#So my only option is to start the four hour practice of painstakingly making and shaping the dough in the middle of the night

[melonpond]

My sleep schedule is cursed to be whatever is most inconvenient to me, except for the rare occasion where I need to get up at a really weird time and then I feel refreshed

[cheri-translates]

[CN] Victor’s Business Exhibition Date

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a date, 企展之约, which has not been released in EN 🍒

[ This date was released on 16 July 2021 ]

After a meal on this weekend afternoon, I’m nestled on the sofa, watching a new episode of an anime.

MC: Hahahaha!

Watching the comical antics of the main character on-screen, I can’t help but laugh out loud.

“Whoosh--”

Hearing the rustling of papers from behind, I subconsciously shut my mouth, my line of sight flitting past the sofa and landing on Victor.

He’s sitting at the dining table, a look of concentration on his face while he reads a report. The small dining table is full of documents.

I had initially planned to watch movies with Victor at my place today. I didn’t expect him to be so bogged down with work lately, and unable to relax over the weekend.

MC: Victor, am I disturbing you? Why don’t you use the study room or my bedroom instead?

Without lifting his head, he props up the spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

Victor: Who was the one who wanted to “stick” together with me over the weekend?

MC: ...that’s true, but you’re focusing on work now.

He has no intention of continuing the conversation. Rubbing my nose guiltily, I head into the kitchen quietly. After cutting some fruits, I bring them over to the dining table.

MC: In that case, I’ll apologise to CEO Victor~

Sticking a toothpick into an apple slice, I bring it to him. He tilts his head up slightly, taking a bite from the apple in my hand.

From my peripheral vision, I spot an invitation card with the words “Elementary and Middle School Students” on it. Curious, I take a closer look.

MC: “Corporate Culture Exhibition for Elementary and Middle School Students”? Is LFG participating in the Corporate Culture Exhibition?

Victor: We received the invitation and haven’t decided if we’re participating.

MC: I see... I’ve never heard of this exhibition.

Victor: The government organised it this year. 

Victor: The officials said that it’s meant to introduce elementary and middle school students to outstanding occupations and various career paths to help them establish their aspirations.

MC: This exhibition seems pretty meaningful. It’s beneficial to LFG’s business image too.

MC: Come to think of it, I wonder if little kids have an understanding of LFG, and what kind of impression they have of LFG?

MC: Oh yes! There was a news report on elementary and middle schoolers going on company tours. Does LFG want to organise a similar activity?

Ideas come one after another in my mind. I rattle on about my opinions, but Victor doesn’t express anything.

When I start making an inventory of the company tour for students, the pen in his hand pauses, and he lifts his eyes slowly.

Victor: I can consider the exhibition, but not the company tour.

MC: Why not?

His deep eyes sweep over the anime on the television screen before landing on me.

Victor: There’s already one very noisy kid in LFG.

-

In the end, Victor accepts the invitation to the Corporate Culture Exhibition. The exhibition commences as scheduled.

Out of interest, I offer my services to Victor. I become a volunteer responsible for decorations at the venue.

Seeing the detailed and vivid posters introducing various occupations  in the exhibition hall, the LFG employees next to me are slightly awed.

LFG Employee A: It’s really nice that we have the chance to understand different occupations. When I was young, I thought there were only astronauts and scientists in the world.

LFG Employee B: Even if you only knew of those careers when you were young and decided on an aspiration, it might not become reality when you grow up. I wanted to be a dancer, but I’m doing something completely unrelated to the arts now.

LFG Employee A: That’s true. If it weren’t for the excellent pay in LFG, I’d probably be at my old home opening a second-hand bookshop and retiring early. Oh yes, MC, what did you want to do when you were young?

Getting pointed out suddenly while engrossed in their discussion causes me to be stunned momentarily.

MC: When I was young...

I blink, recalling somewhat faraway memories. Before I can ponder deeply, my phone rings - it’s a call from Victor.

Victor: Come to the café near the entrance of the exhibition hall.

MC: Now? What for?

Victor: ...what else can you do in a café? Play golf, amend proposals, go horse riding, drink coffee - which one do you think is the most suitable?

MC: ...to be honest, I can’t decide between the two options of “amend proposals” and “drink coffee”.

Victor: I ordered a custard cake. If you don’t come over, I’ll take it that you’re not interested.

MC: I’ll be there immediately!

After notifying those LFG employees, I turn around and head towards the café.

MC: Is this really okay? The others are still busy.

Victor: When did you have such a high sense of awareness? Who was the person who painstakingly learnt “Slacking Hacks” on the internet a few days ago?

MC: I was reading that for fun... I wasn’t planning to put it into practice.

Lifting my phone as I squeeze into the packed café, I notice that most of the people here are parents who are preparing to accompany their kids to the exhibition.

Victor: There’s still an hour till the exhibition begins. I’ve already told Goldman to inform everyone to take a break. In short, there’s no need to feel guilty, because...

Taking two steps into the café, I spot Victor at a glance as he sits at a table near the window calmly.

Seeing that I’m walking towards him, he puts down his phone gently, lifting his head to meet my eyes.

Victor: Aside from you, there’s another person who’s “slacking”.

Taken aback for a moment, I quickly react to the meaning in his words. My brows arch upwards as I take a seat.

MC: I didn’t expect to ever “slack” together with CEO Victor.

Elated, I pick up a fork and try a bite of the dessert in front of me. The custard melts in my mouth instantly, and it’s sweet and smooth.

MC: Delicious! As expected of CEO Victor’s pick~

Victor: Even delicious food can’t stop you from being talkative.

Right after saying this, he seems to stare at me fixedly, his expression slightly strange.

Just as I’m about to ask why he’s looking at me that way, he lifts up his coffee, his lowered eyelashes covering the smile in his eyes.

...am I overthinking things? Why do I feel as if he’s making a joke out of me?

Feeling puzzled, I notice a pen and a post-it booklet at the edge of the table.

MC: This is...?

A staff who is passing by takes a step forward, smiling as he explains.

Staff: This is a small event by our shop. You can write your hopes or suggestions for the children, then hang it on the “Hope Tree” near the door of the shop.

Struck with an idea, I pick up the pen and a post-it note.

MC: Victor, shall we write a few suggestions for the children too?

I tear a post-it note and give it to him. After staring at me in silence for a while, he suddenly reaches out his hand.

Victor: Give me one more.

MC: ?

MC: Does CEO Victor want to write a mini essay?

Ignoring my joke, he writes a sentence on each of the two post-it notes. He hands one to the staff, and stuffs the other one to me.

Bewildered, I sweep a glance at the post-it note given to the staff. The words “You only have one life” are written on it.

Lowering my head, I stare at the post-it note in my own hand. In an instant, I realise why he displayed such a strange smile earlier. There’s a short sentence written on the post-it note:

“Dummy, there’s custard on your cheek.”

??: Hello, could I trouble the two of you to help me with something?

My face reddens. After wiping the custard off my cheek with a tissue, I hear an unfamiliar female voice next to me.

Turning towards the sound, I see a lady standing beside me with two small boys.

Woman: I need to use the washroom, but bringing two boys with me isn’t really convenient. Could I trouble the both of you to take care of them for a while?

I ask for Victor’s opinion with my gaze, and he responds with a slight nod. Understanding this, I nod at the mother.

MC: Of course we can.

While thanking us, she gets the two children to sit at both ends of the table before hurrying off.

The table now comprises of the four of us - two adults and two children. The air gets filled with an inexplicable, thick awkwardness.

Victor looks at me. I look at the kids. The kids look at Victor... Clearing my throat, I decide to break this strange atmosphere.

MC: Kids, how old are the both of you?

Kid A: Mommy said that we can’t give personal information to strangers!

MC: ...

I didn’t expect to be given the cold shoulder the moment I opened my mouth. I release an embarrassed laugh.

MC: Personal information... You can use such advanced terms. You’re so smart haha.

A soft and low chuckle drifts to my ears. I glance at Victor as he picks up his coffee with a blank expression, staying uninvolved in the matter.

The other boy suddenly widens his eyes and leans towards me, pointing at my volunteer name tag and reading it aloud.

Kid B: L! F! G! Do you two work in LFG?

MC: Well...

I ponder over this. LFG is the investor of my company, and Victor is the CEO of LFG. So...

MC: I guess so.

Kid B: In that case, what are the two of you doing here? Did you sneak away?

MC: ...

Although these are unintentional words from a child, I avert my eyes guiltily. At this point, the kid who behaves like an adult speaks loudly.

Kid A: That’s impossible! Mommy said that everyone who works at LFG are really incredible people! They won’t sneak away!

Victor: Cough...

Victor pauses his sampling of the coffee. As though he choked on something, he clears his throat.

Kid B: Really?

The kid blinks his eyes as he waits for our response.

Victor’s expression is a little unnatural. He picks up a newspaper from a rack near the window, immersing himself in it.

Seeing him like this, he probably recalled the earlier conversation we had on “slacking” as well.

It’s rare to see Victor being choked up by someone. A little demon with horns suddenly appears in my heart.

I can’t help but laugh inwardly while turning to the kids.

MC: You’re correct. The employees from LFG never sneak away. We were talking about work-

MC: Right, Vic?

[Note] In CN, MC calls Victor “小李” (“xiao li”, which translates directly to Little Li).

Saying this, I wink at the person opposite me.

Victor arches his brows, astonishment in his eyes. Without waiting for him to speak, I immediately do a “stop” gesture with my hands.

MC: The previous proposal for the show is too conservative. There aren’t any highlights, and it isn’t clear who the target audience is. It might be a waste to show it during prime time.

Adjusting my posture, I clasp my fingers on the table, mimicking VIctor’s tone and expression.

MC: When will you be submitting the new proposal? Tomorrow is the deadline.

Kid A and B: Wow...

Awed gasps from the kids drift to my ears. I straighten up with pride, tilting my chin towards Victor.

He stares at me with a calm gaze, his eyes gradually illuminated with an unreadable, dense light.

He lowers the newspaper slightly, blowing the coffee in his hand gently and unhurriedly.

Victor: Are you sure these are the only problems, Miss CEO? 

Victor: I've also “reflected” much on that proposal, and there are some problems I haven’t had the chance to tell you about. 

Victor: Since you brought it up, I have no choice but to do a “self-reflection” here.

Victor’s tone is composed, and there isn’t a ripple in his expression. As compared to my pretentious posture, he’s laid-back and natural.

Victor: The theme of the show is too general and lacks a segment which stirs the audience. 

Victor: The structure also has the shadow of previous shows. A change in form but not substance - it’s a little unoriginal. 

Victor: A scandal broke out yesterday involving one of the guests for the show. A replacement guest has not been decided upon.

Victor: Also...

MC: Stop! I... I get it!

He leans against the back of the chair, a teasing glint in the depths of his eyes.

Victor: When will you be submitting the new proposal? Tomorrow is the deadline.

MC Tonight, tonight! I’ll definitely submit it tonight!

I reply instantly, my voice carrying with it some alarm. The corners of his lips hook upwards, and he retracts his “overbearing” aura.

Victor: I’ll wait and see.

I heave a sigh of relief, then feel a dryness in my mouth. Lowering my head to take a sip of coffee, I see the disappointed gazes of the two kids.

My cheeks flush. Just as I’m about to say something to salvage some pride, their mother returns, thanking us while taking them away.

I glare at Victor indignantly. He chuckles softly, then clasps his fingers together on the table just like I did earlier.

Victor: I look forward to your next “challenge”.

-

After the exhibition ends, Victor and I leave work early.

The weather is really nice today. We pick a restaurant nearby, planning to head there on foot.

Dusk hangs low, and a misty pink evening mist smudges the sky.

Perhaps due to how smoothly the exhibition went, little emotions surface in my heart. 

Beneath this beautiful sky, how many young aspirations and lives took flight earlier?

Victor: Why are you just standing there in a silly daze? Aren’t you hungry?

Retracting my thoughts, I see that Victor has stopped in front of me, his body turned to the side as he looks at me.

I hurriedly catch up to him, pulling on his arm.

MC: Victor, why did you write “You only have one life” on the post-it note today?

Victor: It’s true that you only have one life. Even an elementary student knows this principle.

MC: ...that’s not what I meant. I’m asking about what’s implied in it. For instance, are you asking the kids to seize the day and work their hardest?

His gaze lands on me. Seeing how serious I look, he slows down his pace slightly.

Victor: If you were to meet your childhood self, would you tell her to work her hardest?

MC: Mm... it’s difficult to say. I might tell her what to do in order for the current me to be even happier?

Victor: And that the reason why you can’t use an overly objective and rational principle to teach others. 

Victor: It’s a desirable trait to work their hardest so that there won't be any excuses to stop in their footsteps. 

Victor: But this doesn’t mean that everyone must have the goal of working their hardest.

Victor: After all, every person expects different things from themselves. 

Victor: Not everyone wants to stand at the peak. 

Victor: As compared to looking down from a mountaintop, there are some people who wish to happily and simply appreciate the scenery along the way. 

Victor: This might sound simple, but being an ordinary person isn’t easy.

Victor: “You only have one life” - this phrase has many meanings in different contexts.

I’m stunned for a moment. I initially thought that Victor’s words were meant to be a motivational quote, and didn’t expect for him to have such thoughts.

Even when he’s faced with young children, he doesn’t wish to give a fixed answer on the basis that he’s a mature adult.

My lips curl upwards, and I can’t help but stick a little closer to him.

MC: You’re right. After all, aside from people who stand at the peak, there are even more ordinary people.

MC: Ordinary people have one life too. They need to cherish it properly, and do what they want to do.

MC: CEO Victor, I’ve learnt something from you!

Clasping my hands together, I bow in mock seriousness. An almost indiscernible smile lifts the corners of his lips.

MC: Come to think of it, I had so many aspirations when I was young. Lawyer, teacher, police officer, judge... I didn’t expect to become a producer in the end. Perhaps in a parallel universe, there’s a me who became a lawyer, teacher or judge!

The scene from the café flashes across my mind, and I burst into laughter.

MC: I might even be a CEO! What do you think?

