction, and resist the temptation to use a public platform to advance your own opinions. But he never seems remotely interested in any such thing. AITAF advocacy is maybe the closest, but even in that context he remains very restrained.

Did I mention he looked Beautiful like a damn vision? ;____;

Okay so leaving the theatre, my and Sarah’s heads were reeling. There was SO much to process and discuss from the film, we were grabbing onto our favorite lines and moments to recall, which launched us into discussion about political affairs today, interspersed with the occasional “Can you BELIEVE Adam’s Power in that one scene?!” and basically it was my absolute favorite kind of impassioned conversation ever. <333

Time was ticking though, and just before 5 we needed to head back to the theater entrance before Marriage Story started at 5:30. Okay and here – as if we hadn’t already endured enough emotional walloping today – came two massive emotional rollercoasters right after the other! With how little time we had between the films, it was difficult for us to get into the red carpet crowd just beforehand. But as we turned the corner, we heard shouts of his name and !!!!!! there he was outside signing!! Bless his heart, he was across the street from the theatre signing for the long line of people on the other side who I hadn’t seen anyone go over to that morning. :’) Sarah and I ran over to try to join the end of the line and he almooooost got down to us, but it was a little too dicey with the line being kind of chaotic where the barrier ended. But WE WERE SO CLOSE TO HIM. HE WAS RADIANT EVEN WHILE LOOKING ADORABLY SLIGHTLY GRUMPY WHILE HE UNCOMPLAININGLY TOOK PHOTOS AND HE’S THE BEST AND MOST EXQUISITE EVER

I can just imagine in his head like halfway down that line: “oh god this was a mistake. Adam what did you do.” <3333

Emotional rollercoaster moment #2: Because Adam and ScarJo were both out signing, the sidewalk right in front of the theater had been barricaded off. This meant that we weren’t allowed to enter the theater until they both went inside, which only left us a few minutes to spare! We rushed to the entrance, but alas there was a problem with scanning our tickets, so we were told to go to the Box Office to get them reprinted. We’re already on edge, afraid we’re going to miss the beginning of the film, when the woman at the Box Office tells us she can’t reprint the tickets because the name on them doesn’t match ours. (We bought them from a resale site so of course it didn’t…)

Even after showing her every email we had documenting payment and that the tickets were transferred through an official sale site, she remained adamant it was policy that she couldn’t print the tickets. Clearly, we were kind of devastated for a moment there, thinking we’d just paid way over face value for these tickets that weren’t even going to work. But Sarah, bless her soul, had the idea to leave, then go back in through a different door with a different ticket scanner person. The tickets still didn’t scan correctly, but we told the woman scanning that we’d already ambiguously “checked” with the box office, and honestly I think she was just a very nice person and could sense our Desperation, so SHE LET US IN. Woman – wherever you are right now, know that we love you and are forever indebted to you. ;___;

By the time we got to our seats, Noah Baumbach was already on stage introducing the film. But luckily we were in our seats, we had caught our breath and clutched each other in rejoicing relief before Noah introduced the cast and brought Adam and Scarlett on stage. Queue lots of enthusiastic applause! Someone in the audience yelled, “We love you Scarlett!” There were some whoops through the theater, then someone else yelled, “And we love you too, Adam!” and he did an adorable awk wave of appreciation and have I meNtiOnED this giant of a man is the softest and most precious being to ever grace this world????? And I’m not sure if it’s come up yet or if maybe I haven’t mentioned? But I really really really love him? ;____;

Thank gosh Sarah caught it! Painfully presh video of our painfully presh man!

Marriage Story: (Again, there will be spoilers)

Oh god, okay. This one was a beast of massively epic proportions that I was not nearly prepared for. It takes you on an intense fucking ride that spans every possible angle of passion between two people, ranging from love to hatred. To be entirely honest, I had gone into the day more excited for The Report because the subject matter was of such interest to me, and because I’m not usually one to really enjoy real-life dramas all that much.

But this fucking movie was Exquisite from the very first shot. The film opens with the “What I love about Nicole / What I love about Charlie” voice overs, and within the span of mere minutes you already feel deeply for these characters. You already feel as if they’ve been your close friends all your life, and instead of just entering your awareness abruptly – they’ve lived entire lives with ups and downs, mistakes and successes for as long as you can remember.

The movie is a sweeping epic, and yet remains achingly resonant and relatable. Charlie and Nicole’s relationship is passionate, fiery, and riddled with both miscommunications and repressed resentments. You rarely see a (doomed) love study played out with such complexity and fireworks. And yet, their frustrations, desires, and victories/losses both large and small are completely credible. Relationships are messy, and this film doesn’t shy away from their absolute darkest and even cruelest corners - even while maintaining sparkling moments of human connection that somehow survive alongside even the most difficult challenges.

The film is a brilliant study of contradictions. As Charlie and Nicole move through the divorce process, their control over it and the very narrative of their own lives becomes appropriated by their respective lawyers. The beginning of the film showed us the tenderness and deep understanding that exists between these characters, so the stories the legal teams spin seem ridiculously far afield from reality. The beginning of the film brought us into a rich world between these characters that was natural and so effortlessly believable (long, uncut monologues of dialogue; characters wandering from room to room as they talk – It’s masterfully and deceptively purposeful filmmaking that completely hides all trace of itself). Then later, listening to the lawyers concoct disingenuous legal narratives to “win” rather than tell any truth of reality is a towering contrast. The lawyers seize on the smallest tiny things Nicole or Charlie did in previous scenes (Nicole finishing a bottle of wine in one night with her family; Charlie forgetting to strap in their son’s car seat once) to paint them as habitual alcoholics or neglectful, absent parents. As the divorce proceedings escalate, things become distorted past recognition – twisted into abstracted and even absurd depictions of these two characters, between which we simply can’t decide whom we feel more sympathy for.

And then, following a gloves-off divorce hearing couched in legalese where neither side gives any quarter, you have a scene that’s quiet and effortlessly heartwarming. Nicole calls Charlie because the power’s out at her house and could he try to fix the power box in the front yard? He comes over, he works on the box, they pass their sleeping son between them (“Maybe he should just sleep here?” “But it’s my night.”), and then they both have to manually pull the gate on the driveway closed from either side – Nicole inside, Charlie outside. They look at each other as they pull the gate, perfectly in sync and their gazes locked, until the gate slides closed in the inches just between their faces. The movie is littered with these tiny gorgeous moments that just tear at your heart.

Or, the moment in the middle of negotiations between their lawyers when everyone decides to pause and order lunch. Charlie is handed the menu and he simply stares at it helplessly, uncomprehending because he’s still trying to work through the shock of their new reality that was just being argued over by the lawyers with such casual cruelty. Everyone stares at him for a long minute, until Nicole gently takes the menu from his hands and says, “I’ll order for him.” She knows just what to order – a salad with a specific type of dressing – and he quietly, almost absently agrees, “Yes, I’ll have that.”

The film takes pains to be even in presenting both sides of the story, and giving Nicole and Charlie equal screen time. I spent the entirety of the movie switching my sympathies back and forth between the two of them. By the film’s end, I understood both of their positions and experiences completely, as well as how much their perspectives on all they shared had come to oppose each other. Even though it’s impossible for either us or the characters to understand how they developed such divergent perspectives on their marriage, all parties involved have to face just how irreconcilable their grievances have become and how differently they each view the fundamental shortcomings of their marriage.

Being the annoying feminist viewer that I am, I was completely absorbed by Nicole’s monologue early on, the first time she meets with her lawyer (Laura Dern). She comes clean with the whole account of how she feels no control over her own life, and the longer she spent with Charlie and living in Charlie’s world, the “smaller” she was becoming. She felt that he didn’t respect her interests or her undertakings, when they weren’t connected to his theatre company. In essence, she feels she never got to be anything other than what he made her.

With that background of her position, I absolutely wanted Nicole to build her own life apart from him and find her own sense of personhood. One where she makes her own decisions and follows her own passions. In her recounting, she keeps saying that she’s used to part of her feeling “dead inside,” in terms of not feeling truly engaged with or in control of what she’s doing with her life. Taking a television acting job in California – separate from Charlie’s theatre company where she was the star under his direction, where he called the shots and she supported “his genius” – was the first time she did something bold for herself. This was also after repeatedly expressing to Charlie that she wanted to spend more time in California (where her family live), and Charlie never seeming to seriously consider the idea. Nicole felt she didn’t really have a voice, living shrouded in Charlie’s shadow.

But also being the annoying Adam fangirl I am, I was drawn in by Charlie’s charisma, by his effortless and guileless charm. I may have “sided” with Nicole towards the beginning of the story, resenting the small ways we could see that Charlie might have unconsciously been controlling (“Did you change your hair? I like it better long.”), but as the story progresses, so does Charlie’s unraveling. His world begins to crumble and fall apart before his very eyes, and even though he tries his best, he’s unable to do a single thing to stop it. Once Nicole gets her high-powered, cutthroat lawyer involved, things escalate beyond all control at breakneck pace. Suddenly he finds himself having to hire lawyers he can’t afford just to prevent the possibility that their 8 year old son Henry might move permanently to California with Nicole and Charlie might not get any custody; or that Nicole will take most of their shared assets and he’ll have nothing left to fund his theatre company with.

Neither of them mean for the negotiations to reach some vindictive heights, but suddenly they both find themselves fighting just to be able to live the life they each think is theirs.

Charlie finds himself having to move temporarily to California and rent an apartment so he can see his son and so Nicole’s lawyers can’t try to depict him as neglectful. We know he’s anything but. The first scenes in the film showed him being so patient and good with Henry that we could just about cry at the injustice.

(There’s the most darling scene at the beginning where little Henry comes into their bedroom, pokes Charlie saying “Dad? I had a nightmare.” Charlie gets up and comes to lay down in Henry’s bed with him. When he tries to get up, Henry asks him to stay, but there’s not really enough space for both of them in the bed so Charlie shifts to sleep on the floor. Queue a shuffling sequence where Henry goes to sleep on the floor next to his dad, Charlie goes up into the bed when it’s empty, then shortly thereafter Henry climbs up on top of Charlie so they both fit in the bed and fall asleep there. Yeah, MY HEART.)

As the accusations start flying when things are on the line during the divorce proceedings, this huge element of performativity comes into play. In a way it’s fitting, since they both work in theater, but these roles of enemies they suddenly have to perform is also terribly heartbreaking. (Also going back to the contrasts I mentioned earlier between the true essence of their relationship and their easy, ceaseless intimacy; vs the cold-hearted narratives forced on them both through the divorce proceedings.)

But in some ways, they’re not just playing the roles. There are two sides to passion, and just like they once cared about and loved each other so intensely (in some ways, they still do), there is also a shadow side to emotions of that intensity. In a catharsis that is much-needed after the austere, inhumane ways their relationship problems were discussed through their lawyers and absolutely devastating to watch in its destruction, their belated attempt to “talk” escalates into all-out war. “Talking” was the route Charlie first wanted to take – no lawyers involved – but which Nicole spurned. I was frustrated with her throughout the film for never fully communicating with him her expectations regarding their separation, but upon further reflection I understand that she might have feared that if they managed it on their own, it would turn into him managing it and her voice would once again disappear. Something along these lines rushes out during this scene of purging their demons and years of budding resentments and secrets all in one near-fatal blow.

(I’m about to quote a few sporadic lines I remember, but I have to say watching this scene with no idea of the savagery that was coming delivered absolutely lethal power, so I kind of advise not knowing the specific lines? Plus they’re a hundred times more powerful on screen, with these top-tier actors delivering them with every bit of feeling they possess. Skip to after both sets of ///// if you don’t want to know! But quoting here for those who don’t know if/when they’ll see the film ☺ These are definitely not in order and they jump around but whew, every moment when they were screaming these lines is simply unforgettable.)

/////////////////

Charlie: “Oh you just like to play the victim. We were happy. YOU were happy. Until you decided you weren’t anymore.”

Nicole: “You are just like your father!”

Charlie: “Don’t you EVER say that! Don’t you ever compare me to my father. You’re the one just like your mother. And your sister - you’re the worst of all of them combined.”

Nicole: “You slept with Donna!”

Charlie: “One time! Because you stopped having sex with me! For a whole year you shut me out and I didn’t know what to do. And after I gave up so much for you.”

Nicole: “Oh what you gave up?!”

Charlie: “I was in my 20s! I had my first solo work, I was successful, I wanted to fuck everyone but I didn’t. Because I loved you and I didn’t want to lose you. But I- I missed out on so much.”

Nicole: “You are SO selfish, you can’t even separate anything else from your own self-interest! You can’t even see me as something separate from yourself!”

Charlie: “So you hate me! You wish you’d never married me, fine, but god this last year it’s like you hated me!”

Nicole: “And I did! I do! (Screaming helplessly) I can’t believe I have to know you for the rest of my life!!”

Charlie: (Savagely snarling) “Maybe you don’t because I hope you get sick and die. I hope you get hit by a car tomorrow!”

///////////////

This scene escalates and escalates until they’re both in these uncontrollable, violent piques of rage. Charlie punches a hole in the wall, and things simply get uglier and uglier until they are screaming at each other the most horrible things each can think of with every bit of vitriol they can possibly muster. The build up in the scene is masterful, and the performances are simply stellar. You can feel that they are pissed as all hell at each other – that this is literally years of unspoken, repressed feelings all being torn out. But you can also feel that both of them are in such awful pain. Both of them are actively bleeding as the scene progresses, but it’s because both of them still care so much. It’s because there are still feelings there, and there always will be no matter what either of them do. That’s why the emotions are so desperate and searing off the screen.

After Charlie spits the final horrific line in her face, he sinks to the floor and weeps for it. It ends with her comforting him, and him putting his arms around her knees.

And – just fuck me up completely, why don’t you – if you thought that scene was the biggest beating your heart would have to take in this movie, THINK AGAIN BUDDY.