After I say this, Victor turns his head and gives me an amused glance.

Victor: I think you do behave like a CEO.

MC: It’s because I’ve been influenced after spending such a long time by your side~ Returning to the topic - what was your aspiration when you were young? To become a powerful business tycoon?

Victor: ...have you ever heard of a child having such a pragmatic dream?

MC: In that case, tell me about it?

He doesn’t respond, and simply keeps his eyes faced front. No matter how much I probe, he doesn’t speak.

The sweet fragrance of desserts wafts into my nose. Following the scent and turning to the bakery near the roadside, I’m struck with an idea.

Since I can’t crack this difficult question in a straightforward manner, I decide to adopt the process of elimination.

MC: A baker?

Victor: ...

A signboard with the words “Watchmaker Shop” enters my vision, and I immediately look at him.

MC: A watchmaker?

MC: The boss of a lottery shop?

MC: ...director of a zoo?

Throughout the journey, I rack my brain and ask him about all sorts of occupations. However, it’s clear that none of them are correct.

Finally, we stop in front of a crosswalk, waiting for the red light.

Looks like I won’t be able to get any answers from him today. Disappointed, I let go of Victor’s arm, releasing a soft “hmph”.

MC: Aren’t you curious if there was a choice and you weren’t the CEO of LFG, and if I weren’t a producer...

MC: What would our identities be? Would we meet? And what kind of a relationship would we have?

The red man at the other end of the road suddenly turns green, signalling for us to move forward.

My hand, which had drooped to the side, is lifted up gently by someone. His broad palm conveys a comforting temperature.

Victor: There’s nothing to be curious about.

The crowd flows past in an endless stream on the crosswalk. Their footsteps are hurried, and the tips of their feet point in different directions.

I look at the person beside me. His gaze is resolute as he holds my hand, taking large strides towards the restless crowd.

He seems to sense my gaze. Lowering his head slightly, the light in his eyes is deep and scorching.

Victor: The life that I want to choose most is already in my hand.

-

[ MOMENTS ]

Victor's Post: Turns out someone could still go to work normally after staying up to watch anime last night.

MC: Could we cancel tonight’s reservation at the restaurant? I really want to go straight home to sleep...

Victor: Eating is a necessity. The location will be changed to your home.

-

Victor's Post: Turns out someone could still go to work normally after staying up to watch anime last night.

MC: As long as I’m hardworking enough, nothing’s impossible!

Victor: Working hard to make yourself even more stupid?

-

Victor's Post: Turns out someone could still go to work normally after staying up to watch anime last night.

MC: I solemnly vow not to do such things again.

Victor: This vow better count before you start on the next anime.

🍰 Call: here

[thetriggeredhappy]

Dad!Spy in the father-son bonding AU is obviously much more stable than canon Spy, and much more emotionally mature. What sort of stuff do you think Spy really had to grapple with and work on that made him so different than canon Spy when it comes to how he handles Scout (or other personal affairs)? He obviously had his attitude changed fundementally through the often humbling experience of raising a child, but what are the the things that seperate that Spy from our canon, so-scared-of-rejection-he-pretended-to-be-Tom-Jones Spy?

i think the big one is just the experience of like, the come-to-Jesus moment of realizing that he couldn’t turn back anymore, he no longer had the option of messing up in a major way or taking breaks or giving up. the realization that for better or for worse, it was his responsibility to make sure that his son turned out okay. and i think it took him a few months into having Jeremy with him to realize it, to have that epiphany that he was the most important person to this child, that he was the only one around to help him and make sure he was happy and healthy, but i think his lifestyle changes started very very swiftly once he had that realization.

i think on a more recordable level, he stopped smoking nearly as much as before (only using it to mitigate pain or more extreme stress rather than the half a pack a day he’d been smoking previously). i think he probably stopped drinking altogether when he could help it, limiting himself to at most one glass of wine when he went to events but even then trying to avoid it. i think he worked hard on doing his research, worked hard to really think through as many of his own issues as he could around the time that little baby Jeremy repeated a phrase back to him that he overheard from a phone call that sounded so much more ugly and cruel when spoken by a four-year-old. he had the abrupt understanding that he was ultimately the one in control of whether his son understood kindness and empathy and love, and he understood how hard life was going to be for the both of them, and he knew he couldn’t afford to slack off.

on an emotional level, something about having that contrast, that different mental and emotional space to occupy, really helped save him in a lot of different ways. i think that going back to his motel rooms and being greeted by a very, very excited six-year-old who simply couldn’t wait to show him the drawing he made, or how far he made it into his practice reading books, or just that he missed him and loved him so very much, i think that made him a very fundamentally different person from the man in the universe where there was nobody in that motel, and would never be anybody in that motel waiting for him, not really, just his own thoughts and nothing to distract him from the memory of his pain and his failures. in one universe, the rest between missions was used to sulk and wallow and grow angrier and sadder and to get more and more swallowed up in himself, but in this one it’s rest used to do a different kind of work, a kind that involves both distraction and relief from the worst parts of himself and the knowledge that surely he can’t be all that bad if his son spent the last hour painstakingly rendering him in green and blue crayon and worked extra extra hard to spell his name correctly (not that he managed to, not quite having figured out the difference between D and B quite yet, but he worked hard nonetheless).

i think the biggest difference is that in the father-son bonding AU, spy got very well acquainted with the idea of admitting when he was wrong, because there was always someone to hold him accountable. by the time Jeremy is old enough to really call him out on things, he’s gotten very good at saying, no, you’re right, i made a mistake. you did ask that i get cheese pizza and not pepperoni tonight, and i forgot, and i’m sorry. i did mean to order you chocolate milk rather than regular, and i made a mistake, and i’m sorry. i did forget to tuck you in and say goodnight the way i always do, and that is my bad, and i’m sorry, and i’ll do that right this instant as an apology and i’ll try my best to not forget again.

admitting he made mistakes made him a better and more humble and self-aware person. in the canon AU, admitting that he did something wrong would only ever be relevant to him, and even then it would eat away at him until he spiraled into doubts and paranoia, and so he worked hard not to ever admit he made mistakes, holding himself to an extremely high standard and then falsifying it when absolutely necessary.

i think those are the biggest differences

[blurry-fics]

Chapter Nineteen

Where Did We Go | Series Masterlist

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1982

Author’s Note: I have a feeling all of you are going to enjoy this chapter :) (picture credit to jenna on ig)

“Alright, we’re good,” Tyler said as he shut the car off. He had spent the last ten minutes painstakingly reversing into spots until you found the one with the best view, which was all part of Tyler’s plan to have the perfect date. You quickly unbuckled your seatbelt and started to gather up your things from the backseat. The two of you had borrowed Carter’s old truck from your parents, just to make sure you had the best stargazing experience.

“Did you grab the speaker?” you asked as you bumped the door closed with your hip.

“No, I’ll do that in a second,” Tyler mumbled over the mountain of blankets in his arms.

You tossed the blankets you were carrying into the bed of the truck and then climbed in after them. Tyler added a few more to the pile before going back to grab the speaker and some pillows that you had thought to bring this time. Although blankets worked to support your head while you were staring up at the sky, it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable option.

“Pillow incoming!” Tyler yelled, tossing a pillow into the bed of the truck. It bumped into your leg and fell to the ground with a quiet thud. Shortly after, the same thing happened again.

“Would you just get in here and help me set up the blankets,” you laughed.

Tyler pulled himself up and practically fell over the side of the truck bed, just barely landing on top of the pile of blankets. He gave you a shy smile as he pulled off his shoes and set them on top of the hood where they wouldn’t get lost. You shook your head and handed him a pillow to put where he wanted it.

“This is looking really nice so far,” he said as he fluffed up his pillow.

“Thank you. Our stargazing set up is very important.”

“Understandable.”

Tyler grabbed another blanket and shook it out so that it was no longer a jumbled mess. You, meanwhile, set up your own pillow close to Tyler’s, although it didn’t really matter. There was a good chance you would just end up laying on his chest.

“Is that everything?” you asked, surveying the little bed you had made. From the looks of it, it was going to be the most comfortable stargazing experience yet.

“I just need to get some music going, then we can get comfortable.”

“Then you can get comfortable. I’m getting under the blanket right now.”

Although summer was slowly beginning and the weather was steadily getting warmer, the hours after the sun went down still weren’t quite a comfortable temperature. Your sweatshirt was just barely keeping your torso warm as you sat out in the cold.

You waited patiently under the blanket for Tyler to finally lay down. As soon as he did, you curled up next to him and wrapped an arm around his stomach, stealing as much body heat from him as you could. Your limbs quickly became a tangled mess until you were both laying comfortably and looking up at the stars.

“You were right, it is really clear tonight,” Tyler said. He was idly tracing patterns on your shoulder.

“Remember that one time we spent an hour making snacks for stargazing and drove all the way out here only to realize it was cloudy?”

“Yeah, but then we got thai food and watched movies at my apartment until four in the morning, so it wasn’t all bad.”

“You’re right.”

You both went quiet for a little while as you looked up at the stars. Tyler was humming quietly along to the music that was playing, while you were trying to work out which constellations were currently in the sky. It was peaceful, although you couldn’t help the existential thoughts that always crept in during these moments. You tried your best to push them away and focus on spending time with Tyler.

“Hey, did you see that?” he asked.

“See what?”

“The shooting star.”

“There was a shooting star?”

“No, I made that up for fun,” Tyler laughed.

“Hey! I was too busy looking at your pretty face.”

“I know, it’s very distracting.”

You rolled your eyes, but Tyler was too busy looking up at the stars to notice. His eyes were practically shining in the moonlight.

“Did you make a wish?”

“Of course I did.”

“What was it?”

Tyler turned so that he was facing you now. “If I tell you, then it won’t come true.”

“Please?” you pouted, sticking out your lower lip.

“The wish is too important to risk losing it.”

“Fine, I can respect that.”

Tyler leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to your lips. He was warm, so you caught his chin and pulled him in again when he started to pull away. His arm wrapped a little tighter around you.

“Has this been an ok date so far?” Tyler asked.

“Of course. Any time that I get to spend with you is a good date in my eyes.”

He laughed softly. “I think your standards for a good date might be a little low.”

“Still, we have this wonderful nest of blankets, I’m cuddled up with you looking at the stars, and we’re listening to our favorite songs. I don’t think it could get better than this.”

“I bet it could.”

“How?” you asked, turning to look at him.

“There are just… ways.”

His tone was a bit confusing, but you brushed it off as nothing. Sometimes Tyler just tripped over his words. If something was really wrong, he would tell you.

You looked back up at the sky, letting your eyes wander over the various constellations and the tree branches that framed the clear area above you. Even though you had been to this same spot on countless occasions, you swore that the sky never looked the same way twice. Something about it was always a little different, making each visit special in its own way.

“Isn’t it weird to think that we’ve been coming up here for years?” you asked.

“How did we even find it?”

“Weren’t we just driving around one night and noticed a little side road? And of course our teenage brains though it was a great idea to drive up it.” Tyler laughed. “Then we realized it led to a little park where you could look out over Columbus and see the stars.”

“Now it’s special to us.”

“Exactly. Just think about all the things that have happened up here,” you said. “I told you that I considered you my best friend, and you held my hand and it was never spoken of again, and we said we loved each other and kissed for the first time…”

“And now I’m asking you to marry me.”

You were pretty sure you could feel your heart physically skip a beat in your chest. There was no way that you had heard him correctly. The two of you had always agreed that you were in no rush to get married, but when you turned to look at Tyler he was holding a small box in his hand.

“I love you, Y/N. I mean it. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Tyler slowly opened the box, revealing the most beautiful ring that you had ever seen. It was everything you had ever dreamed of having. You wanted to say something, anything, but all you could do was stare at him as tears welled up in your eyes. He got up so that he could properly be on one knee, which made you giggle because of the height difference.

“Y/F/N Y/L/N, will you marry me?”

You nodded quickly. Tyler gently grabbed your left hand and slid the ring onto your finger. As soon as it was on comfortably, you practically attacked Tyler with a hug, burying your face into his neck.

“I love you so much,” you mumbled.

“I love you too.”

You held onto Tyler until all the emotions finally subsided and you felt calmer again. Tyler pulled you into a kiss, holding you close and smiling against your lips. The two of you could only kiss for so long before you started laughing.

“We got so good at kissing without smiling and now we’re back to square one,” you laughed.

“I don’t mind.”

You kissed for a while longer before finally laying back down and getting comfortable. Tyler wrapped an arm around you, holding you close to his side.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I already asked you to marry me, Y/N. You were too slow.”

“Stop,” you laughed, pressing your forehead to his shoulder. “A different question.”

Tyler laughed and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. “What’ve you got?”

“What happened to waiting to get married? I mean, obviously I’m ecstatic that we’re engaged now, but I’m curious about what made you change your mind.”

“I mean, really it was just about trying to find the right time to ask you. I’ve known that I wanted to marry you for years, but now that the Blurryface era is coming to an end next year and this is the last big tour for awhile, I figured it was the right time to ask you. That way we can start planning in our free time and get married during the break.”

“I can’t wait,” you smiled.

You shifted how you were sitting so that you were more easily able to look at Tyler. His eyes shifted over to you for a moment, and he began to smile when he noticed you were staring, once again averting his gaze.

“Hey,” you said, gently turning his chin towards you. You could just barely make out the pink tint to his cheeks in the darkness.

“What?”

“Why are you embarrassed?”

“There’s a pretty girl staring at me,” he smiled.

Now it was your turn to start blushing. You dropped your forehead back down to Tyler’s shoulder to hide the dorky grin that had quickly taken over your face. When the heat had finally subsided, you looked back up at him.

“You’re so handsome, Ty.”

You took a moment to admire him, from the way that his lips curved to the color of his eyes. He had changed so much since you first met in English class when you were fourteen, and yet at times it felt like he hadn’t changed at all. In some ways, he was still the same dorky kid that you had found a best friend in.

Except now he was going to be your husband.

“How did I get lucky enough to spend my life with somebody like you?” you smiled.

“If anyone here is the lucky one, it’s me.”

“I think we’re both lucky that Mr. Brown made us sit next to one another in English class.”

“Do you think we should invite him to the wedding?” Tyler laughed.

“Can you imagine?” you joined his laughter. “Oh man, there’s so many people we’re going to have to invite.”

“And you’re going to have to pick out bridesmaids.”

“And a location. And flowers. And an outfit.”

“Hey, love, it’s ok,” Tyler said, resting a hand on the side of your face. He gently brushed his thumb along your cheekbone. “We’ll figure it all out eventually. All we have to do right now is focus on the present.”

“I like that idea.”

You kissed Tyler once more and then laid back down on his shoulder with your head turned towards the stars. The proposal kept replaying itself in your head, making it impossible not to smile. Who knew all those years ago when Tyler held your hand that he would end up asking you to marry him in the same spot years later.

It was the best date you could have asked for.

*     *     *     *     *

Taglist

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[ravenvsfox]

what’s up what’s up what’s up, here’s rockband au chapter nine as promised!!!

7.

Andrew hands Neil his t-shirt. It’s Saturday, and they’re in Neil’s room, shoulder to shoulder, moonlight quivering above them like a ladle-full of mercury.

“Walk me through it again.”

“Walk yourself through it,” Andrew says. “It’s not that complicated.”

Neil holds the shirt in a ball against his bare chest. “Closed venue. Metal detectors. Sixteen songs. Quick encore.”

“Riko’s not coming.”

Neil swallows, thinking of the number seven in bold, underlined. “He might.”

“I told you to stop believing everything he says he’s capable of,” Andrew says. Neil strums his fingers on the messy wad of his shirt. “He threatens ten people before breakfast. He doesn’t realize how defended you are.”

Neil turns his face into the pillow and screws his eyes shut. “It’s not really about him. It’s just—I don’t know. I trust my instincts.” He doesn't mention the final numbers in a drawn out countdown. He doesn’t rehash the details of Riko’s threat. It won’t change anything.

Andrew shifts and splays his hand over Neil’s jaw. “Don’t,” he says. “They lie.” He scrapes his teeth over Neil’s neck. His half-hour old yes hangs in every corner of the room like smoke. They’re so close, he feels like a shadow being painstakingly gathered up and rolled on.

He licks his lips so close to Neil that his tongue flickers against his skin, and his pulse reacts to the feeling, thunderously fast. He feels the brief pressure of Andrew’s hand on his wrists, and he makes himself go boneless beneath him.

Every time they do this, Neil replays everything a moment after it happens, stockpiling the taste of the frantic breath trapped between them, the hot, calloused hands up under his clothes. His mouth is perpetually gasping open, Andrew’s wet hair choked in his fists. He never used to want anything like this, so badly it could kill him. It could really kill him.

“Neil,” Andrew says. Neil chases his mouth, but Andrew sits up over him, slouched against his hip. “Don’t do this if you think it’s your only option.” “What do you mean?” Neil breathes.

“I don’t need this,” Andrew says, holding a hand down hard on Neil’s chest. “Neither should you.”

Of course I need it, Neil wants to say. I kiss you and I feel — the way music feels before it leaves my mouth. When it could be anything.

“I just want to,” Neil says, shrugging. Just. Like there’s something nonchalant about admitting it, like it’s nothing to him. He waits for Andrew to call his bluff.

He doesn’t. He just looks down at him, slides his index and middle fingers over Neil’s hipbone, and kisses his chest.

Oh no, Neil thinks. We’ve been so stupid.

6.

His hands make the shapes of the chords, but he can’t seem to play them. His vision swims white.

He can hear what his part should sound like, the dark wind chime cacophony, big-band style backgrounds underneath the grind of furious twin guitars. He should be the food colouring bleeding into their batter.

“Play,” Kevin says bluntly. “This isn’t a read inside your head kind of deal.”

“Yeah,” Nicky says. “Share with the class.”

“One second,” Neil mutters.

“I’m serious, get out of your head,” Kevin says.

“Give me a fucking second,” he snaps. There’s a cool moment of silence.

“We’re never going to be ready for Saturday,” Aaron says, ducking out from under the strap of his guitar.

Neil’s ears burn. He plays some simple inversions so it seems like there’s something musical going on behind his eyes other than alarm bells.

“The rest of us are going to play,” Kevin says. “Catch up.” He slides his fingers down the neck of his bass like he’s slitting a throat. Andrew launches himself at the drum-kit, and Neil blinks at the time signature on his music, the little 6 stacked over the 8.

One, two, three, four, five, six. Play. Play. Play.

He plays a natural A instead of a flat, and the structural integrity of his first chord crumples. He blinks, disbelieving, at his hand, hunched over the botched note. He straightens all of his fingers. The song gallops on without him.

“Are you okay?” Nicky mouths. Neil frowns. His head is full of numbers.

It turns out the song isn’t very good without vocals or keys. Kevin is obviously aware of it, and his face is sour, clenched like a fist. Neil watches his pursed mouth, then Nicky’s concerned brown peach-pit eyes, and Andrew and Aaron’s uncannily synced expressions of disdain.

“I’m sorry,” he says, before the last note has completely died.

“Useless. That’s utterly useless to me,” Kevin says.

“I’m distracted.”

“Obviously,” Kevin says tightly. “Let’s go again.” They play for a minute. Andrew puts his sticks down suddenly, and the tempo trips over its own feet. He stands up amid the clatter of directionless instruments. “Jesus Andrew, fucking participate.”

He sidles out from behind the drums and walks wordlessly out of the room. Neil immediately gets up to follow, but Kevin catches his arm.

“This distraction, Neil, it’s poison. If you let it progress I will never forgive you.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything progressing,” he tells him.

Kevin’s grip loosens. “This isn’t a joke to me,” he says quietly.

“I guarantee you I don’t find anything about you funny.”

Kevin sighs and looks at the ceiling. “Okay.”

“Five minutes,” Neil says. He shakes Kevin loose and stalks out of the room, feeling a little shock of adrenaline lifting his feet.

Andrew’s waiting for him around the corner.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“Okay,” Neil says.

“You’re not careless like this. Not about music.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not about this,” Neil says, gesturing between them.

Andrew narrows his eyes. “Riko’s not going to hire a hit on you at a public gig, and the more you obsess about it the more I think you might actually be clueless.”

“You don’t already think that?” Neil asks, surprised.

Andrew ignores him. “If you’re so afraid of losing your voice, then why are you going silent now?”

“It’s not just about my voice anymore. It’s about all of us. You—“ He searches Andrew’s face. “You must know that.”

“I try to know as little about you as possible.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

He watches Andrew’s tightly closed expression and wants so badly to screw it open.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Andrew says.

“Just—distract me?” Neil begs.

Andrew considers. “From what?”

He steps closer. Andrew lets him. He doesn’t bend backwards in Neil’s blustering, wanting wind.

“From him.” He doesn’t say Kevin and his prying, or Riko’s posturing, or his father’s oppressive memory, but Andrew seems to understand.

He understands all the way into Neil’s space, and then he understands his mouth open and his thighs apart, and he gives him something to press down into, when the piano keys wouldn’t budge.

They sway. Music trickles through the halls from somewhere. Maybe out of Neil’s mouth.

“Oh,” someone says.

The interruption is a lightning strike, and it splits them in half. Andrew uses Neil’s chest as leverage to push himself backwards several feet. He’s overcorrecting, trying to close off his expression and hold his breath, wrenching a door closed over the vulnerability of being seen wanting something.

Neil sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, and tries to get his equilibrium back, shifting from being deeply kissed to being shoved halfway across the hall.

“Oh,” Nicky repeats. “Oh, fuck, um. Sorry. We’re just—starting.” He holds a hand to his face, half laughing. “Oh my god.”

Andrew wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and Neil and Nicky watch him breeze past them both.

“What the fuck, actually,” Nicky hisses. Neil shakes his head, speechless. “You’re— no, I can’t even talk about this.”

“Good,” Neil manages.

“Actually, wait, I definitely can,” Nicky says. “That’s my—Neil, you know that was Andrew, right? My cousin Andrew?”

Neil bristles. “Unlike you, I do actually try to identify a person before I kiss them.”

Nicky ignores this dig, and says, “so that is what you were doing? I didn’t hallucinate that?”

Neil gives him a look, and tries to walk back to the recording studio, but Nicky catches him by both elbows.

“No, no, no, no, I’m nowhere near done with this, oh my god.”

“I am.”

“Neil,” Nicky moans.

“Practice, now,” Neil says, dragging him back with him.

“Then talk later, please, Neil, take pity on me.”

He ignores him, and everyone else, until he’s behind the piano.

He starts playing the sequence, pitch perfect this time, and one by one, the ensemble climbs in behind him. 

If he doesn’t look up at them, it’s like nothing even happened. Andrew’s drums are full of space and Nicky’s guitar is urgent where Aaron’s is steady. Kevin’s bass is thick and sweet as syrup, and suddenly they’re good again.

In the shuffle of coming and going, he had completely forgotten to count himself in.

5.

Before Monday can start, Neil tries to stop time.

He wanders the house in the twilight, hoping that the silence will somehow keep him preserved in place.

The oven clock blinks 5:00 am for what seems like a very long time. The humidifier in Kevin’s room makes a noise like wheels on asphalt, that silky, endless grind.

As always, Neil doesn’t have a destination. He pauses drowsily at the kitchen window and looks at the grey stucco of the house next door. He goes downstairs, pauses on the second to last stair, then walks back up again. He sits on the porch steps for a while, but it feels so exposed that he panics, fumbling loudly with the screen door on his way back inside.

He almost cries in the bathroom mirror, and then he pinches his fingers over his eyes until it hurts.

He nudges the door to Andrew’s bedroom open, but he’s soundly asleep for once, and it makes him want to cry again, to think of waking him. He eases the door closed.

“Hey,” Nicky says gently. Neil looks up, hand still curled around Andrew’s doorknob.

“What do you want?” he whispers.

Nicky looks sad. “Just checking on you. I heard you moving around up here.”

“How did you know it was me?”

Nicky smiles, crossing his arms and leaning sleepily up against the wall. “I listen pretty good, you know? It’s what makes me so invaluable.”

“Right,” Neil says. Then stronger, meaning it, “right.” He swallows. “Look, Nicky, I don’t really want to talk about—“

“It’s fine,” Nicky says, waving him off. He grins. “You’ll tell me everything eventually. They always do.”

Eventually. Neil tries to smile, or roll his eyes, or get angry, but he feels like he can’t move. If Nicky isn’t actively telling a joke he always looks like he’s about to, or like maybe he just did and you didn’t get it. It feels incongruous and cruel to do anything but laugh. 

“Come sit with me,” Nicky says, nodding towards the living room. “We’ve got time.”

Neil peers around the dividing wall into the kitchen as they pass. 5:15, the oven reports. They settle into their usual spots on the couch and love seat, predictable as ghosts. Cold air presses in through the cracked window and makes the old leather crunch when he moves.

“Are you nervous?”

Neil looks back at him, distracted. “About what?”

“Saturday.”

Neil’s heart jerks, confused, before he remembers the concert. He feels like he’s been staring so hard at the details of the frame that he forgot the painting inside it.

“I don’t really get stage fright,” Neil says honestly.

“I know,” Nicky says. He’s smiling wryly, chin propped up on his knee. “You’re fearless. It’s obnoxious.”

“I’m not fearless. I just think it’s a waste of time to worry about the things I actually like to do.” “Sage wisdom,” Nicky snorts. “Trying to put Betsy out of a job?”

Neil shrugs. “I probably could.”

“Pff,” Nicky says. “I’m not sure you’re well-adjusted enough for that.”

“It’s a pseudo-science anyway,” Neil says.

“Uh-huh,” Nicky says, amused. His smile sags a little, and he looks away. “Um. I know I wasn’t going to make you talk about it, but—“

“Nicky,” Neil warns. “You didn’t even last five minutes.”

“I know, I know, I’m a gossip, whatever. Just tell me you’re not jerking him around, okay? Tell me it’s serious. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I pretty much raised that rascal.”

“It’s not serious,” Neil says, confused. “It’s not really anything. It’s just—a distraction. For both of us.”

“Neil, come on.”

“What?”

Nicky’s looking at him with wide-open disbelief, and Neil’s skin crawls.

“It’s obviously something.”

“It’s not,” Neil argues. He thinks of Andrew, hot against him, saying I don’t need this, neither should you. “I know exactly where we stand.”

“Really, because it seems like maybe you don’t, at all. There’s no fucking way this means nothing to him. I think there’s been something about you from the very beginning. He only writes lyrics about shit that’s like, in his bloodstream—“

Neil shivers, annoyed. “We don’t have feelings for each other just because you want us to. We have a deal. He’s counting on me not to get attached.”

Nicky studies him appraisingly. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” Neil says, trying not to dwell on it. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Okay, fine,” Nicky says. “Believe what you want.” He pushes himself to the edge of the couch, and reaches out to pat Neil’s cheek. “Just be careful with each other, okay?”

“Andrew doesn’t need to be coddled.”

Nicky smiles, sideways. “Sure he does.” He stands, steadying himself on Neil’s shoulder. “We all deserve a little coddling, I think. Why not? It’s better than getting hurt for no reason.” He rounds the couch and makes his way over to the stairs to the basement. “I’ll try not to bring it up again unless you fuck up in a big way, okay?”

“Okay,” Neil agrees, relieved.  

Nicky smiles. “Go back to sleep.” He nods back to the place where he found Neil skulking in the hall. “Believe me, waking Andrew up is more trouble than it’s worth.”

Neil shrugs. “I’ve done it before.”

Nicky wrinkles his nose a little, and scoffs, “I bet you have.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Neil narrows his eyes at him until he slinks back down the stairs towards his room.

He knows Nicky is wrong about this. Andrew agreed to stop writing about him, and Neil agreed to stop pinning his hopes on him in return. He would know, if Andrew wanted more from him. He thinks—no, he would know.

He sits in the chilly little sitting room, listening to that grumbling humidifier and watching the dark TV screen reflect the outside lights. Every corner of this place is familiar. It hurts to think of how much time he’s spent here, letting himself in, drinking and singing and kissing Andrew’s tired morning mouth. 5:30, the oven clock whispers.