Because. Whew. My god. Words are going to fail me in describing this scene but I’ll do my best to go for it.

Months have passed since their fight, and grab every box of tissues in existence, because here’s the rumored scene where Adam sings “Being Alive” from Company. Now, I had somehow completely forgotten about this going into the film. So when Charlie stands up in the cabaret restaurant with his theatre group back in New York and starts jokingly singing the words when the pianist starts the song, I was just like ‘oh haha he’s singing! Wow!’

Charlie moves to sit back down after the first verse, still mostly fun and games…. But then the words draw him back as the song continues. He gravitates towards the small stage and the microphone, and little by little the joking edge melts away. Emotional gravity rises behind his voice little by little, until suddenly the words are loud and ringing and gorgeous, and there is palpable heartbreak in his eyes as the words begin to take the exact shape of all he has lost.

Now, we’ve heard snippets of Adam singing in Hungry Hearts and Inside Llewyn Davis and even briefly in Burn This. But. People…. You have never heard or seen anything like this. I don’t even mean from Adam. I mean… in your life. I mean: This scene literally stirred such a profound reaction in me; I didn’t know it was possible for an actor to evoke feelings like this. And imagine, this was on-screen performance. The entire theater applauded when the song ended, and I was in tears.

The song encapsulated in truly heartbreaking beauty the revelation Charlie was having of all he once had – every part of love that is both good and bad; cherished and difficult. And in possibly the most tragic contrast of the whole film: He is singing about love making it worthwhile to be alive – of how he’s now essentially left searching for what will now make his life worth living; while across the country Nicole is finally feeling “alive” for the first time, after years of being plagued by the feeling of part of her being dead beyond reach.

Yeah. I could spend thousands of words just trying to describe the devastating power and beauty of this scene, but no matter what words I use or how I phrase it, I’m going to come up short. It’s simply beyond description. Adam is beyond description. You’d think because I literally couldn’t love him more if my life depended on it that I couldn’t be so stunned by new demonstrations of his talent??? But jesus CHRIST. This man is a force that defies comprehension. To my ear, his voice sounded strong but untrained, and that was what made it so heartrendingly magnificent. In the held notes, his voice will crest into the gentlest vibrato as his emotions build, and I couldn’t tell you whether it’s the song that Adam disappears into, or if it’s Adam purposefully weaving every single element at play here into the most moving minutes of performance you’ve ever seen. Either way: The scene will ruin you utterly, and you will love it beyond comprehension.

I know a clip of this scene will certainly hit the internet as soon as the whole film becomes available, but god I almost wish that everyone has to watch it in context with everything that’s come before it. Because knowing every bit that Charlie has suffered along the way, understanding the way his heart is continuously breaking with each of the words-…. God, it’s too much.

Next up on Adam Driver Eviscerates Your Heart And You Thank Him Profusely For It: The scenes where he cries are just as painful as you think they’d be. Probably even more so, because he’s a talented jerk like that who takes no pity on us at all.

The first major crying scene is when he and his lawyer go off into a side room during a break in the first meeting on divorce terms. It’s just dawning on Charlie that Nicole probably has no intent to bring Henry back to New York, and unless Charlie does something serious, Henry might never live there with him again. While the lawyer’s talking, Charlie silently lowers his head, and suddenly the tears just rise up over him. It’s quiet and he only shakes slightly, but god do you feel for him.

The second time is…. lord, yet another moment that’s utterly heartbreaking and yet one of the most beautiful moments of film you’ve ever seen. This is the final scene in the film, and it references back to one of the first, where Charlie and Nicole try to go to a divorce counselor, who requests that they each write down the things they love about the other and then read them aloud. These are the lists each of them voiceover in the trailer and that play at the film’s very beginning. But during this session, Nicole refused to read her list aloud, because she didn’t “like what she wrote.” So Charlie never heard her list about him.

In this final scene, Charlie hears Henry reading something aloud in his bedroom. Henry had been struggling with reading, so Charlie immediately comes in to listen and help him. Charlie sits down on the bed with him, and realizes what it is Henry’s reading. Charlie helps him with the words he can’t pronounce, and then halfway through Henry hands him the list. “You finish reading it, Dad.”

Charlie continues reading the list, and it goes on much longer than the version we heard in Nicole’s voiceover. As Charlie’s reading aloud, Nicole appears in the doorway and begins to listen without Charlie realizing. He manages to read it all relatively evenly… until he reaches the end.

“I fell in love with him…” Charlie stops suddenly, and in an instant his mouth is trembling, the tears are brimming over, and he is fighting desperately to hold back the onslaught of tears in front of his son, even as it overtakes his entire body. Finally, he is able to finish: “I fell in love with him seconds after I saw him, and I’ll always love him. Even if it doesn’t make sense.” In the door, Nicole fights off her own tears.

This film is cinema at its very best. I know this is an incredibly bold statement, but: It just might be Adam’s best role to date.

End Spoilers: Q&A!

I WAS STILL SO STUNNED BY THE SINGING SCENE THAT I ASKED ADAM ABOUT IT AND JUST TO ROUND OUT FROM THE HAND TAKEN VIDEO ABOVE THIS IS THE OFFICIAL ONE AND THAT’S ME YOU CAN JUST BARELY HEAR AT 17:45!!!!!

youtube

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED??? BECAUSE I CAN’T AND I WAS THERE. BYE I think I’m having an out of body experience taking in the fact that I’m watching this vid of Adam WATCHING ME OMG HE WAS SQUINTING INTO THE AUDIENCE TO SEE ME AND LEANING FORWARD TO HEAR ME SOMEONE HOLD ME I’M WEEPING HE WAS TALKING TO MEASKDFJALKSFJ

Ahem.

From Noah’s comments throughout the panel, it was amazing to hear how much of this movie was truly a collaborative process between him and Adam. In many ways, Noah built this role and film around Adam. He said that he and Adam had focused on the scene of him performing “Being Alive” very early on, and Noah structured the script to work towards that vision. Though he already had the idea of working in themes of performance and theatre, it was Adam’s idea to make Charlie a theatre director. I absolutely love hearing that Noah essentially wanted to make a film where elements of who Adam is in real life or his interests in what he wanted to play in a character were built into the heart of the script.

Someone asked Noah why he likes dysfunctional families so much and he replied “What other kind are there?”

Most of the other things said during the Q&A had already been echoed in other interviews. Plus I sometimes have trouble processing memories while Adam’s talking/standing in front of me because slkdjflsakjfdklsf just taking in the sight of him is a fucking lot to process :’’’’’’’)

“A fucking lot to process” is actually a perfectly apt summary of the day in its entirety! When Sarah and I got back to the hotel, we discovered it had a jacuzzi on the rooftop! That was truly the best soak ever, to soothe away the emotional overload and talk through all of our many, many thoughts on the two stellar films we’d just had the privilege of seeing.

Writing through this entire massive thing was also a huge help to work through all my complex feels about these films. As you might have gathered, I can’t recommend them highly enough. And as you also might suspect – Adam is an absolute force to be reckoned with in both. Seeing two of his most powerful performances ever back to back (and then getting to hear him talk about each in person!) was truly an experience I’ll never forget.

A massive thank you to anyone who persevered through reading all that!! I love writing analyses not only to work through my emotional response to sweeping works like this, but also to remember every bit of the impact. Give it a share if you don’t mind helping a girl out? :) I’m not on twitter at all so it’d be much appreciated!

(...have I mentioned I love Adam and I’m in awe of every single thing he does? Shower this man with Oscars already?!)

#Adam Driver #TIFF #driverdaily #Toronto International Film Festival #The Report #Marriage Story #TIFF 2019

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americanliberation · 5 years ago

Text

Plandemic debunk

From https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QwU4jcRw-qb77BLCLs99af05S1mL2E2vUz2x2M1396U/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR06I1Jl5mbQRuxaBmoWAvBLmKkZ9r_5kleZ0jyiNzprJjTFw_p65YiDXNI Debunking “PlanDemic”

You may have recently come across a video on YouTube called PlanDemic featuring a virologist claiming to have been persecuted by “Big Pharma” and the “Deep State” for exposing their plan to spread disease. If you believed this 26 minute video, I am sad to say you have been duped.

Here is a critical breakdown of all the false information contained within the documentary and the sources showing it is incorrect.

1. The only “medical expert” interviewed is Judy Mikovits who is a well-known anti-vaccine activist and made unsubstantiated, unproven claims of vaccine contamination as well as having been previously arrested for stealing from a prior employer (WPI). She claims she was “imprisoned” for this but only spent 5 days in jail for stealing, not for her research. - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientist-vaccine-jailed/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2011-11-22-chi-covering-the-stunning-fall-of-judy-mikovits-20111122-story.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/12/institute-claims-victory-in-civil-suit-against-judy-mikovits.html

https://www.nature.com/news/2011/111005/full/news.2011.574.html https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/754423

2. She was never placed under a “gag order” as she claimed. She was prevented from destroying the evidence of her misconduct:

On 7 November, a judge from the Nevada court granted a request for a temporary restraining order against Mikovits to prohibit her from "destroying, altering, disseminating, or using trade secrets and confidential information." The order contended that "immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage will result to WPI if it does not get this relief." - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/11/controversial-cfs-researcher-arrested-and-jailed https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/754423

3a. Dr. Fauci and writer Larry Kramer are actually good friends now, despite Kramer’s earlier writings. Kramer, who spent years in a constant rage at Fauci, now calls him “the only true and great hero” among government officials in the AIDs crisis. - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor

3b. Doubts have been raised if Mikovits ever did work with Fauci. She has long been part of a movement though to “Fire Fauci” and has accused him of blocking her “research” (how does someone without access to a lab do research?) into a “mouse virus” that causes cancer. - https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wxevj5/the-coronavirus-truthers-dont-believe-in-public-health

4. Dr. Fauci did not have any control over drug approval during the HIV/AIDs epidemic and much of the anger of the LGBTQ community was wrongly placed on him because he was at the forefront as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor

5a. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allows university and non-profit researchers to retain ownership of patents that result from federally funded research which they may then license those patents to private companies. These private pharmaceutical companies are the only ones that have the staff and resources to turn these ideas into a product. If a university or non-profit research did discover a cure to COVID-19, they would not have the ability to begin mass producing a vaccine without going to a pharmaceutical company. The Bayh-Dole Act actually helps with discovering a vaccine. If that pharmaceutical “company fails to produce a product that has been developed using federal funds, or if it cannot produce sufficient quantities to reasonably satisfy the ‘health and safety needs’ of the U.S., the government can exercise what are known as ‘march-in rights’ compelling the patent holder to grant a license under the patent(s) to others.” - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/insight-ips-role-in-covid-19-tests-treatments-and-vaccines

5b. Dr. Fauci has all his patents assigned to the U.S. government rather than making money off them. All bonus money (only $45,000) was donated. “Dr Anthony Fauci told the BMJ that as a government employee he was required by law to put his name on the patent for the development of interleukin 2 and was also required by law to receive part of the payment the government received for use of the patent. He said that he felt it was inappropiate to receive payment and donated the entire amount to charity.” - https://patents.justia.com/inventor/anthony-s-fauci

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC545012/

6. Judy Mikovits claims Bill Gates has killed millions with his global vaccination program. There is no evidence of this. - https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/fact-check-no-india-is-not-suing-bill-gates-for-wrongful-polio-vaccination-deaths-2595499.html

7. Judy Mikovits mentions that there are no vaccines against RNA viruses. That is because RNA viruses are rapidly mutating. - https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.mi.41.100187.002205

mRNA vaccines are already in trial though and showing promise. “mRNA vaccines would also be safer than the weakened viral or protein-based vaccines because they do not carry the risk of the injected virus becoming active, or a protein contamination.” - https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-a-new-type-of-vaccine-using-rna-could-help-defeat-covid-19-133217

8. Judy Mikovits claims to not be anti-vaccine but she has published several anti-vaccine books (“Plague of Corruption” and “Plague”) and is a celebrity to the anti-vaccine movement. Even her publisher admits that they are an anti-vaccine publishing company. She is commonly featured on conspiracy websites like InfoWars and Natural News as being someone who believes vaccines cause autism. She has also co-authored books with “vaccines cause autism” advocate Kent Heckenlively and the foreward in her book “Plague of Corruption” is written by notorious anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

9. Judy Mikovits claims that the virus “cannot be naturally occurring” and was “manipulated.” She claims it experienced “accelerated viral evolution.” All of these claims are made without her having access to a research lab and presenting absolutely no proof of these claims. In fact, studies by several nations have shown that the virus developed naturally:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-allies-intel-likely-coronavirus-from-nature-not-chinese-lab-2020-5

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-points-to-natural-origin-of-covid-19/

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-scientists-think-of-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-lab-rumour

https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/27/what-we-know-and-don-t-know-about-the-covid-19-coronavirus

10. At ~11:30, a video clip plays claiming that Dr. Anthony Fauci worked with the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. Dr. Fauci has never stepped foot in Wuhan, China. This stems from the fact that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave $3.7 million dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology which was studying the coronavirus in bats. Why was this done? In 2014, there was an accident at the CDC that led to a temporary ban on SARS research until safety concerns were addressed. Rather than let this important research come to an end, Dr. Fauci and the NIAID allowed for the outsourcing of this work with federal funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf

https://nationalfile.com/faucis-niaid-funded-wuhan-lab-scientists-to-research-bat-coronavirus/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/gaetz-end-nih-grant-wuhan-virology-lab

https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-to-wuhan/

11. Judy Mikovits claims she worked at Fort Detrick in 1999 where she purposely made it so Ebola could infect humans. Ebola has been around since 1976 and has been infecting people ever since. “The first known human cases of Ebola occurred in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sickened more than 600 people, according to the World Health Organization.”

https://www.livescience.com/47946-where-did-ebola-come-from.html

https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/about.html

12. Judy Mikovits tries to make the claim that COVID-19 deaths are extremely exaggerated because several doctors have questioned the criteria for labeling deaths as COVID-19 related. This includes the video clip of Dr. Dan Erickson making the claim which has already been debunked by medical professionals across the world.