He puts his hand to a crease in the couch, and thinks, hopeless, I want to stay.

4.

Some nights, Kevin drags him back into the studio after practice. He forces him through vocal gymnastics and ear training until he can sing all of their songs a cappella and unwavering.

Kevin walks him through the empty halls with such purpose, like he’s fighting through a crowd that isn’t there. Neil wonders what it would be like, to have that self-importance baked into you. To feel like you’ve earned it.

He watches the arc of Kevin’s back as he tinkers with wires. As always, in the final days of the countdown, Neil wants absently to be somewhere else. 

Of course he loves these sessions, honing his skill with Kevin, and he enjoys pacing through Palmetto when it’s a perfect empty labyrinth. But he doesn’t want to go through the motions of the same fight, and he doesn’t want to think about what they’re practicing for anymore, a tour that he is unlikely to finish.

He swallows stale bottled water and plonks his phone up on the piano where he won’t be tempted to check it.

“Are we ready?” Kevin asks. Neil shrugs. “Let’s try the harmonies in big blue.” Affectionately nicknamed by Nicky for its bluesy influence, a sound so rich and dark that it’s almost purple.

“Can we workshop the repeat? I’m still not sure what we’re doing with dynamics, there.”

“Not yet,” Kevin sniffs. “We need everyone here for that.”

“But I’m good on everything else,” Neil says.

“I decide when you’re good,” Kevin says, adjusting Neil’s microphone in front of him, like he’s a child who can’t fasten his own bib.

He can’t help it, his fists curl. “Right. Remind me why you get that privilege, again?”

“Neil,” Kevin says. “We don’t have time for this conversation.”

“For once we agree,” Neil says icily.

“I was one half of Evermore, remember? We weren’t the most popular duo in America because we wasted time bickering. We were an organization in every sense of the word. We each had our tasks and we completed them.”

“Do you think that’s what makes a good band?” Neil asks.

Kevin falters. “I—not anymore, no.”

“We’re better than Evermore because we fight. For everything.”

“We’re not better than Evermore,” Kevin scoffs.

“That depends on how you define better,” Neil says. Kevin looks away. He can’t seem to hold eye contact; his face always splinters under the heft of the other person’s gaze, like thin ice underfoot.

“I try not to think about before.”

“Yeah,” Neil says, feeling his stomach sink. “Yeah, I understand that.”

“I—“ Kevin starts, twisting the plug at the root of his bass, rocking back so he’s sitting on the nearest amp. “I know you’re hiding—something. From us.”

Neil nods. “Okay.”

“And it’s weird because, there’s a lot of shitty stuff about you that you don’t bother to hide.”

Neil snorts, feeling unusually lenient with Kevin, almost enjoying his sharp mouth.

“So I’m kind of thinking… whatever it is must be really bad.”

“Interesting theory.”

“Are you denying it?”

“I can’t be bothered to lie to you, Kevin. Most of what I say goes over your head anyway.”

“Fuck you,” Kevin says, but he’s kind of smiling.

“All you need to know is that I’m committed to Ausreißer. I will be until the very end. Will you keep practicing with me until then?”

“Yeah,” Kevin says, reaching out and knocking awkwardly on top of the piano. “Every night.”

3.

Neil has never had trouble telling the twins apart. The way they hold themselves is entirely different; Aaron’s shoulders are always at a contrary angle while Andrew’s are straight across. Aaron is sour where Andrew is bitter—there’s a crucial difference there. The armbands help, but he likes to think he could tell them apart in a snowstorm, bundled up across the street.

He also has disdain for Aaron where he has respect for Andrew, and he hasn’t teased those feelings completely apart yet.

When he walks out of the record shop on main street and sees Aaron walking with an unfamiliar woman, he stops short. His fingers bunch in the plastic handle of the bag swinging from one hand.

“I thought you had an appointment with Dobson,” he calls. Aaron looks around guiltily, and his arm shrivels away from the woman’s shoulders. “And unless this is her...”

“Neil,” he says stiffly. “This is Katelyn.”

She waves cheerfully. Neil ignores her. “Is there a reason you’re lying to the team?”

Aaron rolls his eyes, and makes a show of relaxing back into Katelyn’s side. “It’s none of your business, at all, as usual.” He tries to steer them past Neil on the sidewalk, but Neil sidesteps back into their way.

“Andrew doesn’t tend to like outsiders.”

“Do you honestly think I’ve forgotten that?” Aaron hisses. He seems embarrassed, and Neil can see his hand consciously gentling on Katelyn’s shoulder. “Can you—“ he looks at her apologetically. “Just give us a second, okay?”

“Of course,” she says sweetly. “Wave me over if you need extraction,” she says, quieter, and he smiles secretly back at her. Neil frowns as Aaron kisses her on the temple, and ushers Neil back under the awning next to the record shop.

“I know what Andrew’s opinions are on this, probably better than you do,” he starts.

“So why are you still doing it?” Neil asks.

“Why are you fucking my brother?” Aaron returns. His irises look exactly like Andrew’s do when he’s frustrated, more like an absence of colour than anything else. Neil shivers, though the noonday heat is still tense in the air.

“How is that relevant?”

“So you are then.”

Neil squints at him. “Just tell me what to think about this so I can stop talking to you.”

“Nice,” Aaron says sarcastically. “Don’t act like you’re above this. You’re breaking the rules just as badly as we are.”

“What rules am I breaking, exactly?”

Aaron looks nervously back at Katelyn. “You should’ve spoken to Andrew about this, not me.”

“Believe me, I would rather be talking to him, but you’re the one who just showed up here with a secret.”

“Look, just pretend you never saw us. I’ll pretend your obsession with my brother isn’t physically repugnant to me.”

“I don’t have time for pretending,” Neil snaps. A passing bicyclist startles at his raised voice, and one pedal briefly spins out. “I don’t have time for whatever is keeping you and Andrew apart.”

Aaron scrutinizes him for a long moment. There’s something surprisingly sharp about his expression. “Whatever problems we have were here long before you got here, and they’ll be here after you’re gone.”

“You’re right,” Neil says. He can feel the frustration bleeding out from his face, wetting his collar, flooding the street. “What a waste.” 

He tugs his shopping bag up around his wrist like a bracelet and sets off in the opposite direction from the one Aaron had been walking in.

Later, when he’s listening to Ausreißer’s first studio album on a borrowed CD-player, he can’t stop thinking of the family they have so clearly always been.

Their sound was chaotic, angrier than it is with Neil. Andrew’s lyrics are about missing something you’ve never had, and Neil emphatically thinks yes, without really understanding why it resonates with him.

Nicky and Aaron and Andrew had only found each other six or seven years ago by Neil’s count. They had been slung together with Kevin from circumstances that looked entirely incompatible on paper, but harmonized when they were spoken aloud.

They hurled things at each other like pottery that shattered into colour and powder; they demolished their glass houses and stood hand in hand in the rubble; they flattened all of that gravel into smooth open road.

Neil knows they play better, now that the music is all pointed in the same direction, but there’s something about this snapshot of who they were that’s so compelling. Teenagers who didn’t know they were all feeling the same terrible things. Even though they sing about hollowness and regret, it’s so obvious from the outside that they weren’t alone at all.

Neil clutches the jewel CD case to his chest, lying in the dark, and wonders if the five of them look like that now, always at odds but completely in tune.

2.

They have brunch at the Foxes dorm on Thursday.

Neil has long been charmed by the cream and sunshine corners of their house, the huge monstera plant in the kitchen, the teacups full of wrapped candies on every surface, the orange living room wall with a couple of framed music awards hanging above the couch.

It’s lived-in in a completely different way from the monsters’ strange storm-cloud pocket in suburbia.

Wymack and Abby have been invited to keep the peace. It’s interesting to see the way everyone from Foxes relaxes with them posted at the dining room table, while everyone from Ausreißer get the slightest bit stiffer, possibly out of some warped kind of respect.

Almost nothing happens, all morning. It’s a tableau so appealing that it’s almost ugly. It already feels like a memory.

Neil watches Renee and Nicky setting the table, and Matt threatening teasingly to pour coffee in Kevin’s lap. Wymack’s voice when he calls the rest of them to the table is commanding in a way that startles Neil less than it used to. Dan jumps when Neil does though, and they share a look.

“He has such a dad voice, it’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Neil says, pretending to understand.

“No one even think about leaving this table without a good reason,” Wymack says. “Anyone bringing animosity to breakfast gets a boot in the ass.”

“You promise?” Nicky says.

“Don’t be gross,” Aaron says. Allison laughs. They tuck into french toast and peaches and whipped cream from a can. Matt made the bacon too crispy, and even the smell of it is nauseating.

“Neil, are you freaking out yet?” Matt asks.

“What? Why?” Neil asks. He can feel Andrew peering at the side of his face for a fraction of a moment.

Matt’s smile quirks, turning on its side. “Big concert on Saturday? Live debut of your very own songs? Ringing any bells?”

“A few,” Neil says awkwardly. “I’m in denial.”

“Mm, he is,” Nicky says around a mouthful of fruit. “About so many things.” He’d definitely smoked a little weed bright and early this morning, and it’s made his lips dangerously loose.

Neil glares at him, but Dan’s focus is already cranked in tight. She puts down her knife. “Like?” she asks.

Neil shrugs.

“What, is it a sex thing?” Allison asks.

“Uh-uh,” Wymack says. “Vetoed.”

“You can’t veto conversational topics in our house,” Dan argues.

“I can, I am, change the subject.”

“Boring.”

“How’s the mixing on the collab going?” Kevin asks, reaching across half of the table to get at the orange juice.

“Done,” Matt says proudly. “Chopped and screwed. Signed, sealed, delivered, etc.”

“Collab?” Abby asks, interested.

“Neil’s featuring on a Foxes track,” Renee says, smiling around her napkin.

“We’re set to drop it on Monday,” Allison adds.

He wonders if they’ll still release it, once he’s gone missing. He thinks again of his echo, the proof of his relationships with all of these people, fossilized in mp3 files and kicked around the radio forever.

“That’s exciting,” Abby says. “Kind of outside your rocker comfort zone though, isn’t it Neil?”

“My ‘comfort zone’ is pretty narrow,” Neil says flatly. “But music is music.”

“I suppose so,” she says, smiling sheepishly. “It’s not like you don’t have the voice for it.”

“And anyway, genre’s a beautiful thing,” Dan says twirling a fork full of pineapple in the air. “It’s made to be fucked with.”

Matt raises his glass in mock toast. “Here here.”

“I still haven’t heard this song,” Kevin complains.

“You haven’t earned it,” Allison says.

“Play it for him,” Neil hears himself say. He can’t catch the thought before it flutters out of him. They all look at him. “I want to hear what he thinks,” he admits.

He half looks at Andrew, who is slouched back in his seat, drowning his french toast in syrup and jam. Neil suspects that he’s the sort of person who would put ice cream on breakfast foods.

Neil can see a little moth-eaten hole in the shoulder of his t-shirt. There are mismatched seat cushions tied to the dining room chairs, and Andrew’s is orange and blue gingham.

“Play it, play it,” Nicky says.

“Okay, fine, but only because Neil actually asked,” Dan says.

Allison hums. “Neil’s superpower. Asking nicely.” He looks up at her, but she’s looking past him.

Dan starts to stand, but Renee scoots back from the table and waves her away. “I can pull it up for you,” she says. “I was just playing it while I made breakfast.”

There’s a little set-up in the far corner of the room, a couple of monitors and speakers, a keyboard, a microphone. Renee tugs her skirt primly underneath her and sits in the rolling chair, sliding home at the desk.

Neil watches her click through a few files and toggle the volume controls. The longer it takes her, the more his hands start to shake. He hides them under the tablecloth. Andrew’s knee presses against his, hard.

“Ready?”

Neil almost shakes his head.

“Just don’t offer unsolicited critiques,” Dan says. “It’s a done deal, no more tweaking allowed.”

“Yeah, Kevin,” Matt says pointedly. “If you comment on the timbre or whatever the fuck, you’re uninvited to brunch.”

“Please, he’d love that,” Nicky jokes. “He loves insulting people and hates social obligations.” He scruffs the top of Kevin’s head teasingly but his hand gets slapped away.

“Just hit play,” Wymack commands. Renee does.

The house floods with music.

kidnapped by two pomegranate halves

the seeds won’t let me go

walked thigh-deep in the ocean

I’ve never been this slow

I have to die tomorrow

but for a minute I could grow

here in your garden.

don’t don’t watch me go

it’s so much worse if you know

I really thought I was home

and the lights stay on

but there’s no more show

and don’t watch me go

it stays a yes if I don’t say no

it was dangerous to fly so low

But worth it not to be alone.

Neil sits through it, embarrassed and relieved at once. It’s like a love letter being passed around the room to be read.

He knows most of them will listen only to the tune at first, the same way he knows that Andrew is memorizing the lyrics as they are sung.

Everyone in Foxes had assumed that he was writing about something that had long since happened, so he managed to dodge their concern. They’d been excited, contributing, unspooling then re-spooling his rhyme scheme so it was tighter, vacuum sealing his ideas to the shapes of the notes.

And the music is exactly right, dark and rolling with the lushness of a thunderstorm. 

Neil and Dan sing together, caught up in these tricky, wonky harmonies that almost grate but resolve sweet—like the burn and flush of hard liquor. Matt, not usually one to sing, is a counterpoint in the bass below them.

The guitar gallops next to the bass, pinched together with layers of electronic effects. Renee’s muted violin comes in halfway through, building up to a crescendo, making everything feel urgent and serious, and then the tension breaks — the instruments all drop out, but Neil is singing so hard that he’s almost shouting, Dan’s voice pinned up underneath him, the rest of them humming, like a machine, or like a mother soothing her child to sleep.

“Oh man,” Nicky whispers.

It’s not pop, but it’s not rock either. It’s an outlier on the album that Foxes put together and it’s meant to be that way, more of a marathon of sounds and feelings than a formulaic piece of music. It’s a risk, they keep telling him. Their audience might not ‘get it’.

He loves it in the particular way that you love the limb that’s about to be amputated. You have it, and you’ve always had it, and you won’t have it again.

Nicky leans over and fishes his hand out from under the table to be held. “You’ve outdone yourself, Neil Josten.”

“I haven’t heard you sing like that,” Kevin admits, nose in his drink to hide the compliment.

“You have,” Neil argues.

“He has,” Aaron agrees, unexpectedly. “You’re just too busy admiring your own playing to notice.”

Nicky squeezes his fingers. “Those lyrics—“

“Okay, give us compliments now,” Allison says.

“Well it goes without saying,” Nicky starts, but he says it anyway, lauding the production, Allison’s warm alto, Renee’s switch from drums and synth to violin, and the a cappella section in the heart of it all.

Andrew is silent next to Neil, but he is pulling a loose thread from his cloth napkin so it contorts around one tense point.

He’s never heard the conversation get so animated between these two groups, so much so that it kind of doesn’t feel like two separate groups at all.

At some point, Kevin says, “maybe we should all try working on a track, if it gets these kinds of results.”

“Seriously?” Matt asks. 

“I’m not moderating that recording session,” Wymack says, looking exhausted at the thought of it.

“We can all take care of ourselves, it’ll be fine,” Dan says flippantly, and Neil thinks, yeah, of course.

They’ll be fine.

1.

“Are you planning on going somewhere?” Andrew asks.

Neil looks up from his notebook. He’s been sitting at the kitchen table in his sweatpants while the rest of the band flits around the house collecting shoes and jackets and dugouts full of stale weed. The doors keep opening and closing, but he thought they’d finally left for Eden’s Twilight.

Andrew stares him down, backlit from the hall. He has the sudden thought that he can’t remember the last time he saw Andrew have a drink.

“I told you,” Neil says, “I don’t want to go to a club the night before our concert.”

“Don’t watch me go / it’s so much worse if you know,” Andrew recites. “I want to know where you think you’re going.”

Neil’s eyes flit towards the foyer. “Are they just waiting in the car for you?”

“I asked you a question.” His voice is dangerously close to colour.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, or who’s going to come for me, but someone will, and I’m worried that it will end badly for more than just me.”

“Worried enough to write a song about it.”

A moment passes between them in which they both think of what else is important enough to write songs about.

“I never expected to be here forever,” Neil says.

“You should’ve thought of that before you signed with us,” he says. Neil shrugs, miserable. He had thought about it, and he’d decided they were worth every feverish moment of risk. “I’ve told you I won’t allow the Moriyamas to get to you,” Andrew continues.

“I don’t think you should promise me that.”

“It’s part of the deal.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have a deal anymore,” Neil says, too loud. Andrew stares at him. “Maybe we should call it off.”

“You’re a special kind of suicidal,” Andrew says. “There���s no reason for you to let them win before they have even come.”

“I need to fight for myself,” Neil admits. “I need you with me, and behind me, but I can’t keep holding you in front of me.” Andrew stands perfectly still, a muscle straining in his jaw. “Let me go.”

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

Neil almost laughs. “For once, I’m not. There are people in my life that I want to protect. So I’m going to do that.”

Andrew steps just barely closer. “You can’t change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay,” Andrew says simply.

“Thank you,” Neil says, leaning back in his chair, wrung out with relief.

Andrew walks all the way up to him, and Neil’s loose neck tips back to keep him in view.

A hand slips up to hold the back of his head, a tight, familiar grip.

“Don’t make me regret trusting you.”

In a moment of weakness, Neil wets his lips and says, “you trust me?” His heart is so far up his throat that he imagines he can feel his molars digging into it when he talks. His hand finds the bottom of Andrew’s sweater and tangles in the hem.

Andrew winces, spectacularly, an entire chain reaction of eyebrows and lashes and wrinkled nose. He reaches down and pulls his hand away, but it takes him too long to let go of Neil’s flexed fingers.

For days afterwards, Neil will replay this suspended moment, in which they are connected at the hand, and Andrew can’t bring himself to deny that he trusts him.

0.

He gets the last text in the countdown halfway through final rehearsal at the venue, but he doesn’t let himself dwell on it. There’s no follow-up, no phone call, no shadow in the window. He turns his phone off.

The more day that they manage to chew up and put behind them, the more the anticipation turns into confusion, and then droops and dissolves completely. They have a show to put on, and he is tired of being threatened.

They’re playing the same auditorium in Colombia where Neil saw his first Foxes show, the same place where he received the first text in the countdown. Backstage is exactly as he remembers it, cooler and darker than the rest of the building, lined with equipment and snaked with wires. This time though, their custom Ausreißer drum-kit is centre stage, and their set-up is as organized as a well-laid table.

He keeps making grinning eye contact with Nicky and remembering that under any other circumstances, he would be hyper-charged with good adrenaline, a wind-up toy trembling to be let go.

He warms up so thoroughly that he could pour his voice straight through a sieve and nothing would catch.

The sound check is a bit bumpy, and it’s always jarring to be mid-song and get the signal to stop. He never knows how much he should be performing, in practice.

Eventually, the curtain is dropped, and the five of them are corralled into the dressing room at the very end of a ropey backstage hallway. Neil sits cross-legged on a worn leather couch and lets Nicky apply make-up to his face. He often did his own before he joined the band, when he was concerned with sculpting his face and covering scars, but Nicky’s toolkit is entirely different — eyeliner and smoke.

Kevin shrugs on his custom jacket, fitted, leather. He’s warming up under his breath, always. Aaron’s been ready since lunch, and he sits with his combat boots dangling over the arm of a chair and a book balanced on his knees. Neil’s watching though, and he can see Aaron running through fingerings with his left hand. Andrew isn’t in the room, which means he’s smoking somewhere.

They’ve done so many shows, but it feels like a different art now, somehow. He thinks of the words that Andrew has written for him, the chord progressions that Kevin fed him every night until he spoke in notes instead of words. He thinks of the moment before you perform, when the crowd is a runway and you are a plane.

For the first time all week, he wants time to move faster.

______

The show grins and spits in the crowd’s faces.

It’s filthy and fast-paced and polished, and the sound and energy could prop Neil up even if his body gave out.

They’re sold out, and the audience never stops arcing up to try and touch them; all he can see is a forest of arms forever and ever.

He loses his mind a little bit, somewhere between their opener and their eighth song. His hair works itself out of the stubby little ponytail that he’s knotted it into, and his eyeliner melts off under the stage lights. Kevin does some improv so excellent that Neil holds his microphone up to the bass, and feedback screams like a sixth band member. Andrew hammers the snares so hard at the end of their third song that the momentum forces him up out of his seat.

They take a mid-show break, and a nervous employee tells them that the crowd is getting out of hand. Nicky replies that they’ve obviously never been to an Ausreißer show before. Kevin tells them to call in more security. Neil thinks, how did he ever think that Riko could get him here, through this thicket of fans?

The second half of their set is somehow even rowdier; songs devolve into sheer noise, and Neil has to grab at his ear piece and concentrate to stay on pitch. They’ve organized posters and chants, and action ripples constantly through the venue.

His anxiety spikes, somewhere under the thrill of performing. He looks back from the keyboard towards Andrew, who raises his chin at him. There’s a noise like something shattering, at the back of the hall. Something feels wrong.

Nicky’s laughing, unaware, spritzing a beer into the audience, and Aaron is playing fuller chords to make up for his absence. Kevin takes the melody in this one, and he’s holding the mic tenderly with both hands.

Finally, they play the song Neil wrote, and he’s half in and half out of the euphoria of it. He’s coasting from uneasy to sickly, but it’s the biggest crowd they’ve ever played, and the music is snapping together so perfectly. It might be better than their studio version. It’s the most frightening thing he’s ever done.

They careen through their final songs, to raucous applause.

Backstage is an ice-cold haven, and Neil droops gratefully into its open arms, accepting a water bottle and holding the back of his hand to his feverish forehead.

He blinks hard in the new darkness, listening, detached, to their fans begging for an encore.

They’re in a loose circle, debauched and exhausted. There’s no point in trying to talk through the noise, so they breathe together, and nod, and gather themselves back up.

Four fifths of them are back on stage in a riptide of joy that sounds painful, when a stage-hand gestures violently for Neil’s attention.

He jogs up and hands him an open flip phone. Neil looks down at it, then back into the person’s nervous face.

“It’s for you,” they mouth.

A shiver rakes viciously down his back. He takes the phone in one frozen hand.

There’s a text that reads:

Come find me in your dressing room, Junior.

And then,

You really should have answered my calls. Too late now.

He can’t see. His whole world falls on its side. He drops the phone. He can’t hear the noise it should make when it connects with the floor, like maybe physics isn’t working, and he thinks--I’m dreaming. 

He manages to look out at the stage, where it feels like everyone in the world is looking expectantly at him. He looks back towards their dressing room.

For a moment, it’s hilarious. He was safe and invisible, and then he clambered up on stage and sang himself raw for months. He was constantly recorded, and photographed, and trackable. 

He wonders if he could’ve even performed like he does, without the fear at his back, if part of him was using the band as another means of running away. He wonders why they let him live this long, what kind of mercy could possibly live inside his father.

He walks unsteadily towards the dressing room, ears ringing. His legs don’t belong to him. He tells the stage-hand—something. To vamp, or excuse him. He doesn’t even know.

He’s been pacing this hallway all day, he knows it creaks and moves with you, but the sound is all swallowed now.

He wrings the doorknob, and presses inward, expecting the barrel of a gun, expecting some impossible amalgamation of Riko and Nathan and all of their muscle combined.

The dressing room looks the same way they left it.

He scans the table full of their belongings, and the wall of mirrors. His breath is so loud in the stillness of the room. He thinks wildly that it was all a cruel prank, or a misunderstanding. 

And then he sees her grinning, cheshire reflection in the dark. He whips around.

“Lola,” he chokes.

“Oh, good. You do remember me,” she says. There’s a gun in her hand with a silencer screwed into the barrel, and she’s holding it casually at attention, the same way one might hold a lazy cigarette.

“You can’t be here,” he says.

“I very nearly wasn’t,” she says. “I didn’t have a backstage pass. I can’t decide if you’re an idiot, for choosing to stand directly in the public eye, or if you were counting on your position affording you extra… protection.” She shifts, and Neil can see now that there’s a corpse at her feet. She nudges it with her shoe. “Anyone you know?”

He nearly throws up. His body roils with terror and fury, and his voice is thick when he says, “you’d better hope not, for your sake.”

She laughs, delighted. “Have you decided to fight back? Your father will be so pleased.” She stands up. “Hate to cut this short, but we’ve got places to be, rockstar.”

He shakes his head. “You can’t possibly think that you can get me out of here that easily. My band is literally waiting on stage for me.”

“That’s why you’re going to finish your little set, and then you’re going to come find me in the parking lot. Oh, and this guard was a dud,” she says, nodding at the crumpled body that Neil can see now is one of the hired security guards who had been controlling the crowd. “So I hired you some specialists.”

He shakes his head again, thoughts racing. “They won’t just let me go.”

“I think they will, with some persuading,” she says.

“Don’t touch them.”

Lola wiggles the gun teasingly against his chin. “Don’t make me.” She moves past him, trailing her nails along his shoulder as she goes. When she opens the door, he can see the looming figures of Jackson Plank and Romero Malcolm, decked out in all black. The thrill of music and cheering bursts back into his ears. He’d almost forgotten where he was.

Lola tucks her hair behind her ear and her gun into her waistband. She smiles at him, and he has the sick feeling that the whole time he’d been thinking of the daily texts as the dwindling digits on a time bomb, Lola had been relishing in every number.

“See you soon, Junior.”

[chiseler]

A Palestinian Guide to Surviving a Quarantine: On Faith, Humor and ‘Dutch Candy’

Call it a ‘quarantine’, a ‘shelter-in-place’, a ‘lockdown’ or a ‘curfew’, we Palestinians have experienced them all, though not at all voluntarily.

Personally, the first 23 years of my life were lived in virtual ‘lockdown’. My father’s ‘quarantine’ was experienced much earlier, as did his father’s ‘shelter-in-place’ before him. They both died and were buried in Gaza’s cemeteries without ever experiencing true freedom outside of their refugee camp in Gaza.

Currently in Gaza, the quarantine has a different name. We call it ‘siege’, also known as ‘blockade’.

In fact, all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s when Israel became a state and the Palestinian homeland was erased by Zionist colonialists with the support of their Western benefactors.

That lockdown intensified in 1967 when Israel, now a powerful state with a large army and strong allies, occupied the remaining parts of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Under this lockdown, the Palestinian freedom of movement was curtailed

to the extent that Palestinians required permits from the Israeli military to leave the Occupied Territories or to return home, to move about from one town to the other, and, at times, to cross a single Israeli military checkpoint or a fortified wall.

In Palestine, we don’t call our imprisonment a lockdown, but a ‘military occupation’ and ‘apartheid’.

As for ‘shelter-in-place’, in Palestine, we have a different name for it. We call it a ‘military curfew’.

Since I was a child, I learned to listen intently to orders barked out by Israeli military officers as they swept through our refugee camp in Gaza declaring or easing military curfews. This ritual often happened late at night.

“People of Nuseirat, per orders of the Israeli military you are now under curfew. Anyone who violates orders will be shot immediately,” the terrifying words, always communicated through a loudspeaker in broken Arabic, were a staple during the First Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) of 1987.

The period between 1987 to 1993 was a virtual ‘lockdown’. Thousands of people, mostly children, were killed for failing to respect the rules of their collective imprisonment.

In Gaza, even when a full military curfew was not in place, we rarely left our small and crowded neighborhoods, let alone our refugee camps. We were all haunted by the fear that we may not be able to make it home by 8p.m., the time designated by the Israeli military for all of us to return home.

Every day, ten or fifteen minutes after the nightly curfew set in, we would hear the crackling and hissing of bullets as they whistled through the air from various distances. Automatically, we would conclude that some poor soul - a worker, a teacher, or a rowdy teenager - missed his chance by a few minutes, and paid a price for it.