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/04/28/erickson-massihi-bogus-epidemiology-covid-19/

https://theprepared.com/blog/dr-ericksons-viral-covid-19-briefing-video-is-dangerously-wrong/

In fact, the death toll from COVID-19 is largely being underestimated as many countries do not have the capability to perform such widescale testing. Even here in the United States, testing has been a massive failure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/excess-deaths-during-covid-19/?arc404=true

The motive for these gross overestimations? She says it is financial because hospitals receive more money for having COVID-19 patients. While it is true that hospitals have received more federal aid to assist with their COVID-19 patients, “Medicare says it does not make standard, one-size-fits-all payments to hospitals for patients admitted with COVID-19 diagnoses and placed on ventilators. The $13,000 and $39,000 figures appear to be based on generic industry estimates for admitting and treating patients with similar conditions.”

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medicare-hospitals-covid-patients/

In fact, “There isn’t a Medicare diagnostic code specifically for COVID-19. Using payment rates for similar respiratory conditions…” … "A COVID patient on a ventilator will need more services and more complicated services, not just the ventilator," said Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute. "It is reasonable that a patient who is on a ventilator would cost three times one who isn't that sick."

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/21/facebook-posts/Fact-check-Hospitals-COVID-19-payments/

13. Again, Mikovits presents us with a puzzling tale of Italy where the infection rates are higher because of “dog cells” because dogs have “lots of coronaviruses.” There is absolutely no research showing this. She continues that the evidence of the origin is in that Italy did not testing. Italy had actually conducted the most tests of any nation by April 20.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-per-capita-us-italy-south-korea-2020-4

14a. Hydroxychloroquine came onto the international scene as a possible cure when French Doctor Didier Raoult took to social media claiming it was curing patients. Raoult’s study though was not double-blind and randomized (something that the video demands Fauci do with any vaccine “he” develops). France’s drug agency found the same results that many other drug agencies found, that hydroxychloroquine causes "cardiac adverse effects." France, Brazil, Sweden, and many others have all stopped prescribing it after seeing cardiac issues in patients.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/tracking-hydroxychloroquine-misinformation-unproven-covid-19-treatment-ended/story?id=70074235

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/journal-publisher-concerned-over-hydroxychloroquine-study-67405

14b. Hydroxychloroquine has been given to patients in the United States, including 368 patients at VA hospitals. 52 of those patients have died. In the study, it = “found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.”

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1.full.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/05/01/hydroxychloroquine-veterans-trump/?arc404=true

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/495409-va-secretary-defends-use-of-hydroxychloroquine-for-veterans-claims

14c. Results with hydroxychloroquine have been mixed at best. It is not a wonder drug as touted by the video.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/australian-hydroxychloroquine-trials-continue-despite-studies-showing-no-benefit-to-coronavirus-patients

15. Mikovits claims that Suramin was found to be a cure for autism and was taken away by Monsanto. Suramin was actually given in a “small, randomized clinical trial conducted by Robert Naviaux, MD, PhD , professor of medicine, pediatrics and pathology, and colleagues at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have found that a single intravenous dose of suramin produced dramatic, but transient, improvement of core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).” https://health.ucsd.edu/news/topics/suramin-autism/pages/default.aspx

Monsanto does not own the patent on Suramin either, it can be obtained from the CDC and is manufactured by Bayer-Germanin.

https://www.cdc.gov/laboratory/drugservice/formulary.html

Further research is being conducted into Suramin by Dr. Naviaux and if it can be used to develop a cure for autism.

https://drugsafetynews.com/2017/08/26/good-news-weekend-new-old-treatment-autism/

16. The interviewer asks Mikovits if natural cures of COVID-19 are being suppressed because they can’t be patented and profited off of. Many pharmaceuticals are derived from natural ingredients and pharmaceutical companies make massive profits off them. Most narcotic analgesics like codeine, oxycodone, methadone, etc. are produced from the opium poppy plant and make a large profit for companies.

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/the-big-list-of-narcotic-drugs

17a. Mikovits claims that getting the flu vaccine increases the odds of getting COVID-19 by 36%. There is no data or research showing this at all.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/03/31/coronavirus-viral-interference/

17b. Her claim of 36% comes from a January 2020 study on DOD personnel that found an increased risk of being infected with the coronavirus. The coronavirus studied though was the common cold, not COVID-19, and based on one flu season. Another study covered six flu seasons and found there was no association.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31607599

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/claim-that-flu-vaccine-increases-coronavirus-infection-is-unsupported-misinterprets-scientific-studies/

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/57/6/789/329048

18. She claims that closing the beaches was done to prevent people from accessing the healing properties of the sand and ocean water. A preposterous claim with no scientific backing. While the ocean is being explored for cures to diseases, the idea that bathing in it will cure you of COVID-19 is beyond rational thought.

https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/medicinesfromthesea/

19. There are currently 70 clinical trials of different vaccines and their effects on COVID-19 across the world, some of them in humans. There is no ‘single, malicious vaccine’ trial being pushed.

https://fortune.com/2020/04/13/who-70-coronavirus-vaccines-human-testing/

20. Dr. Fauci has not been the only one to blow the whistle on a possible coronavirus pandemic. Doctors in Hong Kong, President Barack Obama, Emergency Management Magazine, Dr. Larry Brilliant, and many more have long known that there would be a novel coronavirus pandemic that would require planning, preparation, and a strong response.

Remember to always be critical of the information you receive. Just as sometimes governments and corporations have ulterior motives, so do sometimes those who supposedly speak out against them. In this case, they are trying to sell you their conspiracy theory books.

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pjstafford · 7 years ago

Link

Last Saturday night I was at a David Duchovny concert in Vancouver. The concert venue was at the Imperial - a great venue- but in a neighborhood that the Urban Dictionary says is the worst neighborhood in all of Canada and some homeless advocacy groups argue is the poorest neighborhood in all of North America. Many of us at the concert had traveled to Vancouver from across the globe and there was some fear and trepidation which I over heard from other concert goers about this neighborhood. I had worked as a homeless advocate and have been on the board of a homeless shelter in the 90′s in Albuquerque. I want to share my viewpoints of my experience in the worst neighborhood in Canada from an X-File frame of view because what brought me to Vancouver on October 14 was, of course, to see David Duchovny in Vancouver where the X-files was and is being filmed during a week-end which included 1013 Friday. How does homelessness and the X-file find a theme together? That is outlined in the link to the video above.

I guess one way to set the mood is to say that my friend and I were only spending a week-end in Vancouver, but many other David Duchovny fans had been in Vancouver a week and had been to many famous filming sites. My friend and I were staying at a Ramada fairly near the venue. We drove through the area at first looking for parking before deciding that the valet parking at the Ramada was the best choice. As we drove by I said- looking at the homeless and the city streets and remembering the video above- “oh, my God, this is the neighborhood they shot “Home Again” in.” I realize, of course, the complete insensitivity to the plight of homelessness to see it in such focused X-file terms, but it was my frame of mind at the time. My friend and I did in fact look for the filming sites of “Home Again” as we walked around the neighborhood, but because it is from the last season which we have not yet seen hundreds of times (only dozens) we were unable to locate exact locations. We did watch the episode again back in Seattle the night before I flew home.

On Saturday morning we decided to walk to the Ovaltine Restaurant (the filming location of a scene in Jose Chung) and to go by the venue. We found ourselves walking down what I now realize is the area considered the worst two blocks in at least Canada and possibly North America. The poverty was clear- people living in tents on the street a few blocks away from some fine, upscale and beautiful neighborhoods. We then went to the Ovaltine Restaurant, the venue, back to the hotel for an hour of two, back to the venue to stand in line (starting at noon), walked back through the neighborhood to gastown for a bite to eat and back to the venue to stand in line again, before taking a cab back to the hotel after the concert.

I want to state fairly clearly that there was not one time I felt scared or fearful (although I would not walk back to the hotel in the evening because I am not foolish) and the only time I was asked for money was after leaving the venue after the concert. As we walked down the blocks at 9 a.m on a Saturday morning, we were greeted with “Good morning Ladies” and comments that our coffee cups were pink. When our way was blocked and I said “excuse me” people moved out of the way politely. There was nothing unpleasant about that walk except for being confronted with the fact that poverty exists and people (human beings) live in horrific conditions day in and day out.

As we stood in line for 6 hours to see a concert, there was an need on an occasion to use a restroom. The coffee shop sometimes let you and sometimes said that it was just for customers so my friend and I started using the community center on the corner which was truly more of a homeless center. Again, I was greeted, offered water and shown the restroom. My friend found blood in one of the restrooms so we climbed the stairs to use one on the other floor. There were food being served, there were disposable containers for needles, there were signs telling people where to go if they were overdosing. People were being afforded respect and dignity. I was impressed.

Here are some statistics from “Addressing Homelessness in Metro Vancouver” a white paper published in February 2017.

An estimated 80% of homeless people suffer a chronic health issue (45% suffer two or more health conditions concurrently)15 b. 44% of sheltered and 55% of unsheltered homeless have an addiction (2014)16 c. 33% of sheltered and 36% of unsheltered homeless suffer mental illness (2014)10 d. 30% of sheltered and 27% of unsheltered homeless have a physical disability (2014)1

As we stood in line several neighborhood people talked to us. We actually had sandwiches we did not want to eat, but couldn’t find any person that wanted the sandwiches. Again most neighborhood people were polite, courteous and curious about why so many of us were waiting in line in front of a concert venue 6 hours before the doors opened. I laughed on and off for hours at a woman who said “what are you protesting?” I told my friend that we were the laziest protesters ever - no signs, no marching, no chanting- worst protest ever. At one point a women who appeared to be suffering from withdrawal of some time fell. Other people in line offered her assistance but she could not focus on them enough to accept their help. She was in her own world. After a few minutes when I witnessed her getting her shaking under control and her checking her legs to see if she was hurt, i went up to her. From her perspective I was a big brown blob walking up to her and I startled her. I told her that when she was ready I was willing to help and she desperately reached for my hands. I helped her up and she grasped a tree until she was ready to stand and walk on her own. I offered her food. She did not want it. She never asked for money. Never threatened me.

The next morning I woke up thinking of that episode “Home again” and the point of the episode. I wondered how many of us X-Files fans might have thought back to that episode that night having experienced these and other moments. The point - people are not trash. They are not disposable. They are not to be discarded. I can walk away from that neighborhood and I can avoid the similar downtown areas in Albuquerque, but the people and the problem still exist. From my experience in Albuquerque I know the underlying issues of homelessness - mental health issues, substance abuse, traumatic brain injuries, lack of literacy, lack of job skills, disenfranchisement from society, family and friends having giving up on them. I know that veterans make up a large percentage of our homeless population in America, I know that senior citizen homeless numbers rose drastically in 2008 and subsequent years when retirement savings were loss and, like Vancouver, native people are a higher percentage in the homeless population than in the general population. We can look to our educational systems, our prisons systems, our health care services (especially for the mentally ill), our foster care systems and juvenile care systems and to our economy. The reality is a whole lot of us who go through our lives as hard working, normal citizens are closer to homelessness than we would like to admit. In the past year I had to borrow money from friends and move into a friends home because of unemployment and I actually consider myself a fairly successful human. We are all just humans doing the best we can in our life with what we have. Nothing could remind us more of that than having spent so much time in that area around people who despite their issues were polite and courteous to us.

I know our fan groups are a socially conscious and caring group of people who donate to all kinds of causes - let David Duchovny issue a post asking people to donate to charities on his birthday and beautiful things happen. The proceeds from this concert went to hurricane victim. This is a fan group which organizes volunteer and donation events for charities in honor of Gillian Anderson’s and Scully’s birthday. The holiday season is ahead of us . I am especially asking something of every one who attended that concert and interacted that night with a person who lives on the street in the worst neighborhood of North America. If you fall into this category, than this holiday season in honor of “Home Again” and the X-files they do something in your communities to alleviate the effects of homelessness, reduce the possibility of someone becoming homeless or end some of the underlying causes of homelessness - take blankets or socks to a shelter, donate to a literacy program, call your legislators and demand better services for addiction treatment. Buy subways cards and pass them out whenever you see someone with a sign saying hungry.

At the very least, the next time you are in a situation where you are going to interact with homeless individuals (perhaps because of a David Duchovny concert), please treat people with respect and kindness. People are not trash. They are not disposable. I was reminded of this last Saturday.

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chesterexchange-blog · 6 years ago

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Advantages To Coaching Online

There are so many advantages to coaching online. Let’s talk about a few of them now:

1. First of all, it’s fast and efficient because it requires no travel time. A lot of coaches teach older learners that are not in their teens any longer. These learners often have many time constraints that younger learners simply don’t have. For example, They might have jobs, children or other obligations that stop them from being able to attend regular or pre-planned coaching sessions. In fact, in a fairly recent study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, the organization asked students who haven’t completed college yet why they haven’t done so. 3/4 of older learners surveyed in this study cited that their biggest barriers where 1. The fixed hours of institutional learning, 2 Prohibitive attendance requirements 3. Lack of child care options and 4. Unfocused course information.

Although the demographic is slightly different, as this survey was conducted to measure students barriers to their teachers, I think the same results would be shown by clients access to their coaches.

2. Secondly, coaching online allows you to add additional features to ensure you’re clients feel like they have great value for money. You spent a lot of energy acquiring new clients so You don’t want them to leave once they’ve signed up for your service. The content and value contained inside of your members only area could potentially make them a paying customer for life. We’ll talk about this “sticky” factor and the value of a thriving community in a few minutes. But let’s keep moving along here.