Now that nearly half of the population of planet Earth are experiencing some form of ‘curfew’ or another, I would like to share a few suggestions on how to survive the prolonged confinement, the Palestinian way.

Think Ahead

Since we knew that a complete lockdown, or a military curfew, was always pending, we tried to anticipate the intensity and duration of it and prepare accordingly.

For example, when the Israeli army killed one or more refugees, we knew in advance that mass protests would follow, thus more killings. In these situations, a curfew was imminent.

Number one priority was to ensure that all family members congregated at home or stayed within close proximity so that they could rush in as fast as possible when the caravan of Israeli military jeeps and tanks came thundering, opening fire at anyone or anything within sight.

Lesson number one: Always think ahead and prepare for a longer lockdown than the initial one declared by your city or state.

Stay Calm

My father had a bad temper, although a very kind heart. When curfews were about to start, he would enter into a near-panic state. A chain smoker with obsessive, although rational fear that one of his five boys would eventually be killed, he would walk around the house in a useless rush, not knowing what to do next.

Typically, my mother would come in, rational and calculating. She would storm the kitchen to assess what basic supplies were missing, starting with the flour, sugar and olive oil.

Knowing that the first crackdown by the Israelis would be on water supplies and electricity, she would fill several plastic containers of water, designating some for tea, coffee and cooking, and others for dishes and washing clothes.

Per her orders, we would rush to the nearby stores to make small but necessary purchases - batteries for the flashlight and the transistor radio, cigarettes for my dad, and a few VHS videotapes which we would watch over and again, whether the curfew lasted for a few days or a few weeks.

Lesson number two: Take control of the situation - do not panic - and assign specific responsibilities to every family member. This strengthens the family unit and sets the stage for collective solidarity desperately required under these circumstances.

Preserve Your Water

I cannot emphasize this enough. Even if you think that a water crisis is not impending, do not take chances.

It is easy to feel invincible and fully prepared on the first day of quarantine - or military curfew. Many times, we lived to regret that false sense of readiness, as we drank too much tea or squandered our dishwashing water supplies too quickly.

In this case, you have a serious problem, especially during the summer months when you cannot count on rainwater to make up for the deficit.

Years after the end of the Intifada, my father revealed to us that many a time, him and mom used the rainwater they collected in buckets throughout the house, including the leaked roofs for our drinking supplies, even when there was no electricity or gas to boil the water beforehand.

In retrospect, this explains the many bouts of diarrhea we experienced, despite his assurances that they had painstakingly removed all bird droppings from the salvaged water.

Lesson number three: Cautiously use your water supplies during a quarantine, and never, under any circumstance, drink rainwater or, at least, keep diarrhea pills handy.

Ration Your Food

The same logic that applies to water applies to food. It goes without saying that any acquired food would have to cover the basics first. For example, flour, which we used to make bread, comes before bananas, and sugar, which we consumed abundantly with tea, comes before Dutch candy.

I made that mistake more than once, not because of my love for the imported Dutch candy which we purchased from Abu Sa’dad’s store, located in the center of the camp. The truth is, my brothers and I played a strange form of candy poker which kept us entertained for many hours. I dreaded running out of my precious supplies before the curfew was over, thus subjugating myself to potential humiliation of having to auction everything else I owned - including my small radio - to stay in the game.

My poor mother was devastated numerous times by the horrible choices we made when we rushed to buy ‘essentials’.

Lesson number four: Agree in advance on what classifies as ‘essential food’, and consume your food in a rational way. Also, if you are lucky enough to locate Dutch candy in whatever version of the Abu Sa’dad’s store, in your town, do not gamble it all in one day.

Find Sources of Entertainment

If electricity is still available, then you still have the option of watching television. For us, Indian movies, especially those starring Amitabh Bachchan, were the number one option. Imagine my disappointment when our beloved movie star, who helped us through numerous military curfews in Gaza, was photographed grinning with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the latter’s visit to India in 2018.

If electricity is cut off, be ready with alternative options: books, free wrestling, living-room soccer (with the ball preferably made from stuffed-up socks contributed by all family members), and, of course, candy poker.

Lesson number five: The key is to have more than one form of entertainment and to be prepared for every eventuality, including power outages as a form of collective punishment.  

Find the Humor in Grim Situations

Don’t focus on the negatives; there is no point or wisdom in that. Emphasizing the grimness of a situation can only contribute to the feeling of defeat and powerlessness that are already generated by the lockdown. There will be plenty of time in which you can look back, reflect, and even bemoan your unfortunate circumstance.

But, during the curfew itself is when you actually need your sense of humor most. Take things lightly - laugh at your miserable situation, if you must. Forgive yourself for not being perfect, for panicking when you should have been composed, or for forcing your younger brother to gamble his underwear when he runs out of Dutch candy.

Difficult situations can offer the kind of scenarios that can be interpreted in two extreme ways: either extremely tragic or extremely funny; opt for the latter whenever you can, because as long as you laugh, as long as your spirit remains unbroken, your humanity remains intact.

Lesson number six: Be funny, don’t take life too seriously, share a laugh with others, and let humor inject hope in every hour and every day of your quarantine.

Hold Tighter to Your Faith

Whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith; whether you are an atheist, agnostic, or practice any form of spirituality, philosophy or belief system, find comfort in your faith and beliefs.

Since all mosques in our refugee camp were shut down, if not raided during a military curfew, the call for prayer, which we heard five times during each day, was permanently silenced.

To keep the call for prayer going, we would sneak to the roof of our houses, carefully scan the area for any Israeli soldiers, and collectively make the call for prayer whenever it was required. Volunteers included my English teacher, who was communist and claimed that he did not believe in God, myself, and Nabil, the neighbor boy with the massive head and the most unpleasant voice.

In curfews, we developed a different relationship with God: He became a personal and more intimate companion, as we often prayed in total darkness, whispered our verses so very cautiously as not to be heard by pesky soldiers. And, even those who hardly prayed before the curfew kept up with all five prayers during the lockdown.

Lesson number seven: Let your values guide you during your hours of loneliness. And if you volunteer to make a call for prayer (or recite your religious hymns) please be honest with yourself: if you have no sense of rhythm or if your voice has the pitch of an angry alley cat, for God’s sake, leave the job to someone else.

In Conclusion ..

I hope that under no circumstances you will ever hear these ominous words: “You are now under curfew. Anyone who violates orders will be shot immediately.” I also hope that this COVID-19 quarantine will make us kinder to each other and will make us emerge from our homes better people, ready to take on global challenges while united in our common faith, collective pain and a renewed sense of love for our environment.

And when it’s all over, think of Palestine, for her people have been ‘quarantined’ for 71 years and counting.

by Ramzy Baroud

[crystal-snowing]

enemies to lovers | oh sehun

summary: modeling is a tough industry, but when you’re forced to do a shoot with the one and only oh sehun, damn did it become a lot tougher. 

genre: angst/fluff

other members: | chanyeol | baekhyun | kai | chen | minseok | suho | kungsoo | yixing | 

oh sehun was one of the brattist men that you have ever meet, and no, you were not exaggerating.

there was really no one incident that caused you to become absolutely disgusted with him, and honesty you weren't even sure how all of this even started in the first place.

in the beginning of your career as a model you didn’t have a problem with him, in fact as a rookie you actually looked up to him.

there was something about the way that he poses for the camera and the way the photo captures his expression practically gave you chills.

yet that all changed when you actually met him in person and he was so rude???

in those following months not only was your career growing, but you received a copious amount of jobs from designer brands.

from then on, it seemed that sehun made it his job in order to make sure that he stayed on top, always attempting to outdo your last modeling job.

magazines soon caught wind of this and often referred to it as being some “friendly competition”, yet there was nothing “friendly” about your competition. 

you wanted nothing more than to just obliterate him and show him who’s in charge, yet he still manages to keep attempting to outdo you every time.

and damn did that piss you off.

you did the best that you could, continuing to earn the front pages of magazines across the globe and for a while you almost forgot about him.

well, till someone had the bright idea to pair two of the hottest idols together to collaborate on a photoshoot, also known as pairing you up with sworn enemy. 

oh boy did your manager receive a scolding once you found out, but deep down no matter how much you complained there was nothing that either of you could possibly do.

it would practically be suicide for your career if you refused this job offer, and you have worked too damn hard to let him ruin all of your accomplishments.

which is how you found yourself sluggishly making your way inside the room as your half-asleep self was greeted by his smug face at four in the morning.

“good morning princess, you look radiant this morning.”

what an asshole.

an hour later after you filled up on your caffeine, could you finally deal with his annoying ass.

first the two of you did your solo shots, and you did what you always did and played it up for the camera, knowing full well that sehun’s eyes were all over you.

and when it was his turn, you tried your best to look away, but you couldn’t as your eyes were practically glued to his figure.

after the individual shots were finished, the photographer directed you to do pose for couple shots—the one thing that you were absolutely dreading.

and there he stood with that cocky ass smirk on his face, his hands resting gently on your hips.

while that was only one of the many poses that you needed to complete, there were others that were a bit more intimate. 

you could swear that everyone in the room was enjoying your anger and embarrassment. 

in some of the poses you could feel his hot breath tickling your neck  or the way that his hands would linger on your body even after the photographer asked the two of you to prepare for the next shot.   

and you lowkey enjoyed his touch but you would never admit it by the time the shoot was finished you were glad that this day was finally over.

the staff began cleaning up, leaving you and sehun enough time to decompress and relax after another day of work. 

never have you ever been in close proximity with oh sehun without it being forced by either a photographer or your manager and it was creeping you out to say the least. 

as you scrolled through your feed on your phone, you were occasionally peeking over to look at him and unbeknownst to you, he was doing the same for you. 

and only when the two of you locked eyes, did the awkward silence come to an end. 

“and what are you looking at?” 

your tone had caught him off guard causing him to fumble with the phone that he currently held in his hands. 

regaining his composure, he flashed you a blinding smile.

“i’m just admiring your beauty, my love.”

 what a flirty piece of work, and despite knowing that his compliment is not genuine, you couldn’t help but blush. 

as soon as the director gave you both the okay, you bolted out of there as fast as your legs could carry you, leaving your manager to scramble after you. 

over the next few weeks you did your best to forgot about the photoshoot with him, trying to forget the feeling of his chest pressed against your backside, or the way his hands felt around your waist.

yet, no matter how hard you tried to forget him and his absolutely gorgeous body, your mind kept wandering back to him.

goddamn, did that piss you off. 

but it was fine, at least all your troubles with him were in the past and thankfully you never had to see that cocky asshole ever again. 

and once again, you were horribly wrong. 

apparently the shoot that the two of you did together was so “riveting” and “fantastic” that soon handfuls of photographers were messaging your manager and his manager to take more photos together.

if you thought it was impossible for you to refuse before, well now, it wasn’t even an option. 

still, you tried to persuade your manager to take only a select few, making up an excuse of wanting to “broaden your horizons with different models.

yeah, they were not buying it. 

yet, even if you did attempt to refuse, your manager would always come back to you the next day with the same news. 

“apparently, oh sehun and his manager already confirmed this shoot, so you have no choice but to confirm as well.” 

and no, this did not just happen for one or two shoots that the two of you were booked for—it was every damn shoot. 

which is how you found yourself in the position of seeing the man that you despised practically every day. 

and every damn day he would greet you with those crusty ass pickup lines or compliments that made you want to hurl every object on the set at him. 

but, that wasn’t even the worse part. apparently, the public adored the intimate shots of the two of you, causing a whole conspiracy to blow up online about the two of you and how you were possibly dating.

however, it also inspired the photographers to place the two of you in the most romantic positions as possible.  

couple poses were an absolute must, which meant holding hands, kisses on the cheek and lots of skin on skin contact. 

at first, you couldn’t believe that you were a willing participant in this—touching oh sehun of your own free will, that was simply not the [y/n] [l/n] way. 

yet here you were.

 but, soon enough you found yourself enjoying his touch, only slightly though. 

his body was warm and it was nice whenever you had to wear the skimpy and revealing outfits on set. 

and for some strange reason you not only fit perfectly inside his arms, but you felt safe with him wrapped around you, which you found absolutely bizarre. 

and there was the despair that you felt when the shoot came to a close, the emptiness setting in as he pulled away from you, flashed you a flirtatious smile and comment before disappearing. 

which is why you did your best to suppress these irrelevant feelings. but it seemed that the photographers were clearly not on your side, as the poses for the photos kept getting more and more romantic.

however, when the commanded that the two of you kiss was where you simply drew the line. 

signalling the photographer, who immediately let you take a break, you promptly stormed off the set and off to your station with your manager. 

it wasn’t an outrageous request and for other magazines and with other models you have done the exact same thing that you were refusing. 

but this time it was different!!!!

this wasn’t some nameless model or handsome idol, no this was oh freaking sehun, the one man who shouldn’t even be allowed to share a shoot with you let alone kiss you. 

you had expected your manager to come over and give you a long ass lecture about complying with the photographer’s orders since he is the artist and blah blah, however you were pleasantly surprised when you turned around and saw your fellow model standing behind you. 

“i’m offended that you believe kissing me would be the worst thing in the world, i promise i don’t bite,” he ginned, flashing his pearly whites. 

“please, with your mouth and all the shit that comes out of it, you never know what kind of bacteria lingers,” you rolled your eyes, standing up and crossing your arms over your chest. 

placing his hand on his chest he feigned being hurt by your words. fast forward the painstakingly boring speech that your manager gave you, did you receive the order to kiss sehun. 

god, did you want to barf right then and there. and there you stood, with his arms wrapped around your waist and his face inching ever so closely towards your lips. 

finally your lips collided and oh my god what is the fluttering feeling that is happening in your stomach and why does your heart feel like it’s going to burst from your chest????

you couldn’t help but move your lips along with his, enjoying the slight bitterness of his coffee that lingered on his lips.

“and that’s a wrap.” 

yet for some reason even though you wanted to you couldn’t pull away, well that is until sehun pulled away, flashing you that shit-eating grin once again. 