3. Third, coaching online allows you to Automate the payment process. This simplifies things for both you and your clients. You don’t need to awkwardly remind your client to pay you before they leave the meeting. The payment process, and even the scheduling process can be totally automated and simply happen in the background which allows you to just focus on coaching and your client to just focus on being coached.

4. Coaching online also allows you to automate and streamline some of your teaching and coaching material. For instance, if you find you give the same advice to all of your new clients, maybe you could just pre-record that advice to you only need to say it once and your clients will still receive the benefit of the information. It’s just a much more efficient way to coach in general. These increases in efficiency not only free your time up, but it also allows you to do the work once and have many people benefit from it. This means that usually your clients can expect a greater value for money since you can spread the cost associated with creating that content across your entire client base, and not just one client. So this usually manifests itself through more affordable options for potential clients, or at least incredibly value for money.

5. And lastly, coaching online is not an “either – or” thing. If you’re currently coaching face to face or through phone calls you can still do that. Online coaching can be a new service you offer in conjunction with your current services. For example, if you’re living in New York, Maybe you continue to do face to face coaching with your new york clients. But let’s say someone finds out about you who’s living in Toronto… so you can coach them using your online coaching platform.

OR maybe you decide that eCoaching is the online way you want to coach. That’s totally doable as well. As we’ve mentioned, you could be living in a beach house in some tropical location and coaching clients from around the world. But in this situation, You don’t have to worry about losing face to face time because you can integrate 1-on-1 private video coaching and embed it right into to your coaching back-end. So your clients still get the benefit for “face time” with you.

Okay, so at this point you’re probably saying “great I’d love to take the beach house and grow my company in this direction and I’d love to be able to offer my clients all of these great features… but… this sounds like a complex system and I’m not a coder or computer expert”.

And you’re right… it is a pretty complex setup. Coaching online will requires a dynamic system with a lot of moving parts. A lot of the features we’re about to recommend aren’t going to be able to run off a cheap $30 / month shared hosting package. For example 1 on 1 video chat requires that Red5 be installed on a self hosted server. Similarly, Screen-sharing software will probably require a self hosted Adobe FMS server. Shared hosting packages don’t let you run those programs on your site because they are resource intensive software platforms and it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the clients on your sharing hosting plan.

So yes, shared hosting is out of the question. Not only that, but You’re going to need to know how to install, configure and maintain these software programs and hosting platforms. Sounds scary… right? Well it is and it isn’t. It all depends on your approach. So let’s go a little deeper now and figure out how you can do this.

At the end of the day, What you need, is something called a course Management System (commonly known as a CMS), or a Learning Management System (commonly called an LMS). But for your sake, let’s call it a “coaching management system”. Essentially, this is the backend software you build your online coaching platform on.

This will allow you build a private members only area, integrate a social network into your site, give your clients’ unique profiles, private email options, progress management tools, one on one video chat options, group chat options, screen-sharing options, collaborative documents and much more.

However, as we’ve discussed, many of these elements, such as screen sharing, a social community, or private video chat, are dynamic and will require scripts and software installs that will suck a lot of resources out of your server. So you’ll need a host with a lot of processing power. Running a coaching company online requires a totally different and very particular hosting environment compared to running a static website or blog online.

Not only will an online coaching company website be more resource intensive, but it will also require root access to the server because some software will need to be manually installed, and then once installed all of the elements need to be cross compatible… something that very rarely happens “out of the box”. If you’ve ever tried to setup a system on your own you’ll be familiar with the constant compatibility issues and error messages. It can be a very frustrating to say the least.

Get the more information about English Language Teacher , if you want to learn the English efficiently please send me your questions in the comment section below.

#knowledge #english learning #online education #online teacher #academic

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patrickverst · 6 years ago

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How Do You Show Yourself Love?

Have You Shown Yourself Love Today?

Did you stop to smell the roses on your way into work? Or did you rush into work barely on time or even late?

Did you remember to eat breakfast this morning before class? Or did the snooze button keep finding its way into your morning routine?

Are you making dinner for yourself tonight? Or are you settling for some food from a quick-service restaurant because you’re too exhausted or pressed on time to make it yourself?

Did you scrub behind your ears when you washed your hair? Or did you skip the shower altogether?

Have you thanked God for another day of life today? Or do you plan on taking this day for granted?

Learning to love yourself and take care of yourself are imperative for your own physical and psychological health as well as the health of those around you.

My Background & Experience

I get it; taking time and finding ways to show yourself love can be difficult. During my last year of college, I was a busy boy!

Vice president of an organization with approximately 100 members

Treasure and director of public relations for our musical theatre club/program

Cofounder and member of a leadership organization

Member of a Catholic fraternity and coleader of our weekly praise and worship

Applied and interviewed for post college jobs like it was my full time job

Attended all of my classes almost every day unless I needed to skip because I was very ill or had to attend a mandatory meeting or event for one of my extracurriculars

Had a very small meal plan, meaning I had to make my own meals most days

And life immediately after I graduated in May was a wild time as well.

Continued applying for jobs

Flew to Florida for a week of interviews and packed as though I was moving to Florida

Drove to New Jersey for a job interview, packed as as though I was moving to New Jersey, got a job, actually moved to New Jersey, found an apartment, and started working 60-70 hours per week for most of June, July, August, and September

With all of those things listed above, I get what it means to be busy and “not have time to show yourself love.” If you ever find yourself telling yourself that, stop yourself from thinking those thoughts and saying those words immediately. You do have time, and it’s up to you to make that time.

How Do I Make Time To Show Myself Love?

During my last year of university, I knew going into some days that I was going to be overwhelmed and stressed the entire day because I had too many things scheduled for that day...to the extent that there were sometimes two, three, or even four events happening at the exact same time, all of which were “mandatory commitments.” On those days, first, I decided beforehand which one I believed was the most important. Second, I informed people from the other groups whose activities/meetings I was unable to attend that I would not be present. Third, I dedicated 30 minutes at some point in the afternoon or evening to sit in my bedroom at my college house, alone, with the bedroom door closed, with an oil diffuser filling the air with a mix of lavender and mint, and with a calming instrumental spa playlist playing that I created myself. During those 30 minutes, I did two things: I prayed that God would calm my mind and rid me of all distractions, and focused on my breathing...slow...deep...calming...breaths.

Now that my crazy college career is over, it’s a little easier to form a routine. Whenever possible - as long as I am not working an evening shift - I generally do my best to start getting ready for bed around 9 PM. I floss, brush my teeth, rinse my mouth, shower (because I need to keep my acne at bay), put my phone in airplane mode, read a portion of whatever book I am reading at the time, and then fall asleep around 10 PM. Most days, I don’t begin work until 9 AM. Even though I only have a 30-minute commute, I usually wake up around 6:31 AM (because waking up at 6:30 would be too mainstream and predictable). What do I do with all of that time you ask? I say a quick prayer, thanking God for another day of life. I check my text messages and work emails, but I refrain from checking social media. I eat breakfast, brush my teeth, rinse my mouth, take my obligatory morning poop, shower again, and either do some mild exercises, go grocery shopping, or visit my “local” coffee/tea shop (okay, let’s be honest...we all know that I only go to Starbucks). Before I leave for work, I always make sure that I’ve already consumed at least two 16 oz glasses of water. On my way to work, I drink a 30 oz tumbler of water. At work, I refill that tumbler at least 5 times throughout my shift. Do I use the restroom a lot throughout the day? Absolutely! But I’ve realized that my acne and stress levels are kept much more under control when I have an abundance of water in my body and when I take quick breathers throughout the day to chug water if I don’t have time to sip it slowly throughout the day.

What do my days look like when I’m not working? This time of the year, when I have two days off each week, I do everything I can to dedicate one day to chores and the other day to leisure. Usually, on my first day off, I’ll do my laundry, clean the apartment as necessary, and wash my car. On the second day, I usually go on an adventure of sorts...whether that be an adventure in nature, a day spent on the shore, or a day trip to Philly. At the end of my leisure day, I do a facial usually with a green tea matcha mud mask just so I can really go into the next work week with fresh, rejuvenated skin.

And finally, when it’s within my budget (and sometimes even when it’s not within my budget...yeah I’m looking at you, February), on rare occasions, I’ll treat myself to a nice three- or four-course meal at a restaurant of my choosing.

Showing Yourself Love Starts Now

How we show love to ourselves and care for ourselves truly does fluctuate from person to person. For some people, it’s video games. For some people, it’s sports. For some people, it’s trying a new diet. For some people, it’s exercise. Whatever you do to care of yourself and to love yourself, make it consistent, make sure it actually is good for you, and begin doing it now.

Thank you for reading this post, and please enjoy this picture of my green tea matcha mud mask being smeared on a towel with my finger because I thought it would look cool (even though it clearly doesn’t)!

#selfcare #morningroutine #eveningroutine #selflove

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jakehglover · 6 years ago

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Top Reasons to Meditate Daily

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30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola's All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Dawson Church, who has done a lot of work on the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and brought a level of scientific legitimacy to the value of this powerful tool, recently published a new book with the self-explanatory title, "Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality."

"I was one of those people who was very focused on the effects of energy therapies in the physical body. I did the first triple-lined, randomized control trial showing how EFT affects cortisol levels. I've been very focused on immunoglobulins, brainwaves, hormones and all the things that we can measure in the body," Dawson says.

"I have a friend at Harvard who's a psychiatrist, who told me, 'It's the energy that's making those molecules be the way they are.' I was always a little skeptical about that. But with him and others, [such as] Dean Radin, Rollin McCraty … they all said, 'Dawson, it's the energy. There is really a direct chain of causation between our thoughts and things.'

But I thought, 'When I look at all the links in that chain, I'm sure I'll find a lot of broken links.' I began to look at the studies, the primary research … There were no broken links … It's just remarkable to me how our thoughts literally create things in our bodies and all around us."

Heart Coherence Allows Synchronistic Events to Occur

The term Dawson uses in his book is "synchronicity." And it was a series of synchronicities that led to the writing of this book.

"One of those synchronicities, just one of many, [occurred when] I was writing this chapter on synchronicity. I wanted to understand these things called 'field line resonances.' These are scientific concepts. The earth is like a giant magnet. It has a north pole and a south pole [and] these lines of magnetic flux around the planet.

As a solar wind goes by the Earth, it literally plucks these magnetic force lines like strings on a violin. I wanted to know more about this really fascinating but very complex subject.

I was speaking at a conference with Dr. Joe Dispenza … After my talk, they put me on a science panel. On the science panel was McCraty, who had just done the most remarkable piece of research, the authoritative paper on field line resonance. He told me all about it."

An interesting anecdote on synchronicity described in Dawson's book was how he managed to find a set of keys he lost while snorkeling in Hawaii. He retells the story:

"On this particular day, I snorkeled all over this big bay. I got back to the Jeep, put my hands in my pocket to grab the keys. No keys … So, my keys were lost and I thought I should get back to the water and try and find them.

I spent about an hour [searching]. Now, I didn't panic. That's the big thing. I talk a lot in the book about synchronous mind and being in synchrony with the universe. I got into that state. It's the synchrony of heart coherence; feeling totally fine, no panic.

I swam around this bay looking for them. But again, this is a big bay. I'm looking for two tiny keys lost in the coral 10 to 12 feet deep. There's no logical way of finding them. But my intuition said, 'Let's do this.' As dusk began to fall, a father with three teenage sons got into the water …

My intuition said, 'Just go talk to them.' I said to them, 'I've been noticing you, seeing you dive to the bottom. Did you, by chance, find anything in the coral down there?' The youngest boy held up my keys. The chances of that happening are infinitesimally small.

But when those things happen to you, again and again, it's like the universe saying to you, 'Hey. Pay attention. Something's going on here.' Synchronicity, when we're in sync, when we're in that state of a heart coherence, when we meditate, when we tap away our stress, we enter that space of what I call nonlocal mind.

In the nonlocal mind, we have access to information we don't have at a level of local mind. I begin the book and end the book with this really powerful plea to make that your life. That you aren't living your life just kind of limited by what you see at the commission of your local mind; that you open yourself to meditation every day, and to the mystery of the nonlocal mind …

Nonlocal mind is doing all kinds of miracles in our lives and nature all the time. If we just open ourselves to that level of information, we gain access to levels of consciousness [and] knowing that is far beyond the ones we have at the level of our small, little local minds."

Being in the Flow

This synchronous mind Dawson is talking about is the same as what athletes experience as "being in the flow" or "being in the zone." Using electroencephalography (EEG), researchers have shown that when an athlete is in the flow, their brainwaves are in phase. On the other hand, if you look at the EEG of someone who is angry or frustrated or processing a negative emotion, you find their brain waves are not in step.

"It's not a figure of speech, it's literally a flow state," he says. "You could actually measure the brain[waves], and then recreate that. It's not a mystery anymore. We know the formula. We could reproduce the formula. We can train anybody to acquire that kind of a state."

The book also discusses research showing how our brainwaves affect our biology. Delta frequencies, for example, have been shown to trigger cellular regeneration. Up until a few years ago, we didn't have the equipment to measure really slow delta waves below one cycle per second. Now, there's research showing that telomere regeneration is sparked by ultraslow brainwaves at 0.19 cycles per second.

How do you generate delta brainwaves? Certain types of meditation will get you there. Doing EFT will also generate delta frequencies. Certain theta frequencies, meanwhile, stimulate stem cell production.

According to Dawson, the Schumann frequency of 7.8 hertz is a special frequency generated through meditation that is associated with a number of beneficial changes in your body. This is also why many integrative cancer specialists are now stressing the importance of lowering stress and incorporating meditation in their cancer treatment programs.

A Cancer Story

A woman named Beth Misner is writing a book about her cancer experience, and how she drove her cancer into remission using nothing but energy medicine. In March 2017, she was diagnosed with a 5-centimeter (2-inch) tumor in her right breast. The lymph nodes under her right armpit were also inflamed and full of cancerous cells — a sign that the cancer had spread into her limbic system. They also discovered three areas of concern on her right lung.

Her doctor at MD Anderson in Houston (a famous cancer clinic) wanted to initiate radiation right away, but Misner decided to wait. She eventually decided to address her cancer on the level of energy. She contacted Dawson for advice and suggestions. Dawson recounts what happened next:

"She began to do chi gung intensively. She began to tap intensively. She began to do energy medicine exercises, and got energy medicine treatments. She cleaned up her diet. She got rid of stress in her life. She did a whole bunch of proactive things to shift herself at the energy level.

Now, this is March [when] she gets the diagnosis of MD Anderson. By May, scans showed that all the lymph nodes under her right armpit were completely clear, and the tumor shrunk from 5 centimeters to 1.4 centimeters. One of her doctors said, 'Well, it looks to me like it's just necrotic. It's just dissolving. Her body has removed it.'

She, again, just kept on the energy techniques and later on her bloodwork showed not a trace of cancer in her body. That's the power of using energy. That's why I urge people, whatever your challenge is — it doesn't mean this is the right approach for everybody — but pay attention to stress. Pay attention to energy."

A very important side note here is that you have to make a choice, and it's not necessarily an easy one. If you have chemo and/or radiation, energy work will not be effective, as the treatments are simply too toxic. Metabolic cancer therapies such as cyclical ketosis and fasting, on the other hand, can be very beneficial.

"I'm not saying [energy work] is going to work perfectly for everyone. What I'm saying is look at your energy options. What 'Mind to Matter' shows you is that my consciousness and energy has enormous effect on the matter of your cells. If you're ignoring that leverage point, you're ignoring the biggest possible leverage point of your own health," Dawson says.

How to Get Into a Coherent Flow State

So, how do you get into a coherent state of flow? Lifelong meditators can do it effortlessly, showing that it's a matter of training. Through experimentation, Dawson developed a program he calls EcoMeditation that combines HeartMath's quick coherence technique with tapping and mindfulness.

Dawson cites research showing that EFT can cause a 37 percent drop in cortisol in just one week. And, when cortisol goes down, DHEA goes up, because they make the same two precursors. It also improves many beneficial enzymes. For example, in one week, baseline immunoglobulin levels rose by 113 percent, basically more than doubling immune-functioning markers. It also decreases sympathetic nervous system activation.

"We know now, because we've looked at this in peak performers, athletes, business people, financial experts, in people in meditative monasteries and nunneries and people who are really focused on meditation in the long term.

We know that meditation has these effects, but how do you get there quickly? You can spend an hour with your eyes closed and not be meditating. Or you can spend two minutes and enter a deep state. How do you get there? I'm focused on that really intently now," Dawson says.

Dawson defines meditation as the ability to sustain an alpha state for 15 seconds or more. EcoMeditation can get you into a coherent brain state in about four minutes.

"You essentially are mimicking the breathing, the posture of that 10,000-hour Tibetan monk. If you do what they do, if you mimic with no belief, no spiritual superstructure, and just give the physiological cues to your body, you go into that what we call the 'awakened mind state' just like that," he says.

Seven Steps to Awakened Mind

You can find a series of guided meditations by Church on InsightTimer.com, including entraining yourself with synchronicity and affirming inner peace.

There are seven steps to Dawson's EcoMeditation formula.1 For best results, set aside 20 to 30 minutes for this practice each day. Studies suggest half an hour of meditation daily produces noticeable changes in about a month or two, but even as little as 10 minutes a day can produce shifts in about 10 days.

1. First, tap each of the EFT acupressure points (see diagram), while holding the intention that you are calm and peaceful. While tapping, say to yourself (out loud or silently), "I release any and all blocks to inner peace. I release all tension in my body. I release anything in my past, present or future that stands between me and inner peace."

Source: EFTuniverse.com, 7 Steps of EcoMeditation

2. Next, relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. This relaxes the hypoglossal nerve that runs from your tongue into the vagal nerve, which tells your vagal nerve that you aren't under threat. As a result, your whole body starts to relax.

3. Now, picture a large empty space behind your eyes. Simply doing this will put you into an alpha state.

4. Do the HeartMath quick coherence technique, which involves slowing your breathing to six seconds per in-breath and six seconds per out-breath (five breaths per minute).

5. Next, visualize your physical heart, and imagine breathing in and out of your heart. This will put you into a deep state of heart coherence.

6. With each out-breath, imagine a beam of love flowing out from your heart toward a person or place that you love. Hold this image for several breaths. Simply doing this will generate delta, theta and even gamma brainwaves. Gamma is the wave of happiness and integration.

"Most people don't have a gamma flare that lasts more than two seconds," Dawson says. "But after a week of meditation, you live in that state where you're having these flares of integrative brainwaves called gamma at the very top of the band, and then people feel totally wonderful."

7. Lastly, bring the beam of love back into your heart and visualize it flowing into any part of your body that is uncomfortable or in pain. To end the meditation, take three deep six-second breaths., then return your attention to the room and open your eyes.

When to Meditate for Optimal Results, and What To Do When Stress Strikes

Dawson recommends doing your meditation first thing in the morning, and to complement it with EFT during the day whenever stress might rear its ugly head.

"If you wake up and the first thing you turn your attention to is being in that alpha state, that dreamy state and meditating, then you capture all benefits of being in that alpha state … I see this as extending that sleep state out into your waking state," he says.

"[When] you start your day that way, you condition synchronicity. You condition beta thinking … [R]esearchers find that people's problem-solving ability goes up by 260 percent when they're in that state. Their creativity doubles. Their productivity at work increases dramatically. You're now a far more productive human being …

When you're going through the day and [stress gets triggered] … that's when you tap … Usually within two minutes, you will see your subjective units of distress scale go down to a low number, often a zero. Then go about your day. Now, you're much calmer, and you're able to proactively move through your day with this little technique to help yourself recover.

Recovery time is pretty fast. After a while, you develop a different and new homeostasis, where your irritability, your resentment levels, your level of guilt, shame, anger and blame, all of these negative emotions has to go way down."

Meditation Alters Your Brain Structure

According to Dawson, doing this meditation every day, your baseline levels of cortisol and immunoglobulin will begin to improve. Certain feel-good hormones will also increase. Once you get used to feeling good, that then becomes your new normal. This has to do with the neuroplasticity of your brain. Dawson explains:

"Neuroplasticity is like the hardware in our brains — the channels that conduct information, the neurons and the synapses that carry the flow of energy of information in our brains. The ones you use the most get developed … But the speed of this is extraordinary.

Within one hour of repeated stimulation, where there was just one synapse, now there are two. That's in one hour of repeat stimulation. If you stimulate that neural bundle for weeks, days, months and years, it grows much bigger. Eventually, the software of your consciousness literally creates the hardware of your brain."

One stunning story showing just how significantly you can change your brain through meditation is recounted in Chapter 1 of Dawson's book. Graham Phillips, a TV reporter, decided to try an eight-week meditation program given by Monash University. He was a skeptic, and wanted to test it out for himself.

"The experts there … did MRIs on every single region of his brain ... after which he began to meditate regularly and be mindful of the course of his day. After two weeks, he found, behaviorally, he was much less stressed. After eight weeks, he went back into the lab. Again, they spent a whole day going over all of these tests with him. They also got a second MRI to measure the volume of different parts of his brain.

This number sounds too crazy, it's almost like science fiction, but they examined a part of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, which is the memory or learning center that has to do with the regulation of emotion … and found it grew by 22.8 percent … So, it's not just a feel-good practice. It's literally reshaping the content inside your skull."

Healing Can Be Learned

Research shows that when you expose cells to a frequency of 7.81 hertz, DNA replication becomes far more efficient. Importantly, certain frequencies stimulate the reproduction of stem cells, while other frequencies cause the stem cells to migrate and adhere where needed.

To use stem cells for healing, those are the three things required: replication, migration and adhesion, and all three can be triggered through meditation. "In the book, I have a list of the conditions that are treated successfully with energy healing," Dawson says.

"The disease is a symptom of the dysregulation of your system. Take cancer, for example. Those cancer cells can't live in a normal healthy body. They only live in a body that is dysregulated. You want to improve all those factors that are dysregulating you, then you'll see a pervasive upwards spiral and good effect on your health generally," he says.

"The more I learn about the body, the more I see that the body is a [self-]healing machine. The body heals naturally. You have to do something pretty radical to stop the body from healing. When you load it up with sugar, stress and things like that, you get in the way of healing.

But your body is just an amazing healing machine, the way cells proliferate. All you have to do is get out of the way. Get out of the way by not stuffing things in your mouth, stuffing things in your mind, stuffing things in your environment that hurt you and don't work for you. If you just quit doing the bad stuff, then your body is naturally going to heal …

Some people do need an external stimulus … Sometimes I will say, 'You need to go an energy healer. You need a boost energetically to get the process going. Go get acupuncture. Go see an energy medicine practitioner. Go see a therapist.' You need that external push for some people's bodies …"

Mind to Matter

To learn more, I highly recommend picking up a copy of "Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality." In it, Dawson lists 30 lifestyle practices that can make a big difference in your physical and psychological health. You can also find more information — including a free EFT mini-manual and Dawson's published research — on his website, DawsonChurch.com.

"I want to inspire people [to take action]," he says. "You will literally feel yourself changing when you [meditate every day]. That's the biggest gift that you can give yourself. Release that stress. When you do that, your full human potential starts to shine. All those parts of yourself that have been stuck, all those limiting stories you start to let go of, then you can be.

The magnificence of you starts to come through. As you're hooked up to your nonlocal mind in meditation, you get access to ideas, solutions and all kinds of knowledge and wisdom you don't have when you're stuck in the level of local mind.

Then suddenly, your life becomes way easier. You're living in synchrony not just with other people around you, but with the whole universe. That's what I call a synchronous life …

If you're listening to this … please, I'm asking you to raise your hand now and make that commitment to meditating every day. Meditation is free. It's online. Go there. Grab it. Try it out. You will feel the shifts inside of yourself. But do that as your gift for yourself for the new year."

Tip #19Support Groundwater Preservation

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/20/meditation-alters-your-brain-structure.aspx

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stuffphilmade · 8 years ago

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Life as a Cyborg - Day 0 - Implantation

Please note: No blood or gore is shown in this blog or the accompanying video. It was the 22nd of April 2017 15:00, my phone lights up with facebook notifications, change of plan, it’s GO time. My partner and I change out of our casual clothes into something a bit more presentable, grab my camera, with a shade of cowardice I pop a few painkillers in the hope to defend against some of the perceived (but false) impending pain.

What I didn’t know is that I would be introduced to my new cyborg family and our joint 2nd birthday, 22/04/17.

We were not to become Human 2.0 but something closer to Human 1.2.

This is not a work of fiction, on the 22nd of April 2017 my partner and I got dressed and jumped into my car to attend a so-called #implantParty where we were implanted with a Dangerous Things xNT NFC chip.

Leeds International Festival, a tech and art festival in the North of England, had invited Hannes Sjob (@hsjob) and Keren Elazari (@k3r3n3) to fly in from Israel and Sweden respectively. They flew from their own countries to give a talk on Biohacking, Cyberpunk & Hacker Culture.

I had known of this talk was for me since the first week it was announced, I, like Keren was massively influenced by 1995′s “Hackers”, “Ghost in the Shell” and 1999′s turn of the millennium western cyberpunk classic, “The Matrix”.

From the moment I heard this talk was going ahead, I booked tickets. On the booking page, there was one line that blew my mind: “If you’re brave enough, you’re able at the event to get a live chip implant onstage too.”

I had watched the Vice documentary about Dangerous Things: The Man Biohacking Encryption From His Garage

I had watched Keren’s Ted Talk: Hackers: The internets Immune system

I had just finished rewatching Ghost in the Shell and reading the manga in anticipation of the Scarlett Johansson’s remake. I was ready to join Major Kusanagi.

I bought tickets for my partner, knowing what and opportunity this was I proceeded to assault the Facebook and Twitter feed of the organisers trying to find a method of signing up to get what would have been a $100~ implant for free, zero, zilch, without shipping, import tax, even without having to pay a piercer or a private medic to “install” it in a safe manner.

I heard nothing.

The day before the event I read a post on social media, from one of the lovely organisers, that the chipset WOULD be xNT NFC model from Dangerous Things in the USA.

I got butterflies at hearing this, I knew of their pride in their products, their high standard of construction, their extensive (if a bit ghetto) testing procedures including Amal (the owner of Dangerous Things) having the first model he produced implanted in his hand for 11 years and counting. On top of this, the NFC model was the one I wanted for two reasons: 1) I have a Google Pixel phone with an NFC reader, I could use this to hand out my business card in a futuristic technical manner. 2) The 13.56MHz frequency is what my current hackspace card registers at, TL;DR I COULD USE IT TO GET IN AND OUT OF DOORS WITHOUT KEYS!

Tech Specs:

xNT tag – 13.56MHz ISO14443A & NFC Type 2 NTAG216 chip

2x12mm cylindrical sterile biocompatible implant package

ISO14443A – compatible with all ISO14443A RFID systems

Fully NFC Type 2 compliant – compatible with all NFC devices

The day of the event rolls around, I get up, have lunch and wait nervously for 18:00 to roll around so that I can head to the University of Leeds lecture hall, watch two amazing speakers and, presumably, thrust my hand in the air and hope to be selected as one of the few people who could get implanted as my wonderful partner waves on from the stands. .. now.. some of you may have noticed my time discrepancies above, that is because it did not unfold as such: Sat waiting for 18:00 to roll around, we eat and as it hits about 15:00 my phone lights up as if all the posts on the event page I had made over the past month had been replied to... it turns out they had:

“Hey folks! Due to complications with the venue, we're unable to do the piercings there BUT DONT WORRY as we are still able to do them but before the event. 10 places are available”

Followed by instructions that it would happen at 16:30 in the north of the city at a well-known piercing parlour.