“see, i told you i wasn’t a bad kisser, after all you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

flipping him a certain finger, you grabbed the rest of your things before leaving the set, your cheeks practically glowing red as you left the building. 

finally all the scheduled shoots that you had with him were finally over and you could now enjoy doing your job without seeing him and his stupid face ever again.

you couldn’t help yourself as your thoughts would drift back to the kiss that you both shared. 

it shouldn’t have meant anything, just two professional people doing their jobs, but for some reason you couldn’t help but feel your lips tingle or feel your face becoming flushed whenever you thought about it. 

you couldn’t help yourself as you did your best to try and suppress those thoughts, however your mind kept drifting back to them and the feeling of his lips pressed against yours and his hands tangled in your hair. 

then it finally dawned on you, that holy shit, somehow and some way you had a crush on oh sehun, your rival and mortal enemy. 

well fuck. 

it hopeless anyways, after all he had made it explicitly clear that he despised you and therefore there was no possible way that he could feel the same way. 

and thankfully you would never have to see his incredibly cocky (but cute) ass ever again. 

well, that is until you received a certain invitation in the mail, inviting you to a party in honor of an award that a photographer won for his shoot of the two of you. 

and the best part was that you, [l/n] [f/n] and oh sehun were the guests of honor. 

as soon as you stepped into the venue of the party, you already felt like leaving.

everywhere you turned there were the pictures of you and sehun plastered across the room, in those positions that made you turn beet red. 

navigating your way around the party you politely greeted the other guests, thanking them half-heartedly when the commented on the beauty of the pictures. 

while you were only one guest of honor, your mind couldn’t help but wonder where exactly the other guest of honor was lurking. and your question was soon answered, as he tapped you on the shoulder and offered you a glass of champagne, which you took graciously. 

the two of you soon began conversing, talking about your experiences in the modeling industry and everything in between, all while keeping up the friendly facade for the rest of the partygoers. 

after finding a secluded spot to chat, you couldn’t help but believe that everything he was telling you was genuine and real and that wow, perhaps he wasn’t as insufferable and boring as you once thought. 

the conversation soon dies down and the two of you sit in comfortable silence while watching the night sky, well until he brings up an unexpected topic.

“you know to be honest, i never really hated you.” 

that almost caused you to spit out the champagne that you were drinking. 

“i honestly admired you and i still do, and i guess that every time i saw you on the front cover or having a specialized photoshoot it kinda pushed me to work harder as well,” he mused, smiling softly at the stars. 

[y/n].exe has stopped working.

but he was oh sehun and of course he had to push it a bit more. 

“i also wish that our first kiss wasn’t photographed for the public to see.” 

well two could play at that game, sliding closer to him you tugged down his tie and looked into his eyes.

“well, our second kiss doesn’t have to be.”

glancing at his lips before flicking your eyes back up to his was all it took for him to capture your lips in a searing kiss, his hands cupping your cheeks in the process. 

moments later the two of you pulled away from each other, panting, but with stupid lovesick grins sitting on each of your lips.

“and you thought i was a bad kisser,” sehun mused, cockily raising an eyebrow. 

“nah you’re not bad, i’m just better,” you grinned, leaning in for another unforgettable kiss. 

[thetruthseekerway]

Quarantine: A Palestinian Guide to Survival

New Post has been published on https://www.truth-seeker.info/quran-science-2/quarantine-a-palestinian-guide-to-survival/

Quarantine: A Palestinian Guide to Survival

By Ramzy Baroud

Quarantine: A Palestinian Guide to Survival

Call it a ‘quarantine’, a ‘shelter-in-place’, a ‘lockdown’ or a ‘curfew’, we Palestinians have experienced them all, though not at all voluntarily.

Personally, the first 23 years of my life were lived in virtual ‘lockdown’. My father’s ‘quarantine’ was experienced much earlier, as did his father’s ‘shelter-in-place’ before him. They both died and were buried in Gaza’s cemeteries without ever experiencing true freedom outside of their refugee camp in Gaza.

Currently in Gaza, the quarantine has a different name. We call it ‘siege’, also known as ‘blockade’.

In fact, all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s when Israel became a state and the Palestinian homeland was erased by Zionist colonialists with the support of their Western benefactors.

That lockdown intensified in 1967 when Israel, now a powerful state with a large army and strong allies, occupied the remaining parts of Palestine – East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Under this lockdown, the Palestinian freedom of movement was curtailed to the extent that Palestinians required permits from the Israeli military to leave the Occupied Territories or to return home, to move about from one town to the other, and, at times, to cross a single Israeli military checkpoint or a fortified wall.

In Palestine, we don’t call our imprisonment a lockdown, but a ‘military occupation’ and ‘apartheid’.

As for ‘shelter-in-place’, in Palestine, we have a different name for it. We call it a ‘military curfew’.

Since I was a child, I learned to listen intently to orders barked out by Israeli military officers as they swept through our refugee camp in Gaza declaring or easing military curfews. This ritual often happened late at night.

“People of Nuseirat, per orders of the Israeli military you are now under curfew. Anyone who violates orders will be shot immediately,” the terrifying words, always communicated through a loudspeaker in broken Arabic, were a staple during the First Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) of 1987.

The period between 1987 to 1993 was a virtual ‘lockdown’. Thousands of people, mostly children, were killed for failing to respect the rules of their collective imprisonment.

In Gaza, even when a full military curfew was not in place, we rarely left our small and crowded neighborhoods, let alone our refugee camps. We were all haunted by the fear that we may not be able to make it home by 8p.m., the time designated by the Israeli military for all of us to return home.

Every day, ten or fifteen minutes after the nightly curfew set in, we would hear the crackling and hissing of bullets as they whistled through the air from various distances. Automatically, we would conclude that some poor soul – a worker, a teacher, or a rowdy teenager – missed his chance by a few minutes, and paid a price for it.

Now that nearly half of the population of planet Earth are experiencing some form of ‘curfew’ or another, I would like to share a few suggestions on how to survive the prolonged confinement, the Palestinian way.

Think Ahead

Since we knew that a complete lockdown, or a military curfew, was always pending, we tried to anticipate the intensity and duration of it and prepare accordingly.

For example, when the Israeli army killed one or more refugees, we knew in advance that mass protests would follow, thus more killings. In these situations, a curfew was imminent.

Number one priority was to ensure that all family members congregated at home or stayed within close proximity so that they could rush in as fast as possible when the caravan of Israeli military jeeps and tanks came thundering, opening fire at anyone or anything within sight.

Lesson number one: Always think ahead and prepare for a longer lockdown than the initial one declared by your city or state.

Stay Calm

My father had a bad temper, although a very kind heart. When curfews were about to start, he would enter into a near-panic state. A chain smoker with obsessive, although rational fear that one of his five boys would eventually be killed, he would walk around the house in a useless rush, not knowing what to do next.

Typically, my mother would come in, rational and calculating. She would storm the kitchen to assess what basic supplies were missing, starting with the flour, sugar and olive oil.

Knowing that the first crackdown by the Israelis would be on water supplies and electricity, she would fill several plastic containers of water, designating some for tea, coffee and cooking, and others for dishes and washing clothes.

Per her orders, we would rush to the nearby stores to make small but necessary purchases – batteries for the flashlight and the transistor radio, cigarettes for my dad, and a few VHS videotapes which we would watch over and again, whether the curfew lasted for a few days or a few weeks.

Lesson number two: Take control of the situation – do not panic – and assign specific responsibilities to every family member. This strengthens the family unit and sets the stage for collective solidarity desperately required under these circumstances.

Preserve Your Water

I cannot emphasize this enough. Even if you think that a water crisis is not impending, do not take chances.

It is easy to feel invincible and fully prepared on the first day of quarantine – or military curfew. Many times, we lived to regret that false sense of readiness, as we drank too much tea or squandered our dishwashing water supplies too quickly.

In this case, you have a serious problem, especially during the summer months when you cannot count on rainwater to make up for the deficit.

Years after the end of the Intifada, my father revealed to us that many a time, him and mom used the rainwater they collected in buckets throughout the house, including the leaked roofs for our drinking supplies, even when there was no electricity or gas to boil the water beforehand.

In retrospect, this explains the many bouts of diarrhea we experienced, despite his assurances that they had painstakingly removed all bird droppings from the salvaged water.

Lesson number three: Cautiously use your water supplies during a quarantine, and never, under any circumstance, drink rainwater or, at least, keep diarrhea pills handy.

Ration Your Food

The same logic that applies to water applies to food. It goes without saying that any acquired food would have to cover the basics first. For example, flour, which we used to make bread, comes before bananas, and sugar, which we consumed abundantly with tea, comes before Dutch candy.

I made that mistake more than once, not because of my love for the imported Dutch candy which we purchased from Abu Sa’dad’s store, located in the center of the camp. The truth is, my brothers and I played a strange form of candy poker which kept us entertained for many hours. I dreaded running out of my precious supplies before the curfew was over, thus subjugating myself to potential humiliation of having to auction everything else I owned – including my small radio – to stay in the game.

My poor mother was devastated numerous times by the horrible choices we made when we rushed to buy ‘essentials’.

Lesson number four: Agree in advance on what classifies as ‘essential food’, and consume your food in a rational way. Also, if you are lucky enough to locate Dutch candy in whatever version of the Abu Sa’dad’s store, in your town, do not gamble it all in one day.

Find Sources of Entertainment

If electricity is still available, then you still have the option of watching television. For us, Indian movies, especially those starring Amitabh Bachchan, were the number one option. Imagine my disappointment when our beloved movie star, who helped us through numerous military curfews in Gaza, was photographed grinning with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the latter’s visit to India in 2018.

If electricity is cut off, be ready with alternative options: books, free wrestling, living-room soccer (with the ball preferably made from stuffed-up socks contributed by all family members), and, of course, candy poker.

Lesson number five: The key is to have more than one form of entertainment and to be prepared for every eventuality, including power outages as a form of collective punishment.

Find the Humor in Grim Situations

Don’t focus on the negatives; there is no point or wisdom in that. Emphasizing the grimness of a situation can only contribute to the feeling of defeat and powerlessness that are already generated by the lockdown. There will be plenty of time in which you can look back, reflect, and even bemoan your unfortunate circumstance.

But, during the curfew itself is when you actually need your sense of humor most. Take things lightly – laugh at your miserable situation, if you must. Forgive yourself for not being perfect, for panicking when you should have been composed, or for forcing your younger brother to gamble his underwear when he runs out of Dutch candy.

Difficult situations can offer the kind of scenarios that can be interpreted in two extreme ways: either extremely tragic or extremely funny; opt for the latter whenever you can, because as long as you laugh, as long as your spirit remains unbroken, your humanity remains intact.

Lesson number six: Be funny, don’t take life too seriously, share a laugh with others, and let humor inject hope in every hour and every day of your quarantine.

Hold Tighter to Your Faith

Whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith; whether you are an atheist, agnostic, or practice any form of spirituality, philosophy or belief system, find comfort in your faith and beliefs.

Since all mosques in our refugee camp were shut down, if not raided during a military curfew, the call for prayer, which we heard five times during each day, was permanently silenced.

To keep the call for prayer going, we would sneak to the roof of our houses, carefully scan the area for any Israeli soldiers, and collectively make the call for prayer whenever it was required. Volunteers included my English teacher, who was communist and claimed that he did not believe in God, myself, and Nabil, the neighbor boy with the massive head and the most unpleasant voice.

In curfews, we developed a different relationship with God: He became a personal and more intimate companion, as we often prayed in total darkness, whispered our verses so very cautiously as not to be heard by pesky soldiers. And, even those who hardly prayed before the curfew kept up with all five prayers during the lockdown.

Lesson number seven: Let your values guide you during your hours of loneliness. And if you volunteer to make a call for prayer (or recite your religious hymns) please be honest with yourself: if you have no sense of rhythm or if your voice has the pitch of an angry alley cat, for God’s sake, leave the job to someone else.

In Conclusion

I hope that under no circumstances you will ever hear these ominous words: “You are now under curfew. Anyone who violates orders will be shot immediately.” I also hope that this COVID-19 quarantine will make us kinder to each other and will make us emerge from our homes better people, ready to take on global challenges while united in our common faith, collective pain and a renewed sense of love for our environment.

And when it’s all over, think of Palestine, for her people have been ‘quarantined’ for 71 years and counting.

———-

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).

His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

[teethdollar47-blog]

Student photographs earth from space

Author: Jacob Smith -

After my unsuccessful launch attempt in July I wouldn’t be able to attempt another launch for at least another four weeks because I had to apply for permission from the Civil Aviation Authority again. I had a free week in mid-August so sent an application and got to work figuring out how to solve the issue I had had first time around.

What went wrong?

If you remember back to my last blog post, when I was preparing to launch my High Altitude Balloon, the signal I was receiving from my tracker was intermittent, forcing me to abort the launch. I studied this back at home and determined the likely cause was that the antenna on the underneath of the payload had been damaged. The radials must be straight and well soldered together, but having accidentally dropped the box on them once or twice, they may have been damaged. Admittedly, I had taken the easier option when making this antenna the first time, but clearly it wasn’t reliable. So, with the help of my mum who sat night after night painstakingly unbraiding 20cm of insulation from a coax cable, we made what we hoped would be a more robust antenna (basically it was all one piece rather than 3 pieces soldered together). I also re-soldered some of the old connections on the circuit board, which could have also contributed to the issues I had. Next was a trip to the local lake to test the new antenna. And…success! I was really pleased that it produced a clear constant signal that I was able to pick up from the other side of the lake.

The payload antenna seen forming a cross on the underneath of the box, and the main radiating element covered by a straw to keep it straight.

Further improvements from lessons learnt

The eagle-eyed readers amongst you might notice that the polystyrene payload box in the picture above is not the same as you have seen in all my previous blog posts! During the first launch attempt I found it difficult to secure all the components in the box so I decided to start again with a bigger sized box, and this time use Velcro as well as cable ties. The interior of the new payload is shown below.

The payload interior. Starting at the top and going clockwise - Canon camera, tracker with external temperature sensor poking out the box, Arduino battery pack, power bank for video camera, video camera, iPhone as backup tracker, perspex to hold my mascot...