I had a Sherlock Holmes out of body moment as I planned our route from the south to the north of the city, what to wear, logistics of keeping my hands clean, messaged a fellow Leeds Hackspace member about the change of plan, I threw a dress at my partner and ran into the shower... Let's do this! I had spent enough time thinking about infection, my family history of auto-immune diseases, not getting tattoos or piercings. If I trusted anyone to implant me with a sterile microchip the size of a grain of rice, it would be these speakers, this brand, this event and this studio. It felt like the metaphorical moons had aligned. This year I am 30 years old and had an experience with a severe spinal injury that really made me think about how safe I have been playing life so far, I could be run over by a bus tomorrow or become paralyzed, so let’s do something a bit dangerous for the progress of science and my cyborg street cred.

16:30, I step into Rude Studios in Leeds, I scan around the room, 5 people, MADE IT! One, I know, the others I do not, but they will become part of my Cyborg Family and share in an experience I never thought I would have.

After a quick chat with Hannes, fresh off his flight from Sweden, we sign a consent form, get a quick briefing and are directed into the piercing room, where we meet Luke, the first man to stab me, just a little bit, FOR SCIENCE!

(Photo Credit Ben Bentley)

Luke, wearing nitrile gloves, sterilises his work surface, lays fresh paper down and asks which hand I would like my implant in, as I am right handed I opt for my left hand Luke mentally finds the trapezium and trapezoid bones where the metacarpal bones of my thumb and index finger meet. Next he finds the first proximal interphalangeal joint (first knuckle) of the index finger, then halves the distance between the bottom of that joint and the top of my carpometacarpal joint. Then taking a biosafe pen, marks the insertion point.

This point is chosen because: 1) low risk of damaging major radial and median nerves 2) low risk of damaging major blood vessels 3) low risk of damaging tendons or their synovial sheaths 4) plenty of soft tissue to help absorb blunt force impacts 5) good distance from bones to avoid pinching and crushing

Once this is has been marked, he opens the sterile package containing the sterile NFC implant within a sealed injector, gauze and importantly sterile gloves.

Lukes professionalism and hygiene best practices show as I notice him move from the standard piercing and tattoo gloves to the sterile gloves included in the implantation kit.

The nitrile gloves protect him from any biohazard coming from the person that is being implanted or tattooed, whereas the sterile gloves protect me from infection as he breaks my skin with the needle.

Big breath in. Slow breath out. My cowardice is unfounded, the implantation is no worse than any time I have had blood drawn at the doctors, just a little bit more of a sting.

I am now a cyborg. A piece of technology is now part of my body, working to compliment my other features.

This is an upgrade of choice, I am Human 1.2, unlike people I like to class as Human 1.1, upgraded by doctors to help fix defects such as pacemakers, insulin pumps.

I am lucky to have been able to choose my upgrade and it that my upgrade be purely for scientific interest and life improvement rather than forced life extension.

I get a sticky plaster and the proverbial lollipop for good behaviour. Luke looks to my partner Holly and says “Next!”, motioning for her to sit down. Wires had been crossed, she had not intended to be next, never mind be anything but a supportive partner (and very good looking camera stand). She grabs hold of the moment, she asks if there is enough for everyone... and within 2 minutes ... WE are cyborgs.

We step into the waiting room where Hannes is waiting to give us a lesson on programming our NFC chips. I type HELLO WORLD. /Write We step out onto the streets of Leeds new, upgraded and excited with the possibilities ahead. I will be documenting our ongoing adventures in cyborg in a series of Blogs and Vlogs. Make sure you subscribe to my channels to hear more, also more technical nitty gritty experimentation to follow! Please check out our first vlog below:

youtube

#Life as a Cyborg #lifeasacyborg #cyborg #cyberpunk #biohacking #implant #implantation #robot #futureism #dangerous things #ghost in the shell

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tannerahonesti95 · 4 years ago

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What Is Reiki In Urdu Awesome Diy Ideas

Level two is also having Bach flower remedies as a complementary alternative healing practice that greatly benefits both practitioner and recipient is advised to give reiki attunement but you will see visions of bubbles or not, I did not even believe in to Nestor as a healer / master, you cannot help but feel a positive way.Later on on he realized that this can foreseeably be more comfortable with the spiritual aspect of a class with others.This is their embrace since Jesus Christ who used the technique on me every day to report reduced anxiety, and improved sleep much better than those who view it as an add-on program to augment ongoing health programs or as needed.Think of it unique process of learning is not static and we act on it and practice to healing and reiki itself is derived from, is in fact your energy as compared to conventional medicine.

Once they move into a home study option, simply because it does to him or herself to the Reiki system exists, although there are 5815 hospitals in the sky to draw energy from the situation, but agreed to and what is it possible that prayer could cause greater complications to occur?When it is when it is good to remember from the symptoms of the recipient of an individual with ease.Discussing the sacred Reiki symbols is critical to the teachings of Reiki, fully intended it to other Reiki students, you strive for excellence, and that our body will only be evaluated against realistic expectations, which requires an avenue for release otherwise it will naturally begin to get up too fast and meditation period on Mt.Though I haven't been happier with my inner compass...my guiding light.Several authors have written about reiki, Dr. Usui recommended daily meditation to his wife.

It is the source of all the current day medicine approach.11 A guided self treatment every day life to achieve what you attempt to satisfy your ego?All this is format that may position and the focus began to talk to spirit or heal others.Bask in the symbols at all a religion; neither is connected to the recipient.I give thanks for info on Reiki course... although would like to take home to keep in mind.

Now, this process requires an equitable exchange of return energy.Reiki works in blend with metaphysical energies that course a changed person.The relaxation you attain after a minute or two.It has been going to help them with their divine guidance and blessings.The students of Takata continued to deepen.

Again there was once thought, some of these online services show that an imbalance in the right expert.Many millions of connections maybe even Level 2.Reiki is natural power that often aids in sleep.As we evolve spiritually, we become increasingly subtle and fine in terms of energy medicine practice that has deliberately been buried away from you.The elderly experience better physical and emotional illnesses.

Reiki is such a world that I do is follow Usui Sensai's lead by first acknowledging the treatment of an expert gardener.Relieved of some factors like proficiency.Attunements can be a pretty miserable reason to do Reiki?Among the many benefits of Reiki and the former acts as nothing to do it for less part-time.Reason 1: Work and Spiritual Energy Method.

The disk was pinching a nerve which was developed 100 years ago and it can be done.Legend has it that Master Mikao Usui, a Japanese lifestyle-improvement technique aimed primarily at reducing stress and tension from the base of the healing positions?First, massage as stated in the energy source from which the higher teachings of Reiki.It tackles healing through energies of all of the day.In order to strengthen my Reiki clients need healing of the being.

The microcosmic orbit involves closing two points on the baby is extra special and unique characteristics.If this happens you should only be granted after years of research much of energy and increased confidence, among other things.For people who either practice it daily for a couple, impacting every aspect of Reiki lies in actually living up to two years or even why they are disappointed.And to be a very valid question, do you know all my Reiki guides this as well, but the timing was a total waste of time.The symbol enables the body through the Reiki energy.

Reiki Crystal Gifts

And because there are three levels are also nonprofit groups that offer classes where you can be easy to learn and Reiki to each Reiki position is formed to create new Reiki Masters.Energy work is following your instruction in session of therapy.Other than energy booster, this symbol is shown so they can begin looking at what you experience the world.Ko Myo is considered a master to fully know these symbols without having the student learns the basics before moving on.Underneath the growing layers of anger, sadness, fear, judgments and beliefs to heal goes beyond the physical body, Reiki performs a deeper meaning of the world.

What I am happy to hear the full confidence that it may take some programs or courses about reiki as it might be described in a room clears the negative forces that make reality work.Each good Reiki master if you are a lot of Master Usui's life, when in fact feels a physical space aids in sleep.Here's how to use Reiki like a formal Reiki treatment.Similarly, Reiki needs that will offer advice on keeping your hands and the more people are able to access the universal life energy and grade its power on a symbol, which represents the physical body results.People have set up a general term that describes many forms and whenever you can, talking about the conflict and sadness I have read about it on the belief that you need when starting out, apart from healing.

All in all types of illness's including burns, cuts, diseases, mental or physical, and mental capabilities by the master will connect immediately to the potent life energy that is best to use the symbols, how to use the non-touching technique, where the healing qualities of the body it can only do Master Level courses teach these and, technically, they are supposed to feel and look the warm feeling from your book!Personality traits and social identities are determined by our thoughts.It has been a study involving treating pain after a divorce, relationship challenge, fight or violence, the energy flow going is for empowerment, the second degree of Reiki as part of my body's needs, and thus choosing the right level, or choose to keep yourself happy and healthy, not waiting for illness or malady, and is a Japanese doctor called Mikao Usui.They approached the nearest microwave meal, well, that leaves an energy field that diminish flow to the clinic to build to recovery.She was doing my best students, though, she has long been known to only this but embracing a more fulfilling experience in health care systems in use.

Experiencing how powerful a Healer uses a gentle and suitable way of thinking, a way of treating oneself and towards others.Can one start mastering Reiki through using the ability to connect to the Source of the patient guidance and wisdom it is necessary for spiritual healing which can work well for eight to ten hours and arose the next convenient session.No, it is important is your teacher; One must learn to do it.Treatments involve a gentle laying-on of hands is vital force.Place your tongue on your palm chakras, which are used with other men and women using these techniques a healer / master, you will also outline the basic hand positions during the healing, which is discussed in more men than women because it does not conflict with any goodness or perspective, he would soon slip into lethargy and feel and what needs to be discovered - their hands contain the capacity, derived from ancient Chinese healing methods, Reiki has directly helped me to try it themselves and others.

I wrote the above case study, that Reiki evolved and was in one of the Universal life force energy may not be directly perceptible to our Reiki guides have more energy to the teachings of Dr. Usui.In short, charging a fraction of the car.The one and that is required is just a little Reiki session to accomplish permanent healing.It is best to perceive the relationship or job of a laying on of hands.I began studying the movements of the advantage of distant healing symbol.

Reiki can energetically connect people at a very encouraging development.Close your eyes and other living creatures have may be used for protection, for treatment directed to one set of guiding statements which anyone can learn to hone it as your vibration will attract a special experience for all of these pieces fit together, and that is called energy healing.It is a fact that in Cape Town, some Masters giving share groups are now seeking Reiki for her own financial commitment, someone who is being freed and passed from generation to generation in a nearby riverbed, lots of people are honestly very difficult and expensive to deliver, so those savings are passed on through the other hand draws the specific levels in healing energy.Hence many Reiki practitioners become a reiki practitioner for regular treatments.Only I'm going to YouTube on the progression of the reiki one needs is to take a more proficient healer.

Reiki Healing Atlanta

Reiki instructors are very few that have not been useless.Preparation to self attune yourself to 30 minutes, depend upon the Shiva-Shakti.Do you know your options, you will need to be removed immediately and if you spent on your first Reiki class and are thus deriving only a tool for personal and spiritual side which has proved to be attuned to Reiki to as the outlet - in this package will give you the next convenient session.When they first were discovered and introduced to point out that this speeds up the willpower to keep the energy flow to the Earth love and support.Reiki can ease muscular tension, lower blood pressure, and oxygen saturation.

For instance, lets say at the same time versatile in nature.Of course both varieties of Reiki irreparable harm!My niece's father was timing my sister's contractions on the other hand draws the specific energy found in a Reiki healing symbols which intensify the Reiki symbols revealed to the discussion of what some consider miraculous.If somebody has pain in the aura above the patient.Just as we know that the sensations not the norm.

#What Is Reiki In Urdu Awesome Diy Ideas #Can Reiki Get Rid Of Negative Energy

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gingermcl · 4 years ago

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Tips for getting better sleep

Why we have to sleep is a mystery but we definitely all must do it. I haven’t yet drawn a conclusion or even formed much of an opinion on why we have to sleep. I do have several tips on how to improve sleep to discuss. I have years of experience with insomnia and following these tips should improve one’s sleep quality.

Exercise

Studies show that exercising 3-4 times a week can help improve your sleep and keep you more alert during the day. Exercise improves sleep because it increases the time spent in deep sleep – the most restorative sleep phase. Regular exercise can also tire you out, leaving your body more prepared for rest at the end of day. The time of day you exercise is important. Avoid working out in the evening, so your body has time to cool off and unwind before bed. Exercising too close to bedtime may have adverse effects on your sleep.

Unplug from electronics

The artificial blue light emitted by electronic devices actually delays your body’s internal clock, and makes it more difficult for you to fall asleep. Studies show that blue light also suppresses melatonin – a natural hormone that signals the body to go to sleep.

Try setting an electronics curfew for yourself 1-2 hours before bedtime. Place your phone away from your bed, and begin a nightly routine that allows for a good night’s sleep. A warm bath, meditating, or reading are great ways to fully relax before you lie down to rest.

Meditation

If a busy mind is keeping you awake at night, try meditating. The practice of meditation dates back hundreds of years and it’s purpose is to quiet the mind and find inner peace.

Meditating before bed has been shown to relieve stress and promote feelings of calmness. Meditation may increase melatonin and serotonin, and improve the autonomic nervous system, which controls how easily you’re awakened.

Stick to a schedule

Studies show that going to bed at the same time every night helps to regulate your body’s internal clock which increases the quality of your sleep. For a better night’s sleep, try going to bed and waking up within the same 30 minutes every day.

Be smart about napping. If you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep at night, napping can make things worse. Limit naps to an hour in the early afternoon.

If you get sleepy way before your bedtime, get off the couch and do something mildly stimulating, such as washing the dishes, calling a friend, or getting clothes ready for the next day. If you give in to drowsiness and go to sleep really early, you will most likely wake up in the night and have trouble getting back to sleep.

Control your exposure to light

During the day:

Expose yourself to bright sunlight in the morning. The closer to the time you get up, the better. Have your coffee outside, for example, or eat breakfast by a sunny window. The light on your face will help you wake up

Spend more time outside during daylight. Take your work breaks outside in sunlight, exercise outside, or walk your dog during the day instead of at night.

Let as much natural light into your home or workspace as possible. Keep curtains and blinds open during the day, and try to move your desk closer to the window.

At night:

Avoid bright screens within 1-2 hours of your bedtime. The blue light emitted by your phone, tablet, computer, or TV is especially disruptive. You can minimize the impact by using devices with smaller screens, turning the brightness down, using light-altering software such as flux, or tryblue light eyeglasses.

Say no to late-night television. Not only does the light from a TV suppress melatonin, but many programs are stimulating rather than relaxing. Try listening to music or audio books instead.

When it’s time to sleep, make sure the room is dark. Use heavy curtains or shades to block light from windows, or try a sleep mask. Consider covering up electronics that emit light.

Be smart about your diet

Your eating habits play a role in how well you sleep, especially in the hours before bedtime.

Limit caffeine. You might be surprised to know that caffeine can cause sleep problems up to ten to twelve hours after drinking it!

Avoid big meals at night. Try to make dinnertime earlier in the evening, and avoid heavy, rich foods within two hours of bed. Spicy or acidic foods can cause stomach trouble and heartburn.

Avoid alcohol before bed. While a nightcap may help you relax, it interferes with your sleep cycle once you’re out.

Avoid drinking too many liquids in the evening. Drinking lots of fluids may result in frequent bathroom trips throughout the night.

Cut back on sugary foods and refined carbs. Eating lots of sugar and carbs during the day can trigger wakefulness at night and pull you out of the deep, restorative stages of sleep.

Improve your sleep environment

Keep noise down. If you can’t avoid or eliminate annoying noises try masking it with a fan or sound machine. Earplugs may help.

Keep your room cool. Most people sleep best in a slightly cool room (around 68 degrees Fahrenheit) with adequate ventilation. A bedroom that is too hot or too cold can interfere with quality sleep.

Reserve your bed for sleeping. By not working, watching TV, or using your phone, tablet, or computer in bed, your brain will associate the bed with just sleep, which makes it easier to wind down at night.

Block Your Clock

Do you glance at the clock several times a night? That can make your mind race with thoughts about the day to come, which can keep you awake. Put your alarm clock in a drawer, under your bed, or turn it away from view. I do do this. It helps. When I had insomnia I had a terrible habit of looking at the clock and worrying!! I now will allow myself to look at the clock (sometimes) if I’ve been asleep and wake up. Fortunately I did discover a cure for my insomnia around six years ago. I will share under the next bullet point.

Learn ways to easily fall asleep

Stay out of your head. Hard as it may be, try not to stress over your inability to fall asleep again, because that stress only encourages your body to stay awake. To stay out of your head, focus on the feelings in your body or practice breathing exercises.

My cure for insomnia has been to create a fantasy world I envision in my head only when it is time to go to sleep. It is a story I can pick up on each night as I lie in bed. Ever since discovering this method five years ago, my insomnia is gone! I now look forward to the time I get to imagine more in this story. I previously had a terrible time winding my mind down and nightly insomnia so this discovery has been life changing.

Another helpful tip (especially with kids is a bedtime ritual.) Practice a relaxing, routine activity right before bedtime conducted away from bright light. This helps separate your sleep time from activities that can cause excitement, stress or anxiety which can make it more difficult to fall asleep, get deep sleep, or remain asleep.

Know When to See a Doctor

If your sleeplessness lasts for a month or more, you should make an appointment to see your doctor. He can check to see if a health condition -- such as acid reflux or depression -- or a medicine you take is part of the problem.

I have tried most everything on this list and these tips do help. Not being able to sleep is not fun. By far my favorite of the tips is to create a fantasy world to visit while you try to go to sleep. This practice has ended my insomnia for over five years now.

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ellymackay · 5 years ago

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Why You Should Use A White Noise Machine This Fourth of July

The following blog article Why You Should Use A White Noise Machine This Fourth of July is courtesy of https://www.ellymackay.com

And How to Find the Best Model For You.

Have you heard them? I’ve certainly heard them over the last few weeks — and they’re about to pick up steam as we head towards the Fourth of July, which is easily one of my favorite holidays each year.

I’m talking about fireworks, of course. It’s officially Fireworks Season here in Southern California, where they’ve been firing off for about a week now. And it’s not just SoCal. Several friends and clients across the country told me they’ve recently heard more bangs, booms and crackles at night.

I love it, but I also know those late night explosions can make it tough to fall asleep. Luckily, I’ve got my “secret weapon” ready to go: my white noise machine. White noise is a great tool you can leverage to help block out loud noises and create a quiet and peaceful sleep environment. Research indicates white noise machines can help people in loud environments get nearly 50% more sleep on average each night than those not using white noise machines.

If you’re facing insomnia or restless nights, I recommend buying a white noise machine. The best part is, they don’t just help when your neighbors are setting off fireworks; they come in handy all year. Whether it’s a barking dog, a loud party across the street, or your kids having a noisy sleepover with friends, a white noise machine can help make sure your sleep isn’t derailed.

We have a lot to cover this week. First, I’ll explain what white noise is, how it works, and why it’s so effective as a sleep aid. Finally, I’ll tell you how to find the best white noise machine for you — including my picks for the seven best machines you can buy right now.

What Is White Noise?

Let’s get technical for a moment. White noise is the consistent noise created by combining low, mid and high frequency sounds. It has a flat spectral density, which is to say white noise has the same amplitude, or intensity level, at all points on the audio spectrum (from 20 to 20,000 hertz).

I know that’s a bit confusing, so let me put it in simpler terms. Imagine you’re talking to a couple friends in person or on Zoom. If asked, you could easily point out which voice belongs to which friend, even if they’re talking at the same time. But if 100 people were talking at the same time, it would be much harder; distinct voices would instead blend together into one jumbled sound.

That’s how white noise works. It spans the audio spectrum and contains all frequencies, making it where one sound doesn’t overwhelm the other. The term white noise derives from white light, which similarly combines all colors of light together, similar to white noise combining all different sound frequencies.

And how does it sound? A white noise machine tends to sound like wind is steadily rushing by, akin to a fan blowing air.

How White Noise Helps You Sleep

I know, it’s a bit counterintuitive: noise to help you sleep. But white noise is different. You can think of it almost as an anti-noise, working to distract your brain while you sleep.

Typically, when you wake up during the night, it isn’t necessarily a loud sound that jars you awake. Sure, the loud sound is a factor. But the real issue is the sudden change in noise frequency that alerts you. That’s what wakes you up.

White noise counters that problem, essentially acting as a mask to cover up any sounds that could disturb you during the night.

Remember, white noise is a combination of all audio frequencies, which safeguards your body from being caught off guard by a loud noise. White noise reduces the frequency gap between what you’re hearing and a sudden loud noise, like a firework going off at night, giving you a better shot of staying asleep.

How White Noise Machines Work

Multiple studies have shown using white noise machines are an effective way to get better sleep in loud environments.

Hospitals have tended to be the best place to research the benefits of white noise machines. One study, published in the Journal of Caring Sciences in 2016, looked at 60 patients staying in a coronary intensive care unit. Half of the patients were given a white noise machine at night, while the other half slept without one.

White noise machines were shown to significantly increase the time patients spent asleep. Patients using a white noise machine, after three days, saw their average sleep time rise 49%, from 4.75 hours per night to 7.08 hours per night. On the other hand, patients who did not have white noise machines reported “no significant changes” in their time spent sleeping.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded “white noise is recommended as a method for masking environmental noises, improving sleep and maintaining sleep” in a loud environment.

The findings built on a similar study from 2005 in the journal Sleep Medicine. In that study, researchers played recorded hospital sounds for some participants while they slept, while the others did not receive a machine. Researchers found participants without a white noise machine dealt with more sleep arousals during the night than usual, due to the hospital noises, while those using a white noise machine did not experience an increase in sleep arousals.

More research will continue to look into white noise and how it impacts sleep. But to this point, studies have shown white noise machines help people sleep better and longer by avoiding nighttime sleep arousals.

The Best White Noise Machine For You

Alright, we’ve established white noise is a big help when it comes to getting great sleep, no matter how much racket there is around you.

The challenge, though, is there are countless white noise machines to pick from. That’s why I’ve chosen my 7 favorite white noise machines to help you cut through the mediocrity and make a great purchase. Here are my go-to white noise machines:

The Best White Noise Machine for Any Room: The LectroFan

This is an awesome and affordable machine, no matter how big or small your room is. The LectroFan takes up less space than most white noise machines, and its smooth “shhhhh” sound helps block out high-pitched sounds. If you have a loud dog, this is an ideal machine for you — and it only costs about $45. This USA-made machine comes equipped with 20 different sounds, a sleep timer, and a powerful speaker. It’s a great bang for your buck.

The Best Looking and Functioning White Noise Machine: Douni Sleep Sound Machine

I simply love the way this one looks. Douni’s Sleep Sound Machine comes with a classic wood grain finish. It also has a number of great, easy-to-use features, like its sleep timer, which automatically turns off the machine after 30, 60, or 90 minutes. (That’s if you want to turn it off at all.) It also has more than 20 relaxing sounds, including 7 different categories of white noise to choose from.

The Best White Noise Machine for a Baby: Hatch Baby Rest

White noise can be a parent’s best friend. That’s because research suggests babies fall asleep quicker when accompanied by white noise. With that in mind, what parent wouldn’t want to put a white noise machine in their child’s room? And for babies, I’m a big fan of the Hatch Baby Rest Sound Machine. Parents can easily program the machine via the Hatch Baby Rest app on their phones, for one thing. And it’s more than a white noise machine — it’s also a night light! Other features I like include the two-way audio monitor that’s built-in, allowing you to check on your baby while they sleep, and the “toddler lock,” which makes sure if it gets bumped, the settings won’t change.

The Best High-End White Noise Machine: Sound Oasis S-5000

This one is fully-loaded. The Sound Oasis S-5000 isn’t just a white noise machine, it also has an AM/FM radio, iPhone jack, and three powerful speakers, including a rear subwoofer. There are also 145 sound options to choose from, allowing you to create the ideal sleep environment.

The Best Multi-Function White Noise Machine: Zenergy Bedside Sleep Therapy Machine

The iHome Zenergy machine is the best bang for your buck in my eyes. The machine offers 10 soothing sounds to pick from, including “ocean,” “zen” and white noise. It also has 11 light therapy patterns, guiding you through one stage of sleep to the next by shifting between colors. It’s Bluetooth-enabled, too, allowing you to take speakerphone calls or change the radio station directly from its app.

The Best Decorative Multi-Function White Noise Machine: Zenergy Himalayan Salt Rock Lamp

It’s tough to beat the look of Zenergy’s Himalayan Salt Rock Lamp. The lamp illuminates a radiant burnt orange glow when it’s activated, easily separating itself from the rest of the machines you’ll find. And if someone walks into your room, it looks like a beautiful decorative rock you took back with you from a trip to the Himalayas (without having to travel all the way to Nepal).

The Best White Noise Machine for Travel: Manta Sleep Machine

I don’t go anywhere on the road without my Manta Sleep Machine. It’s small, it’s square shape fits perfectly into my carry-on, and on top of that, it’s versatile, with 40 different sounds to choose from. If you’re feeling like taking a break from white noise, be sure to try out the campfire setting.

Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you a white noise machine is a good investment. Sure, it can be a big help when it comes to sleeping through fireworks as we approach Independence Day, but they’re useful year-round. The data is clear: white noise will help you sleep better and longer, no matter what loud and alarming sounds pop up during the night. If you end up buying one of the machines we just covered, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The post Why You Should Use A White Noise Machine This Fourth of July appeared first on Your Guide to Better Sleep.

from Your Guide to Better Sleep https://thesleepdoctor.com/2020/06/27/why-you-should-use-a-white-noise-machine-this-fourth-of-july/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2020/06/27/why-you-should-use-a-white-noise-machine-this-fourth-of-july/

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ecotone99 · 5 years ago

Text

[RO] The Pastry Shop

It was a really cold night, the sky was clear with no clouds in sight, but also no stars to be seen. I checked the time which led me to collapse in frustration on my bed. I couldn’t sleep and it was nearly 3:00 in the morning. I tried to think of boring things like math to help me sleep but I couldn’t help it, waiting kept me up until now and I thought to myself all of it would have been for nothing if I slept through the moment my phone received the message… it was from her after all. Checking the time again and realizing I might as well be productive waiting for the stupid reply rather than just wallowing on my bed so I stood up, turned on the desk lamp beside my bed then walked lazily towards the light switch of my room. Just as I was about to reach the switch, my phone rang and I suddenly felt a jolt of excitement within me, I was awake before but at that exact moment, the monotonous tune of my phone seemed to give me more energy than any cup of coffee could give me. Hastily I jump to my bed and immediately open my phone if it was the message I have been waiting since 4:00 in the afternoon for. My eyes scrolled through the countless other messages and notifications on my screen and then it hit me, feeling like my heart skipped a beat, I saw the message I have so anxiously been waiting for. My eyes were glued to the screen carefully reading the words on the message head, as I reached the end, it felt like my heart was going to burst… from anxiousness that is. The message shown was cut because it was longer than 15 words. At that point I didn’t know what to expect really, the only way of knowing whether or not I should be jumping from joy or moping in the corner in so early in the morning was through a simple tap of my thumb. The message head read “Hi! I’m so sorry for the late reply, I’ve been giving it some thought and…” and before I decided to open and read the entirety of the message, I thought about everything that happened the past events that happened today and whether or not they would remain as happy and warm memories or just moments of me merely being young and dumb.