Something extra special 

Launching a balloon to 30km and taking pictures of the Earth is something quite special, but I wanted to do something to make it even more out of the ordinary. It’s not uncommon to send a mascot with the payload to get pictures of said mascot with the Earth in the background, and this is exactly what I tried to do… Everyone at the University of Bath knows how popular our ducks are on campus, so I thought I would honour the ducks and send an astronaut rubber duck up as my mascot!

Meet Tim Beak!

Tim will be sitting on piece of Perspex in front of the Canon camera – hopefully I can get some good pictures of him and he'll bring me good fortune!

Oh the British weather

It turns out the hardest part of the project was actually getting a good day to launch on. Four weeks after the first attempt I had new launch permissions, this time for two launch sites so that I had a choice depending on the wind direction. I was raring to go but in running the flight predictions I was again disappointed…the wind was the wrong direction for one launch site, and from the other site the payload was predicted to land in central London. Launch cancelled again!

Another four weeks later took us to mid-September, right at a time when Storm Ali and the remnants of Hurricane Florence where battering the UK. I had my permissions (this time for three launch locations!) but all week the payload was predicted to land in the North Sea or pass over restricted areas! But, just as I was running out of time before university started again, the winds eased, and I had my chance!

The big day (again!)

Travelling to the launch site I felt excited and completely prepared, but still a bit nervous. It was a family event and I was very grateful for help from my parents, grandparents, and uncle in preparing the payload and balloon for launch. We first turned on the tracker and made sure the signal was strong – it was! Then it was a case of starting the cameras, setting up the iPhone as a backup tracker, securing everything in the box with cable ties, and then taping up the box. Next it was time to fill the balloon, which proved quite difficult when the wind picked up. I won’t say too much about the process because it can all be seen in the video at the bottom of this page. I used a ‘fill tube’ – basically some PVC pipe with lots of sealant and tape – to pass the helium from the hose nozzle into the much larger diameter neck of the balloon. You may also notice a milk bottle with a certain amount of water in attached to the fill tube. I knew the balloon was filled with the correct volume of helium when the balloon could just lift the weight of this bottle off the ground, as this was equivalent to providing the force required to lift the weight of the payload and lift it up in the air at 5m/s.

Filling the balloon - nearly enough helium to provide the required lift

With all systems go we tied off the balloon and secured it to the parachute. Sounds simple but believe me it was much trickier than I had anticipated - in the end requiring three pairs of hands to hold and secure everything! So, after weeks of waiting and months of work, I found myself on a rugby field holding the payload in my hands, with a huge balloon 15m above my head. It was finally happening! A final wish of good luck to Tim Beak, a prayer that everything in the payload was still working…and release!

There was nothing I could do to it now. The balloon would rise and rise, the wind would blow it miles away, and although I had an idea of the area (provided my calculations were right), I had no idea where exactly the payload would land. What I could do though was track it! We quickly packed up and got in the car, and I was so pleased to get a good signal from the payload. I had notified the High Altitude Balloon community of my flight and I was amazed that I had up to nine people at once receiving my telemetry and helping to track the flight, some from as far away as the Netherlands and France showing just how good a radio tracker like I had made is!

We tracked the payload throughout the whole flight and as it came down we were waiting in the countryside near where we expected it to land. 2 hours and 25 minutes after launch we could see on the map that it had stopped moving, nearly 60 miles from the launch site. It had landed, and was only a 4-minute walk away! It was very exciting, and I was so happy that the tracking had been successful. The only remaining question was – what had it landed in? Well, not a lake, not a tall tree, not on a house, but in a field at the end of a public footpath! How lucky! I was thrilled to find that everything was still working, and Tim had survived – even though the Perspex had snapped on impact! Tim reached an altitude of 29.2km and a temperature of -53°, an inspiration to all ducks! I was even happier when I watched back the flight footage and pictures, which I have combined to produce a video about the launch, flight, and recovery. The flight could not have gone much better!

Top: screenshot from video camera. Bottom: picture from Canon camera. Both overlooking the wash near the burst point at 29km above Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

Concluding comments

I really enjoyed doing this project and solving the many problems I encountered along the way. I have learnt new skills, particularly in practical electronics which I had little experience with before, and has taught me that things will work out alright in the end as long as you don't give up. I hope you have found these blog posts interesting, and may have been inspired to do something similar yourself! I'd like to thank the Department of Mechanical Engineering for their support, the people of the UK High Altitude Society for their advice and fantastic online guides, and my family for their help throughout the project and on the launch day.

Source: http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/engdes-student-insights/2018/11/13/the-launch-and-recovery-launching-a-high-altitude-balloon/

[milenasanchezmk]

The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today, October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

[cristinajourdanqp]

The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today, October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

[fishermariawo]

The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today, October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

[watsonrodriquezie]

The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today, October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

[cynthiamwashington]

The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today, October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

The post The Keto Reset Diet Excerpt—and a Video!—to Celebrate Today’s Release appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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[ridingthatbike]

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive

Let people call you crazy for the choices that you make Climb limits past the limits Jump in front of trains all day And stay alive (from  "Amy A.K.A. Spent Gladiator 1" by the Mountain Goats)

Riding the Idaho Hot Springs Mountain Bike Route

My photo set is here. Q’s photo set is here. Q’s writeup is here. Route info is here.

1.  Altitude, full sun, no clouds, no shade, burn zones, holy shit I am turning to dust, I’m a human raisin, I need sunglasses.  We bought three tubes of sunblock. The dust makes my mouth taste bad and the only thing I want to eat is sour patch kids to obliterate the taste so by the end of the trip I’m starting to get acid sores in my mouth. This doesn't happen at home. In a span of two hours, we see a small rattlesnake in the shade in the canyon, and watch two bald eagles fly above the river and land in a tree. This also does not happen at home, and I’m so grateful that Dan taught me how to spot eagles when we were backpacking this spring.

2.  On a long hot dusty sandy steep slog up our third climb of the day, pushing our bikes in the sun, a pickup truck pulls over. They offer but really actually insist on giving us a ride over the mountain. They give us cold drinks, and the fella hands me a chunk of ice and points to Q, saying “now I don’t know him so you’ll have to do this: you put that ice right on his neck.” Their dog licks the sweat from my knees as they tell us stories of their Idaho lives, and before sending us on our way, they hug us and point us toward the ice cream shop.

3. One of the things I wanted to learn to get comfortable with on this trip was having less access to water. But record snowfall in Idaho this winter meant epic snowmelt, and the rivers and creeks were raging. There was water everywhere. It was thrilling and kind of scary. And in a way, disappointing. But just a little time passes, it gets hot, we take a few days off route, and suddenly there is way less water available. I start feeling anxious. It’s a hundred degrees! What will we do if we run out? We can’t run out! I calm a bit when I realize that this is exactly what I wanted, that this is what I want to practice getting comfortable with. The route is still largely along creeks and rivers, so I know that I can get water, even if it involves a shitty long scramble. I am pleased that we turn out to be reassuringly good at monitoring how much we have and where to get more.

4. A thunderstorm rolls in, and we wait it out on the porch of a saloon. A local tells us that the road to the summit we were planning to climb the next day has washed out. He painstakingly maps out a dirt road detour before the storm knocks out the power, and we sit, waiting, watching the sky, deliberating, contemplating the maps and the miles, and eventually I ask the other folks on the porch if anybody has a pickup truck and some free time tomorrow. I’ll buy you breakfast and a tank of gas in exchange for a ride to Ketchum. I strike a deal, and we hobo-camp by the river that night, wondering if our agreement will be forgotten in the harsh sober light of day.

5. We get some really helpful route info from the bike shop: so far this year, nobody’s been on the section of trail we want to ride, and the main intersection of trails still has six feet of snow. Ok. We’ll take pavement up to the top of Galena. Our tallest summit on this trip, 8700 feet, and it feels like total redemption -- the climb is amazing and smooth, we feel strong, everything feels amazing and possible. We climb like champs, gleeful and proud and punchy in gusting winds. Maybe altitude makes us wacky, I don’t know, or maybe we like being reminded that we are capable. The overlook is glorious, and though we are pretty sure the dirt track back down off the mountain would be clear, I am so excited for a fast smooth paved descent that Q acquiesces and we blaze down the highway, getting pushed around by the wind and chilled from the speed, hearts pounding, eyes watering. 

6. Maggie and Rajal join us to look at books of wildflowers, helping us identify what we’ve seen so far. We start talking about birds too, and they mention seeing a western tanager. We look at photos and I get distracted by learning to identify thrush songs. A few days later, after accidentally barreling past the turnoff to a planned stopping point, we find a perfect dirt road with a perfect swimming hole and two perfect shaded sitting rocks in Silver Creek. We dunk our heads in the water, filter some ice cold water to drink, and sit quietly at the edge of the creek, cooling down and listening to the churn of the water. Q points to a branch on the other side of the creek. Hello, western tanager, we have only just learned your name!

7. We bomb down the wildest dirt road I’ve ever met - washboards and washout ruts across the track, deep channels in the same direction as the road, big humps like a pump track, tightly switchbacked, deep gravel and sand in places, and I LOVE IT. Grinning like an idiot, just utterly thrilled. Just a few years ago, I would have been out and out terrified of riding stuff like this. Part of it of course is having the right kind of equipment for the conditions, but a lot of it is just practice and experience and also learning to read the terrain, a skill I really worked on this spring. It feels so good to be enjoying it and unafraid and riding well, after a spring of fear-limited riding. It’s so easy to forget where you started and how much you’ve learned and grown. I sing out loud, “don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still I’m still jenny from the block. I used to have a little now i have a lot, but everywhere I go I know where I came from!”

8. Rolling out of camp early one morning, rippin’ down a dirt road all fired up and fresh, we see something in the road ahead and slow way down. Q says “ohhhhhhhhhh shit” as the shapes take form and we see long long mammal legs. But as the shapes come into focus, we see it’s a mama elk and four babies. FOUR! As I am busy being astounded by the sight of four elk calves, more elk come out of the woods and onto the road. And more. And more. A full herd of elk! Holy shit! Well, I guess we’ll just wait this out and watch for a while. But at the sound of our tires on gravel as we roll our bikes to a tree to lean them against, the herd scatters and disappears as if it never even existed. We wait another minute or two, and then I start singing at the top of my lungs as we ride down to the spot where they’d just been. The road surface is entirely covered, edge to edge, with clear impressions of big and little tracks.

9. I wake up to a rustling sound that I thought was maybe the wind. I look over to Q’s side of the tent and WHOA, there’s an animal right by his head! Something has crawled under the rainfly and is curiously pawing at a bag. I wake Q up with my sleepy efforts to shoo it away, basically just shouting at it and patting the side of the tent. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! exclaims Q, as we realize the critter is a skunk. “DON’T SCARE IT!” Eventually, through some combination of our noises and movements, the skunk saunters away: not the retreat of a scared animal, but the bored sashay of someone who’s got something better to do in the weeds anyway.

10. A blazing hot day, after we’d ridden most of the day’s miles and stopped to swim in a lake, we cranked out ten or twelve miles on a dirt road so washboarded that I felt like it was going to rattle the teeth right out of my mouth. It was so dusty, and I was so hot. I was too spent to enjoy the ride. I was feeling a little sorry for myself and started singing “if i get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” Q seemed to be doing fine, and it was so hard for me and I didn’t even know why. That evening, as we set up camp and started prepping dinner, I realized I forgot to pack the fucking vegetables and burst into tears. This is no big deal! What the fuck! Why am I crying? We put it together later. Carrying the Camelbak just makes everything so much harder when it’s hot out. You don’t realize you’re overheated, and everything is a struggle. The times each of us struggled most were the times we were wearing the pack. Q calls it the Crybaby Bag and I laugh.

 11. Our first choice campsite was closed due to a bridge out with a ten-foot drop, and our backup option was fully booked for a wedding. Contemplated stealth camping, and even stopped to chat with a local family at their swimmin’ hole on the river to inquire (they directed me to a cave on the side of the highway where the kids party on the weekends) but the closer to town you get, the more exposed the terrain is and the more private land there is -- and everyone in Idaho has a gun and I just didn’t wanna mess up. We decided to road dog it all the way back to Boise, around 80 miles total on a 100 degree day. So onward, onward, onward, past all the trucks with boats, past the reservoir, past a lookout where a family stopped to take in the view and said “wow, how long did that last climb take you?” and we sort of blinked like, that was no climb! We just spent 500 miles on dirt roads in the mountains, this was just sort of like floating! That was the moment I realized that we were leaving Idaho tougher than when we arrived. We climbed the last summit, pushing hard to get to the top before the little store at the top closed, downed tall boys of sweet tea, and asked about pitching a tent behind the shop. Nope, not allowed. Ok, we’re really doing this. We roll fast down the paved descent toward town, on the highway’s narrow shoulder, in between fast traffic and a rock wall with a jersey barrier to keep falling rocks off of the roadway. And shit, that’s a fucking rattlesnake. Holy shit holy shit oh thank god it’s dead. I say a tiny thank you to the dead rattler. I’m sorry you’re dead but THANK YOU FOR BEING DEAD so I don’t have to choose between the dangers of a live rattler and a road full of pickups with trailers racing by. I think of it as one last gift from Idaho to me directly. Suddenly and incredibly, we are on the greenbelt that goes right into town, close enough to have cell signal finally, and we get in touch with our pal in town and confirm that we can crash at her place for the night. The sun erupted into the most glorious sunset I’ve ever seen, unfolding before us, and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees as we rode along the river, and a huge clear nearly-full moon appeared, and I felt jubilant, couldn’t stop laughing. I felt amazed by the bounty of beauty in the world made accessible to me by luck and effort, just triumphant and strong and capable and grateful and astonished by what our bodies and minds are capable of, what an incredible thing it is to have this opportunity to learn and grow and become stronger and smarter and more connected and more open hearted. Bursting at the seams of my being, filled to the brim with joy. Idaho really pulled out all the stops for us, like it was giving everything it had, to make us fall in love.