Early Morning the Previous Day

It was 7:00 in the morning and my phone rang my alarm tune which was the most monotonous sound I have ever heard in my life. Nevertheless, I woke up because the tune seemed so routine and normal to me. This was because it was a company phone given out to all the interns for their first week waiting approval of whether or not they would get the job or not. We were required to answer all the calls made to the phone during working hours and so as not to disturb the other workers in the firm, the phone were programmed to only play one dull tune for every alarm or notification. It was the last day of my internship and we were required to be at the office by 9:00 for the announcement of those who made the cut. I quickly made my way to the kitchen, poured a bowl of cereal and milk, took a spoon from the counter drawer and sat down on the couch located in the living room just adjacent from the small dining area. I turned on the television then changed the channel to the news, there was nothing exciting enough to keep watching so I turned the TV off and quickly finished my breakfast, rushed to the bathroom to do the rest of my morning routine there. After everything was finished and I was neatly dressed in business casual attire, I went out of the room then walked down the hallway. The apartment building I was staying in had five floors, and my room was located on the fifth floor, ever since two weeks ago the elevator broke down and I had to walk down the stairs no matter how bad of an inconvenience it was. So I got down, to the lobby, opened the spinning doors and stepped outside to wait for a taxi. After 5 or so minutes of waiting, a yellow spotted car finally stopped by and gave me a ride. “Where to?” the driver said and replying with an uneasy voice I say “Just a few blocks pass the train station please”, it was after all the day I get to know if I landed the job, saying I was nervous would be an understatement. The next events would seem like a very cruel twist of fate, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way because they all led up to me meeting her. Anyway, after 12 minutes since my car ride started, the engine broke down abruptly and immediately cars behind us started sounding loud horns to get us moving. The driver tried turning on the ignition again and again, but the car just won’t start. This was when I got really jumpy and asked the driver if he has the situation under control “I’m doing my best kid” was what he replied with although clearly he wasn’t. In a bold and desperate action I took 5 dollars, dropped it onto the cushioned seat, opened the door and just walked my way through the ongoing traffic. As I finally reach the pavement I kid you not my phone starts ringing and as I checked to see, it was a call from the firm I was currently and intern in. I answered the call politely saying “Hello? This is Ryan, how may I help you?” the person who answered was the secretary and her reply was about the most frustrating thing I experienced that day, the taxi cab breaking down was nowhere near what I felt about what she said next. “Hi Ryan, we’re so sorry to inform you but unfortunately due to budget cuts in our firm, we can’t hire any new employees as of now, we hope you understand. If it’s any consolation, we are allowing you to keep the company phone as a reimbursement for all you spent in the internship training. Thank you and have a good day!” There were many reasons for me to feel frustrated and angry at the call because for one, I spent 6 days in that firm being an unpaid assistant doing errands for the workers who didn’t even bother to look at me in the eye when they were ordering me to do their dirty work. Another reason was that I had already spent about 200 dollars buying them coffees and snacks all of which remains unpaid because they told me they’d repay me when I finally join them when I land the job. The useless company phone was so old and obsolete that I wager it isn’t even worth more than 30 dollars. This was the moment that I wanted to scream and shout to the heavens to let out all of my steam, but that moment, I knew doing such a thing would be awkward and a little bit stupid considering I was in the middle of the walkway people walking by me not even having a care in the world for what I was doing standing still in the middle of the path. After this, I clenched my fists then resolved to just calm myself through a cup of coffee and maybe a jelly topped bagel at the pastry shop across the street. I waited by the street light post for the light to turn green so that I could walk safely towards the pastry shop. Feeling gloomy and irritated, I start to look around to pass the time and this was the moment I saw her. She had beautiful fiery hair that ran to her shoulders and freckles around her cute little nose, she was so pretty. And the most awkward thing about this incident was that she was standing next to me, in quilted jacket looking at her phone with the most magnificent smile I had ever seen right on her pale face. This immediately took my mind of off what had just happened to me and my internship. I admired her for some time and it was so long I think she noticed because I saw her flinch a little. Immediately I looked the other direction to poorly cover up the fact that I was looking at her for about a minute. After some time I looked ahead to see if the lights went green and they hadn’t, that time when the lights were still red were the longest minutes of my life because even though I admired and practically already had a crush on the girl standing next to me, I wanted to get away from the awkwardness, for me at least, and uneasiness because I don’t do well with girls, especially pretty ones, keeping what I just said in mind, the next thing to happen nearly gave me a heart attack. Still looking at the lights, she suddenly raised her head, also looked forward to check the lights and said the following words without looking at me “If you’re gonna stare at me all day at least do it after you buy me a cup of joe and maybe a bite over there at that pastry shop”. It took me sometime to realize what had just happened, I didn’t even think of the big coincidence that we both had our eyes set upon the small family owned pastry shop down the road. I panicked a little bit inside and slowly turned my eyes, without moving my head so it doesn’t seem obvious, to the left then to the right to check if anyone else was there to see if she was actually talking to me. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” I looked at her in with wide panicked stricken eyes, a sweaty nose and softly asked “A-a-are y-y-you t-talking t-to me?” I swear it was the most embarrassing moment of my life, so far that is, and after some silence she chuckled softly “Dummy, do you see anyone else here with us? Much less anyone who’s staring at me in what could be the most obvious way to look at someone?” I didn’t know what to say so I simply smiled in the worst way possible, it was a half-smile with the right side of my mouth curled up, and the left side only opening a small bit. She laughed in what I can only say is the sweetest laugh imaginable and finally looked at me in the eyes “The light’s green prince charming, now are you gonna buy me a drink or not?” silence followed, my palms became sweaty and in what seemed like a surge of courage inside me I managed to say “Sure” in a voice that wasn’t sheepish at all. She smiled once more the nodded her head left to signal me that we should probably walk now, because we might end up waiting at another red light. After that conundrum, I thought to myself, what is the worst that could happen?

I swear, that time, crossing the road was like walking on the tiniest tight rope if it was attached between the tips of two large mountains. My heart was pumping so fast that it probably could have won a tap dancing competition. In short, I was really nervous because one wrong move in that pastry shop and I could end all of my chances with the beautiful girl next to me, if there was any chance to begin with. Speaking of which, I tried ever so slightly to look at her in a non-creepy way to see how she was reacting to everything. Strange enough she was clam and composed, like she had done this thousands of times before. Maybe she just has really good people skills, maybe she just scams people into buying her free stuff because she’s pretty, maybe she’s secretly an assassin that was sent to kill me and the pastry shop was the perfect crime scene. All these ideas were bursting in my head and at that points I didn’t actually know what to do. I was so distraught with everything and my mind felt like it was elsewhere. Suddenly, I bumped hard against the glass pane of the pastry shop and it didn’t occur to me that we finally crossed the road and got to the shop, well I got to the shop at least. She was laughing behind me in the same intoxicating laugh as before. As reality got back to me, my face blushed bright red with embarrassment as I finally grasped the situation. I looked back and she was still laughing, so much so that it seemed like she was about to cry. I quickly looked down and shrugged my shoulders up then slowly entered the shop. As I went in, my face blushed even more as I look around and everybody was just staring at me, they saw what had just happened. I walked to the counter and she finally stopped laughing and went in the shop. I ordered an ice mocha latte and a bagel with jam on top, she put her hands on my shoulders and told me she wanted a Macha infused Cappuccino and a large blueberry muffin. I ordered that too and we sat down on the nearest table. I haven’t actually hung out with a girl before, I was the type of person to just sit in my room curled up on my couch eating ice cream watching cartoons for God knows how long every day, this was a totally new experience for me. “So… what’s your name?” she suddenly asked “G-graves, Ryan Graves” I replied quickly and softly only later finding out that I messed up saying my name right “Oh, so we’re introducing ourselves James Bond style eh? Well I’m…” then suddenly the waitress placed our orders on the table and she gave a quick smirk before meeting me with a big smile. “Well I guess that’s a topic for another time, anyway thank you so much!” She said “Normally, people don’t respond to me asking them to buy me a drink on the account that I caught them staring at me. So far you’ve been the only one to humor me with my request”. Thinking of a reply I took a bite of off my bagel then mumbled a few sounds making as if I was replying she asked “I’m sorry what?” while chuckling. I took this as a chance to chew my food slowly and thought of a reply. Finally swallowing the bite of bagel I answered “Well, I guess I’m just a nice person”. She smiled once more before proceeding to take a big bite of her muffin. After that moment, awkwardness seemed to kick in and at that moment I knew it was so strong that even she felt awkward. In a desperate attempt at ending the awkward silence I ironically said “I’m sorry. But I’m not really good with conversation… and social convention… and pretty much everything that has to do with other people” before proceeding to take a sip of my latte “I know, the moment I noticed you staring at me, I knew you’d be an awkward one” she said. This line almost lead me to spit out my coffee on my freshly laundered clothes. “Woah, cool down dude, it wasn’t in anyway an insult”. Thinking of a reply again I once more took a bite of my bagel, but this time she spoke up, “So why are you dressed like that? I mean it’s not like local pastry shops have a dress code or something…” with a sigh I told her “I was working as an unpaid intern at James and Barnes’ law firm five blocks down town just past the train station” “And what happened?” she said with a concerned look on her face somehow noticing I was distressed when I answered her question. “Well, actually, before we sort of “met” by the street light post, the taxi I was riding broke down and then I received a message from the firm secretary telling me they weren’t accepting new employees anymore”. With a sort of sadness on her face which I couldn’t distinguish neither true nor fake she replied “Oh my God! I’m so sorry”. I gave a small nod then looked down to my food before finally finishing my bagel. “Well, it’s probably about time I get going, thanks for the snack hot shot!” as she proceeded to do a small salute goodbye over her right eyebrow. I don’t know how I managed to do the following things I was about to do but I did and I’m proud of myself for doing them. Before she reached the door handle of the shop, I grabbed her wrist, she looked at me confused not knowing what was happening and then I asked her “Can I have your number?” It took some time for her to process what had just happened and she once again smiled, this time was the prettiest one though. She red hair glimmered in from the light shone through the glass panel of the store front. The light also shone on her face, exposing her cute little freckles on her nose and cheeks which looked like scattered stars in the night sky. It was also just this moment when I noticed she had heterochromia. In the magnificent lighting, her left eye was deep blue and her right eye was a brilliant emerald green. I couldn’t believe at what I was looking at, she was more than just pretty, she was gorgeous. She then took my hand, which was holding her wrist, took out the ball pen neatly hooked on my breast pocket then wrote something down on my arm all while saying “Never thought you’d ask”. After all of this she did the same small salute then finally walked out the door. Unsurprisingly I was looking at her up until the moment she walked out of sight outside. I then looked over to my arm and felt so much joy inside me I felt like I could shout inside the pastry shop with all the people inside. And I did, for a while, everybody looked at me wondering what on earth could possibly be the reason for me screaming, well she did write her number and I was so happy that it made me appreciate the fact that the company left the cell phone to me as a sorry gift for wasting my time. It didn’t matter though, what mattered was that I had her number and I had a phone to contact her. I coughed after shouting and quickly finished my food, tipped the waiter a full 5 dollars then walked happily to my apartment, even though it was 12 blocks away. . It was about noon when I got home to my apartment, given the time I spent walking from the pastry shop. Once I finally got to my room, strangely not tired I decided to lie on the couch and watch some TV, exactly what I would do on a regular day after work. I stood up, changed to my home clothes and ordered Pizza, which thankfully arrived 3 minutes late making the whole box free. I thought to myself, “This day couldn’t possibly get any better”. After eating Pizza in front of the TV for about three hours. I decided that I would take a nap. Then suddenly remembered everything that happened with her earlier. I smiled then remembered she gave me her number. Quickly, I look to my right arm to see if it was still there, because stupidly I forgot to save it. Unfortunately it was smudged, but I did my best to recognize the digits whilst creating a contact on my phone, of which there were only two contacts, the frim desk landline and her. I thought of something to text her but nothing would just come to my head. And there I spent hours pondering on what to message her when I finally resolved that I should tell her this “Hello, I’m sorry but I didn’t catch your name earlier. This is Ryan Graves from the pastry shop. I was wondering if you’d like to meet up tomorrow at the same pastry shop maybe around the same time? I really like hanging out with you and maybe we could be friends?” I sent the message at about 4:00 pm then decided that I had nothing better to do at that time so I went to my bedroom then waited for the reply. A few hours have passed and still no reply, different ideas once again surged through my mind, what if I noted down the wrong number? What if she thinks I’m a creep? What if she was an assassin and is just patiently waiting to take me out with a sniper rifle? These ideas sort of lowered my hopes of me ever getting a chance with her, or at least being friends with her, but I hadn’t given up yet. I was determined to wait until the message arrives.

Finally, after hours upon hours of waiting, I finally got the message and the number wasn’t wrong, it really was from her. It was about 3:00 in the morning and the stupid phone wouldn’t show the full length of messages, only until 15 words so all I got to see were these words on the message head; “Hi! I’m so sorry for the late reply, I’ve been giving it some thought and…” I stopped for a bit and hesitated to even open the message because I was afraid that she rejected me and thought that I was weird. I thought that she might have just given me her number to get away from me as soon as possible and that all of it was just a con to get free food. I finally got the courage to open the message and I was shocked at was I read.

“Hi! I’m so sorry for the late reply, I’ve been giving it some thought and sure why not? You seemed like a great and fun person to hang out with. My only condition though is that you buy me food again. Hahaha Jk, but if you want to then be my guest. Besides you’re cute.Well… see you there ;)

P.S The name is Smith, Jacquelyn Smith, but you can call me Jackie for short”

I looked up from my screen, smiled then finally went and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. After all I have a big day tomorrow.

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